For years, the multinational pesticides manufacturer Bayer had its UK headquarters in Newbury. The weedkillers and insect sprays it manufactured were sent out into the surrounding countryside, where farmers and landowners doused their crops with them, year after year. Only now are we starting to wake up to the catastrophic effect this chemical inundation has had on ecosystems. One recent study from Germany reports the disappearance of three-quarters of all flying insects over the past twenty-seven years. Another study from France has shown that bird populations have fallen by a third in the past decade and a half. ‘There are hardly any insects left, that’s the number one problem,’ observes one scientist. The UK has seen a 56 per cent decline in farm birds since 1970, with industrialised farming and agrichemicals the key culprits. Neonicotinoid pesticides, in particular, have been shown to pose a major risk not just to insect ‘pests’ but to many other pollinating insects, including honeybees. Bayer, alongside other pesticide manufacturers, has been making them since the 1980s.
My parents used to keep bees in woodland belonging to the Sutton Estate. I still vividly remember extracting the honey from the big wooden Langstroth hives in our kitchen, spinning the wax-coated frames around in a big barrel, while chewing greedily on pieces of sweet honeycomb. But though we could make sure our bee colony had a good supply of food through the winter, and kept a watchful eye out for any signs of the bee-harming Varroa mite appearing in the hives, there was little we could do to stop surrounding landowners from spraying pesticides on their crops.
At least one landowner in the county, however, decided to treat their land differently. Sheepdrove is an 1,800-acre organic farm, lying to the north of Lambourn’s horse-racing studs, owned since 1972 by Peter and Juliet Kindersley. ‘Our original aim was to protect ourselves from the polluting chemicals used by farmers all around us and recreate the original downland landscape that we fell in love with so many years ago,’ they write. ‘We have witnessed the miraculous generosity of nature as the countryside around us has come back to life and, with the return of myriad birds, wild flowers, small mammals, reptiles and insect life, land which was turning into an arid prairie has been transformed to a rich tapestry of wildlife.’
But not all landowners have shared the Kindersleys’ philosophy. It’s taken much campaigning by environmental groups to eventually achieve an EU-wide ban on bee-harming neonicotinoid pesticides, in the face of considerable opposition from the National Farmers’ Union and other landowners’ groups.
The impending mass extinction of species poses a profound threat to the survival of human civilisation. A generation ago, a very different threat loomed over Britain: the spectre of nuclear annihilation. Here, too, the decisions of a large landowner in my home county were to have far-reaching repercussions.
West Berkshire’s recent history is deeply entwined with both the nuclear establishment and anti-nuclear protests. Since the 1950s, the village of Aldermaston has been central to Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, and became the target of the first CND marches towards the end of that decade. Another part of the Atomic Weapons Establishment is based at Burghfield, just down the road. But it was one military site in West Berkshire, above all others, that came to embody the terrifying logic of the Cold War, the struggle against nuclear weapons, and the battle over the land on which they were stationed: Greenham Common.
Comprising nearly a thousand acres of woods and open heathland, Greenham Common had been used as a military training ground for centuries, but was only enclosed when it was requisitioned for an airfield during The Second World War. When I visited Greenham in the spring of 2018, the remains of its huge runway could still be discerned amid the spreading sphagnum mosses and prickly gorse bushes that have now colonised it. It was leased by the Air Ministry, a predecessor department to the Ministry of Defence (MOD), to the US Air Force in 1968. Then in 1980, with Cold War tensions reaching a new peak, Margaret Thatcher agreed to station ninety-six US nuclear Cruise missiles at Greenham Common, making my hometown nuclear strike target number one.
The move represented a significant escalation in tactics by the hawkish new US President Ronald Reagan, who had reversed years of détente with the Soviet Union and begun calling it the ‘Evil Empire’. Many felt that the MOD – and the British state overall – had sold out British interests for American ones. ‘The sign at the gate maintained the pretence of RAF ownership, hence British control,’ notes historian George McKay. But ‘there is no obligation for the US Government to obtain Britain’s consent before firing missiles from Greenham Common.’ Instead of feeling safer under the US ‘nuclear umbrella’, the UK was now in the firing line, more than ever before. The investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, who revealed many of the Government’s clandestine plans for nuclear war, noted at the time: ‘Cruise missiles may soon be sited at Greenham Common and Molesworth, also US main bases. The Soviet Union would wish to destroy all these bases with considerable speed.’ Years later, when I met Campbell in person to interview him, I told him I had grown up in Newbury. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. ‘Yes, that would have gone quickly.’
To local residents who had moved to this leafy Home Counties fastness for peace and quiet, the spectre of nuclear war now loomed terrifyingly large. Greenham Common quickly became a magnet for anti-nuclear protest. In 1981, a group of anti-nuclear protesters called Women for Life on Earth decided to march from Cardiff to Greenham to protest the lunacy of nuclear weapons. Upon their arrival at the base, four of them chained themselves to the fence, while a fifth, Karen Cutler, created a diversion. The lone policeman on guard ‘mistook her and the other protestors – as if playing his part in an unsubtle feminist satire – for the base’s cleaners.’
Ann Pettit, another of the marchers, was awestruck by the potential for a protest camp at Greenham Common. ‘I thought, “My God, it’s the Forest of Arden”,’ she recalled later, referring to the magical woodland in Shakespeare’s As You Like It where social rules are broken and norms challenged: ‘Somewhere to take to the woods and uphold better values than the corrupt court values.’
Historian Andy Beckett argues that Greenham Common ‘was one of the best places imaginable to stage a confrontation with the overmighty, transatlantic power structures that had grown up around British-based nuclear weapons. A great sweeping tabletop of gorse heath and grassland, fringed with deep-green stands of birch and bracken, in 1981 it was one of the few charismatic landscapes left in an increasingly suburbanized southeast England.’
The MOD and US Air Force had now militarised this landscape, sealing it off from the outside world with miles of fencing and barbed wire. But Greenham’s enclosure fence was soon to become synonymous with civil disobedience. On 12 December 1982, in an action called ‘Embrace the Base’, 30,000 women, including my mum, encircled Greenham Common’s perimeter. Others adopted spikier tactics, cutting through the fence with bolt croppers in order to exercise what they argued was their right to walk on common land. A court later found the protesters to be in the right: since Greenham was indeed a common, they couldn’t be stopped from walking on it – but damaging the fence in order to actually get in was still a criminal offence. Even so, the MOD opted to introduce new by-laws covering Greenham to ensure future trespassers could be sentenced harshly.
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