#011// England’s ‘green’ and pleasant land.

I found out yesterday, purely by accident through a local rag’s Facebook post, that one of my deerstalking permissions is likely set to disappear.

Not overnight, but soon enough. A planning application has gone in to turn the farm into a solar site. If approved, it means the land I’ve stalked across for years - hedgerows, game covers, copses full of songbirds - will be converted into neat rows of solar panels, broken only by strips of fencing and sheep netting.

On the surface, it’s hard to argue with the intention. Clean energy, climate action, green investment - it all sounds noble enough. But what’s often lost in the headlines is what gets displaced. Not just me and my spaniel losing a favourite permission, but the wildlife that lives there. Roe deer, fallow, hares, owls, voles, foxes, linnets - gone or pushed out.

And what takes their place? A kind of ‘green’ monoculture. Rows of cheap, imported metal and glass that don't hum with life, but hum all the same.

I’m not against solar. Not in principle. But there's something off in the way we greenwash these decisions. A beautiful, very English bit of countryside, rich in hedgerows and quiet wild corners, gets sterilised in the name of environmentalism. Meanwhile, imported solar panels with questionable supply chains are hailed as the solution.

And yet, just a couple of miles from Rushbrooke, on the north side of the A14, you’ll find hectares of new warehouses, built on prime arable land. You can see them from my boy’s bedroom window. Row after row of industrial rooftops, and not a single solar panel among them.

It begs the question—what are we really prioritising?

All the while, the quiet work of land stewardship - often led by stalkers, farmers, and conservation-minded outdoorsmen of old - gets quietly bulldozed. I can only imagine how the landowner’s forebears would feel about seeing their land, once tilled with pride by the mighty Suffolk Punch, now feeding only the national grid.

And it’s not just here.

There’s a much louder conversation going on across the Atlantic right now. Donald Trump’s new proposed bill includes measures to sell off large chunks of public land. In a country where public lands are the backbone of hunting, fishing, and access to wild places, the implications are seismic. Once those lands go private, they don’t come back. Access ends. Generations of opportunity vanish with a few signatures.

It’s all part of the same pattern: decisions made far from the land itself, far from the people who walk it quietly, with more care and understanding than the policymakers ever will.

If I were a more clever man, I could probably tie this up with a neater bow, connect all the dots in some satisfying way. But perhaps it’s simpler than that. Once land is lost - once it’s converted, sold off, sterilised - it rarely comes back. And the life it held, the memories made there, the work done in silence, they don’t show up on a planning application.

So if you’ve got it - public land, a permission, a patch of woods - look after it, fight for it. Because once it’s gone, it’s gone.