24 minute read
The Green & Pleasant Land: The Political Geography of Vegan Britain by Jordi Casamitjana
JORDI Casamitjana, the author of the book “Ethical Vegan”, looks at how much the British landscape could be considered “vegan-friendly”.
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I remember well the first time I travelled through the British Islands.
When I emigrated to the UK in the early 90s, I went straight to London — as most immigrants do. Because I could not speak English, I survived the first months doing very low paid jobs. But I did not give up trying to find work as a Zoologist, so in addition to sending many letters to any potential employers I could think of, I decided that I would hitchhike through the British Islands trying to find a suitable job for me. The reason I chose hitchhiking was mostly economical, but it also forced me to have conversations — in my broken English — with whoever was trusting enough to offer me a lift. I thought that would be far more effective than just sending letters that would never get any reply.
I asked every driver whether they knew anybody that would need a Zoologist like me. And, as you can imagine, most of the time the answer was “no”. However, eventually, after having hitchhiked through most of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, someone in Cornwall answered “yes” — and this is how I ended up working at The Monkey Sanctuary in Looe and settling in the UK for good.
But one of the interesting things that my hitchhiking adventures provided me with was the opportunity to see up close the different shapes and colours of the “green and pleasant land” the British countryside is traditionally described as.
Having grown up in the relatively arid Iberian Peninsula and under a very heated fascist regime, my experience of the British Islands were totally aligned with this stereotypical description. From what I saw, it did look pleasant and definitively looked green. That was one major appeal for me, so I did my best to find ways to stay, rather than moving to the next country if things did not turn out as I expected — as I had been doing so far.
At that time, I knew very little of foxhunting and shooting, and how these fraternities had ruined these islands and stripped the “pleasant” attribute that only some outsiders still maintained — and by ‘outsiders’ I mean humans, horses and dogs that had not evolved in these islands as foxes, hares, deer and badgers had done. Neither did I have any idea of who owned the fields and meadows I was occasionally sleeping on. Some of them looked a bit wild but then, in the morning, an intimidating herd of cows would approach and disabuse me of that idea. Not even today, many decades later, have I a good enough knowledge of who owns Britain. And I would like to know how many of those who own a bit of it use their land to grow proper food and sequester carbon — instead of destroying habitats, polluting water, heating the air and causing a huge amount of suffering. In other words, how much British land is owned by vegan-friendly landowners? This article is my attempt to answer this question.
People own land
The fact that the land you normally see is owned by people is something you probably take for granted, but for me, that was a relative surprise. I knew that buildings and crops were owned by proprietors and farmers, of course, but I assumed that the bits that looked “wildish” were either owned by local governments, the State, or nobody. I assumed that wild animals were “free” animals not owned by anyone. How wrong I was! In many places, and heavily populated islands such as Great Britain in particular, each individual wild animal is owned by whoever owns the land that animal happens to be on. And most of the land is owned by a person, a family, a corporation, or an institution (all of them composed of people). I was shocked I was allowed to walk through most of the country not because I was a free human that I could go anywhere I wanted, but because landowners were giving me “permission” to do so, as long as I used, exclusively, the very few paths legislators had forced them to make available to pedestrians (the famous Right of Way paths, which are not, by any means, common in most countries).
Who are these landowners? Are they “anyone”, or a very particular set of “someones”? I found some data from Guy Shrubsole, author of the 2017 book Who Owns England. It seems that half of England is owned only by less than 1% of the population. About 25,000 landowners have control of half of the country’s land. According to this source, 30% is owned by the aristocracy and the gentry, 18% by corporations, 17% by oligarchs and city bankers, 8.5% by the public sector, 5% by homeowners, 2% by conservation charities, 1.4% by the Crown and the Royal family, and 0.5% by the Church of England. About 17% of the land is undeclared at the Land Registry, so it may be owned by some of these too. Some of the privileged people identified as owning much more land than the average Briton — a huge amount more — are the Duke of Buccleuch (who owns the Boughton Estate in Northamptonshire), the Duke of Bedford (who owns the Woburn estate in Bedfordshire),
the Duke of Beaufort (who owns the Badminton estate in Gloucestershire), and businessperson James Dyson (who owns several large grouse moor estates). And by the nature of their titles, these are, as you might expect, mostly upper-class white males. I never met any of them, but they don’t strike me as very vegan-friendly landowners to me.
As far as institutions or corporations are concerned, when in 2018 I tried to find which one owns more land, I identified The Forestry Commission as number one. This is a non-ministerial government department responsible for the management of publicly owned forests and the regulation of both public and private forestry in England. It’s Britain’s largest land manager, leasing 208,895 acres of the 2.5 million acres in its care. If all local authorities were part of a single institution, that would possibly be the second largest, which would total about 1 million acres. But they don’t, so the number two prize goes to the National Trust, with 620,000 acres of land and 780 miles of coast. This is a charity founded in 1895 for the purpose of heritage conservation in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
The third prize would go to the Ministry of Defence, which owns about 593,000 acres, more than two-thirds of which are considered to be “rural estate” held solely to train the armed forces. If all pension funds were a single institution they would get the fourth prize, and the fifth would go to all utility companies that provide water, electricity, and transport (i.e. railways). If we don’t count them, though, then the fourth prize would go to The Crown Estate — which, as you know, tends to choose one person, and one person only, as the wearer of its precious crown. The Royals can use about 358,000 acres without fear of being accused of trespassing. And the legitimate fifth prize goes to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), with its 200 nature reserves covering about 321,237 acres of British land.
The next one size-wise would be the already mentioned Duke of Buccleuch & Queensberry with 240,000 acres, who beat all the UK “peasants” who, had they all been running a co-operative under a single institution called something like “UK Independent Farms”, would have reached 300,000 acres (according to 2001 figures). Again, neither of these institutional top winners spell vegan-friendliness to me.
Land for killing
Unfortunately, landowners are allowed to kill wild animals on their land (unless the individuals belong to protected species), as they, legally, own them all. They can also allow other people in, and let them kill a few too — sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee. Even the right to kill on someone’s land can be passed or sold in the form of hunting, shooting, or fishing licenses. Landowners who allow any so-called “field sports” or lethal “wildlife management” in their land could definitively not be considered vegan-friendly.
During my anti-hunting work, I tried to calculate the amount of land that was available to registered hunts (foxhunts, hare hunts, staghounds and mink hunts). Land owned by people who allow hunts to enter and do what they want. People who disregard any evidence that shows how trail hunting — which is what the hunts say they are normally doing since the Hunting Act 2004 was enacted — is, in fact, a false alibi used as a cover for illegal hunting. I did not manage to calculate it, as most small landowners either do not publicly declare if they allow hunters in, or some may only do it reluctantly, fearing retaliation if they do not. Regarding foxhunting alone, if you look at the UK maps of “hunting countries” which show which areas are considered the “territory” of each foxhunt, you will notice that about a quarter of Scotland is “taken” by foxhunts, about two-thirds of Northern Ireland, over 80% of England and over 90% of Wales. These are the areas they traditionally used, trespassing with their hounds and horses into any land they wished within their territory — terrorising wildlife and farm animals alike.
However these days, many landowners no longer allow them in. There is even an organisation, Hounds Off, dedicated to supporting them. My friend Joe Hashman runs Hounds Off, so I asked him if he had any idea of the percentage of landowners in hunting countries who do not allow the hunts on their land anymore. He replied: “No, I never did that calculation. Because it’s fluid’. Land changes hands and wishes change too. And most importantly, because we always encourage autonomous action. The idea is that we provide the tools and empower people to just get on with it. That’s the purpose of the website. So, it’s actually not possible to calculate because most landowners don’t come to us, they just do it.”
From all the people and institutions I mentioned in the previous chapter, the National Trust and the RSPB are the only two that no longer allow hunts in. But the former just recently decided so after their members voted to ban trail hunting in their 2021 AGM (after many years of pressure asking them to ban all types of hunting). The RSPB does not allow hunting with dogs but allows animals such as foxes to be shot on their land in the name of “wildlife management”, claiming that it is necessary to protect their favourite birds (the blogger and environmental campaigner Jason Enfield stated that the RSPB killed 598 foxes and 800 crows in one year). For this reason, this institution cannot be classed as vegan-friendly either.
The shooting industry (which commercialises the shooting of some birds, such as pheasants, partridges, grouse and aquatic birds) uses a huge amount of land too. According to the industry itself in its 2014 ‘The
The Pheasant. Not native to the UK, Pheasants are specifically bred to be shot, in the name of ‘sport’.
Value of Shooting’ report, nearly 35 million acres are managed by it. More than 60 million birds are bred and released for shooting each year on Britain’s 300 game farms, according to the Game Farmers’ Association. And in commercial shooting states, as they charge per animal shot, they kill all the natural predators as they see them as competition for their punters. They either poison them illegally, shoot them, or snare them. According to figures from the UK Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), 1.7 million animals fall victim to snares every year, mostly in shooting states.
I did not know at the time, but when I was walking on fields during my hitchhiking days, I was going through a land where either wildlife was regularly chased by dogs or shot by guns, or farm animals were fattened before being sent to execution. I did not realise that under the pleasant green flourishing everywhere, laid the disturbing red of the blood of so many innocent victims. It’s not easy to find land in the British countryside that is not used for animal agriculture and does not allow any bloody field sport. For instance, Vegan Camp Out is a highly successful event that happens every year — pandemics permitting — in England. Thousands of people camp in very big fields and attend very interesting talks and workshops given by the most popular vegans of our time. However, there has been controversy regarding the sites they have chosen for not being vegan-friendly enough (such as belonging to animal farmers, or for allowing hunting or shooting). In a Facebook conversation, Jordan Greiner Martin, one of the organisers, explained the process they went through to select the right place for their latest event: “There are 3 types of venues for festivals typically - showgrounds (owned by agriculture societies), farmland, or estates/halls (which allow shooting). We went to over 100 site visits to pick the new venue for VCO and everyone fell into one of those 3 categories. So, we asked our audience which they preferred and the vote was overwhelmingly estates/halls, so that’s what we did.” The site chosen for 2022 is Stanford Hall,
Leicestershire, but despite the organisers claiming that the venue recently banned any hunt from using their land and the community farm in there does no longer farm animals for meat, some vegans have questioned the latter and there is no doubt that “external” shooting is still allowed. It’s hard to find bloodless land in England.
Land for growing
If you are a landowner who consumes animal products and allow your land to be used for field sports, neither most animals nor most vegans are likely to have you on the priority list of people to send a card to for Christmas. Becoming vegan is a good step towards increasing the chance to be on that list, but you can do better than that. You can use your land to produce crops for vegans while reducing as much as possible the negative impact on local wildlife. But to attempt that, unless you are a very high-tech vertical farmer or fermenter, you would need some arable land.
According to the 2019 report ‘Eating Away at Climate Change with Negative Emissions’ written by Helen Harwatt and Matthew N Hayek from Harvard Law School, the UK has about 84,000 km2 (20,756,852 acres) of permanent pastureland and 57,528 km2 (14,215,479 acres) of cropland. The latter is divided into 51,449 Km2 (12,713,325 acres) in England, 4,737 (1,170,538 acres) in Scotland, 812 (200,650 acres) in Wales and 530 (130,966 acres) in Northern Ireland.
That’s great! But is all this cropland used in a vegan-friendly manner? Sadly, most of it isn’t. The report states 55% of this cropland is used for animal feed (56% in England, 49% in Scotland, 49% in Wales and 58% in Northern Ireland).
This is a pattern we see repeated in almost every country in the world. According to a 2019 report from Greenpeace, 63% of EU cropland is used to feed farm animals, and if we include permanent pastureland, then it raises to 71%. Ourworldindata has calculated that 29% of the Earth’s surface (149 million Km2) is dry land, 71% of which is habitable land, 50% of which is agricultural land, and 71% of which is used to feed farm animals (40 million Km2).
And who runs the croplands in the UK? Mainly white people. The UK Government census shows that 98.6% of farm managers and holders are white-British — it has even been claimed that Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones MBE is the only black farmer in the British countryside! Navaratnam Partheeban, the founder of the British Veterinary Ethnicity and Diversity Society, said to Wicked Leeks that only one per cent of farm vets are from an ethnic minority, while 3.5 per cent of all vets are non-white. This is not unique to Britain. In the US, black farmers account for only 1.4% of all US farmers, cultivate only 0.5% of the country’s farmland and generate only 0.4% of total US annual agricultural sales. According to the census, in 1920 there were ten times more black farmers than today, so it seems that it is industrial farming that is leading to this racial disparity. There is certainly an issue of land justice to consider here.
What about the 45% of UK cropland used to feed humans rather than farm animals?
Is all that vegan-friendly then? I am afraid not. On most of it, many animals are killed on purpose with pesticides. DEFRA stated that in 2019 the UK had a total area of 4.85 Km2 (1,199 acres) of land farmed organically (an increase of 2.4% compared to 2018). This is more vegan-friendly than traditional farming as it uses fewer pesticides that kill wildlife and no chemical fertilizers that damage the environment, but it is still not vegan-friendly because it does use some pesticides and uses animal manure from animal agriculture.
To get to true vegan-friendly farming, we need to look at “veganic farming”, which is the type of organic farming that tries to avoid all animal products and does not intentionally kill any animal. Via Facebook, I asked UK veganic farmers if they knew how much of the organic cropland in the UK is veganic. Iain Tolhurst, one of the top veganic farmers in the country who created the Vegan Organic Network (VON) and it’s stockfree (animal-free) organic standards, replied the following: “Less than 100 ha. I think we may still be the largest certified Stockfree organic farm in the UK”. This means less than 1 Km2 (247 acres). It seems that, from all the cropland currently in the UK (14,215,479 acres), around 0.00002% is vegan-friend-
ly — and I don’t think adding the land owned by vegan animal sanctuaries will make a big difference to this figure. So much for a pleasant land for the animals.
There is hope for a vegan Britain
Imagine a hypothetical anti-speciesist equalitarian UN Assembly where all animals could have a say. If we were to tell the representatives of the non-human animal communities living in the British Islands that veganism is growing and now the UK is one of the most vegan-friendly countries in the world, they would look at us with perplexity and disbelief. They will think we are delusional, deceived by opportunistic marketing and wishful thinking. I could not blame them. Considering how small is the proportion of our vegan-friendly land, they may be right.
We could measure vegan friendliness in different ways. We can calculate the “blood footprint” (the total amount of suffering caused to other sentient beings by an individual, event, organization or product) of a country, and the lower it is, the more vegan-friendly the country would be. But we could also measure it by the area of vegan-friendly land (where animals are not deliberately harmed or exploited by who owns it, manages it, or occupies it, and which does not form part of any animal exploitation industry or project). We could call the rest of the land “blood land”. A low blood footprint plus low blood land equals vegan-friendly. Britain may score relatively high compared with most developed countries on the former, but, after looking into this issue, unfortunately, I don’t think it does on the latter.
But there is hope. Change may be on its way.
Although the top landowners are members of the aristocracy or the Royal family known for their bloodthirsty habits (I am not talking about any conspiracy theory here involving lizards or babies, but their keenness for blood sports) there is one that seems to be leaving the pack. Randal Plunkett, the Baron of Dunsany, is vegan now, and he has started rewilding his family state in the Irish county of Meath to give it back to the animals. He said to the Irish Independent:
His new insight made him remove all grazing animals from the property and banned the use of both pesticides and fertilisers on his crops. He changed the use of 750 acres of a highly profitable 1,700-acre pasture into a rewilding reserve, which is now home to otters, red deer, foxes, badgers, pine martens, hares and stoats. If he could become vegan and do all that, perhaps the next generation of English aristocrats could do it too.
And we should not forget the urban areas. Although they do not form part of the countryside, they can become vegan-friendly land too, by either passing local authority ordinances banning different types of animal exploitation or harm, or by growing food in a veganic way in allotments, gardens, and city farms. New research has found that urban allotments could be as productive as farms. A two-year pilot study by the University of Sussex in Brighton and Hove in 2021 found that people in cities were able to harvest in their gardens and balconies one kilogram of insect-pollinated fruit and vegetables per square metre in a season — yields comparable to conventional farming.
And perhaps in the cities, we could also solve the issue of land inequality. Over 98% of Black people live in cities, so if we encourage urban dwellers to give food growing a go, people of different ethnic groups may take the challenge — especially if they see it as an act of social justice. For instance, the Community Farm is an organic farm and social enterprise in Bristol which has now appointed Acomo Oloya as its Black Lives Matter champion. In 2019, Black Rootz, the first multigenerational Black-led growing project in the UK, was created. It grows sweet potatoes, exot-
ic squashes and tomatillos, among other vegetables, in the Wolves Lane Horticultural Centre in north London. The Land in Our Names (LION) is a grassroots Blackled collective committed to reparations in Britain by connecting land and climate justice with racial justice. They give grants to Black people interested in getting into growing food.
And in cities, we also have many vegan eateries, vegan markets, and vegan fairs, every one of which adds a tiny bit of vegan-friendly land to the islands. If we all make our homes vegan-friendly, imagine how much more land we could add to the list — we don’t have to own a house, we can make our rented homes vegan, as I have done with mine. Data from the latest 2022 poll from Finder shows that 3% of the UK population is already vegan — and it could reach 7.8% by the end of 2023. As this percentage keeps growing, sooner or later we are bound to affect the vegan friendliness of the land.
If most vegans are in cities and most of the countryside is not yet vegan-friendly, we could turn the tables around. If the countryside doesn’t progress towards a vegan world and gets stuck in the past, we could make the vegan revolution urban-led, spilling outwards to and through the fields, and correcting the food injustice that has led to just a few people from a particular demographic profile to own most of the islands’ land, as we go.
We vegans could go and buy land from animal agriculture or shooting estates, and convert it into veganic farms or rewilding projects. It is already happening. The Vegan Land Movement (VLM), which recently became a Community Interest Company (CIC), was founded by Gina Bates, an animal rights activist and veganic farmer in Scotland. They aim to buy land used for animal agriculture and rewild it. All use of their land must be in line with eco-vegan principles, and promote non-interventionist rewilding. On their website, they explain what eco-vegan principles are: “Eco-vegan principle means that which promotes the well-being of individual species members, recognised as persons with interests, and the habitats that support them. Eco-veganism recognises that diverse and abundant ecosystems are preferable to support the good of the whole. Eco-veganism does not sacrifice specimens for the good of the whole. Eco-Veganism is non-violent. Eco-veganism prohibits the use of pesticides/insecticides and any substance that is intended to kill organisms and might reasonably be thought to cause harm to creatures. (ie precautionary). In light of climate change, VLM CIC will prioritise reforestation (of native trees). Eco-veganism recognises all creatures as ends in themselves and of intrinsic value, and strictly prohibits their use as means to the achievement of ends beyond themselves.” That, for me, is what vegan-friendly land looks like.
After crowdfunding for it, VLM CiC already bought a 3.3-acre piece of land in Somerset in September 2020, where hundreds of trees have already been planted. And when they get more land, they are planning to use part of it for veganic farming or establishing community orchards, as long as any profits made from selling produce are used to buy more land. It seems like a good plan.
Also, if the ban of trail hunting in National Trust land begins to be imitated by major landowners, we can use this new trend to go beyond, and lobby for a ban on shooting and snaring — which in Wales may be closer than some people may think. And now that the UK government is beginning to add conservation criteria for some of its agricultural subsidies, we could push them to go further and begin subsidising veganic farming. With the promise of extra cash, animal farmers may turn to crop production, horticultural farmers may become organic, and organic farmers may convert to veganic agriculture. A wave of positive conversion reverberating throughout the land.
We may be green, but we are far from the pleasant land that we could be.
But if we know where we want to go, we may get there in the end.
Jordi Casamitjana
Author of ‘Ethical Vegan: A Personal & Political Journey to Change the World’
Pictured: A young Jordi Casamitjana hitchhiking in Scotland. Photo credit: Jordi Casamitjana
