AS I stood on the top of Mount Caburn, a chalk promontory of the South Downs, and looked east, I could see, stretching for many miles, the landscape that has been created over 140 million years. Scarps and combes, floodplains, ridges and rivers.

I could “read” this sleeping giant of a landscape and its deep-time story in all its natural detail, under its soft blanket of woods, pastures, crops, and villages.

I could picture the immense tectonic heavings that had thrust up the Wealden Dome, and I could see the Ice Age torrents, freezings and meltings that had eroded the chalks, clays, and sandstones back to their current forms.

You can’t feel that uninterrupted “naturalness” now. For the posh Glyndebourne Opera House has plonked a 70-metre wind turbine just below you.

Watching that view now is like trying to concentrate on a conversation while someone is flicking their hand just in front of your eyes. All you can see is the flicking of the giant turbine. You have to force your eyes away from its intrusive presence.

The linked climate and extinction catastrophes are an overwhelming imperative for us socialists.

We know, of course, that the most prominent solutions being proposed are within the capitalist framework. They are market solutions, dependent on financial transfers (such as via “biodiversity net gain”) from climate-damaging developers and businesses to landowners offering ameliorative services such as tree planting. They are internal transfers of big money within the capitalist class.

Many of us know how ambivalent these market solutions can be.

There is, however, another kind of ambivalence in the current Labour climate crisis solutions, and that lies in the damage they will do to nature at the level of the whole countryside — the damage to be done to the “naturalness” of our countryside’s landscapes.

Less than a fortnight after Labour’s July 4 victory Ed Miliband announced permission for three landscape-scale solar arrays, all in lowland eastern England on middling quality farmland with low public recognition, because without public access, major recreational hotspots or national landscape protections.

We can see the pattern arising now. Flat farming landscapes without special levels of prior protection are fair game for solar arrays and for wind farms, too.

Yet our great western and northern moors and fells are not protected either, as a glance at a map of wind farms makes clear. Only national parks are free (but not completely) of giant wind turbines. In Scotland and Wales, huge stretches of hill, plateau and islands are disfigured by them.

Macro-scale “naturalness” is being dropped as a countryside-wide conservation value. Natural views to the horizon of sky and land (and sea) are not valued, while we have to accept handouts like tree planting, meadow creation and peat rewetting as sufficient compensation for this gigantic loss.

Ninety-five years ago the UK Electricity Commission announced plans to erect pylons over the South Downs in order to include Brighton in the national electricity grid. The opposition was so intense that Ramsay Macdonald, the Labour prime minister, intervened and instructed the commission to do their utmost to avoid damaging such areas as the South Downs.

That was in 1929. Now, in 2024 proposals for industrial-scale energy developments right across whole rural landscapes are met with vastly more confused responses from much of the green movement.

They forget the foundational principle of green politics, which is that you don’t damage one aspect of nature and natural systems to mend another. You don’t ridicule the scale of natural features such as trees, moors, hills and horizons, with gigantic wind turbines, for the sake of mitigating our unsustainable levels of energy usage. That is pure hubris.

We must make the ruling class pay for the climate crisis. Not nature.

Miliband’s first batch of solar farm permissions needs examining.

Mallard Pass Solar Farm’s 2,105 acres, across the boundaries of Northants, Lincolnshire and Rutland, sits in the middle of John Clare’s countryside. Clare was our truest poet of nature and of the rural labouring class.

Helpstone, just three miles from the Mallard Pass giant solar farm, was his home parish, and the area filled his poetry. Clare met his future wife Pattie when he was working at Casterton, just a mile from the solar farm site, and later married and lived with her there. His first strong ally was a bookseller in Stamford, less than a mile from the solar array site.

Running right through Clare’s poetry is the theme of the destruction caused by enclosure, which came to Helpstone in 1809. He never ceased to mourn the losses it brought. We can only imagine what Clare would have thought of this latest solar farm “enclosure” in his countryside.

Inclosure like a buonaparte let not a thing remain
It levelled every bush and tree and levelled every hill
And hung the moles for traitors — though the brook is running still
It runs a naked stream cold and still.

Yet Clare’s countryside still retains so much of value and beauty. It deserves to be treasured and restored quite as much as Wordsworth’s Lake District. North of Helpston and the solar site lie the Kesteven Woods, an eight-by-five-miles redoubt of ancient woods, streams, relict pastures, parks and beautiful villages.

Southwards is the ancient landscape around Barnack, with its nodding pasque flowers (“Danes’ blood”) and relict Ailesworth Heath — where Clare learnt from his Gypsy friends to play the fiddle, learnt a bit of Romany, and ate roast badger and hedgehog!

If ever there was an area that cries out for countryside and ecosystem restoration, public love and ownership it is there. Yet what it gets is industrial solar arrays and ever-greater encroachment by expanding Peterborough.

Sunnica Energy Farm’s 2,700 acres deal a death blow to the naturalness of the threatened Fenland edge countryside north of Newmarket. It sprawls across the Cambridgeshire and Suffolk border.

It brings industrial development right up to the edge of Chippenham Fen, a National Nature Reserve and one of the largest fenland sites remaining in Europe.

It will abut another fenland meadow SSSI and run close to a third. There are relict lowland meadows and floodplain grazing marsh scattered across the district, and a large (but very private) lowland meadow site in close proximity.

This countryside was already at a tipping point, with expanding urban encroachment from the north, around Mildenhall and its RAF-USAF airfield, and from bypasses, industry, and the mega-rich racing establishment, and expanding housing development around Newmarket.

This giant solar array means places like Chippenham Fen are set to become mere “precious fragments” in a sea of subtopian sprawl.

Gate Burton Energy Park’s 1,690 acres lie partly on the widely ramified floodplain of the River Trent, north of Lincoln. It is at the south end of a cluster of ancient woods and surrounds one such wood.

It is a deserted village, now reduced to a posh manor house, old parish church and ornamental park. It is on moderately good farmland in remote countryside.

The landscape values of this countryside are intact — huge stretching crop and pasture flatlands / tranquillity / giant skies / wandering rivers and streams.

It is exactly such areas that need a programme of landscape and wildlife restoration, repeopled with sustainable community farming.

Living and wandering on the very edge of the Fen Country, our “peasant poet” John Clare saw such flat expanses as crowded with detail. They were not empty places. He mourned their loss to fences, drainage and enclosure.

It is our tragedy that we have lost his sensibility. We have lost the pleasure of his endless moors where:

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
No fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky
One mighty flat undwarfed by bush or tree
Spread its faint shadow of immensity
And lost itself which seemed to eke its bounds
In the blue mist the orisons edge surrounds

This morning I looked out of my kitchen window across the wide urban Brighton valley where I live. I looked at an array of roofs, mostly steep, slated or tiled, and some flat.

Solar panels are still nigh as scarce here as nesting swifts or house martins. A few council blocks and terraced homes have them. That’s all. Yet in my urban valley, they would do much good and no harm, giving us our own energy sources.

Ed Miliband promises a “rooftop revolution,” with millions more homes fitted with solar panels. I would like to believe him, but the costs and problems of doing this instead of damaging open countryside would mean providing major public funds, or alienating the renewables companies.

Miliband-Starmer’s Labour Party are not the people to do that.

Notes From a Free Walker is a monthly column that appears on the second weekend of the month.