Increasing biodiversity is all well and good but why is the Government striking trade deals for meat imports? - Andy Brown

For hundreds of years this later view held sway. The Amazon was thought to have only been occupied by a few hunter gatherers with a light impact on the forest.

Then a few years ago it became possible to use satellite images to look at what lay beneath the tree cover across large swathes of jungle. They discovered unknown ancient civilizations, complex buildings, long roads, and places where humans had deliberately enriched the soil. We now know that a surprisingly high proportion of the trees in the Amazon are ones which were once selected by humans for their usefulness as either food or raw materials.

The civilisations that had shaped and altered the Amazon had been wiped out by diseases imported from Europe and the only trace of their impact on the landscape that remained were some well hidden ruins and significant changes to the types of trees.

On one level this is a very sad part of history as the loss of life and of culture that this represents must have been horrific. On another level it gives us hope. Even once heavily managed Amazonian rainforests can be restored to such vibrant health that they appear to the untutored eye to have never been touched by humans.

They can, of course, also be destroyed by humans. Cut down enough trees and it becomes very difficult to ever restore the damage. What remains can turn into savanna whilst the river of rain that is drawn deep into a continent can cease to function leaving large areas of deserts where there were once vibrant and highly productive landscapes.

In Britain and in Yorkshire we cut down our own rainforests gradually across more than two thousand years. What we look at in the glorious open countryside of the Yorkshire Dales is not a natural environment. It was once covered by much more woodland whilst most of the west of our country was home to a densely wooded temperate rainforest.

Such an environment drips with moisture. Moss and lichen cling to every available space and epiphytes grow in profusion on the branches. This kind of woodland tends to consist of short stubby trees of a variety of ages. Seedlings are able to develop under the protection of a thick cover of bramble whilst old wood gets consumed by a huge variety of beetles and fungi.

There are still a few remnants of this type of temperate rain forest in places like Devon and Cumbria which get heavy rainfall and a few pockets of similar landscapes can be found in valleys in the Dales. Yet only around 1 per cent of Britain’s temperate rainforest is left.

Most of our Yorkshire uplands can no longer support self seeded trees. Not because the trees can’t take root and survive if left to their own devices but because animals nibble them down to the ground. Either the sheep get them or the deer do. Even in many of our long established forests it can be hard to find young trees and the whole forest is very slowly dying as the old trees expire without being replaced.

All of which means there ought to be good grounds for celebrating the current enthusiasm of the government for funding environmental land management schemes. There is much to be said for paying small farmers decent amounts of money to increase the diversity of wildlife that can survive on their land and to produce food in ways that can be sustained for many generations.

Unfortunately, there is a distinct tendency for this government to give small amounts of money with one hand and take away with the other. It is a strange system that incentivises British farmers to look after the land but then allows imports of food to come in from abroad produced by methods many of us would find deeply disturbing.

We are at severe risk of encouraging the destruction of large stretches of foreign rainforest in the hope that we might be able to restore a bit of our own. It has to be wrong to import meat from battery farmed cattle that are fed on soya beans grown on land taken from cut down rainforests even if we do succeed in working our own local landscape more sensitively.

Andy Brown is a Craven District Councillor representing Aire Valley with Lothersdale and the Green Party North Yorkshire Councillor for Aire Valley.