The book is a record of what he does, sees, feels, and thinks during a year when he ploughs, harrows, sows, and harvests the field in traditional ways, in an attempt to bring back the wildlife. In The Running Hare he writes about his experiment with past arable farming methods on a rented plot, Flinders, in that area. John Lewis Stempel, who owns a farm on the edge of the Black Mountains, was fired by a longing to hear birds and see hares again in what he describes as the sterile, albeit beautiful, landscape of lowland Herefordshire.
In the sequel I will consider Rebanks’s English Pastoral. In this piece I will consider John Lewis-Stempel’s The Running Hare. And while they share concerns about the problematic relation of farming to the environment, their presentation, and the structuring of their material is also very different. The two authors come from very different backgrounds, and their books deal with very different farming practices. But a wide and diverse book-loving public has clearly been engaged by their work, and found it compulsive reading. What accounts for the immense popularity of their writings about their present farming experiences, their memories of past practices and traditions, their observations of the natural world, and their reflections on the destructive changes that have occurred in that world since the Second World War?īoth authors’ stories of rural lives present and past and of their own farming experiences might seem to be very far from the preoccupations and lives of many of their readers. Yet John Lewis-Stempel and James Rebanks are environmentally concerned farmers who are also historians and who have become best-selling and prize-winning authors.
And we are also frequently warned that advances in technology threaten the existence of printed books and might eventually lead to their disappearance.
Illustration from The Running Hare by Micaela Alcaino, used with permission.įarmers are frequently seen as villains in media discussions of environmental problems.
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