This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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July’s intake of fresher Labour MPs would surely have had their interest piqued by a work in the House of Commons Library, titled, “Are we on target for the environment?” This research briefing is one in a series of “quick reads” specifically produced for Westminster’s 2024 new arrivals. Here, in bite-size form, “priority areas” are identified within the Environment Act 2021 — those priorities being air quality, biodiversity, resources and waste, and water.

The four-paragraph section on biodiversity is suffused with the word “loss”. The authors describe the UK as “one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world”, adding that “nearly one in six [UK] species are threatened with extinction”.

These startling statements rely on the 2023 “State of Nature” report — the product of a collaboration between environmental NGOs, academic institutions and government agencies, including Natural England. A link within the briefing whisks MPs to a blog written by Dr Pete Brotherton, director of science at Natural England who repeats the claim that the UK languishes in the bottom 10 per cent of nations for nature.

Our largest environmental NGOs echoed the refrain in the media with gusto. The RSPB claimed “38 million birds have been lost in the last 50 years”, the Wildlife Trusts said our “most important habitats are in poor condition” whilst the National Trust believes, “More than half of the UK’s flowering plants have been lost since 1970.”

However, the parlous state of British nature may not be as cut and dried as our politicians are led to believe. A fascinating blog by Henrietta Appleton published in September questions how our status as “one of the most nature depleted nations in the world” is arrived at. Appleton’s essay, buried in the cavernous website of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), for which she is the England policy advisor, asks if the metrics used are accurate or appropriate for the UK? She points out the term “nature depleted” has no formal definition, being a phrase that arose from the Natural History Museum’s global Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII).

BII compares current biodiversity levels of sites with ecological baseline surveys of areas that are nearly undisturbed by human activity. This matter of “nearly undisturbed” may well be why British nature is reported as being so devastated.

The islands of the United Kingdom have a history of agricultural and industrial land use and population expansion, far more protracted and intense than most other countries. Thanks to research by the archaeologist Francis Pryor, we know that we boast the oldest hedgerows in Europe, dating to at least 2500 BC, and that England has the longest hedgerow network in the world — some 355,000km. This may sound all naturally leafy but, wherever you have a hedge, you have farming; the hedgerow is after all not a natural phenomenon but an agricultural device, planted and managed by man.

Landscape features such as hedgerows, the ridge and furrow of the shires or stone walls in the uplands, may all be images associated with quintessential English countryside, but in truth they provide unequivocal visible evidence that for more than 4,500 years, thanks to our farming past and present, Britain was and is a country far removed from being in a “natural state”.

The BII values decrease as human influences increase on our natural ecosystems. Due to long-term comprehensive and intensive human land usage in the UK, our BII is calculated as having a mere 53 per cent of its original “nature” left intact. With BII used as the preferred metric for compiling the State of Nature report, our biodiversity levels appear in the bottom 10 per cent of nations and territories in the world, giving seeming legitimacy to the claim that “Britain is the most nature depleted country in Europe”.

However, as Appleton observes, using nature depletion through human activity as the sole method of assessing biodiversity decline fails to reveal the complete picture. She draws our attention instead to a system called “Environmental Performance Index (EPI)”, produced by Yale University.

EPI utilises 58 performance indicators across eleven issue categories. These wide-ranging factors go far beyond those of BII, providing a more muscular set of data on environmental health and ecosystem vitality, using indices based on habitat intactness. If EPI had been used to create Natural England’s “State of Nature” report, rather than BII, we find the UK placed in the top rather than the bottom quartile for nature, 23rd out of 180 countries for our overall biodiversity — a very different picture to that painted by Natural England.

Yet even if we had used EPI, there is no room for complacency. In the manner of white dog shit, seeing vast flocks of lapwing delving on sports pitches, starlings in murmuration over rooftops or house sparrows chattering in myriad mass, all are now, for the most part, a hazy memory of the 1970s. Much of our flora and fauna species are flatlining; some continue in decline.

The overwhelming culprit for this is post-war change in agricultural practices. Yet for all that, agricultural activity has historically, and contemporarily, been responsible for creating habitats, thereby boosting biodiversity. Just think back to those iconic hedgerows, filled with yellowhammers, linnets and whitethroats; planted and then laid by farmers and horny-handed yokels like me. If the farmers were largely, if unintentionally, accountable for nature decline, it was recognised they can also be responsible for its return.

Successive governments have not been blind to declines in biodiversity. They grew increasingly aware that it was their policies that had ultimately driven farmers to a decidedly nature-unfriendly form of industrialised agriculture, the bane of corn buntings but a boon for Tesco shareholders.

The first agri-environment schemes began in 1987 with the Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESA) scheme. In the following decades these were improved, culminating in the fully-fledged post-Brexit, Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs) that incorporate Countryside Stewardship and the Sustainable Farming Initiative (SFI).

ELMs have their detractors in both agricultural and environmental sectors, citing issues with complexity, insufficient funding and the lack of compatibility with efficient food production. In spite of these faults, ELMs are notably more generous and beneficial to nature than any agri-environment scheme enjoyed, or endured, by farmers elsewhere in Europe.

According to DEFRA, there are currently 40,000 Countryside Stewardship agreements in place across England. 23 per cent of English upland. 28 per cent of lowland meadows are now managed under nature-friendly schemes and nearly 13,500 farms, comprising more than 2 million hectares, had live SFI agreements. 100 farm clusters in England, covering 450,000 hectares, provide landscape-scale, sustainable farmland nature recovery. Nature-friendly farming is increasingly being embraced by our agriculturalists.

Practices such as improving soil health and better management of habitats including hedgerows, woodlands, wetlands and flower-rich areas are all becoming more common, thanks in large part to agri-environment schemes. The efficacy of these schemes is clear, despite what “State of Nature” may say. The GWCT’s Big Farmland Bird Count, a decade-long citizen science project, revealed in its 2023 survey of 600,000 hectares of UK farmland some 460,000 birds comprising 149 species, 33 of which are red-listed.

Slow but sustainable recovery of species such as red kite, water vole, fen raft spider, barn owl and yellowhammer are being recorded, invariably on land enrolled in government agri-environment schemes.

Nobody with the eyes to see believes English nature has returned to pre-Second World War levels. Most realists would argue it never will. Yet there is now a route map to nature recovery and, until July’s general election, a clear political will to fund farmers to reverse nature decline.

However, the environmental NGOs’ trope of Britain being “Europe’s most nature depleted nation” will inevitably continue to dog those of us involved in farmland wildlife conservation. This doomsday communications strategy has helped furnish these organisations, year upon year, with hundreds of millions in income through private donations and significant taxpayer funding. And, boy, do the eNGOs need cash. The RSPB alone requires £1 million every 2.5 days merely to keep their lights on.

The outcome of eNGOs continuing to cry wolf over nature depletion could well prove disastrous, with a number of leading conservationists fearing future reductions in agri-environment spending by DEFRA, a ministry already facing anticipated cuts of at least £100 million in the forthcoming budget.

Farming minister Daniel Zeichner seemed to confirm the concerns by revealing to Farmers Weekly in September that it was “difficult to justify asking for more money because there’s no evidence on the positive impact of existing funding”. He’s not wrong, certainly if he relied upon “State of Nature” and its authors for his evidence. With farmers continuing to face rising costs of feed, fuel and fertiliser and declining farm-gate prices, farm budgets for wildlife conservation are inevitably impacted, resulting in heavier reliance on agri-environment grant support.

It seems incongruous then that communications teams from the RSPB, National Trust and Wildlife Trusts continue with their skewed narrative of Britain’s nature being the sick man of Europe. Do they believe their own continued existence is now more important than that of the wildlife they were originally set up to protect?

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Richard Negus’s Words from the Hedge: A Hedgelayer’s View of the Countryside is available for pre-order from the publisher, Unbound.