Could easily be filed under ‘Spirituality and Consciousness’ too.
Of course, what we see here is that tiny minority of hereditary land ‘owners’ who still have large pieces of land under their personal control, via the inheritance laws.
But of course, there’s nothing to say that a suitably-aware eco-socialist government couldn’t do what these folk are doing, much more widely, with many smaller holdings aggregated - voluntarily, as willing cooperatives of previously-desperate smaller farmers - into large enough areas of contiguous land.
This is a form of permaculture. Though it could produce MASSES MORE useful, sustainable, and cash-earning products than it does already, if it were run just a little more along the established lines of experienced permaculture practitioners.
I imagine that Martin Crawford at Agroforestry Research Trust, and Mark Shepard at Restoration Agriculture Development - amongst many other veteran, good-living-earning permaculturists - can make useful suggestions for further growing the heavenliness of Knepp - whilst at the same time making it even more economically-viable, by making it even more copiously productive; and all in land-revering, reverently-Gaian ways.
Btw, this landscape typifies an ecological form which I’ve always felt fits most appropriately into Britain; and which is also something close to my idea of paradise-on-Earth: what I think of as a patchwork of ‘glades in the forest’…
Aka ‘Pied Beauty’ (see below, at the bottom)
The long time love of my life has just come back from a trip - funded by her better-off brother - to Kruger Park in SAfrica (yes, I know! PamperedTwentyPercenters still indulging in inessential indulgences, even in the current shitstorm; true! ) about which she - a deep-dyed Gaian - has been dreaming for most of her life.
The chief, profound impact on her was the truly revelatory experience of being amongst a climax ecosystem, full of all kinds of animals, including all the big predators, which made for a wholly different mind-set about how to move about in it.
As she tells me, it was a hugely vivid realisation of how proper, seriously-revered ecosystems are supposed to be. Something which both of us have known all our lives, through study and contemplation of these things, but which we’ve actually lived amongst virtually never.
https://www.agroforestry.co.uk/
Pied Beauty
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
[S]he fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him [Her].
[RhG’s impudent tweakings…]
Please forgive my desecrations of Hopkins’ verse; but it seems necessary: shifting his obsessed effort to drown his own homosexuality, and be a good Catholic, over towards uncomplicated reverent, happy worship of Mam G; whom he clearly loved.