mental activists are seeing considerable success in their campaigns to halt further damage to the South Downs landscape and to secure their permanent protection as a National Park.
Though the South Downs were on the original list of landscapes drawn up by the Attlee government for National Park status in 1949, they were dropped 7 years later, ostensibly because damage to their ancient, open pastures by modern farming had gone too far.
The South Downs was long famous both for the freedom to roam which its open landscape provided and for the richness of its prehistoric heritage and wildlife. Rare species abound and up to 60 species of plant can be found within a square metre of its turf.
Yet modern farming has in the last 60 years destroyed 80 per cent of these pastures and their ancient monuments, and many species have become desperately rare or locally extinct.
This picture of damage and threat to historic landscape and wildlife resources is one that can be replicated nationwide. From the Cotswolds to the East Anglian coast, and from the Welsh boarders to the Chilterns, ancient heaths and downs, woods, marshes and meadows have been ploughed, bulldozed and drained.
Feeble Protection Yet since 1957 only one new quasi-National Park, the Norfolk Broads, has been declared, and the National Parks system has been largely ghettoised in upland areas where land values, biodiversity and development opportunities are low.
Protection for particularly rich centres of biodiversity and cultural heritage has been minimal, and government recreational strategies have sought to channel and confine access to existing paths and "honeypor" sites and to ignore demands for a broad "right to roam".
The movement for the protection of nature and for public access has historically been held back by many factors. Working class people have been socially and politically marginalised in the countryside itself, and farmers and landowners have legitimised themselves by a clever use of archaic cultural notions of stewardship and continuity.
In the cities and towns where 80. per cent of us live, people have lacked the means, knowledge and confidence to organise around these issues.
A New Movement Yet in recent years the influences of mass re-migration of city people into the countryside, the paradoxical effects of increased mobility brought by the car economy, raised cultural levels and the persistent public exposure of farming's destructive role have all combined to power new urban-based demands for access to nature and for its conservation.
In Brighton the movement has reached a considerable level of organisation.
Two years ago a broad coalition of wildlife activists, Labour, Green Party and Friends of the Earth succeeded in halting plans for the priThe fight to save the countryside must be built on alliance with urban campaigns vatisatioff of Brighton Council's 13,000 acre Downland estate. Against the conservatism and passivity of older rural-oriented access and conservation organisations, "Keep Our Downs Public" petitioned, lobbied and campaigned until the ruling Labour Group shelved their sell-off proposals.
The coalition was able to take advantage of a large network of local groups based on a range of middle class and working class communities. The movement's focus of activity was in the central Brighton area rather than the edge of town, however, and in the central St Peter's ward a Green Party candidate was able to win a Council seat against the unpopular architect of the privatisation proposal. tive role of the National Trust, who sought to purchase parts of the dismembered estate. Activists argued that if the Trust was able to "cherry pick" off the best portions of the estate, then all other local authority landholding would be increasingly laid open to privatisation pressures.
The combined nationwide local authority estate in agricultural and conservation grade land is the "sleeping giant" of the conservation movement. Their combined holdings equal in scale the total landholdings of the conservation sector (which includes such organisations as the RSPB and the National Trust).
Already County Council smallholding estates have been seriously eroded, and there are now serious THE RESISTANCE of the protesters at Manchester the National Nature Reserves system.
Our victory was a significant step in "holding the line".
National Park Using the energy generated by this success, environmental activists have now launched a new campaign for National Park status for the Downs. The material basis for this project is very strong. The empty Downland landscave is bounded by large coastal conurbations and 10 million people live within 90 minutes drive of the Downs.
Two thirds of central Downland are already in social or quasi-social ownership. A serious project of landscape and habitat restoration would thus be able to call on the support of large numbers of people who would have no natural sympathy with farmers who put their private profits before public need.
Activists have found that demands for National Park status - on a par with Dartmoor, the Peak District or Snowdonia - have a ready appeal, particularly in urban areas. A 12,000 strong position has been built up. All the major conservation and amenity organisations - including the National Trust - support the demand, and the ruling Labour Party in Brighton, as well as in neighbouring towns, has been won over.
The Labour Party's environment policy document "In Trust for Tomorrow" speaks of the need for new National Parks. And the Party has proposed a new "freedom to roam" law on "open land" - heath, moor, down, wood, riverside and coast.
Rural opposition
Activists face, however, the nearunited opposition of rural-based District Councils, Parish Councils and farming oriented organisations.
Whereas these rural networks are quick to respond to any proposals which imply access improvements or planning constraints on farming, environmental activists have to construct their support slowly and laboriously amongst urban commuthe countryside or confident in asserting their rights.
A further measure, though, of the resonance of Downland conservation issues locally was given in the recent successful campaign against the destruction of a chalk grassland "site of special scientific interest" near Lewes.
Campaigners physically blocked the ploughing of the site, set up camp on the endangered ground, and in a highly creative piece of direct action, set about systematically "unploughing" the grassland by turning back the turts.
Their furious national campaign of lobbying forced Gummer, in one of his last acts as Environment Minister, to slap a Nature Conservation Order on the rogue farmer.
Land Reform It is now 50 years since the issue of rural land reform has been seriously debated in this country. Till that time land reformers clearly linked rural land reform with the urban problems of rack renting, congestion and slum landlordism. The marginalisation of working class people in the countryside has destroyed the possibility of such alliances in the present.
Yet the need for social ownership and democratic management of the countryside is as great now as it was then, though the issues have changed. Our demands now must link questions of social equality and democracy with environmental imperatives.
Only with social ownership of land have we the tools to sustain the biological richness of our countryside, to produce food sustainably and healthily, and to satisfy people's deep recreational and cultural needs. And the social alliances we need to construct to reclaim our countryside will this time have to be firmly urban in their focus.
We can learn from the modest successes of Brighton activists. Only the broadest, most vociferous campaigning, linked firmly to urban needs, will stand a chance of holding the Labour government to even its small manifesto commitments for countryside reform. eighths of current business passenger flights from