Gilpin, William. Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made In the Summer of theYear 1770. (second edition)

Here is the first appearance of the word 'Picturesque' in the title of a book published in English. At times the sensibility seems so modern: for instance when Gilpin describes his encounters with the casual guides at Tintern Abbey [p. 50], it brings to mind similar experiences I have had visiting historic ruins in developing countries. Here Gilpin shows us this hugely unequal economic relationship within his own country. This literally brings home the strange relationship of the tourist with the places they visit. 

Gilpin doesn't ignore the coming of industrialisation to this area either:

On the right side of the river, the bank forms a woody amphitheatre, following the course of the stream round the promontory. It's lower skirts are adorned with a hamlet; in the midst of which, volumes of thick smoke, thrown up at intervals, from an iron forge, as it's fires receive fresh fuel, add grandeur to the scene     
[p. 39, see also pp. 35-36]

At first I found his acceptance of this strange: because of the seeming modernity of his mind. One might imagine he would be outraged at the coming of industrialisation to this iconically Romantic scenic destination; but then Wordsworth has not yet written Lines Written a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 1798 ; nor Turner painted Tintern Abbey: The Transept; Gilpin is creating this place as a scenic destination and in 1770 he is only at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Acceptance isn't strong enough because Gilpin embraces this evidence of industrialisation as an exciting innovation that has it's own sensational and pictorial possibilities. It is perhaps the desire to preserve a landscape from industry, or the effects of a particular industry upon the environment that are a mark of the modern mindset. 

Gilpin's impetus for travel is two fold; to enjoy novel sensations and experiences and to find landscape that will provide the raw materials for landscape paintings (the finished painting would be worked up in the studio). To me this replicates the spirit of Gilpin's time; merchants travel to foreign lands looking for raw materials that can be then brought back and manufactured into goods that are far more valuable. Here the rural offers a similar possibility, a colony of the metropolitan, perhaps. For Gilpin Nature itself is too irregular, untidy and unformed to be anything but the starting point. In taking people into the countryside to sketch Gilpin is one of the prime instigators of tourism within Britain (at a time when the Napoleonic Wars made wider travel more problematic). 

Roger Lougher has been investigating Landscape since 2005 when he began his MA in Documentary Photography. He is on the trail of landscape and language, doggedly trying to unravel their complex relationships. He has the curiosity of a three year child constantly asking ‘Why?’ This is not only an attention seeking device but a continuous challenge to himself. He wants to know why we see landscape the way we do. Why is that a perfect sunset? Why should a mouldering tower under a glowering sky make a great picture? Unlike a three year-old Roger Lougher answers his own question by creating new landscapes, through photogarphy, installations or discrete sculptural works. It is in there last manifestation that we see his work in Be Our Guest at Oriel Davies. (I couldn't resist including some of my fire exit signs from the same exhibition)

Domestic Landscape / Tirlun Cartrefol is an attempt to  answer some of these questions. Roger Lougher has taken text from the Rev William Gilpin’s ‘Observations on the River Wye...” and had it printed on tea-towels. It was in the title of this book that the word Picturesque was first used in the English. Influenced by the Sublime the Picturesque is less demanding of the tourist and lays out rules for what makes a landscape picture. Like a river a book travels in one direction. In his sculpture the artist offers the viewer the option of traveling the length of the river, with asides sited apart from the main sculpture.

Man-made burger as milestone in landscape

£200,000 test-tube burger marks milestone in future meat-eating

Project funded by anonymous individual aims to cut 
number of cattle farmed for food and reduce greenhouse 
gas emissions

• Could lab-grown meat solve food crisis?
• Artificial meat could slice emissions, say scientists

• Ian Sample, science correspondent
• The Guardian, Sunday 19 February 2012 16.38 GMT

Lurking in a petri dish in a laboratory in the Netherlands
is an unlikely contender for the future of food. The yellow-
pink sliver the size of a corn plaster is the state-of-the-art 
in lab-grown meat, and a milestone on the path to the 
world's first burger made from stem cells.

Project funded by anonymous individual aims to cut number of cattle farmed for food and reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Dr Mark Post, head of physiology at Maastricht University, plans to unveil a complete burger – produced at a cost of more than £200,000 – this October.

He hopes Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of the three Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, will cook the offering for a celebrity taster as yet unnamed.

The project, funded by a wealthy, anonymous, individual aims to slash the number of cattle farmed for food, and in doing so reduce one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

"Meat demand is going to double in the next 40 years and right now we are using 70% of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock," Post said.

"You can easily calculate that we need alternatives. If you don't do anything meat will become a luxury food and be very, very expensive."

The recipe for meat grown in the lab. Source: Guardian graphics

Livestock contribute to global warming through unchecked releases of methane, a gas 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, Post said the burger would be a "proof of concept" to demonstrate that "with in-vitro methods, out of stem cells we can make a product that looks like and feels and hopefully tastes like meat".

Post is focusing on making beef burgers from stem cells because cows are among the least efficient animals at converting the food they eat into food for humans.

"Cows and pigs have an efficiency rate of about 15%, which is pretty inefficient. Chickens are more efficient and fish even more," Post said. "If we can raise the efficiency from 15% to 50% it would be a tremendous leap forward."

Post and his team of six have so far grown thin sheets of cow muscle measuring 3cm long, 1.5cm wide, and half a millimetre thick. To make a burger will take 3,000 pieces of muscle and a few hundred pieces of fatty tissue, that will be minced together and pressed into a patty.

Each piece of muscle is made by extracting stem cells from cow muscle tissue and growing them in containers in the laboratory. The cells are grown in a culture medium containing foetal calf serum, which contains scores of nutrients the cells need to grow.

The slivers of muscle grow between pieces of Velcro and flex and contract as they develop. To make more protein in the cells – and so improve the texture of the tissue – the scientists shock them with an electric current.

Post said he could theoretically increase the number of burgers made from a single cow from 100 to 100m. "That means we could reduce the number of livestock we use by 1m," he said.

If lab-grown meat mimics farmed meat perfectly – and Post admits it may not – the meat could become a premium product just as free range and organic items have.

He said that in conversations with the Dutch Society of Vegetarians, the chairman estimated half its members would start to eat meat if he could guarantee that it cost fewer animal lives.

Meat grown in the laboratory could have several advantages, because its manufacture is controlled at each step. The tissue could be grown to produce high levels of healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids, or to have a particular texture.

Because the burgers are made from animal stem cells, researchers could make products from more exotic animals. "We could make panda meat, I'm sure we could," Post said.

He believes it will be a relatively simple matter to scale up the operation, since most of the technical obstacles have already been overcome. "I'd estimate that we could see mass production in another 10 to 20 years," he said.

An article from the Guardian.

Don't twist reality to create the wild Wales of English romantic myth

 the living, beating heart of the Welsh language and culture

Imposing 'wilding' agenda in the Cambrians is akin to ripping out

A typical landscape of green fields dotted with sheep in Cymru (Wales). Photograph: Bastiaan Wesseling/Alamy

Wednesday is market day in Machynlleth, as it has been for 722 years. Walk down the town's main street on market day and among the dozens of stalls selling everything from organic courgettes to army surplus gear, you will hear a dizzy array of accents: Welsh, Brummie, Mancunian, home counties, cockney, some quite hard to place. Often too, you'll hear snatches of the Welsh language, but the predominant tongue by far is English.

The diversity of accents at the local sheep market, tucked away almost symbolically behind rows of houses to the north of the town, is also broad, but with one clear difference: these are the many dialects of Cymraeg, the Welsh language. Here, it is spoken English that is in a tiny minority.

In a place just a couple of hours from the heartland of the most expansionist linguistic culture in history, the continuation of an ancient language and culture may seem puzzling, but the fact that this persistence is strongest among those families who have farmed the Cambrian Mountains for thousands of years certainly isn't. Throughout the world, it is within agricultural and hunter gatherer communities that traditions and languages persist the most. And within our farmingcommunity the Welsh language and culture is not just stronger; it is, to all intents and purposes, universal.

George Monbiot is apparently appalled by the insinuation that replacingagriculture in the Cambrians with a 'wilded' environment, where locals derive an income from tourism, would be akin to the displacement of Native Americans to create Yellowstone National Park. What is truly appalling is that he does not recognise the analogy.

Appalling, but sadly not shocking: over the past half century we have witnessed the arrival of countless rat-race refugees and environmental fundamentalists, all determined to reconnect with rural life and nature, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their new-found paradise is already occupied by people whose connection with the land is deep rooted, dates back thousands of years, and is embedded in their language and culture.

While many quickly recognise reality and become genuine and welcome members of the community, others hide themselves away among the English ex-pat community, busying themselves with sorting out the world's problems, usually starting on their own doorsteps.

Mike Parker, an Englishman 'gone native', summarises the position perfectly in Neighbours from Hell?, his book about English attitudes to the Welsh:

"Never underestimate the zeal of the convert … they arrive in rural, Welsh-speaking Wales, fired up with a righteous sense of 'doing the right thing' in their environmental work, and nothing is allowed to dent that. Underpinning many of these attitudes is a deep-rooted certainty … that they have far more to teach the Welsh than the other way around."

Perhaps it is the language barrier, or some similar harmless obstacle or misunderstanding which creates this attitude, but it has the distinct aura of plain old fashioned English colonialism – only with the quinine replaced by camomile tea, and a new, written form of gun-boat diplomacy.

It's all stuff we are used to here, so why the particular anger among the Welsh about George Monbiot's wilding articles and book?

Aside from the fact that wilding would destroy a host of sites of special scientific interest, what is most offensive is the way in which reality is twisted to vilify those people and practices which must be displaced in order to create the wild Wales of English romantic myth.

To this end, a landscape is portrayed where "…towers of smoke ...[rise]… from the hills as the farmers burn tracts of gorse and trees in order to claim more public money". And as if the battalion of EU-funded pyromaniac farmers seeking to "… expand the area eligible for … subsidy" [1] wasn't destructive enough, they are accompanied by an infantry of sheep which lay waste to everything the flames have failed to destroy.

Powerful images, but as much a work of fiction as the felling of Fangorn Forest by Saruman and his Orcs: sheep have been farmed in Wales for thousands of years, while area payments were introduced in 2005 – the same year in which Good Agricultural and Environmental Condition (GAEC) rules were introduced and the area eligible for payments was fixed.

So what impact has this alleged 'slash-and-burn-then-graze' policy "perfectly designed … for maximum ecological destruction", had? Miraculously, since GAEC was introduced in 2005 it has resulted in a doubling of the amount of woodland on Welsh upland farms, and a 65% increase in the same across Wales as a whole.

During the same period, Welsh sheep numbers fell by around 20%, while studies of stocking numbers in vast areas of the Cambrian Mountains suggest that sheep numbers have peaked and troughed, but on the whole changed little, or diminished, over the past century.

Of course, it stands to reason that overgrazing can have a range of damaging impacts, but equally intuitive is the damage caused by the complete removal of herbivores, domestic or otherwise, which have been present for thousands of years – hence the RSPB's conclusion(pdf) that "… undergrazing and loss of vegetation structure is now occurring in some areas, with adverse impacts for some species such as golden plover and other waders."

Not surprisingly, Monbiot's proposed changes to the CAP would render the businesses which undertake such grazing unviable – farms which despite having average incomes of the order of £21,000, nevertheless input the best part of £100,000 into the rural economy each yearspecifically because they farm sheep.

Given that agriculture is estimated to support over 10% of full time employees in Wales (pdf), the implications of any proposals for change need to be carefully considered, especially when they have a wilding in mind, which rural economists generally regard with extreme scepticism.

Finally, academic ponderings aside, what would the impacts be for my own children and their classmates? A quick head-count reveals that of the 46 children in their classes, 67% Welsh as a first language, of whom 39% are from sheep farming families, and 75% are reliant, to varying degrees, on sheep farming.

Wild? No; we are completely livid.

• Nick Fenwick is the director of agriculture policy, Farmers' Union of Wales. He's also the English translator of 'A portrait of Machynlleth and its surroundings'

• © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.