Pathways: exploring the routes of a movement heritage (The White Horse Press, Winwick, 2022)

Abstract

‘tractormen’, and with a case study of conflict between community and ‘expert’ environmental knowledge in relation to the reintroduction of red kites. The final chapter, ‘Challenging environments’, provides a welcome assessment of the experience of old age in a farming community, suggesting that older farmers can continue to play a valued role as mentors even when their physical strength has declined, considering the impact of the closure of so many auction marts on loneliness and balancing this with an assessment of the way social media can allow mainly younger farmers to establish new, sometimes even global, forms of agricultural community. The conclusion underlines the profound role of the Lower Wharfedale landscape and environment in shaping personal and collective identities among the local agricultural community, and returns to the central theme of the compelling intellectual case for bringing agricultural and environmental history perspectives together and the practical policy benefits of doing so, notably in relation to a better understanding of how the agricultural community is likely to respond to different policy regimes and incentives. Like all good books, this admirable work of scholarship prompts many questions. Is the culture of risk taking Rowling describes inseparable from the ‘good life’ so many of her interviewees insist farming has given them? What of those who fell victim to it, losing not just fingers but limbs or even their lives? What were the hidden psychic costs of the highly prescriptive gender roles outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, potentially for all concerned but especially for those who were unable or unwilling to approximate to the normative prescriptions imposed on them? Rowling’s insistence that the environment was an active agent in its own right restores a balance often missing during the heyday of the cultural turn (although it would hardly have surprised Braudel), but where does her thoughtprovoking and well-evidenced observation that farmers and the environment in Lower Wharfedale inflicted mutual violence on each other lead us? Is this still too anthropocentric and abstract a formula, with people construed as standing outside a singular ‘environment’, rather than as one of innumerably many actors within it? Taking this ‘more-than-human’ view, with the farm people, women and men, children and elderly, of Lower Wharfedale considered alongside not only the livestock but also the wildlife, including persecuted ‘pests’ such as rodents, what would it mean for the agricultural landscape truly to be managed for the ‘mutual benefit’ of ‘disparate groups pursuing varied agendas’ (p. 249)?