The middle class have hijacked the English countryside for themselves
Unless the urban majority has a sense of entitlement to the land,
they're hardly going to become the eco-consumers we all need
....
The consequences of this 20th-century middle-class hijack are finally
coming home to roost. The conservationists who spent a half-century
trying to keep people out of the countryside now have to reckon with the
challenge that unless England's largely urban population develops a much
stronger connection to the environmental resources that sustain them,
such as soil and water, they're hardly likely to become the
eco-consumers we all need to be for the 21st century.
Environmental awareness powerful enough to shift ingrained consumer
habits is not something triggered by a government report or even a film:
fear prompts people to switch off, as environmental campaigners are
increasingly aware. Our best bet is the encouragement of a mass
emotional engagement with, and experience of, the land, opening up
access for urban populations to wildlife areas within cities - and
outside them - places that are accessible and free, and part of every
school curriculum. One of the most interesting ideas is how we could
make the greenbelt green in more than name - re-wilding, creating
woodlands and heathlands within easy access of cities. Imagine cities
ringed by vast, accessible nature reserves instead of nondescript
farmland and litter-strewn scrubland.
Already a debate about who the countryside is for has begun in key
organisations like the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural
England - and David Miliband gave a thoughtful speech on it last month.
Their members may not much like the direction this may take them in, but
it's true to the original vision of Octavia Hill, one of the founders of
the National Trust, whose first purchases of land were on the edges of
cities, to provide "open-air sitting rooms for the poor". You could
argue that we've been successful at creating open-air gyms for hikers,
mountain-bike riders and the like, but Hill was describing another kind
of access to land, which offers familiarity and comfort - a far more
demanding and prescient ambition than even she could ever have imagined.
cont'd....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2063199,00.html