An interview with environmental campaigner and author Guy Shrubsole
JGF: Your new book – The Lie of the Land: Who Really Cares for the Countryside? – continues to question the inequalities of land ownership, which follows on from 2019’s Who Owns England? revealing the devastating statistic that “less than 1% of the population own roughly half of the land in the UK.”
Over time, and under pressure to justify such high levels of private ownership in the UK, landowners have presented themselves as ‘custodians’ and ‘guardians’ who can be trusted to act as ‘good stewards’ without the need to introduce any regulations or interfere with ownership. Can you retrace the historical narrative of ‘stewardship’ back to its roots and explain its current – if fading – power?
GS: A lot of people will hear the word ‘stewardship’ or ‘custodianship’ and think that it sounds like a good idea – to not own something outright, but look after it on behalf of someone else. The etymology of ‘steward’ goes back to the Old English stīweard, meaning the ward or guardian of the household or animals – stig gives us the word (pig) ‘sty’ – on behalf of the lord of the manor. What that essentially conveys is that it’s someone looking after something on behalf of someone else, so it has that sense of only being here temporarily – trying to care for the land, to pass it on in a good state. I do think this is a noble ideal but it's also become the vogue as a narrative frame used by landowners, lobbyists, and business groups as a way of essentially defending the status quo and shielding bad environmental practices from too much scrutiny, and evading government regulations.
In the book, I trace this history back to its origins, but what I also found fascinating was uncovering how the language of stewardship was deliberately revived in the 1970s by groups like the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) and the National Farmers Union (NFU), and how successive NFU presidents have used the phrase ‘custodians of the countryside’ from the 1970s through to today. It's basically a right of passage for NFU presidents to keep parroting this phrase. And it's a phrase that's been picked up by politicians as well. Every time they go to the Oxford Farming Conference, the NFU conference, or CLA conference, they make some reference to landowners being the ‘stewards of the land’, and farmers the ‘custodians of the countryside’. And often, at least under the Conservatives, it was accompanied by a promise not to add to the regulatory burdens of farmers or landowners, but to carry on providing billions of pounds of public money in farm subsidies each year. So essentially, it's a way of deflecting attention away from the degree to which landowners and farmers have control over what they're doing, and hold considerable sway over what they do on the land. And too often it’s prioritising profit, personal gain, and private property rights over protection. Ultimately, the reason for it is to say, 'We want to have our private property rights unaffected by wider public, social and environmental issues’. I’m of the view that private property rights have always been to a certain extent compromised; there has to be a trade-off between the rights of private property owners and the wider common good. But obviously the lobby groups and the big landowners will push forcefully for those constraints to be minimised.
People reading my book may think, ‘I know a nature-friendly farmer’, or ‘I know a landowner who is as good a steward as they can be’. And I cite examples of people like that in the book as well – such as James Rebanks in Cumbria, and Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree rewilding the Knepp estate in Sussex. But again it comes back to the idea that individual actors are going to save us, and that we can put our faith in those heroes, rather than in systemic change. In some ways this has been encouraged by the rewilding movement because the way it's been brought into practice in England at least has very much focused on individual landowners doing heroic things on their own land. In Scotland it’s obviously quite a different narrative, with a challenge to ‘green lairds’, for example, and there has been a big debate about land reform, what land is for, and community land ownership in Scotland, over the last 20 years or so.
