Guy Shrubsole: The Lie of the Land. Is Stewardship a Myth?

Hosted by Wallerand Bazin, a DPhil researcher in Geography and the Environment at Oxford whose work focuses on the political ecologies of climate and conservation in heritage landscapes. 

In this episode of the Nature Recovery Podcast, Stephen Thomas and Wallerand Bazin speak with Guy Shrubsole about land ownership, stewardship, and the politics of nature recovery in Britain. Shrubsole traces the ideas behind Who Owns England?, The Lost Rainforest of Britain, and The Lie of the Land, and explains how his thinking developed through environmental campaigning, archival research, and fieldwork.

The conversation explores why land ownership remains so concentrated in England, why “stewardship” is often more rhetoric than reality, and why public funding for nature should be tied to stronger accountability. Shrubsole also discusses community land ownership in Scotland, the case for more transparency in land registry data, and how nature recovery needs to be understood through history, justice, and power as well as ecology.

The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is interested in promoting a wide variety of views and opinions on nature recovery from researchers and practitioners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed within this podcast are those of the speakers alone, they do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, or its researchers.

The work of the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery is made possible thanks to the support of the Leverhulme Trust.

Transcript

Stephen Thomas
Welcome to the Nature Recovery Podcast.

Stephen Thomas
We’re going to take a closer look at some of the solutions to counter biodiversity decline, and we’ll find out more about the people behind these ideas.

Stephen Thomas
Hello, I’m Stephen Thomas, and with me today is Wallerand Bazin. And our guest today is Guy Shrubsole.

Stephen Thomas
Guy is a writer and campaigner focused on land, nature and power in Britain. His book Who Owns England?, and most recently The Lie of the Land, explores how land ownership shapes ecology, inequality and our relationship with nature.

Stephen Thomas
His book on the lost rainforests of Britain brought this ecosystem to public consciousness and highlighted one of our most precious areas, and is a perfect example of how culture drives forward attitudes and approaches to nature recovery, often far ahead of the science.

Stephen Thomas
His work draws on archival research, fieldwork and policy analysis, and his new book challenges some of the core assumptions about land stewardship in the UK, and asks us what a fairer and more ecologically resilient system looks like.

Wallerand Bazin
Great. I guess maybe as a first question to start is the genealogy of the books and what made you arrive today at The Lie of the Land in 2024. Maybe taking us back to even the first blog that you created on Who Owns England, and then the book, then The Lost Rainforest, and walk us through the thought process behind that.

Guy Shrubsole
Sure. Firstly, thanks for having me on.

Guy Shrubsole
So I guess this started for me when I was working at Friends of the Earth as an environmental campaigner. I got fascinated by the question of how we use land, how flooding, for example — there was a series of very destructive floods in the UK kind of 10 or 12 years ago now.

Guy Shrubsole
I was working on climate impacts in the UK and how people were using or misusing land, and how that contributed towards a loss of climate resilience, a loss of resilience to things like extreme weather events.

Guy Shrubsole
And then from that, I started to get interested in, okay, who actually owns these areas of land where we’ve seen the denuding of the uplands or the loss of woodland and so on.

Guy Shrubsole
And in trying to answer the question of who owns this place, I realised actually how difficult it was to find the information.

Guy Shrubsole
You’ve got the Land Registry, which is the official registrar of land ownership in England and Wales, but since it was founded 160-odd years ago, firstly it’s never really been fully opened to the public, and secondly it’s still actually incomplete. It still hasn’t finished the job of registering all the land in England and Wales.

Guy Shrubsole
So that got me fascinated. I decided this was something outside my day job, and I started a blog called Who Owns England, very much inspired by efforts like Who Owns Scotland by Andy Wightman and land reformers and campaigners like him.

Guy Shrubsole
And I started to delve into this, tried to find proxy sources of data, of information to be able to map land ownership, to get around the fact that the Land Registry was kind of behind closed doors, behind a big paywall that was far too much money for me to be able to literally just pay them all the money that you would have to pay in order to get hold of all the information.

Guy Shrubsole
But I looked into all sorts of different data sources such as farm subsidy data or sort of very obscure landowner deposits that have been made with local authorities.

Guy Shrubsole
And that got me really interested in this. I started understanding the sheer inequality and concentration of land ownership in England.

Guy Shrubsole
And that really led me to conclude that there was really a book here, a whole book about this, which I ended up writing, and that it kind of concluded with this figure that 1% of the population owns half the land in England.

Guy Shrubsole
So that was my entry into radical land reform in England and what I saw as being the need for it.

Guy Shrubsole
But also, as an environmentalist, first and foremost, as a kind of campaigner on how do we restore the natural world, I think after one of the lockdowns I ended up moving to Devon.

Guy Shrubsole
And although I’d seen some of these wonderful habitats before, I’d never really been fully immersed in them. And on some of those walks that you’re able to do in between the lockdowns, I discovered for myself these wonderful temperate rainforests that we have in this country, growing on the edges of Dartmoor, not so far from where I am lucky enough to live.

Guy Shrubsole
And that really took me down a route of wanting to look into this habitat, but also into the history of it. I’ve always been fascinated by ecological history. I read history for my degree and that’s always tried to inform my thinking about environmental issues and environmental problems, and what future we can have as well.

Guy Shrubsole
And I guess that led me to write The Lost Rainforest of Britain.

Guy Shrubsole
And then, just to bring us quickly up to date, The Lie of the Land really is an attempt to, in some ways, follow on from Who Owns England?. It tackles land ownership again squarely, but it’s also about how land is used and how the small number of people who own land in this country are actually looking after it.

Guy Shrubsole
Are they doing a good job of stewarding it? That’s a whole conversation I have about whether stewardship means anything. Is it a meaningful concept? And how do we make it more democratically accountable?

Guy Shrubsole
How do we interrogate how landowners are either destroying nature or restoring it, and how can we hold them to account for doing so?

Stephen Thomas
It’s fascinating, and I think your work as a historian really seems to inform that — this idea of stewardship, which you could argue goes back even to biblical times.

Stephen Thomas
And in The Lie of the Land, one of the central arguments I pulled out is that this dominant idea of land and stewardship — that large private landowners are natural custodians of the countryside — when you look at the evidence as a whole, it just doesn’t stand up.

Stephen Thomas
And the evidence suggests that systemically, land ownership in Britain is not delivering ecological stewardship as a whole. Of course, there are going to be exceptions.

Stephen Thomas
Is that a fair reading of one of your central arguments? And what do you think people still misunderstand about our cultural views on land ownership and stewardship?

Guy Shrubsole
Yes, I think that’s fair. And I think, as you say, there are clearly landowners and farmers who are doing their best to restore nature.

Guy Shrubsole
But I think we have to look at that in the context of the wider crisis we face in terms of ecological decline. And we therefore have to interrogate claims to be custodians of the countryside, or rightful stewards of the land, with some considerable scepticism.

Guy Shrubsole
I looked at this and thought this is such a narrative frame that’s used. If you go to the Oxford Farming Conference every year, and you listen to presidents of the National Farmers Union or the Country Land and Business Association, or indeed ministers, you will hear them using these turns of phrase — custodians of the countryside, stewardship.

Guy Shrubsole
In fact, it’s written into many of the farm payments we have. For the last 30 years or so there’s been this greening of farm subsidies, which is a good thing, but it’s interesting how it evolved using the language of stewardship.

Guy Shrubsole
I think that was done very deliberately as a way of appealing to this notion that farmers and landowners are the natural custodians of the land.

Guy Shrubsole
And I think there’s something there about preserving power and preserving existing ownership structures — saying, “we’ve got it sorted, we’re looking after it, you don’t need to regulate us too much.”

Guy Shrubsole
But the evidence for nature loss is all around us.

Guy Shrubsole
And even where large sums of public money have gone to landowners for environmental stewardship, you have to ask — have we actually got good value for money? Have those outcomes been delivered?

Guy Shrubsole
Perhaps we should have invested in buying land rather than renting outcomes.

Stephen Thomas
And I guess I want to pick up on that tension, because I really felt that tension in the book at times.

Stephen Thomas
There were incidents where it’s very hard not to feel some general anger — not only is nature being destroyed, but sometimes people are getting public money for parts of estates where so much ecological damage is taking place.

Stephen Thomas
But like you say, clearly there are still so many individuals out there that are changing the ways they manage land, doing great work, often at cost to themselves.

Stephen Thomas
How did you hold that tension yourself? And do you think we can meaningfully improve ecological standards within this current system through incremental change — through pressure, education, reform — or do we need something more radical?

Stephen Thomas
Or is there a middle ground? And are there lessons from other countries?

Guy Shrubsole
I talk in the book about examples of farmers and landowners who are doing great things.

Guy Shrubsole
You often hear names like Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell at Knepp, who have done a huge amount to push forward rewilding in the UK, or James Rebanks in the Lake District promoting regenerative farming.

Guy Shrubsole
If more farmers followed those examples, we wouldn’t be in quite the situation we’re in.

Guy Shrubsole
But you can’t just look to individual heroes. You have to look at the whole system — the system of land ownership and the ways in which unsustainability is baked into how land is managed.

Guy Shrubsole
There are many approaches needed to tackle the nature crisis, but it doesn’t make sense to draw lines on maps around protected areas without also addressing the existing lines of ownership.

Guy Shrubsole
If you don’t contend with that, you’re not addressing the real incentives or the regulations that might be needed.

Guy Shrubsole
It seems to be a taboo subject — governments don’t want to touch it because it’s politically difficult — but if we’re serious about restoring nature, we have to have those discussions.

Wallerand Bazin
I feel like this is where your new book differs — it’s more ambitious and prescriptive.

Wallerand Bazin
The first book analysed who owns England, but here there’s more urgency and a stronger case for land reform.

Wallerand Bazin
You also go into the archives — the Nature Conservancy, historical debates.

Wallerand Bazin
Do you feel that research on land in the UK is underestimated, given how important it is?

Guy Shrubsole
Yes, I do. I think there’s a low public understanding of land reform and its history.

Guy Shrubsole
There isn’t much awareness of how early conservation bodies like the Nature Conservancy were already grappling with resistance from landowners.

Guy Shrubsole
From the outset, landowners resisted being told they had sites of scientific interest on their land.

Guy Shrubsole
Members of Parliament and the House of Lords were writing to ministers asking why ecologists were telling them how to manage their land.

Guy Shrubsole
And that tension continues today — for example, with debates on Dartmoor about grazing levels.

Guy Shrubsole
These are not new conflicts. They have a long history tied to property rights.

Guy Shrubsole
And I think more research and more public discussion is needed.

Guy Shrubsole
Nature writing often avoids politics and focuses on landscapes, but we need more work that connects ecology with power and ownership.

Wallerand Bazin
And that links to current debates — public money for public goods, ELMS, land reform.

Wallerand Bazin
How do you see those connecting?

Guy Shrubsole
Governments have often relied on incentives — carrots rather than sticks.

Guy Shrubsole
We’ve moved from CAP subsidies, which rewarded land ownership and production, to more environmentally focused payments under ELMS.

Guy Shrubsole
That’s a positive direction.

Guy Shrubsole
But we have to ask whether we’re getting value for money and whether outcomes are being delivered.

Guy Shrubsole
In some cases, large estates have received millions in public funding for environmental management, but the land is still in poor ecological condition.

Guy Shrubsole
You have to ask whether it would have been more effective to purchase land outright and manage it directly for nature.

Stephen Thomas
That raises another point — access and participation.

Stephen Thomas
Most people are excluded from land ownership, yet many want to be involved in restoration.

Stephen Thomas
In Scotland, communities seem to have more opportunity to influence land use.

Stephen Thomas
What lessons can we learn from that?

Guy Shrubsole
One of the shifts I talk about is moving away from the idea of the individual landowner as hero, towards collective ownership and community involvement.

Guy Shrubsole
In Scotland, community buyouts have enabled local people to take control of land and manage it differently.

Guy Shrubsole
The Isle of Eigg is a great example — combining community ownership with ecological restoration.

Guy Shrubsole
There are also larger projects, like Langholm, where former grouse moors are being turned into nature reserves.

Guy Shrubsole
It’s not a perfect system, but it shows what’s possible.

Guy Shrubsole
And we’re starting to see similar ideas emerging in England, such as community right-to-buy proposals.

Wallerand Bazin
And what about transparency?

Wallerand Bazin
There’s increasing discussion about opening up the Land Registry and creating a public nature estate.

Guy Shrubsole
Yes. I’ve been encouraged by recent moves to make land ownership data more accessible.

Guy Shrubsole
That could empower communities and campaigns to hold landowners accountable.

Guy Shrubsole
It would allow more targeted discussions — for example, identifying who owns a polluted watershed and engaging directly.

Guy Shrubsole
The idea of a national estate for nature is also interesting — bringing together public land, NGOs and private estates.

Guy Shrubsole
It sets expectations for what good land stewardship looks like.

Guy Shrubsole
And it creates the possibility of greater transparency and accountability.

Wallerand Bazin
Have landowners responded to your work?

Guy Shrubsole
Yes. Some have reached out and said they support greater transparency, particularly those who feel they are already doing a good job.

Guy Shrubsole
There’s a sense that some landowners want to distinguish themselves from others who are not delivering for nature.

Stephen Thomas
What’s next for you?

Guy Shrubsole
Two things.

Guy Shrubsole
One is continuing to campaign on the issues in The Lie of the Land.

Guy Shrubsole
And the other is writing a new book, The Ghosts of Chalk Country, about chalk grasslands — these incredibly species-rich habitats that have largely been lost within living memory.

Guy Shrubsole
It’s about shifting baselines — how we forget what we’ve lost — and how we might restore it.

Stephen Thomas
That sounds fantastic.

Stephen Thomas
Final question — what does nature recovery mean to you?

Guy Shrubsole
It brings to mind experiences more than words.

Guy Shrubsole
Places where I’ve seen abundance — temperate rainforests, chalk grasslands, places full of life.

Guy Shrubsole
Those experiences make you realise how much we’ve lost.

Guy Shrubsole
Nature recovery means remembering what was there — avoiding the extinction of memory — and then restoring what we can.

Wallerand Bazin
That’s a beautiful answer. Thank you so much.

Guy Shrubsole
Thank you.

Stephen Thomas
You’ve been listening to the Nature Recovery Podcast with me, Stephen Thomas. Please don’t forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Stephen Thomas
And if you can, please consider leaving us a review, as it will really help other people to find us.

Stephen Thomas
Also, why not consider sharing this episode with someone you know? You never know, you might get them interested in the wonderful field of nature recovery.