places being a by-product of that work.
Active management, including grazing
animals, is key to this, with farmers being
rewarded by the taxpayer under ELMS.
In my opinion, Michael Gove has been a bit
weak on forestry. Where is the leadership
in forestry on some of the more marginal
pieces of land?
I hold with the theories of Professor
Frans Vera, who challenges the notion
that Europe and Great Britain were once
a closed-canopy forest. He says grazing
animals had a much greater impact than
we have assumed previously, and that
wood pasture would have been the norm
before agriculture. Human beings like
glades, and the wildlife capturing our
imagination today such as songbirds and
butterflies exists at the woodland edge.
An upland landscape of wooded pasture
appeals to me.
Of course, we must have a commercial
timber industry, but I would like it to be
continuous-cover forestry with native
species, and the commercial sector
should be rewarded for the environmental
benefits and landscape beauty that it
provides. At the same time, let’s not
renature the uplands with forests planted
just for commercial production of wood.
Is there conflict between the various 2020
objectives for biodiversity and renewable
energy, say in conserving upland bird
populations in areas earmarked for wind
farms?
Yes, such policies do sometimes conflict.
For instance, elsewhere in the world,
the use of oils produced in agriculture
including palm oil, or rapeseed oil as fuel
for cars, is profoundly immoral because
you are stripping the land of natural
habitat or food for people. Smaller-scale
biomass makes more sense: projects fed
6 Outdoor focus | autumn 2019
Of course, we
must have a
commercial
timber industry,
but I would
like it to be
continuous-
cover forestry
with native
species...
by local woodchip as a by-product from
mills are great. I would rather see solar
panels on the roofs of warehouses – there
are several thousand hectares of flat roofs
in the South East of England alone that
could be used for this – and solar on our
roads as well, which is an interesting idea
I have seen pioneered in France. I also
think there is a role for offshore wind.
Has onshore wind more or less run its
course?
Potentially the best sites have been used
up and political winds change but it is
about the availability of quality sites.
Do ecologists get in the way of good hydro
schemes?
With hydro, the basic rule is about size,
so small hydro has lower impact. Whereas
large scale hydro mega dams can have
a terribly negative impact on flooding
communities and are difficult to fix once
they have silted up – though, given the
dire threats that we face from climate
change, I would rather have large scale
hydro than coal.
How do you keep legislation ‘at the gate’
to enable innovation to flourish but
trusting people not to overexploit – might
an Environment Watchdog’s teeth be too
sharp?
The Watchdog envisaged in the
Environment Bill would have the remit
of holding government to account rather
than individual farmers and business
people and I do think historically
the implementation of regulation in
the countryside has perhaps been a
somewhat bureaucratic. There is scope
for simplifying life for rural businesses
– though it doesn’t necessarily mean
regulations should be weakened but I