What is the countryside for?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We should all have a legal right to nature, according to a group of more than 60 campaigning charities who say we need better access to the countryside. They have written to the government, complaining that one in three of us lives more than 15 minutes’ walk from the nearest green space. But is nature there for our enjoyment? Is the countryside just a recreational resource, to be exploited by anyone in possession of a pair of wellies? If we are entitled to delight in the landscape, don’t we also share the moral responsibility for looking after it? Maybe that means leaving it alone. Or should we be doing more to encourage our city-dwellers and minority ethnic communities to feel included there?
The UK’s countryside is about to live through enormous change, with farmers to be given taxpayer cash to ‘rewild’ some of their land. But what should rewilding mean to them and to the rest of us? Bees and butterflies are lovely, but is it worth the loss of a few lambs to see eagles back in our skies? How about a few hundred lambs? Maybe the countryside really belongs to those who for generations have worked it for a hard-earned living; and maybe they have a perfect right to sell some of it to developers who want to build much-needed housing estates. We want the countryside to be richly stocked with exciting animals and beautiful woodlands. We want badgers and beavers and some of us (not the shepherds) want wolves and wildcats. We can't have everything, so what should we do? With Dr Sue Young of The Willdlife Trusts; Farmer Gareth Wyn Jones; Director of Rewilding Britain Alistair Driver and Property Analyst Kate Faulkner.
Produced by Olive Clancy
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:04.8 | Good evening, we were all, or nearly all, country folk once. |
| 0:08.6 | At the time of the Doomsday Book, only 18,000 people lived in London, considerably less than the current population of Godalming, a charming but one horse town, if we still had horses. |
| 0:18.9 | Now we're nearly all townies and we seem confused or at any |
| 0:21.9 | rate conflicted about what the countryside we don't live in should be four. This week, 60-odd campaigning |
| 0:27.8 | organisations called on the government to establish a legal knight to nature, saying our |
| 0:34.1 | disconnection from the natural world is worsening and shortening our lives. |
| 0:38.3 | They want nature-rich spaces within easy reach for everyone. |
| 0:42.7 | For its part, the government's planning to use large amounts of taxpayers' cash |
| 0:46.1 | to pay farmers to return land to the wild, to protect threatened species like water voles, |
| 0:52.1 | reintroduce those that have died out, Beavours, even wolves may be. |
| 0:55.9 | Sounds nice and green if you don't count the extra food we'll have to import. |
| 1:00.6 | Meantime, those who actually live in the more attractive bits of the country |
| 1:04.1 | are feeling about, say, Londoners the same way as Ukrainians feel about Putin. |
| 1:09.1 | Down in Devon, a big surge in demand for holiday homes and |
| 1:12.3 | Airbnbs driven by the pandemic has turbocharged the housing crisis. There's a campaign for curbs on |
| 1:19.5 | incomers to stop locals being priced out and tenants turfed out of homes. Closer to the cities, |
| 1:26.0 | everyone wants more houses. Nobody wants them on the green fields |
| 1:29.7 | near them. So what's the country for? As much to the point, who's it for? That's our moral maize |
| 1:35.2 | tonight. The panel Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, the historian Tim Stanley, |
| 1:39.6 | the libertarian Marxist and editor at Navarra Media Ash Saka and the priest and polemicist Charles Fraser. |
| 1:46.0 | Giles, have a yen to be a country person? |
... |
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