Shaping the Wild: Wisdom from a Welsh Hill Farm By David Elias

Shaping the Wild: Wisdom from a Welsh Hill Farm by David Elias, with a foreword by Iolo Williams.

Reviewed by John Harold

Shaping the Wild is an important book. For those who care about nature in Eryri – where it comes from and where it is going – it is perhaps the most important work in English to date.

Shaping the Wild builds a bridge between the worlds of farming and conservation. In front of our eyes, David Elias constructs a flight of steps from each side of that deeply entrenched divide. Two different world views unfurl towards each other, increasingly exposed as they approach above the chasm. Shaping the Wild opens up our understanding of key perspectives on land management, nature and our place in the landscape.

The formal disciplines – and the disciples – of agriculture and nature conservation have been locked in an evolutionary struggle for at least a century now. This book sets out with clarity and empathy where they overlap and where they fundamentally differ. It is a key to a complex map of contested territories – a work that few people could undertake and fewer have attempted. It sits in exalted company, reminiscent in places of Aldo Leopold’s striving for holistic understanding – nothing less than a land ethic.

David Elias knows nature in Eryri like the back of his hand and he writes with the precision and passion of a true naturalist. There is informed material on a great range of species, from the majestic diversity of overlooked bryophytes to the big stories of the day such as the fate of the curlew – emblematic of the wild, yet utterly dependent on farming.

He shares with us the act of experiencing nature on a farm that becomes his milltir sgwar, familiar ground that is an extension of oneself, where close observation is second nature. Layered on that rich base, Shaping the Wild projects nature through twin prisms of understanding – that of traditional Welsh-speaking hill farmers, and that of the professional conservationist. Only in recent times have we started to see individuals planting their feet firmly in both camps, trailblazers who will bring change along with them. This book is a valuable resource for those people and that work. Both interpretations are rich and full of meaning, connecting constantly back and forth between people, places and times.

In this light, the fad for labelling every project as ‘rewilding’ looks like flimsy packaging, no substitute for the hard decisions and hard work that real conservation and real farming demand. Setting out to have ‘no predetermined outcome for nature’ looks appealing, as a safeguard against all forms of failure. Shaping the Wild provides meaty context in which to understand how loss and failure are ever-present in the choices we make; this is the heroic-tragic history of our distinctive cultural landscapes. Hard won gains and easy losses. A field wrested back from a tide of scrub; a species dragged back from the brink. David Elias here illuminates the deeper meaning of such gains and losses and the cultural shift that a switch to ‘no predetermined outcome’ would imply. But what is striking is that the author treats each angle of an issue with respect, curiosity and scrupulously fair analysis. In doing so he finds a wide distribution of both vice and virtue; in his thinking around ‘wilding’ just as much as in other parts of the land management spectrum.

There is an honesty to this writing which demands respect, as the author constantly looks beyond his own thinking, his own experience. This is possible because Mr Elias has built up a lifetime’s empathetic understanding of conservation, farming, the people who live those lives and of the fabric of nature with which they work. This is where mutual understanding between worlds is embodied, and therein lies the potential of the book to support change. In the public domain, how often conversations are cut short by the lack of a shared language, either side unwilling or too willing to express how the fates of farming and nature impact each other.

The focus on farming and conservation as different equals also serves to highlight an overlooked truth – that conservation itself is now a way of life, with culture, skills and knowledge wound tightly around its trunk, comparable to the rootedness of farming in the land.

To prepare for the conversations on the path to nature’s recovery, read this book.

Shaping the Wild : Wisdom from a Welsh Hill Farm
By David Elias
Order this book at: https://www.uwp.co.uk/book/shaping-the-wild/
Calon – University of Wales Press
Published 27th April 2023
ISBN 9781915279347
Hardback, 220pp, £18.99