The Forgiveness of Nature by Graham Harvey, Jonathan Cape, £17.99,
ISBN 0224060473
IT’S just green stuff you walk on, isn’t it? “Sacrilege!” cries the
cricketer, baseball fan or rabid follower of football. Grass is the altar of
performance. Their grassy games are virtual religions, their pitches are
hallowed. Early football games were played on a grazed field, a far cry from
today’s supersmooth, tailored turf. Most spectators give little thought to the
skill of the ground staff and plant breeders who labour to produce that perfect
pitch. The “turf doctors” do battle with the weather—and those savagely
studded boots tearing up the grass. If they fail, they take the blame for a poor
game.
How did this humble family of plants ever come to this pass? In The
Forgiveness of Nature Graham Harvey weaves his way through all the uses and
abuses of grass and grasslands with wonderful passion. And it’s an amazing tale
of exploitation. Grassland is not a natural form of vegetation. Humans were
creating them well before agriculture ever began: the first semi-nomadic
pastoralists cleared forests as they moved their herds across the land. And as
grasslands spread, their way of life flourished.
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Harvey looks at the use of grasses around the world, then concentrates on how
grasslands, which are really communities of plants, both grasses and
non-grasses, have been used in Britain. Today, England possesses less than 800
square kilometres of species-rich grasslands—an area roughly twice the
size of the Isle of Wight. Grass species have also fallen to human intervention:
perennial ryegrass and crested dog’s tail grass dominate fields and meadows,
planted to support modern livestock farming.
Charting the discovery of the American prairies by the early European
settlers, Harvey mourns their destruction as he unravels their complex history
and their importance in supporting an abundance of life. He’s even worked out a
way of undoing the damage done by farmers and ranchers: abandon the cultivation
of at least 360,000 square kilometres of the Great Plains. Return the land to
the bison herds, he suggests, because it has been financially insolvent since it
was taken from the Native Americans.
Harvey has another complaint, too. Modern farming techniques turn what should
be natural food into yet another degraded factory product. The famed “roast beef
of old England” owed its existence to cattle fed on a rich mix of meadow
grasses.
Then Harvey takes us closer to home, to the grassy areas around our towns,
parks and playing fields. Here, he says, we’re indebted to Edwin Beard Budding.
You may never have heard of him, but he changed our lives forever by inventing
the cylinder lawnmower. Lawn production and care, once the province of only the
largest landowner, was now within the grasp of the smallest householder. Now
nature conservation enthusiasts aim to rejuvenate our urban areas and city parks
by introducing mixtures of wildflowers and grasses. So it comes full circle: the
country meadow returns to the concrete landscapes that superseded it.
Sadly, while urban areas are improving, intensely cultivated lands are in a
poor state, and getting worse. Intensive applications of fertilisers produce
badly drained and compacted soils, with poor yields. The old practice of
rotating crops and grasslands would improve the fertility of the soils and the
species richness of the pastoral grasslands, but it’s now largely abandoned.
Meanwhile, fierce agribusiness competition encourages short-term solutions, so
there is little chance that older techniques will return. Many farmers will rue
the day they gave them up.
