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In Focus: Ansel Adams
March 18–July 20, 2014 at the Getty Center

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Mt. Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, negative 1944; print 1981, Ansel Adams, gelatin silver print. The J. Paul Getty Museum, gift of Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin in memory of Marjorie and Leonard Vernon. © 2014 The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

The English Eerie

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/10/eeriness-english-countryside-robert-macfarlane

this too

http://momus.ca/eeriness-tracing-an-unquiet-tradition-in-british-landscape-art/

The Country and the City III

Yet the eventual structure of feeling is not based only on an idea of the happier past. It is based on that other and associated idea of innocence: the rural innocence of the pastoral, neo-pastoral and reflective poems. The key to its analysis is the contrast of the country with the city and the court: here nature, there worldliness. This contrast depends, often, on just the suppression of work in the countryside, and of the property relations through which this work is organised, which we have already observed. But there are other elements in the contrast. The means of agricultural production - the fields, the woods, the growing crops, the animals - are attractive to the observer and, in many ways and in the good seasons, to the men working in and among them. They can then be effectively contrasted with the exchanges and counting houses of mercantilism, or with the mines, quarries, mills and manufactories of industrial production. That contrast in many ways still holds in experience.

But there is also, throughout, an ideological separation between the processes of rural exploitation, which have been, in effect, dissolved into a landscape, and the register of exploitation, in the law courts, the money markets, the political power and the conspicuous expenditure of the city.

The rhetorical contrast between town and country is indeed traditional: Quintillian (c.35 - c.100 CE)  makes it his first example of a stock thesis, and conventional contrasts between greed and innocence in these characteristic locations are commonplace in later Greek and Latin literature. But it was especially in relation to Rome that the contrast crystallised, at the point where the city could be seen as an independent organism. In the savage satires of Juvenal we find the tone which is more than conventional: a sustained and specific catalogue of corruption:

What I do in Rome? I never learned how 

To lie.  

This teeming life of flattery and bribery, of organised seduction, of noise and traffic, with the streets unsafe because of robbers, with the crowded rickety houses and the constant threat of fire, is the city as itself; going its own way. A retreat to the country or the coast, from this kind of hell, is then a different vision from the mere contrast of rural and urban ways of life. It is of course a rentier's vision: the cool country that is sought is not the country of the working farmer but of the fortunate resident. The rural virtues are there, but as a memory as in Satire XIV:

Old mountains peasants

Used to tell their sons...

Be content with a humble cottage...

Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 46-47] 

It is interesting how separations are created between the city and the country from both sides. The city dwellers often wish the country to conform to an old fashioned ideal that they would not necessarily wish to see operating in the city, acting as a brake on its dynamism. It is easy from a country point of view to see the city as crowded and frantic. However, as I have said there is a continuity of experience between the country and the city with a constant movement of people, goods and ideas between the two. The apparent separation created by these ideas disguises the continuities.

Thus in Jonson's poem to Wroth we can feel the contrast between the country gentleman and the worldly men of the city. But what are the lawyers doing, much of the time, if not proving titles to land? A large part of what is being passed across the exchanges is the surplus value of the unregarded labourers at home, and as trade developed, abroad. And as the moneyed order of the city extends in importance, where does much of the capital go but back to the land, to intensify the exploiting process? The greed and calculation, so easily isolated and condemned in the city, run back, quite clearly to the country houses, with their fields and their labourers around them. And this is a double process. The exploitation of the land and of nature, which takes place in the country, is realised and concentrated on the city. But also, the profits of other kinds of exploitation - the accumulating wealth of the merchant, the lawyer, the court favourite - come to penetrate the country, as if, but only as if, they were a new social phenomenon. As was said in 1577, about the merchants:

They often exchange estates with gentlemen as gentlemen do 
with them; by virtual conversion of one to the other.

That virtual conversion is the whole point. There is a common way of seeing the social process of this period as a kind of infection of the city:

from which (as it were a from a certain rich and wealthy seedplot) courtiers, lawyers and merchants be continuously transplanted.

Well certainly Penhurst is such a case. But a real conflict of interest , between those settled on the land and those settled in the city, which continually defined itself in the shifting economy of the time, could be made the basis of an ideology, in which an innocent and and traditional order was being invaded and destroyed by a new and more ruthless order.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 48-49] 

This is where the idea of a 'traditional' order is most effectively misleading. For there is no innocence in the established proprietors, at any particular time, unless we ourselves choose to put it there. Very few titles to property could bear humane investigation, in the long process of conquest, theft, political intrigue, courtiership, extortion and the power of money. It is a deep and persistent illusion to suppose that time confers on these familiar processes of acquisition an innocence which can be contrasted with the ruthlessness of subsequent stages of the same essential drives.

The 'ancient stocks', to which we are sentimentally referred, are only ordinarily those families who had been pressing and exploiting their neighbours rather longer. And the 'intruders', the new men, were entering and intensifying a system that was already established and which, by its internal pressures, was developing new forms of predation. If we have humanity to spare, it is better directed to the unregarded men who were making and working the land, in any event, under the old owners and the new...

Of course a city eats what its country neighbours have grown. It is able to do so by the services it provides, its political authority, law and trade, to those who are in charge of the rural exploitation, with whom, characteristically, it is linked in a mutual necessity of profit and power. But then, at marginal points, as the processes of the city become in some respects self-generating, and especially in the course of foreign conquests and trade, there is a new basis for the contrast between one 'order' and another. The agents of power and profit become, as it were, alienated, and in certain political situations can be become dominant. Over and above the interlocking exploitation, there is what can be be seen as a factual exploitation of the country as a whole by the city as a whole.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p.p. 50-51]   

The true history of the English countryside has been centred thoughout in the problems of property in land, and in the consequent social and working relationships. By the eighteenth century, nearly half of the cultivated land was owned by some five thousand families. As a central form of this predominance, four hundred families, in a population of some seven or eight million people, owned nearly a quarter of cultivated land. Beneath this domination, there was no longer, in any classical sense, a peasantry, but an increasingly regular structure of tenant farmers and wage-labourers: the social relationships that we can properly call those of agrarian capitalism. The regulation of production was increasingly in the terms of an organised market.
Williams, Raymond 1973. The Country and the City. (first published 1973) Spokesman, Nottingham 2011 [p. 60]  

The Country and The City II

On of the things that interests me in relation to landscape, the landscape genre, the sublime and the uses of the countryside is hunting. Living off the land, whether collecting berries or hunting animals for food and protection, surely meets our most primal needs. I have from childhood been an opponent of fox hunting. As I child I felt empathy with the fox not the people on the horses. However, hunting is much more than this and even fox hunting has a context within farming; in the creation of ceremony and organisation of communal support to protect farmed animals in open country from wild predators. Many people who oppose fox hunting would support hunting by indigenous people even though they might have concern in supporting only those hunting methods that are the most humane. It is a complex and difficult topic. This passage from The Country and the City highlights one of the arguments, in a historical context, in relation to this topic:

To make many men poor and dependent, and then to offer them charitable relief, can perhaps, be seen as humane. But the landowning class required dependence, in social and political quite as much as in directly economic terms. Slowly, through this period, there began, in many villages, a direct political struggle. The provision and control of pauper relief went alongside the intensified importance and prosecution of the Game Laws. The figure of what is called the 'poacher' becomes characteristic. A last property in nature, in its old way of life but now its 'preservation' of wild life as 'game', was directly and repeatedly challenged by men living and finding their living in their own places, their own country, but now, by the arbitrariness of the law, made over into criminals, into rogues, into marginal men.

The history of the game laws and of the men who defied them , is a central feature of the class struggle in nineteenth century rural society. In orthodox accounts the morality and the aesthetic of the so called owners, who developed in just this period their leisurely rituals of shooting and hunting, have been widely publicised, and very much later - when it didn't so much matter - there was the minor cult of the 'poacher' as a 'character'; the attractive and vagrant rogue. But there was always a different morality, which I remember hearing in the talk of small farmers and labourers. The immense presumption of this lordly ownership of the rabbits and the fish and birds -

And every beast did thither bring

Himself to be an offering

- was at once savagely asserted and skilfully challenged. I have heard my grandfather talk of the 'labourer's supper' with what seemed to me then as now an understandable pride: a rabbit knocked off behind the hedge, a swede knocked off at the edge of the path: a meal for eight children. If there are any ready to mourn the loss of a country way of life, let them mourn the 'poachers' who were caught and savagely punished, until a different and urban conscience exerted some controls. Or if there are any who wish to attack those who destroyed country customs, let them attack those who made the finding of food into theft.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. 1973. (this edition) Spokesman, Nottinham 2011 [p.p. 183 - 184]

Raymond Williams The Country and the City

Appendix

'Country', as a word, is derived from contra (against, opposite) and has the original sense of the land spread out over and against the observer. In the thirteenth century it acquired the modern meanings of a tract or region, and of a land or nation. in Tindale in 1526 it is contrasted with the city: 'tolde it in the citye, and in the countre' (Mark v.14). 'City' by this time had become normal usage for a large town, though derived from civitas, which in its turn was derived from civis (a citizen in the sense of a national). Civitas had meant community, and was applied to the tribes of Gaul; later it was the name of an ecclesiastical district. In Old English it was interchangeable with burh and was more commonly used in this sense than urbs, which had been nearer the modern sense. In Middle English it had become common and in the reign of Henry VIII was made the equivalent to the seat of a cathedral, a usage since surpassed.

From the late sixteenth century, as the general history would lead one to expect, there are more frequent and pointed contrasts of the 'city' and the 'country'. 'Countryman' and 'country people' in the rural sense date from this period, as do 'country-house' and 'country-seat'. 'Countrified' follows in the mid-seventeenth century; 'bumpkin' and 'country-bumpkin' from the same period. 'Countryside' is an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century development, in its modern sense. 'Rural' and 'rustic' are present as physical descriptions from the fifteenth century but acquire social implications, mainly specialising in 'rustic' and 'rusticity' from the late sixteenth century. 'Urbane' similarly extended from its sixteenth century physical sense to its modern social implications, first recorded in the early seventeenth century.

'Metropolis' had been the chief town or seat of a bishop from the sixteenth century; 'metropolitan' is still mainly physical until the eighteenth century when it begins to take on its modern social implications. 'Suburban', similarly, has a physical sense from the early seventeenth century, and a physical sense from the nineteenth.

'Farm' was originally a fixed payment, then from the sixteenth century, by extension a holding of land on lease, and so to the modern meaning. 'Commuter' is a late nineteenth century railway term, from the ticket bought at a commuted rate. 'Conurbation' first appears in the mid-twentieth century. 'Pastoral' with the sense of feeding, as in 'pasture', is in common use for shepherds from the fourteenth century, and has an almost contemporary analogical meaning for priests. 'Pastoral' in its social and literal senses comes from the late sixteenth century, which can be seen as the decisive period in the formation of the structure of the meanings in the words which describe my main theme.  

It's interesting to start at the end. This list tracks the changes in meaning and development of words that refer to the country and the city as feelings towards these locations mutate through social, cultural and political developments. This is the theme of William's book set in the context of our own desire for a nostalgic countryside.

The initial problem is one of persective. A few years ago I was sent a book for review: a country book, in a familiar idiom, that I would normally have enjoyed reading. But there in front of the experience was a formula:

A way of life that has come down to us since the times of Virgil has suddenly ended.

In detail, this was certainly interesting. From Virgil? Here? A way of country life?
       But in outline, of course, the position was familiar. As it is put in a memorable sentence, in the same book:

A whole culture that had preserved its continuity from the earliest times and now received its quietus.

It had happened, it seemed, in the last fifty years: say since the First World War. But this raised a problem. I remembered a sentence in a critically influential book: Leavis and Thompson's Culture and Environment, published in 1932. The 'organic community' of 'Old England' had disappeared; 'the change is very recent indeed'. This view was primarily based on the books of George Sturt, which appeared between 1907 and 1923. In Change in the Village, published in 1911, Sturt wrote of the rural England 'that is dying out now'. Just back, we can see, over the last hill...
...Is it any more than an age old habit of using the past, the 'good old days, as a stick to beat the present? It is clearly something of that, but there are still difficulties. The apparent resting places, the successive Old Englands to which we are confidently referred but which then seem to move and recede, have some actual significance, when they are looked at in their own terms. Of course we notice their locations in the childhoods of their authors, and this must be relevant. Nostalgia, it can be said, is universal and persistent; only other men's nostalgias offend ... But again, what seemed a simple escalator, a perpetual recession into history, turns out, on reflection, to be a more complicated movement: Old England, settlement, the rural virtues - all these, in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different things are brought to question. We shall need precise analysis of each kind of retrospect, as it comes. We shall see successive stages of the criticism which the retrospect supports: religious, humanist, political, cultural. (p.p. 9 - 12)  

In his introduction to the edition I have (Spokesman, 2011, Nottingham) Sam Smith writes

Like John Berger, in his exactly contemporaneous reading of the visual arts, Ways of Seeing (1972), Williams insists on the actively political nature of the way of perception. Of the 'mystification of the land and estate' in Carew's celebrations of Saxham or Jonson's of Penhurst, he observes that 'It is essential to remember the recent character of these "traditional" settlements when we are asked to take up a position towards the more evidently new and speculating 'landowners', for 'The social change conceals again, a quite precise set of social relationships.' ...
...It is clear from all this that Williams's study is not another moralistic account of the emergence of a capitalist economy and polity, but an attempt, through its literature, to explore the complex and conflicted actualities of the process, in which industrial and agrarian capital were mutually interpenetrative and sustaining, as it was lived, endured or enjoyed, by men and women 'on the ground'. That doesn't mean that he doesn't take a stand. On the contrary, the whole book is infused with an impassioned socialist humanism that puts mealy mouthed twenty-first century versions to shame. When he addresses present-day developments of 'a mode of production which has indeed transformed the world', he doesn't hesitate to give globalisation its proper name, speaking of capitalism's culmination in imperialism'.

One of things that I take from reading The Country and the City is that the relationship is not always one of conflict. That there is a continuity in experience between the country and the city as people move between the two. The rapid urbanisation that took place during the Industrial Revolution was driven by the movement of people from the country to the town and city and in many cases country people took their experience of rural resistance to the cities and helped create the trade union movement. The rural and urban resistance was nurtured by books published in towns and cities. This can be seen to some extent in my blog Cardiff Castle of Crossed Destinies There is a calendar of insurrection under swords_fire_unrest.

This by Luke White is a very good resource if you are interested in the sublime. 

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.