Book Review: The Lie of the Land
Guy Shrubsole
Surrounded by never-ending news-driven despondency, Guy Shrubsole’s The Lie of the Land proves a soothing balm — a roadmap of action calling for the reversal of decades of inaction, and centuries of decline, on the democratic and ecological crises afflicting our isles.
Shrubsole’s argument is two-fold. First, as the book’s title suggests, a central lie surrounds the ownership and management of land in England: its prudent stewardship, or lack thereof — its neglect by (usually) wealthy owners over the past few centuries. Second, the way land is owned and managed does not meet the needs of society today — it runs counter to our climatic, ecological, and sociological needs, preferences, and desires. It is likewise undemocratic: those who own and manage land are those who make decisions on its outcomes, some light-touch regulation aside. Those who use it, and those who benefit or suffer from whatever management decisions are made, are systematically excluded.
Shrubsole’s research and writing is clear, lucid, and thorough, charted across the book’s ten chapters. He begins by breaking apart the myth of land stewardship, outlining both how narratives surrounding land use have been captured by particular interests, and how existing voluntary initiatives and payments schemes have failed to avert decline. He also reveals the deep landownership inequalities in England: 25,000 bodies owning half the nation’s land. Shrubsole goes on to focus on the particular evils of grouse moors, elucidating their domination of English landscapes and imaginaries. We then journey up north to Scotland, visiting Langholm Moor in the Borders to where Shrubsole tells the story of an agenda-setting community buyout — alongside analysing Scottish land reform policy and community-right-to-buy frameworks.
In the second half of the book focus shifts to the idea of a Public Nature Estate, inspired by Matthew Kelly’s idea of the Nature State. The natural world, here, is a public good; a good whose quality should be guaranteed by, through direct ownership and tighter environmental regulations, the state — with roots in the post-war ideals of government ensuring ecological as well as human health. Shrubsole recounts previous failures to take this route, best encapsulated by the founding of the Nature Conservancy (the forerunner of Natural England) in 1949. Successive waves of ideological scepticism towards state intervention, spearheaded both by private landowners themselves and by Thatcherism in the 1980s, laid early plans of this kind of state involvement to rest. This is an idea expanded later in the book with discussions of treating land as national property, and a common treasury, and through the idea of an Ecological Domesday Survey: the ascertaining of the sheer extent of the status quo’s failure, and the need for prudent land management plans to address this.
Shrubsole goes on to survey the carbon(-emitting) bomb that is the East Anglian Fenlands, the literal and figurative plague of invasive species like the Grey Squirrel — many of which were given more than a helping hand by aristocratic sponsors — and the importance of trespassing to keep some landowners’ damaging practices in check. The Lie of the Land ends with ten calls to action, to turn that lie into a truth. These involve practical recommendations like extending the planning regime to agriculture, forestry, and other non-built environment use cases, and implementing a carbon tax on land use to dissuade heavily carbon-emitting practices like grouse shooting and conventional fenland farming. I will not list all of Shrubsole’s recommendations — I encourage you to read the book in full and find your own way there!
My central takeaway, though, is that no matter the reader’s personal, political, or ideological leanings, the arrant irrationality of present landownership and land management arrangements is staggering. Shrubsole makes this argument convincingly. It could, though, have been strengthened elsewhere.
First, Shrubsole places substantial faith in the enduring goodwill of the state. His call for expanded public landownership, alluding to international equivalents in New Zealand, the United States, and Japan, is reasonable — but he could have critically reviewed the dangers of going this way in greater depth: one only has to consider current political turmoil around the world to see that goodwill is far from guaranteed. State sanctioning of nature restoration and nature-friendly farming on one day may well turn into mass monocrop forestry and agriculture on the next, as he outlined was the case in mid-20th-century Britain.
Second, there seems to be a base presumption that expanded public and community ownership of land will lead to better outcomes for the natural world, and that the public’s and communities’ preferences for restoration, if they do hold, will continue perpetually. Langholm Moor, a notable community buyout that is the subject of his third chapter, is one of many community-owned estates in Scotland— but one of the few that places primary emphasis on nature restoration. Examples elsewhere, like in Assynt, show that nature restoration is not necessarily the sole priority of local communities. Their agency to choose — or not choose — to go a certain route, then, should have been emphasised more strongly.
Third, Shrubsole’s allusions to the sunlit uplands of community ownership in Scotland could have been more critical. While he does mitigate this trope in places, it is a fact that community-right-to-buy as a legal instrument has hardly contributed to the expansion of community ownership. Its implementation down south may not be as helpful as claimed — particularly when practical constraints like community capacity and funding are taken into account.
Fourth, while not a critique per se I would have loved to see greater elaboration on how expanded legal personhood and rights of nature — as discussed with Paul Powlesland, a lawyer who leads the River Roding Trust and featured in the introduction and seventh chapter — could be integrated into democratic land decision-making structures. Emphasis throughout the book was on human involvement and human benefit: expanding beyond this may have deepened Shrubsole’s arguments. Adding to this, Shrubsole places a heavy emphasis on landownership as a central tenet, critiquing the private more than the absolute. Discussion of ownership’s alienation of the natural world would not have gone amiss, however abstract it may seem in practical terms.
Fifth, and lastly, The Lie of the Land faces temporal and spatial limitations. Its focus on post-Shakespearean Britain onwards paints an implicit picture of natural harmony both prior to this time and outside of this geography. Ecological destruction was and is a historically universal phenomenon, inflicted by communities the world over — no matter their relationships to land (although they do, importantly, differ in extents). It is limited to ascribe it, whether implicitly or otherwise, to the enclosure of land and subsequent concentration of power alone.
With these considerations in mind, I encourage anyone interested to purchase a copy of The Lie of the Land. An engaging read, it is a real call to arms — drawing on Shrubsole’s final recommendation on the book’s final page is particularly poignant: we must all hold landownership systems to account through personal action, and demand a systemic shift away from the utterly inadequate status quo.
View this book on the NHBS website
Reviewed by Ted Theisinger
Ted is an independent writer and researcher with a background in environmental history. His specialism lies in the intersections between rewilding, land governance, and landownership in Scotland and the UK, with his research focussing on future-centric systems change. Ted is a keen hillwalker, train-travelling enthusiast, and allotmenteer.