ABSTRACT
This chapter places British agriculture’s current climate change challenge in the context of an ecological critique of intensive farming that has evolved since the 1960s. It traces the history of concerns about the environmental and public health consequences of an intensive farming and cheap food policy that began with controversies about the losses of valued landscape features, habitats and wildlife in the British countryside and developed through a string of scandals in the 1980s and 1990s around farming’s contribution to water pollution and public health scares. It maps out the protracted development of environmental sustainability objectives for agri-food and rural land-use policy from the 1990s before the gradual realisation that combating climate change would require significant changes to the functioning of the agri-food system.
