Thread by @BoarBruton

Morning all. With #NaturalCapital exercising rural/eco/farming/tweedy twitter like never before mostly thanks to @Rebirding1 who has managed to unite the Scots Nats, Eco Marxists, Countryside Alliance, ecologist academics and assorted greenish types in a truly extraordinary way.

Here are my utterly worthless views to stir the pot, offer up a few sacred cows for consideration and hopefully stimulate debate. (I’m doing this on my unlocked account to get outside of the normal echo chamber but most of you known my identity or can guess...)

This isn’t a comment on @Realwildestates - they’re currently little more than some PowerPoint and an expensive board of big hitters who’ve stumbled into a swamp of their own slightly cloth-eared making. They’ll not be interested in my views or my land, I’m far too insignificant.

However they do tell us a couple of important things about #naturalcapital - 1) it’s real and big and important and 2) there is cash in them there hills. If you’re anywhere around land management then this has been obvious for years but the sector is starting to form.

3) It confirms that the current model of eco NGOs has utterly failed. The alphabet soup of disparate organisations is stuck in a mode of essentially gardening on tiny scattered reserves, highly inefficient they cannot be the answer to large scale conservation.

4) it also confirms that the Marxist dream of wide scale Rewilding, taking down the landed estates into some sort of state ownership and then shutting the door for the trophic cascade to just happen is also dead - not that it was ever really possible.

The reaction of many “this is just rich white people talking to themselves and cannot be real conservation” is equally myopic - spoiler alert ! Rich white people own most of the land and the 21st century is going to be a massive disappointment for you.

I thought we’d grown out of the attitude that weighs environmental progress on the perceived worthiness of this doing the work - that utopia maybe a comforting place to live but in the real world I’d rather see and celebrate tangible improvements whoever is making them.

The same could be said for many in the farming community - “dig for victory” and talk of national self sufficiency are stuck in a world war 2 mindset and hopelessly out of touch.

The farming industry has ended up beholden to only two major customers - government and supermarkets - if you like that situation and trust either then I have some magic beans that I’d like to sell you.

Farmers and landowners are the best placed group to provide large scale conservation effects - they are efficient, know their ground, have the kit and knowledge required - it simply requires a mindset change to accept a profession of land management and food production as a mix.

In a country where 25% of food is routinely wasted I can easily see a space for 10% of land to be intelligently repurposed into connected habitats by landowners and agriculture something that the environmental NGOs could never hope to achieve.

Lastly the argument that “x, y or z shouldn’t be able to buy up land” I’m not going to tread into the separate arguments around Scots and Welsh land or the Marist utopia but pragmatically I don’t want to live in a country where land ownership is tightly controlled by the state.

I can accept the argument that land, possibly like a football team, has an inalienable higher cultural value, over and above the monetary value and that possibly some tests could be put in place but any more than that would seem to sit firmly outside our democratic norms.

So where do I end up ? Natural Capital is real, the £ are real and here to stay, to ignore its presence would be plainly stupid. Agriculture shouldn’t be stultified in aspic - that field hasn’t always been there, hasn’t always had that crop rotation and could actually change.

Here’s a sacred cow - not all landowners are tweedy bastards and not all tenant farmers are paragons. A shake up in both groups wouldn’t be a massive problem. Indeed new entrants into farming would probably benefit from new entrants and new ideas like grazing partnerships - cont.

And integrating conservation grazing into forestry projects that are frankly more likely with fresh thinking landowners. Now that “shut the door” Rewilding is finally heading out of fashion the need for grazing and deer management etc will be even more important as we all knew...

So as a small / medium scale landowner, here are a couple of real world examples of what I’d like to see natural capital evolve into.

1) this was a boggy corner in a small lowland field, difficult to access and a pain for increasingly large machinery - don’t @ me - the scale of machinery is an important part of reducing emissions and other input costs to producing your food.

So in 2010 I chose to take that area out of production and turn it into a small copse - partly through natural regeneration and partly through tree planting. It’s not perfect but it’s massively more biodiverse than that boggy corner was.

Now say I could offer this little corner on some sort of #airbnb online marketplace for #NaturalCapital it could be audited by AI and aerial mapping / photographs and megacorp A would offer me £50 a year for the carbon biscuits plus some greenwash on their flat pack furniture.

I like that but want to take a bit of firewood and shoot the odd deer because that’s perfectly sustainable use of a little lowland copse. Megacorp A isn’t into that but Megacorp B is fine with that but for £40 a year.

However Megacorp C would let me do all that and have a commercial pheasant shoot but pay £30 a year... Hmm I don’t really like commercial shooting and don’t have a shoot so will accept the £40 Thankyou very much.

So every year for the next 20 years, so long as the AI and Google maps photos show the trees thriving I get a nice cheque for £40 - more trees, more biodiversity and some carbon offsetting for megacorp B at no cost to the taxpayer - seriously what’s not to like about that ?

Example 2 - this little meadow is by the river, it floods every winter and is lightly grazed every summer. With a few simple changes to the management it could hold a couple of million litres of water for months and revert to being a traditional water meadow.

What if a consortium of the house insurance companies decided that paying a few hundred pounds every year to store water here was a good hedge against flooding further downstream ? Just consider what a few million litres of water costs in some poor families kitchen ?

If we could make natural capital work like this and just think out of our silos for a bit then I for one will welcome out new pinstriped overlords. Have a lovely Sunday.