We’re often told there’s a rural “culture war”. That nature recovery and rewilding is an urban agenda imposed on an unwilling countryside. But what happens when you ask people what they want? National Parks polling offers some striking evidence. 🧵

Even Rupert seems to be struggling to summon up sufficient vim for this one

I think there's a softer heritage to some of this (but which has many problems of its own) which is the idea that labouring on the land, or 'improving' it, confers ownership, and with ownership, legitimacy (cf. Locke etc).

a bizarre new thing in our inbox is AI writers, normally with a Substack or something, farming generic articles about access and then emailing them to us asking for engagement / promotion. They do at least announce they're AI in the opening, though I'm sure they'll optimise for that soon enough...

Now, if a journalist from the Telegraph, or perhaps the BBC, came to the valley to report a piece about authentic rural life, or wanted an opinion on rewilding or access or any other 'controversial' rural issue: who would they likely platform? That farmer? Or the thousands of people who live nearby?

This month, a farmer local to where I live managed to poach the main recreational field in a private sale. They knew the community was seeking to buy the land to benefit nature and to protect the long-standing customary access. Nope. They wanted it for silage. They're now planning to fence it off.

You can see how these questions of authenticity and legitimacy become vexed the moment you start to pick apart what they mean. Not least in a country where belonging and ownership have been decoupled for a very long time and the historic break with rural life was not always voluntary.

This broke the link between the family and farming. Were they still the people of the place? Their gravestones are in the churchyard. But they never owned the land and had ceased to farm it. If I moved to the valleys now, would my voice count? I'd be an outsider. But with an ancestral claim.

In the 19th century the Welsh side of my family were upland farmers tenanted to an absentee English landowner. They stuck a stone plaque on the entrance outhouse, which sarcastically read “Not my own, my native land”. Later they would have to move into a terraced town house and work in the mines.

Yes, or the overlaps are blurry. My good friend in Dartmoor used to be a farm labourer, ran a forest school, manages the garden at a care facility, makes mesolithic apparel, helps out at camps, makes and sells flower wreaths at the market etc. Fair to say her ruralism never gets much of a hearing.

James in no way guilty of this but there is a type of journalist who likes to report the 'authentic countryside' by speaking to to three farmers, one estate owner, and five gamekeepers. Rural Britain is also the guy that runs the vape shop and the fella who set up the Indian restaurant in 1973.

People don't focus on that side of ruralism because, not being land-based, it is seen as less authentic and I suppose less uniquely rural... But it makes up the majority of people who actually live in the countryside. Often their values and desires for the countryside are distinct, but overlooked.

Look forward to this and I'm sure James has done a great job. I also think we need to reckon with the fact that a true cross-section of rural Britain would feature: hairdressers, estate agents, roofers, publicans, software engineers, nurses, small business owners, and a lot of retired people.

Where's your site in the WV?! 👀

(in fact, in my view, a misreading of the law. But that's their position..)

Reminder that publishers claim journalistic exemptions to evade basic responsibilities (e.g. GDPR) while simultaneously maintaining they do not have any of the professional duties of journalists, should not have to follow any journalistic codes of practice, and are not accountable to any regulator.