Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank dedicated to achieving ambitious political leadership for the environment. I'm Lydia Collis and I'm the head of natural environment at Green Alliance. We recently spoke to Guy Shrubb Soule about his new book, The Lie of the Land.

In this podcast, you'll hear a recording of that event. This is not Guy's first book. He wrote

Who Owns England, which was a Sunday Times bestseller, and The Lost Rainforest of Britain,

which won the Wainwright Prize for writing on conservation.

For more than a decade, Guy has campaigned on the nature and climate crises,

including working for Friends of the Earth, the Right to Rome, and he also worked for Deffre.

In The Lie of the Land, Guy's new book, at the outset, he says he could have written a book about all the amazing projects going on on farms led by farmers around the country to bring back lost species, expand wildlife populations and produce food more sustainably.

But he decided to focus this book on where things aren't going well, because on a national scale, the trends aren't going in the right direction.

First, I'll hand over to Guy to allow him to introduce the book

before we get into the conversation.

This book really started for me when I sort of realized how many times I'd heard a politician

address a farming conference, an NFU conference, a CLA conference, and used language around stewardship

or talked about landowners as being the rightful custodians at the countryside.

And this same phrase, this same set of narrative tropes seem to come back again and

again. And I got researching this and looked into the history of the language around stewardship.

And obviously it goes back some way,

biblical in origin, or at least in terms of interpreting the Bible, it goes back many centuries.

But I also discovered that there was a deliberate campaign by organisations like the National Farmers

Union, Countryland and Business Association and others

to revive the language of stewardship, of custodianship in the 1970s and subsequently, and that this

was done in response to criticisms and concerns by environmentalists about the increasing

impact of intensive farming, forestry and

...