'Making do' and 'making-with': A politics of compassion in the English countryside.
| Author | Darby, Alex |
| Position | FOOD AND FARMING |
James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance, Penguin 2020
James Rebanks's second book, English Pastoral, tells the story of three generations of farmers: himself, his father and his grandfather. It comes at a critical juncture for farming, which is torn between efforts to continually drive costs down while feeding ever more mouths, and an obligation to protect our vulnerable environment. Rebanks's voice helps to bridge the separation that many in the developed West feel from the 'vital [agricultural] processes that sustain us' (p137), and outlines an alternative path that balances the harsh realities that modern farmers face with a compassionate call to care for our natural world.
Rebanks tells a story from his childhood: his hands tremble nervously as he is about to flick a switch controlling the electrical wires around a field of cows. He's been shocked before, and the dodgy circuitry hasn't been fixed. It's the result, he says, of an 'unspoken ethos' among farmers 'to manage with half-broken things or mend them'; they call it 'making do' (p43).
English Pastoral draws on such wisdom to speak about broader ideas surrounding humanity's relationship with nature. Rebanks is deeply critical of the flaws of farming 'progress', with its vast fields of mass-produced uniform crops, damaging pesticides and machinery, and lack of genetic diversity. But he also critiques the opposing approach of ecologists and activists who propose cordoning off large tracts of land in an effort to return them to an imagined 'wild' former state. This state, he explains, is irreconcilable with the way our infrastructure has shaped our environment in the UK for thousands of years, and the space we require to sustain ourselves (p248).
Uncomfortable with extremes of agricultural intensification on the one hand and 'land-sparing' for rewilding (discussed further in this edition by Kate Swade) on the other, Rebanks turns to the old ethos of 'making do' to chart a new path. He uses his own farm as an example, combining his grandfather's knowledge of the land with that which he's learned from environmentalists and ecologists - alongside some useful techniques from agricultural modernisation. Key to this form of agroecology (also discussed further in this edition by Richard Bramley) is the acceptance that we cannot return to a pre-modern utopia, nor can we modernise farming to the extent of 'pure productivity' (p202).
Like the half-functioning electrical unit that just...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
