It is a national emblem: the patchwork fields, the hedgerows, the dark brooding hills. Its images fill our literature and our cinema screens. Its spirit inspires our finest music. Yet somehow, while we were otherwise preoccupied, the British countryside has been brought close to ruin.
Graham Harvey looks beyond the pony paddock and the well-kept thatch to investigate the true health of rural Britain. He discovers a landscape of lifeless fields and poisoned ditches, of vanishing meadows and silent, empty hillsides; a landscape stripped of its wild flowers, butterflies, birds and animals. For it is a landscape now ruled by the crop sprayer.
In this devastating indictment of rural avarice and political ineptitude, Harvey provides evidence of a countryside in thrall to an all-powerful agriculture, an industry over-endowed with public support and allowed unprecedented freedom to despoil. Its legacy is a ravaged countryside, a crippling tax burden and contaminated food. Yet while serving the interests of almost no one outside a small coterie of rich landowners and industrialists, it appears almost beyond the control of a democratic people.
The Killing of the Countryside is no dreary catalogue of environmental disaster, still less a lament for a vanished idyll. It is an urgent call to arms for lovers of Britain's countryside. For, as Harvey argues, if some remnant is to be salvaged of a once priceless rural heritage, now is the time to say 'no more'. The need is for a food and farming policy that serves the public interest, encourages a safe, sustainable farming system and re-establishes the link between the British people and their countryside.
