The Green Problem

I once asked a friend, "what do you imagine when I say the word, 'countryside?'"

They looked at me with a polite smile and a tilt of the head. They said, "green fields."

And I frowned. They had grown up in the city, but I had been born and raised on the edge of a national park. I had also pursued ecology - the study of natural environments and their processes. Although green happened to be my favourite colour, when it came to the countryside, it didn't always mean 'good.'

Green fields had been my home for as long as I could remember. The country was a place where sheep and cattle were grazed, where tractors left mud scraped across the road, and where the daily commute to school in spring would be one of closed windows and hands over noses.

We were told that green fields was just the way of life for our region. The soil had too much clay, and we got too much rain to grow crops, and so grassy meadows sustained livestock. As a result, we were reared off local milk, eggs, and cheeses. It was the way, and we had no alternative.

The years went by. We went for a walk passing by a field of green, and it was gone. Where there were once friendly cows or horses to greet us, there were paved roads, people with dogs on leads, and red houses as far as the eye could see. Open green land became little square lawns - neat and trimmed, with square bushes and manicured flowers. There were gravelled paths instead of dirt tracks, cars in place of tractors, and the stench of sewers instead of fertiliser.

The farmer had sold their land for development. It was no longer profitable. At the time, I didn't know what this meant.

I needed to know why everything had changed. I took ecology at university, specialising in local ecosystems and agriculture. I learned about 'the livestock problem.' In the 1970s, farmers in the UK were offered grants from the government for each animal they kept. Therefore, they were encouraged to have more animals than their land could support. They had lots and lots of sheep or cows - more than they had room for, as this was the only financially sustainable way to keep a farm going.

But in the past decade, this grant - this scheme, was withdrawn. The movement towards 'greener' agriculture discouraged high stocking densities and instead promoted sustainable land management. Farmers were paid by how much land they owned instead of how many animals they kept.

And so those small-scale family-run farms went under. They couldn't keep enough animals to stay in profit, so they sold off the land. It remained unsuitable for crops, and with the government demanding more housing be made available, developers swooped in and built on it.

They wanted 'greener' farming, but instead they got massive corporations dominating the industry and small farms being replaced by housing estates.

As a result, the 'green belt' - the strips of land around urban regions set aside for agriculture, disappeared.

This was not necessarily a bad thing. The problem with the 'green belt' was that there were too many farms practicing unsustainable agricultural methods. They overstocked for the amount of land they owned - creating pollution, and weakening land structure. Those 'green fields' were a mark of poor land management.

So I told my friend what a good and healthy countryside actually looked like. It is not all green fields. It is green and. There are yellows and pinks and blues and reds and browns, and there is green. There are crops and grasses, there are tall plants and small plants, there are trees and ponds and ditches and walls and fences and no fences and rotting trees and hedges.

"But that's such a mess!" They said.

"That's true." I agreed. "It is a mess. It is not neat and trimmed, it is not manicured and even. There are no straight lines or corners or order or reason. It is chaos."

And I think the same is true for green, the colour. I adore how the sun filters through green leaves to the forest floor. I love the moss on trees and ferns underfoot. How soft grass can be to lie on. The taste of limes and grapes and kiwi fruit. A houseplant against a beige wall. Spring onions and peas and lettuce and cucumber. Green is a feast for the eyes. It is birds singing in the trees and the shelter of the canopy, rolling hills and fields. It is countryside and joy and home.

But green is also sickness. It is envy and jealousy and guilt. Green is pasture for the millions of cows poisoning the planet and carving up rainforests. Green is the palm oil plantations and mile upon mile of soybean farms. It is toxicity and pollution, algal blooms in filthy waters, and the symbol of radioactivity. It is war and death and pestilence.

Green is nature, and green is destruction.

In my adult life, I came to live in a new development - a house built upon an estate built upon what used to be a sheep farm. I thought it would be silent, still, barren, and dark. 'Green' activists talk about how green is bad. Green fields mean livestock. Livestock means pollution, and meat and dairy production. Green should be replaced with crops. But I know that, where crops cannot grow, houses are built. A house in which I found myself.

And then summer came around. We let the garden grow wild. The windows were edged in thousands of spiders - spiders that lived in the countryside. In the garden were grasses from its life as a farm, but also wild grasses. I counted, eight, nine, ten, eleven different species - all native and thriving. Yellow flag irises grew in the damp, rushes and dock thrived in the shade. And the butterflies, and the beetles - there were hundreds. There were farm birds and garden birds, come to feast on the bounty. There were kestrels and hawks, and owls in the night. Moths attracted bats, and midges brought dragonflies.

Concrete and brick and tarmac may have carved up the 'bad' green, but with a little neglect, and a little time, there is chaos. Beautiful, messy, extraordinary, wild chaos.

Today, my daily commute is still rolled-up windows and hands over noses, but for car fumes instead of the stench of cows and sheep. Sometimes I miss the green fields, and sometimes I'm glad they're gone.

I see the farms that do remain, and I am glad to see the cows and sheep - because those farms that survived were forced to diversify into sustainable land management. There are scrapes for lapwing, and stubble for their nests. There are verges for partridge, and rotten trees for bats. Some have a long way to go, some have only just begun, and some will be gone soon.

Green is my favourite colour. It isn't for everyone, because green does not mean tidy, or neat, or clean. Green on its own is rarely good, but green is the first step towards chaos. And chaos, in nature, is beautiful.