Reviving Ancient Woodlands: Traditional Techniques for Sustainable Land Management

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest Pete Etheridge, principal Ecologist at Greenwood Ecology, where he works to keep traditional land management methods alive. This includes low-impact land management, traditional logging methods, hedge laying and heathland management and restoration. We chat about not only these practices but how they fall into our understanding of sustainable living and, more importantly, movement building within a community.

Andy:

Pete, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us. It's kind of funny how paths cross sometimes. I just happened to see you posting something unrelated in a Facebook group, and we ended up chatting about the really cool work you do. So first, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?

Peter Etheridge:

Yeah, of course, Andy. It's nice to meet you in this virtual world we now seem to live in, and it's nice to see that social media does have some advantages. I suppose I don't like to define myself by my work. So I'm 39 years old, white, heterosexual male from the south of the UK, with a loving partner, so I'm in a very privileged position in that I can get up each morning, I get clean water out of my tap, I've got a roof over my head and food to eat, so everything I say should be taken in that context. In terms of work, I suppose I'm an ecologist by training. I've spent all of my working life in the environmental conservation movement. I've worked for conservation charities, on species recovery and habitat management projects, and I've been a self-employed ecologist and woodland worker now for the last seven years.

Andy:

Great. So I want to talk about that woodland piece a little bit more. I know you, your company, Greenwood Ecology.

Peter Etheridge:

First, the term woodlands is kind of different here and your understanding of what an ancient woodland is over there is probably a bit different than how we might envision it here in the United States.

Ancient woodlands, specifically, in the UK context, have been under continuous tree cover for at least 400 years. So back in about 1600, we started to get the first accurate maps of woodland areas in the UK, and those areas that are under tree cover in the year 1600, say, were probably under tree cover for hundreds or possibly thousands of years before that, and they've evolved this wonderful diversity of species from fungi, mycorrhizal invertebrates in the soil through to the plant species that live on the woodland floor, right up to sort of epiphytic plants that grow in the trees themselves.

One of the important things to understand, though, is that ancient woodlands in the UK have been managed for hundreds of years. We're a small island with a dense population, so we don't have these large areas of like old growth forests that we get in other parts of the world. So these woodlands may have been used to grow oak trees for Tudor warships. There's a lot of coppicing that traditionally happened in ancient woodland, whether that was hazel for thatching, spars to help create thatched roofs, or folding sheep in hazel hurdles, or even whether it was producing charcoal to fire the forges of the Industrial Revolution.

All these ancient woodlands have been affected by people in one way or another. So when we talk about ancient woodland restoration, if an ancient woodland is just left and isn't managed anymore, its biodiversity starts to decline. So there are two areas, I suppose, of ancient woodland restoration. One is actually bringing these unmanaged woodlands back into active management because we can't, unfortunately, just leave them because we don't have a functioning ecosystem.

In the UK, we obliterated our apex predators, and at the same time, we imported a load of invasive species like fallow deer, roe deer, grey squirrels. We lost ecosystem engineers like beavers. So if we were just to leave these woodlands alone, take a hands-off approach and not manage them, the biodiversity would just continually decline. I mean, we've evolved as a species in these woodlands in the same way that the other species have evolved, and we, I feel we have a, an obligation, a moral obligation at least, to continue our part of that partnership and continue to manage them.

So then the other aspect of ancient woodland restoration is that, you know, decades ago there was a whole incentive to produce more timber and get more financial return from woodlands. So a landowner would see a piece of ancient woodland and the trees growing in it may be growing with what they consider poor form for timber. They're growing slowly, so there's a drive to almost clear fell these woodlands and replant them with non-native species, primarily softwoods, because in 80, 90, 100 years’ time that provides a larger financial return for the landowner.

But obviously at the same time you're sacrificing the biodiversity of the woodlands themselves by introducing these species that never lose their needles, that just promote shade, nutrients enrichment to the soils. So a lot of ancient woodland restoration work is actually going in and starting to remove these species and either let natural regeneration take place and let the woodland start to recover itself or maybe supplement that with a bit of restocking and planting of our own native broadleaf species.

Andy:

So the first thing I want to note is that it's really interesting how different from our perspective here in the United States, the idea of ancient woodlands being this very managed process. Is it enough just to go through the motions of the landscape management, or does that fall a little bit short if we're just going in and saying, for example, oh, this hazel coppice was cut every seven years, so we're going to show up once every seven years and cut it and that's it. Is that enough in terms of that relationship with the landscape?

Peter Etheridge:

Well, that's a really interesting question, Andy. So Hazel Coppicing, and I speak as a part-time Hazel Coppice worker and I sit as a director of the National Coppice Federation in the UK, which is the organization that promotes coppicing within UK woodlands. Coppicing really hit its heyday in the days of the industrial revolution. Primarily for wood to make charcoal. And it's the financial viability of of coppicing, as in like any other traditional land management techniques, has declined over time and it hit a real low back in the sort of 80s and 90s and the conservation groups in the UK started to realize that there was this associated decline in diversity and abundance of species that traditionally inhabited hazel coppice.

I'm talking about hazel coppice because that's the species I work with and know best. So they started incentivizing coppicing work. They call it conservation coppicing and that's exactly what they do as you described. You know you go in, say, every seven years and you cut the hazel coppice because what you're trying to do is maintain that habitat.

But coppicing in the UK was never about creating habitats for wildlife. It was a woodland management technique that provided products and livelihoods to rural workers. Firstly, you're not going to get any economic return. So quite often, you're either paying contractors to do the work or using volunteers, and everything that's cut isn't utilised for anything.

So the habitat gets maintained. Then it's a very sustainable means of maintaining really diverse, rich habitats and the hazel coppice industry in the UK at the moment is absolutely thriving. The demand for hazel products is through the roof. The problem we have is areas of good quality coppice are kind of geographically limited, primarily to sort of southern counties of Hampshire, Sussex, Surrey, and they're not spread throughout the UK. And obviously, as hazel coppice goes out of rotation and it doesn't get cut, you know, on a regular cycle, then it loses its value to produce rods for making hurdles or thatching spars or hedge, laying stakes and binders. So in those areas where you've got good quality hazel coppice there's a real demand for people to work that blows woodlands and actually keep that management going.

Andy:

It's a fascinating industry to be involved in for folks who are interested in this kind of stuff over there. How do you get into that kind of industry? Do you have to go to school for ecology, or do you just have to find some guy who's been doing it for 40 years and say, "Teach me?" Is there schooling for it?

Peter Etheridge:

No, there isn't any schooling for it. I can tell you how I came into the industry and, like I said, I'm only a part-time coppice worker. Obviously I've got an ecology background and I became fascinated in woodlands and woodland ecology and quickly realised that woodland ecology is very much centred on woodland management. And I came across coppicing because I've been doing it as a volunteer with wildlife groups since I was 14 years old. But I did not know you could make a living out of it. So I actually enrolled in a week-long course on coppicing, and as part of that course, we went out every day, and we met full-time coppice workers who were making a living from coppice.

And I was incredibly fortunate to meet a dear friend of mine, Alan Waters, who's a charcoal burner and coppice worker in the UK, and he very much took me under his wing and he helped me in all sorts of ways in giving me experience in working in coppice, helping me identify what products you can get from it, how you market those.

And yeah, we're lucky in the UK as well that we do have this national coppice federation and this whole network of regional coppice groups where us kind of lonely woodland types actually get to socialize and meet other other coppice workers every now and again, share skills, and we tend to work very collaboratively. You know, yeah, it's a big part of my character. I don't like competition, I just like to collaborate as much as I can, and we do that pretty well over here, or at least in the industry.

Andy:

Yeah, that's awesome. It is definitely a very tight-knit group in terms of interest and knowledge.

So it makes sense that, instead of if you're all fighting to get this old information that's traditionally been passed down generation to generation it's been, I don't want to say largely lost, but significantly lost it makes more sense to be open and collaborative about it than to try to hold that information and not pass it down.

I do want to ask you, you had brought up quickly in that dialogue earlier, about the fact that a lot of invasives and non-native trees have been brought in that were productive for profits but not necessarily for ecology. So you talked about thinning a lot of those processes. So I think a lot of people when they say, oh, you're getting rid of these non-native species or these invasive species, that means you clear cut that, whatever it is that you're trying to get rid of. But I'm assuming that's probably not the case though, right? Can you talk a little bit about that process?

Peter Etheridge:

Yes, there are different techniques we use. When we're restoring woodlands like this, I mean one of the techniques we call halo thinning. So in a lot of these we call them plantations on ancient woodland sites, there will quite often be kind of remnant oak trees and the like which were left behind. So one of the first things we do is we go in and we halo thin around them, so we take out the species around those trees to give them more light and more space to grow and expand. And then normally it's a gradual process over a fair number of years. We're just slowly thinning out the trees that are there to allow more light into the woodland floor, allow those floral species to start growing and allow native species to seed into.

And yeah, there's this big sort of argument, or not argument, a big discussion around native and non-native species, and certainly you know it's a discussion we need to be having with climate change, you know, starting to impact us so dramatically. And non-natives are always seen, as you know, the enemy, and they can be obviously, especially a non-native species, whether that's a tree or an animal, that is kind of transplanted, usually by the use of loads of fossil fuels, into an area that it has no evolutionary history. The effects can be really damaging. But as we look to the future, we have to look at where our climate's going to be. Certainly in forestry we're looking, you know, 100, 150 years into the future, which is a really difficult thing to do at the moment.

So, some of these species that we get, I'm thinking species like sweet chestnut, which is found in continental Europe, it could be a great species in the future for us in the UK. But some of these ancient woodlands, and it's sometimes important to leave some non-native species in place because they provide some habitat. We have a wonderful little bird in the UK called a goldcrest. It's our smallest bird we have in the UK and it loves softwoods. So I'm not a purist. I won't take out potentially all the softwoods in an ancient woodland because they do provide a niche and they do help create that mosaic of habitats.

Andy:

That brings up a good point about the climate change component of it, because you know you think about, you're saying 150 years.

If we're talking about some of the slower growing trees, 150 years is where a lot of them start even just kind of hitting their stride. So you have to think about that today and even if the ecology or the climate isn't ready, isn't ideal for them now, we kind of have a place in managing that evolutionary succession or the forest succession and getting those species a foothold in the places where those climates will be what they need and kind of filling those gaps that ultimately happen when we let ecologies kind of start disintegrating.

I guess you could say so, you know the reason. I think we have a lot of invasive problems, not just globally but the fact that there are unfulfilled niches in the ecology, and it's a balancing act of trying to fill those niches without them exploiting and overtaking native species, which creates its own complicated web of thinking about the future and climate change and the needs of today and protecting species that do need that protection. It's a weird relationship trying to balance all those different pieces.

Peter Etheridge:

Yeah, it is absolutely. We were importing tree stock from nurseries on the continent that were infected. These were then planted and now this, this disease is running rife. So, in the face of tree disease and climate change you know, we've only got a finite number of what we call native species, and if those are gonna be decimated by tree disease, which in itself can be accelerated through a warming climate, then we absolutely have to start thinking about other species that we bring in. And it all comes back to this, this role of humans in the ecosystem.

I used to be I'll go a little bit off topic here but I was brought up as a Christian, so I went to church religiously and I really bought into this idea. You know, man has dominion over nature and I, I left Christianity when I was about 20 years old, and I've gone on a very long, complex journey into my kind of philosophy now, around our place within the ecosystem, and I subscribe to a philosophy called deep ecology, which very much considers us as part of nature, and I therefore think it's we've got this responsibility.

We're always going to have an impact in our lives and what we do, but it's for us to decide whether that's a positive impact as a species that has evolved on this planet, or whether it's a negative one. And if we can start to try and undo some of the damage we've done and help habitats and species adapt to our changing climate, then I think it's something that we have to do.

Andy:

Yeah, I think you know for us over here. I'm sure you're familiar with the chestnut blight that wiped out the American chestnut. Where I live in New England, there are some old stands of American chestnut that grow about 25 years, die off and then come back a little bit stronger and, like over the next probably thousand years, those trees will eventually become resistant to chestnut blight to the point where they can start dropping nuts again.

But is it worth us just waiting for that natural time or utilizing the knowledge and technology we have to start selectively breeding and managing, you know, the hybrids and things like that, where we can integrate, you know, different genetics to help those trees repopulate the landscape again? And it comes back to that same thing you're bringing up. It's what is our place and our role in the local ecology.

I think for me personally, one of the big points around this whole conversation of what is the role of humans in landscapes is that it really has to be a local decision, because there's no way for somebody a thousand miles away to understand the nuance and complications of your local conditions. I think that's where a lot of bigger projects on like reforestation, where they go and plant 10,000 trees someplace and then you go back a year later and there's like 300 left because local people didn't do the planning, wasn't managed by local people and it wasn't considered of the local conditions, which only somebody there can say this is going to work or this isn't going to work.

And I'm sure that's something you probably experience quite a bit too. Sometimes, when you see, I know in the UK, a very big thing is replanting oaks, like a massive amount of oak plantings, and I imagine some of them work, but I also imagine a lot of them don't. If, if you were to look at them five, ten years later, unless there's massive, massive input to get those trees to take, I just, I personally don't see how that could ever possibly work. So is that something you've had some experience with at all?

Peter Etheridge:

There's a large push in the UK at the moment towards in “woodland creation”, which is effectively providing subsidies and support to plant fields. Agricultural fields with trees, to my mind, those, for probably a couple of hundred years at least, are just going to be fields with planted trees in them. It's so important that we actually value the woodlands we have because they've grown and evolved over so long and it's you know, you've got to be exceptionally arrogant to think that we know better than nature that we can just go in and plant trees in the ground and recreate this incredible habitat that nature has created.

Okay, we've modified it and we've managed it and worked it and we've bent it towards our needs. But, yeah, trees and fields and this sort of broad brush policy approach, it, like you say. It doesn't take into account site-specific factors very well.

And I spent a very rewarding time working on a regenerative agriculture farm in South Devon, and we took 175 acres of farmland which had been well, it'd been knackered. It had been knackered through decades of fertilizer use and herbicide use of the soils. Were the soils with dirt? You know, it was just dust. And we started trying to restore this farm through, you know, various methods, including holistic plan grazing, but also a lot of agroforestry work and planting up new shelter belts and strips of trees, and we came in for some criticism because we weren't using purely native species.

You know, we're in a farmed environment, and we started bringing in all sorts of tree species, shrubs, and bushes and creating canopy layers, the species that could provide a food resource for humans in the future and also for the livestock we were farming but be ultimately fairly resistant and resilient to climate change. But you never would have probably prescribed that mix of tree species unless you had that. You were living and working every day on that farm and knew what the climatic conditions were.

You knew that we had incredibly saline winds coming in off the sea. So, yeah, to cut a long story short, basically, like you say, it has to be very site specific and targeted and, as far as possible, involve local communities. I feel like with the local communities, there's a little bit more ownership of the project's success or failures.

Andy:

Again, like you had said, you get this money from the government to go plant 10,000 trees. They get thrown in the ground and then you move on to the next project, and you know it's like, even if you go check it occasionally or whatever, it's not the same thing. Much like my original question earlier about, like the coppicing projects, whether or not it's just enough to just go in and cut it every seven years.

I think it's better than nothing, but it's still not the same as that. Full, immersive humans in ecology versus humans going through the motions of the relationship with ecology. There's a big difference in that process. One of the things I know you're doing and I don't know if you can talk about it a little bit is working with horses in timber management.

Peter Etheridge:

Yeah, so I'm not a horse logger myself, but Toby, who I work for from Dorset Horse Log, is a full-time woodsman and a horse logger. So I, Toby, and I get on like a house on fire, and we started chatting a couple of years ago. We said, look, we have great fun when we work together. Should we, like you know, set something up together? So Toby himself and our friend Harry have set up a little company called Wessex Woodland Services where we're kind of mixing our skills and knowledge and experience in ecology and low impact woodland management with the use of working horses and low impact forestry machinery.

And I say low impact, I mean really low impact. Small machinery and, yeah, I mean horses are just a wonderful way of working in woodlands and these ancient woodlands. It's only fairly recently that we've started taking tractors and mechanized machinery into them. For hundreds of years they were worked with horses and oxen.

Andy:

So just to clarify for folks when you say small machinery versus large machinery, what's the size difference we're talking about?

Peter Etheridge:

We're talking about like a chainsaw versus like a thing that looks like a house on wheels. There's no way we could run a business without them. Harry has a small we call it an alpine tractor. So it's a very small manoeuvrable tractor with a little three ton timber trailer and grab on the back, and the ground pressure it exerts is actually less per square inch than the pressure from someone walking through the woodland. Yeah, and actually as we speak now I'm here talking to you, Harry and Toby are on a site in Dorset extracting timber.

So, how it works is Toby goes in with the horses and this is a very wet woodland, so he felled the trees that needed felling back in the winter, and now ground conditions have dried out a bit. So Toby's taking his three horses in there. They're dragging the timber to the edge of the woodland, to the field edge, and then Harry collects them with the tractor and transports them to the biomass boiler on site, which they're then using the wood to provide hot water and heating for the little community that lives there.

We call this woodland wet Aldercs a bit like an ancient woodland restoration project, which is incredibly valuable for biodiversity. It had been drained, so ditches were cut into it, and new species were planted, which really negatively affected the ecology in the woodland. So we blocked up a lot of those drainage ditches to start re-wetting the woodland floor.

But you can't get a tractor in there to extract this timber, but the horses can. So it's really it's a great combination of working with horses in traditional manners but then also accepting the world and the, you know, the system in which we live, where we have to be able to make an income for ourselves by using machinery where it's sustainable and and not causing damage.

And the last thing—you know, we don't use big machinery, and we don't cause great, big ruts. And you see some of the forestry operations, large-scale forestry operations, you know, and the devastation they cause is just immense, from slow compaction to runoff. And ah, so I think for a lot of people, the idea of using smaller equipment is good because it's a less ecological, less damaging ecological footprint.

But really the piece that's so important about that conversation is, the soil compaction right yeah, yeah so what ends up happening is the soil you know, things can't grow after, essentially or it kills off what's left yeah, or it allows opportunities in, for, you know, other species to come and seed into it, and the beautiful thing with horses is they leave, so you know that obviously they call they leave some impact, but it's just almost like a light scarification of the ground which provides a perfect seed bed for the wildflowers to seed into and natural regeneration to take place. It's a wonderfully peaceful and productive way of extracting timber from woodlands where otherwise you couldn't do it. Significant damage at least.

Andy:

So I imagine that the horses have a similar ecological impact as grazing does in some ways in the way they manage the landscape when they're coming through the forest like a silvopasture type system or something like that, when they're coming through the forest like a silvopasture type system or something like that, the idea of still working with horses is just wild to me. That people can do that and kind of like coppicing, like how do you learn something like that? Like where does that come from?

Peter Etheridge:

So I can only talk on what Toby's told me. So Toby used to be a sailmaker, so he would sit for hours every day at a sewing machine making sails for boats. Then he did a course, a woodland course, where he learnt to. It was green woodworking. He went and they looked at the whole management of the woodlands, and then they all crafted a chair, they took home, and Toby said it was a watershed moment for him that he could actually make a living from working in the woodlands and producing beautiful, sustainable craft items.

And, like Alex Langlands said on the recent episodes, you know there's nothing artificial goes into these. You know, if that chair finally reaches the end of its life or it breaks, then you can put it on your wood-burning stove or you can just put it in the corner of the garden and let it compost away.

So he became a full-time woodsman in 2008 and his wife had a couple of horses and toby said he had absolutely no interest at all in horse riding and show jumping, but when he realised that there was this potential to use horses in woodland work, it just clicked with him and he's largely self-taught and he said at the beginning he knew virtually nothing, he just threw himself into it. But we're blessed.

In the UK, we've actually got a whole community of horse loggers and, again, like the coppicing world, it's very collaborative and they'll often, you know, join up to work on contracts together. You might have three or four horse loggers all working on the same job at the same time. So again, there's this just wonderful network of people who are there to help you know you could pick their brains and help each other out, because ultimately we all kind of feel we're on the same journey in this industry and you know it's not about capitalism.

You're never going to get rich doing the work I do. You know I'm 39 years old, I don't own a house, I don't own property, but I have a wonderful, fulfilling lifestyle and the primary focus of what I do in all aspects of my work is to try and leave the environment in a better state than it was when I went in there. And an awful lot of us have that exact same approach, and if we can help each other out, we will do.

Andy:

That's awesome. So again, this might be an American thing versus something that you guys experienced over there. One of the things that I noticed here is I raise sheep, I've got, you know, livestock, I do that kind of stuff. Other folks here that do that are primarily more conservative, but I find that we have a lot of these similar values about the importance of these traditional practices. There's this very interesting overlap here.

I feel like over there it's not just conservative overlap, but there is a much more, a deeper understanding, I guess you could say, of the relationship of community and these we'll call them ancestral practices, these time-honored land management practices. From your perspective, does that sound accurate?

Peter Etheridge:

It does. Yeah, it's a very actually apolitical world, kind of coppicing, hedge-laying, low-impact wooden crafts. I've met and made friends with people from every part of the political spectrum. I mean, I suppose people would say I'm pretty strongly left wing. I'm a member of the Green Party, have been for a number of years now. But equally I've met people who are doing fantastic work in woodlands on very little money, who have been, you know, great supporters of your former president.

In the woods you can tend to put aside a lot of the political elements. Like I say, there's many motivations for doing this kind of work. It might be just this idea of maintaining an old cultural practice and old traditional techniques and kind of the fabric of rural English country life, or it might be driven by a desire to, you know, see woodlands thrive going forward in time. I'd say a fairly common denominator is not much of us, not many of us earn that much money, so the financial aspect doesn't tend to come into it. If you wanted that, then you go into big forestry, big commercial plantation forestry.

So yeah, it's a really interesting question because we've got people from all political persuasions, but we all have that kind of common ground, and we all muddle. But we all have that kind of common ground really, and we all muddle along and we all generally get on fairly well, provided we don't start talking about, you know, certain topics outside of coppicing and hedge laying.

Andy:

Sure, it's really interesting though, the demographic and political overlaps that can happen in these spaces. I find that it reminds us a lot of our humanity. There's that common denominator of, like you had said, the kind of the role of humans in the ecology and, you know, thinking about doing work that's more important than just ourselves, which I think by definition and this might annoy some people can really only exist in rural and suburban places, in the sense that if we care about the future, we have to do things that help the ecology.

Not to say that you can't do anything in urban spaces, but humans belong in nature in a lot of ways. You know we've spent 100,000 years existing in nature. Cities are only, you know, maybe a couple thousand years of our history, and even until the last 150 years, only 15, 20% of the population even lived in those urban spaces. So to try to take humans out of nature isn't just bad for nature, but it's also bad for humans as well.

Peter Etheridge:

It's a, like you say, it's been around relatively short term, but the influence and impact it's had in you know the population and the consumption levels and feeding those dense populations in urban areas, you know that impact has spread out throughout the countryside.

And it's interesting because now, with this whole covid pandemic in the UK, we're seeing almost a migration in the last six to twelve months out of urban areas again because people have realized that actually, if I'm going to get locked down at home for for two months and not be able to leave my house, I'd much rather be somewhere where I can go for my daily walk in in the countryside and breathe fresh air rather than walking through polluted streets with litter.

And yeah, I've got a fairly downtrodden view on urban areas, but it's interesting what people now start to value. Yeah, I think in the past, they didn't probably think about it, and it's just taken an event like this to make people appreciate and realize how important the countryside and rural areas are and that even if you live in a metropolitan part of town or city, there is still this connection that you need.

Andy:

I think it's opened a lot of people's eyes to the duality of the urban and rural spaces and what they offer. You know, right now here in the United States there's a massive shortage of cars being sold because they shut down plants, like nine months ago, a year ago now, and that backlog is hitting now and it's just.

You know, that's the kind of the urban counterpart to the fact that there have been food shortages and things like that that was going on at the beginning of the pandemic here, where shelves were empty because foods weren't being processed and grown and all of those types of things, and that you know, each piece has a part in it. But I think today we're we put too much weight on the urban piece of it and that I think that's just by proxy of our economy that values that efficiency and scale that exists within cities at the detriment of the ecology, because we can outsource that through things like fossil fuels and that eventually is going to catch up to us, probably sooner than later.

Peter Etheridge:

Yeah, no, I think that's very true. We saw the same kind of food shortages and empty shelves in the shops here in the UK, certainly back at the start of 2020. A lot of people had to realize that you get your daily essentials, but you might not be making your favorite recipe for dinner.

You're just kind of working with what you got, but there’s hope. I'm actually moving house in a couple of weeks to a little village in north Dorset. A friend of mine inherited the village and the surrounding 950 acres when her mum died a few years ago, and she said she could sell it all up and become a multimillionaire overnight and not have to worry about this.

But instead I've been working with her now for the last few years to build up a kind of a sustainable model for the estate going forward, in which we're looking at every single aspect of how this estate works, how the estate can produce food, wood products for the villagers that live there, with then a surplus sold for income. And the problem is you have these systems where everything is managed and done for a financial return, and ultimately we need to remember that agriculture is there to provide food to feed people.

It's not necessarily to provide a financial return; in my view, it shouldn't be anyway. So there are some really exciting times there, with someone who's taking on this responsibility and wants to do something really positive and proactive with the position she's found herself just really looking forward to seeing that come to fruition. Yeah, because we are that perfect model of a community where everything is kept as circular as possible.

Andy:

Yeah, absolutely. That sounds super cool and I hope you do some social media on it because I'd definitely be interested in following it and watching it. Progress, which actually kind of brings up two points, I'm curious. So one of the things is that you brought up this idea of food not being a financial shouldn't be driven by financial gain, which is, I think, really important.

One of the things that I see at least be driven by financial gain, which is, I think, really important, one of the things that I see, at least here in the United States, is people that get into this type of stuff let's call it holistic agriculture, regenerative agriculture, whatever term you want to use is driven by this idea of competing against traditional agriculture, and I think that's a fundamentally flawed mentality about it, because you're trying to compete with something that doesn't care about the ecology.

You're trying to compete with something that has huge subsidies from underpriced fossil fuels, from depleting the soils and all these things. You fundamentally can't compete with that and I think that's the wrong way to think about it, and I think what you're suggesting that we don't think about it from that perspective at all, that we think more about the. Our goal is to feed our community, not to profitize from this process, which is really important and I think something that gets downplayed a lot, or not even downplayed but not really thought about, like the. The core part of what we're trying to do is feed our community with our local resources, if that makes sense.

Peter Etheridge:

Yeah, it does totally. A lot of work in the UK in terms of food production or land management. Incentives drive principles in general. You know what the government wants you to be doing. Unfortunately, I've got to say, there are increasing environmental incentives that are coming through based on what public goods land managers are providing. But ultimately, I'll be working in this industry for over 15 years now and I generally find that when someone's incentivized by economics, the results are never as good.

It's the people who actually intrinsically want to do things that have the most success.

And just for a an example of that, I worked with a farmer in Somerset, which is southwest England, and he wasn't part of any subsidy schemes and he told me how he grew a field of maize every year which is controversial in itself where it's planted because it's not the most sustainable crop. But then, once the maize was ready, he opened the gate and he let his cattle in there for a day or two and the cattle ran amok and they smashed all these maize plants up and then he removed the cattle and he just left all the seed kernels and everything there to feed the birds.

Now he wasn't being paid any subsidy for that, so he was subsidizing that out of his own his own pocket, but he did it because he cared um, and I just think you've got to not just incentivize through money, but through people's kind of ethics and responsibilities, and a lot of that comes down to sort of environmental, nature-based connection work and reforging that connection that people have lost with ecology and the other species that we share this planet with.

Andy:

Yeah, it's really interesting to kind of think about it, about these relationships with ecology and food and how disconnected we really have become, how few people actually understand where food comes from and what that process is like, and I think it's allowed for some demonization of certain practices versus others, and that's probably a conversation for another day.

To be honest, you know, in all this type of work, do you feel like you're starting to see that the next generation is interested in taking the reins, or are you concerned about the viability of the work you're doing in terms of it continuing?

Peter Etheridge:

I suppose overall, yes, I am enthusiastic, I am positive. I think we see the passion and care that a lot of the younger generations have for the environment. You know, through protesting, through actually holding governments to account, there's an absolute upswell in environmental interest and it's up to maybe us or at least me, maybe not you to help inform and guide this younger generation as to how to focus their efforts, because there's an enthusiasm there that we have to capture and make sure it's actually maximized the benefits of of the environment. So, yeah, I'm very positive about the future. That happens.

But there are huge obstacles and barriers. Certainly in the UK, housing is a massive issue. Um, in rural areas, particularly so the work I do. Like I said, I don't own a house. I probably never will do. I couldn't afford one. I can't afford a house in a rural area to work in the countryside because I'll never earn enough to pay that mortgage. But that's a huge barrier for young people and we need to start looking again. All of this is holistic.

Everything is intertwined and if we want land to be managed more sustainably, we want to encourage young people out there to take up woodland craft work or working in woodlands to create bespoke items of furniture or to go in and cut large areas of hazel coppice, then we have to provide the support for them to do that, and housing is one of the massive ones, yeah, and I can't imagine that housing doesn't exist.

Andy:

It's just priced out of the range of the people that actually work those landscapes.

Peter Etheridge:

Absolutely. And we've got very strict planning laws in the UK which, you know, even prohibits someone sitting in a caravan to live in. So you don't even have the option of saying, well, okay, I don't mind not living in bricks and mortar, but I live in a caravan if it means I can do this work that I find so rewarding. A lot of the time you're not even allowed to do that.

And then the other big issue is actually just access to land and the fact that so much of our rural landscape is owned by so few people.You know, and that's that saying, an Englishman's home is his castle. It is very true, you know, landowners will have areas of woodlands that desperately need managing and working again and could provide a livelihood for someone, but they'd rather just hold them, hold on to them and not let anyone in them, because it's their woodland, and why would they want to share that with anyone else?

Andy:

Sure, and I think that speaks to the idea of land as an asset, where they look at it as why would I have somebody come in and remove something that may have be of more value in the future, whether that's lumber or timber or firewood or whatever the idea that, essentially, that they're going to hoard this asset not just literally the ground, but what springs from the ground, which is, I think, a really important distinction when we start talking about things like people holding land.

A lot of farmers own land, at least here in the United States, or they farm rather here in the United States because of the appreciation of land value, not because they make any money in terms of the actual farming itself, which is its own whole own. You know, complicated and convoluted and frustrating history of understanding why we can't make things better under the current economic system.

Peter Etheridge:

Yeah, we have exactly the same problems in the UK. Absolutely, it's absolutely the same.

Andy:

I'm sure that's not a coincidence. So, for folks who are interested in what you're doing, is there some place you would like to send them?

Peter Etheridge:

Yeah, I mean, they can check out our website, which is Wessex Woodland Services. You'll also find us on Instagram and Facebook and, yeah, it'’ll just give you a little idea of what we do and our day-to-day activities in the woods, whether that's climbing trees or working horses.

Andy:

Yeah, find us there. Awesome. I know we definitely have some UK listeners who are always asking me on Instagram hey, do you know anyone in the UK that is doing stuff that you think is really cool? So I'm sure some folks are going to be reaching out and bugging you to teach them stuff. So brilliant.

Peter Etheridge:

Well, I'll help wherever I can.

Andy:

Pete, thanks so much. This was really great.

Peter Etheridge:

No, thank you, Andy, really appreciate it.

To listen to this interview, tune into the Poor Proles Almanac episode 51.