R.I.P Natural Beauty: that wonderful term enshrined in the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act when a romantic idea of scenery still prevailed. Natural beauty was always about more than just the view or appearance of the landscape.  It spoke to its intrinsic character, the interaction of landform and geology, plants and animals with people and the rich history of human settlement over centuries. We might recognise now that what we see as ‘natural’ landscapes in England are almost all cultural, with the hand of people evident everywhere we look but still the term ‘natural beauty’ evokes those characteristics that most people value about these wonderful places: the contrast  between their relative wildness and tranquillity and our everyday experience of modern urban living.  

It’s a shame then that the government has seen fit to cut this term from planning guidance. Now in the NPPF we have paragraph 115 ‘Great weight should be given to conserving landscape and scenic beauty in National Parks, the Broads and AONBs  ’ rather than the statement in PPS7 reflecting the statutory purpose of National Parks and AONBs ‘The conservation of the natural beauty of the landscape and countryside should therefore be given great weight in planning policies and development control decisions in these areas’. Does it matter? We’ll have to wait and see.

Biodiversity offsetting – in the words of Edmund Blackadder: ‘the only slight problem with this plan is that it’s bollocks’. No one can argue with the aspiration to enhance ecological networks, to restore habitats and to create landscapes which are more permeable to species dispersal but this shouldn’t be conflated with compensating for biodiversity loss through development.

If we had an even moderately perfect knowledge of ecological systems and could accurately quantify biodiversity loss, recreate habitats effectively and monitor cause and effect in terms of species diversity and population numbers we might have a fighting chance of making biodiversity offsetting work. In practice we get about as near as the x-box game ‘Call of duty’ does in depicting the complex realities of war.

It seems like a simple idea but where do we draw the line? Can we mitigate for any loss? What about irreplaceable habitats such as ancient woodland? With land being a finite resource surely at some point mitigation sites themselves will need offsetting? In practice even with the best science we can muster biodiversity offsetting will be a deal between the developer and a third party facilitator with politics and personalities playing the major part.

The proposed National Planning Policy Framework already gives developers a green light through a presumption in favour of sustainable development which chooses to equate sustainable economic growth (or growth that can be maintained over time) with sustainable development.  It is interesting to note that the Brundtland Report: Our Common Future states that sustainable development requires the ‘promotion of values that encourage consumption standards that are within the bounds of the ecologically possible and to which all (not just residents of the UK) can aspire’.

Biodiversity offsetting appears to me to be a means of making us feel better about behaving badly. It is  an excuse to allow poorly thought out and bad developments to go ahead whilst providing us with a warm blanket of fluffy community tree planting schemes albeit with extra ‘benefits’ because we will now have colourful maps showing how they contribute to ‘ecological connectivity’.

But good development, truly sustainable development is not an impossible goal and shouldn’t we be demanding that more effort goes into achieving this than compensation measures with uncertain benefits?

Sustainable development requires an understanding of place: their geography and history or if you prefer their social, economic and environmental character. With a bit of forethought, good integrated policy making across government and local planning we should be seeing developments go ahead which serve the needs of the community; are placed in a locality and designed in such a way that they contribute to local character; utilise local skills, services and materials and support sustainable management of the land and environmental resources. Biodiversity benefits should be an integral part of good development and not a sweetener to persuade us to accept bad development.

Today someone kindly sent me a copy of the government's 'Local Growth: realising every place's potential'. It's worth reading to see where the next battle lines are likely to be drawn in rural areas over development. For protected landscapes the focus on tailoring policy to place is welcome and highlights the importance of understanding those natural, social and cultural characteristics that make a place special but the proposed national presumption in favour of sustainable development which will underpin local plans, new neighbourhood plans and proposals for a simplified national planning framework whilst welcome in principle, could be challenging.

Why is it so hard to articulate what our ancestors understood instinctively: that the benefits (or 'services') derived from our landscape are as much down to the action of people winning those services through sheer hard work and innovation as they are to the resources (or assets) provided by the natural environment?

No one can argue with the need to move towards a zero-carbon Britain can they? A low carbon economy is one of the AONB Management Plan objectives so I was looking forward to reading zerocarbonbritain 2030 ( http://www.zerocarbonbritain.org/) produced by the Centre for Alternative Technology but sadly, despite all the specialists involved, the landuse chapter appears surprisingly simplistic and for anyone interested in cultural landscapes it is a depressing read.

Planting monocultures of Miscanthus and Short Rotation Willow on grassland is presented as a solution for decarbonising land use. So for the High Weald this would mean that our small scale, complex landscape with its high biodiversity and ecological resilience which has survived sweeping agricultural, social and technological changes over the last 700 years and provides a whole range of life support services would be sacrificed for a single commodity - biofuels.

A pity the authors didn't read PlanetEarth online 13^th August 2010 - 'The havoc that biofuels is playing with vulnerable ecosystems around the world was unintended by hardly unforeseeable,' writes Bill Sutherland (http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/features/story.aspx?id=754). And it's not just destruction of biodiversity but the constraints biofuels can place on the ability of landscapes and the people living in them to provide other benefits such as clean water and food, materials for industry and inspiring places to live. It is not enough just to balance our carbon budget. The landscapes around us are our life support system and they need a more holistic approach.

Dustin Benton writing in the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/aug/16/emissions-landscapes-ecosystems) welcomes the stimulus zerocarbonbritain 2030 gives to a much overdue debate on how we want our landscape to look, to work and be worked in the 21^st Century but it is easy to be seduced by a quick fix, apparently simple solution to the problems of decarbonising land use. It's worth looking at those landscapes modified in the past to provide single commodities to see how vulnerable they are. The degree of uncertainty associated with the impacts of climate change suggests that the priority for adaptation should be to increase the resilience of both the ecological and social systems underpinning landscape. 'Big' ideas, the  'one size' fits all solutions are not the answer. We need flexible, rapid and adaptable land management responses delivered at a local scale. Our focus should be on the human capital in landscapes at least as much as it is on ecological resilience.  We need skilled flexible land managers - increasingly gardeners who can grow many different crops on a small scale - a resurgent in low carbon craft skills maximising useful products from the land; targeted research with effective communication to the front line via trusted advisors and a community fully engaged with their landscape.

Cultural landscapes like the High Weald demonstrate by virtue of their surviving character a resilience to change that is worth investigating. The difficult physical geography and socio-economic character that has developed in response to it has resulted in small holdings - many people living close to the land - and a mixed farming and woodland economy. It doesn't lend itself to agriculture on an industrial scale but these characteristics which until recently were looked on as rather quaint are exactly the strengths needed to support a adaptive, low carbon economy.

Economic planting of biofuels might be suited to arable areas already modified for industrial farming but for small scale mixed agriculture areas like the Weald there are alternative approaches which reduce carbon and enhance character. The Weald has always be good at growing trees. Our research shows that trees growing naturally in the High Weald AONB already lock up equivalent of a fifth of annual carbon emissions from its residents http://www.highweald.org/home/research/1493-carbon-storage-woodlands.html . We can improve this significantly by promoting the use of timber as a substitute for high embodied energy materials in buildings. Growing high quality timber ought to be a priority along with support for wood using businesses which maximise the range of products produced from each tree. 

It was only in May that the papers reported the dreadful state of the World's biodiversity. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) suggested a ratio of costs of conserving ecosystems to the economic benefits range from 1:10 to 1:100.  Yet zerocarbonbritain 2030 appears to advocate replacing some of the UK's rarest and most diverse habitats, unimproved grassland, with monocultures of Miscanthus and Short Rotation Willow. It even makes the extraordinary claim that plantations of energy crops have a 'strongly positive effect on biodiversity' relative to grassland. I can only assume that none of the authors have ever walked through a Weald meadow in June alive with colourful wildflowers and butterflies with up to 100 plant species, the air heavy with the buzzing of bees and grasshoppers.  These grasslands and the ancient hedgebanks surrounding them also store carbon and can feed us with extensively grazed, highly nutritious traditional breed livestock. Enjoy Weald meadows at www.highweald.org.

Isn't the BBC iPlayer wonderful? I caught up with Dan Snow's Norman Walks last night, Sussex - the Invasion Walk, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the Weald . It reminded me how important communication routes were throughout history. The High Weald is crisscrossed with tracks - prehistoric droveways running out from the old woodland pastures or dens across the Weald to the Downs, straight Roman roads and a myriad of other tracks.  Have you noticed how footpaths almost always run through the old farmsteads and hamlets suggesting they may predate the buildings?  Indeed almost all of the High Weald's roads and footpaths are ancient trackways. We don't know how old or exactly what many of them were used for but we do know that how people responded to the landscape around them in the routes that they made or where they settled has given the High Weald its distinctive character which we now protect as one of England's most beautiful landscapes.

The sunken footpath outside my house in Cranbrook is still cool and damp from yesterday's rain and I know it connects up with tracks linking Battle Abbey with the Royal Manor of Wye, which was given to the Abbey by William the Conqueror so I'm off to see if I can imagine who walked this track - Normans, Romans, Anglo-Saxon drovers?  If you want to walk in their footsteps try our walks finder for routes.