Ash dieback disease: steering clear of the blame game
Before I ignite the letters page again, let me start off by saying I fully recognise that ash dieback disease is not a laughing matter. However, what did slightly amuse me was the international blame game that kicked off the moment it manifested itself on British shores.
At first, fingers were pointed at Denmark but then the Danes were quick to point out they got it from the Germans, who got it from the Poles. No doubt the Poles were on standby to pass the blame further east.
This all took me back to my childhood, when Dutch elm disease was laying waste to the largest trees on our farm. As a 10-year-old I readily assumed it must be some evil plot cooked up by Dutchmen who lurked on the other side of the North Sea. It was around this time that my sister succumbed to German measles. Meanwhile at school we were learning about the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic. It was enough to convince a young mind that foreign parts were well worth isolating yourself from. Mercifully, as I grew older and wiser I started to realise that there were plenty of good things in Britain that had come from abroad such as Toblerone, Heineken and Ulrika Jonsson.
As an island nation the British can, not surprisingly, have an isolationist mentality. Related to this is the notion that the British countryside is some sort of natural ecosystem evolved over millennia. It’s a nice idea but it’s not true. When it comes to fauna and flora, Britain is an island characterised by imports. For starters there is wheat, barley, sheep and chickens, which all originated thousands of miles away in Asia. Even the cricket bat willow, which farmers have traditionally planted by streams on the birth of a daughter to pay for her wedding, is Chinese. Similarly, a quick look around the average garden will reveal 90% of the species are as alien as the monkey puzzle tree.
Outside the cultivation of our gardens and farms there is also quite a bit of wild Britain that isn’t actually native. The hare is a creature of the Eurasian steppe brought here some time before the Romans. As for the Romans, they brought the chestnut tree and the garden snail and quite a bit more besides, including, perversely, the English elm. This list of embedded foreigners goes on and on: the holm oak, the walnut, the pheasant, the little owl. In fact, in 2005, DEFRA counted 2,721 “invasive” species living wild in the British countryside.
The key point here is that our countryside is not natural and is ever-changing. Too often we witness conservationists confusing change in the British countryside with degradation. It is based on a false notion of some sort of genetic purity that actually has never existed and never will. The British countryside is a dynamic, managed environment and often it is farmers at the forefront of that positive management.
It’s depressing that the main response to the arrival of ash dieback disease is hand wringing followed by finger pointing. The farmer in me tells me to ignore the negativity by rolling up my sleeves and starting to plant different species. History shows that although Dutch elm disease killed 25 million trees a generation ago, there are actually more trees in Britain today than there were then. That’s because the sensible response was to plant more trees and it’s still the sensible response now. It’s time for farmers to lead the way again.
Guy Smith comes from a mixed family farm on the north-east Essex coast. The farm is officially recognised as the driest spot in the British Isles. Situated on the coast close to Clacton-on-Sea, the business is well diversified with a golf course, shop, fishing lakes and airstrip.