What Would an Ecosocialist Britain Look Like?
For a truly ecosocialist Britain to emerge, we will need change the way we understand land itself.
Much has been made of the need for a “carbon-neutral” Britain; Boris Johnson has promised such a thing by 2050 and urges other nations to do the same, while my home city of Glasgow has set a target to be carbon-neutral in the next 10 years. While this at first seems like a pleasant proposal – never mind the fact that thirty years is too long a timeline to prevent the ecological crisis we have already begun – doing so under capitalism, and under a conservative government in particular, will do nothing to alter the fundamentally unequal relationships we have to land as dictated by class in this country. A “carbon-neutral” Britain will likely only outsource much of its carbon emissions to nations where many of our goods are already manufactured, such as China who, as of yet, have made no pledge to curb emissions. Labour’s “Green Industrial Revolution”, outlined in the 2019 election manifesto, goes some way to understanding climate justice as a fundamentally socioeconomic project, and has put the idea of a left climate policy – one which recognizes the failure of the conservative government’s neoliberal approaches – into the forefront of British discourse around climate policy. As Labour leadership hopeful Rebecca Long-Bailey wrote for Tribune in 2019, “the neoliberal approach of substituting citizens for consumers, regulation for voluntary corporate action, individual choice for democracy, and democratic institutions for multinational corporations is never going to protect our environment.” But to be able to halt Britain’s contribution to the climate crisis, and to intertwine with this a fundamentally more equal relationship between people, production, and land, a more radical approach is required.
To achieve such a relationship, the use and appearance of the British countryside itself would have to be drastically changed. As is now well-known, animal agriculture is one of the world’s most carbon-intense industries, and is one of the least economical in terms of land use. While I am highly doubtful that Britain would move to a wholly plant-based diet, at least within the next few decades – meat consumption is deeply culturally ingrained in the British psyche, particularly in older generations, and is a key industry for many British farms – a sizable reduction would be necessary. A move to plant-based agriculture on suitable farmlands would greatly increase plant crops and reduce carbon emissions. It is necessary to acknowledge that not all climates and soil conditions in Britain can support entirely plant-based agriculture, and on this land other approaches would be required. Here mixed farming cultures, integrating varied livestock and cash crops, and agro-ecological approaches - already functioning in nations with much lower carbon outputs - would result in a lower-carbon agriculture industry which would greatly transform the British countryside itself.
The culture of mass-importing would also need to see a significant reduction; we have the resources and technology to grow far more of our own crops than we currently do, the current barrier being largely cost and now, as we begin the process of Brexit, a lack of workforce, with many underpaid farm workers returning to Europe uncertain of their right to remain in the UK. A lot of the barriers to this are social – farm labor, like many forms of manual work, is currently undervalued both economically and socially as “unskilled”. The impact of, and response to, COVID-19 could actually go some way to offering a remedy to this, as workers involved in the food supply chain who were previously derided as unskilled – supermarket staff, delivery workers, cleaners, carers – have been rebranded as “key workers” revealing the necessity and importance of these jobs which our middle- and upper-class had previously refused to acknowledge. A sense is beginning to settle in, always known but as yet unarticulated, that high cultural-capital, white collar work is expendable, while so-called ‘unskilled’ labor is a necessity to the supply chain. While this is currently manifesting in well-intentioned but empty gestures - applauding for healthcare workers, renaming this work “heroic” rather than ‘exploitative’ - there is an opportunity here for genuine organizing. This crisis has been a catalyst in the workplace for many, and presents identifiable goals for workers to organize around - better pay and working conditions, adequate PPE during the course of COVID-19, and better ongoing workplace safety after. This crisis is also improving goodwill amongst the public towards these workers, and (potentially) increasing public support for a strike or other industrial action. The Conservative government’s decision to prematurely end lockdown and potentially reduce furlough pay have been met with outrage and increased organizing, with unions providing the most forceful opposition to the suggestion of returning to work, and many workers being galvanized to become union members for the first time. The suggestion of reducing furlough pay to 60% of workers’ monthly wages, down from 80% - an income which almost meets the definition of relative poverty - was met with such outcry that it was eventually rescinded, demonstrating that even amid the catastrophic handling of this crisis by the UK government, public opinion and an organized workforce still have some power. It will be a substantial and difficult project, but there is an opportunity when we emerge from this pandemic for the left to organize around the now-visible necessity of these roles, and the potential to rehabilitate this work both in terms of earnings and reputation.
Such work, undervalued as it is, has often been completed by migrant and refugee workers, both within and without official state recognition. I bring this up not to suggest a continuation of setting new arrivals in a nation to do the tasks citizens think themselves too good for, but to acknowledge a reality that cannot be ignored – while the climate crisis has so far for Britain manifested only as hotter summers and lighter snowfalls, climate disaster is very much a reality in parts of the world which contributed to it least. There are currently estimated to be 26.4 million people per year forcibly displaced by environmental factors – even under the most hopeful projection, these numbers will rise, and the amount of livable land on this planet will shrink. The faster we move towards an ecosocialist planet, the more people can stay in their homes, but this is a crisis that’s already happening now. A country claiming to be socialist which doesn’t accept such refugees into lives of dignity and respect afforded to all its citizens deserves to sink, and a nation with no borders must be at the heart of any redistributive project.
Our landscapes would also be changed drastically by mass reforesting – the Committee on Climate Change estimates that over a quarter of land in the UK would need to be forested to begin to develop sufficient carbon sinks, as opposed to an approximate 13% of land covered by forest now. Again, Labour’s Green Industrial Revolution has floated the necessity of this project into the British public consciousness, proposing two billion trees over the next 20 years, and even the Conservative 2019 manifesto promised a forest of 1 million trees in my native Northumberland, although this falls woefully short of the three billion thought to be necessary. Such a project would return parts of Britain to something like its state before mass agriculture, the natural condition of which is mostly deciduous forest. This could manifest as a movement similar to the currently en vogue, rather middle-class and individualist idea of “rewilding”, represented in British culture by books like Isabella Tree’s ‘Wilding’, in which the author and her husband conduct such a project of “rewilding” - reintroduction of plant and animal species - within their 1400-hectare private property. Taking both land and money out of private hands offers an abundance of public money and space with which to carry out this work; an ecosocialist nation allows such work to be conducted not as pet projects of the wealthy but on a necessary national, communal scale, for the benefit and access of all.
This brings us on to the subject of land ownership itself; as of last year 50% of English land is owned by 1% of its population, typically corporations and members of the aristocracy, with figures being slightly worse for Scotland. Only around 10% of land is owned by the public sector, a figure which has halved over the last 40 years. Our relationship to land is deeply stratified by social class. The upper class, both hereditary members of the landed gentry and those of more recently acquired hyper-wealth, literally own most of our island’s land, used as both a commodity and a site of leisure, often involving animal cruelty, destruction of habitats, or a combination of the two. Various forms of hunting for sport, from pheasant shooting to fox hunting, continue to be part of English upper-class life, and to shape the land and the lives of the people of who live there, upholding an almost feudal atmosphere between the wealthy and the workers of rural places. The middle class, meanwhile, of both urban and rural areas, have access to the rural as a space of leisure, and place high cultural capital on doing so. The trappings of British middle-class life include coveting National Trust memberships (£76 per year), refreshing country walks, holidays to Cornwall or the Cairngorms, and extensive collections of outdoor clothing and equipment, all at a hefty price tag. This represents the closest thing currently in existence to the relationship to land that should be available to all. The right to nature should be upheld as steadfastly as the right to food, to shelter, to human dignity. However, presently this access comes with prohibitive cost, whether in the form of entry fees, cost of travel (the British countryside is woefully underserved by public transport), equipment, food, or more subtle forms of classism; knowledge and cultural capital which isn’t available to all.
For the rural working class, land is a site of labor, most obviously in the form of farmers, farm laborers, forestry and national park workers; but also in the form of hospitality and customer service workers; cleaners, chambermaids, shop workers, who make the countryside more comfortably and easily accessible to the upper and middle class. Meanwhile, the urban working class, especially those in precarious employment, have their access to rural spaces severely limited by financial expense and/or lack of free time in which to travel.
This unequal distribution not only of land itself but of access to rural spaces, currently shared only between descendants of feudalism in the form of the landed gentry, and the victors capitalism in the form of corporations and oligarchs, can only be reversed via radically transformative measures. Under ecosocialism, national parks will become more like our national health service – free at the point of use and available to all, an example of access to clean air and green spaces as a human right.
For an understanding of how our relationship to land would alter, we look towards undoing the enclosure of the commons and returning land to a truly communal space, devoid of ownership and therefore open to all as sites of labor, recreation, thought, and joy. The appearance of Britain would be drastically changed – the volume of forests more than doubling, more grassland, moorland, de-enclosure of farmland, fewer uniform fields, more mixed-use land, and potentially a drastic change in ecosystems closer to the island’s natural state. But an even more dramatic change would occur in the way we relate to and understand land itself – not as property, commodity, or space enclosed by money or class, but as owned by no one and therefore open to everyone, a site of all possibilities to all people, and a public good.
Clare Patterson is a freelance writer based in Glasgow. Her work has been featured in publications including Bella Caledonia, The Guardian, Art UK, and The Skinny.
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of a delightful article, if we may say so. You can help make more of these by donating a small amount to The Trouble. Most of your money goes directly to paying authors. None of it goes to profit or advertisers, because we are a non-profit and we don’t believe in that stuff.