The way out of the woods

Pam Warhurst isn’t afraid to admit her shortcomings. It was back in January, 2010 that she was appointed the Forestry Commission’s first female chair and while she has spent much of the last three years surrounded be trees, she still can’t tell a Scots Pine cone from a Norway Spruce.

“Totally impossible, but then I always reckoned there were lots of other people who could already do that kind of thing and the Forestry Commission really didn’t need another one. They appointed me knowing I wasn’t a landowner or a professional forester, I was just there to be a voice of someone who cared about and who appreciates the forest.”

She was also there as someone who had lived and breathed the old adage that from small acorns large oak trees grow. Two years prior to her appointment, Pam, along with a group of like-minded souls had founded Incredible Edible in their home town of Todmorden. With talk of turning bus stops into vegetable plots, growing beans in the local graveyard and embracing the Dig for Victory spirit of the Second World War, it sounded incredibly well-meaning, but doomed to certain failure. Yet quietly and without much fanfare, the cynics were proved wrong.

Pam and the rest of the team secured more and more land for growing food, the residents of Tod got accustomed to picking up the veg for that night’s dinner while walking home from the railway station and long after the likes of celebrity supporters Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Diarmid Gavin had headed back home, Incredible Edible has not only thrived, but provided an irresistible blueprint for the slow food movement.

Its success was founded on a heady combination of boundless enthusiasm, lateral thinking and hard work, which came in handy when Pam found herself at the centre of a furore, which threatened to bring an end not just to the Forestry Commission, but to the very idea of a publicly owned forest.

Against a backdrop of an economy in a downward spiral and rising unemployment, the Government presumably thought plans for a big forest sell-off would pass under the radar without too much trouble. In fact, it sparked a wave of outrage, which resulted in a hasty U-turn, a review and eventually an announcement the status quo, at least for now, would remain.

“I took the post because I thought we needed to find a way to allow more people to connect to the forest and to find ways of promoting the really good work the commission does. Obviously I had no idea I would find myself in the middle of a public uproar.

“But you know what? The unprecedented furore that followed was good for us in many ways. People felt moved to stand up for the forest and to be honest it showed just what vital work the commission does.

“Obviously, I would not have wished for it to have happened that way, but that challenge from people who should have known better did give us the opportunity to shout about our successes and that’s something we haven’t traditionally been very good at. It was a dire time, but all through it the people who work in the forest never stopped performing as utter professionals. Good things did come of it. It was a wake up call for the Government and hopefully it will give us the chance to sit down with ministers to work out a model for managing the nation’s forests.”

Prior to speaking, the Forestry Commission had said it was keen that Pam, as the organisation’s chair rather than chief executive, was not put on the spot about the sell-off, but it was she who brings the subject up.

Her honesty may be due to the fact she is about to hand over the reins, but more likely it’s just the way she’s built. Having previously been on the board of Natural England, where she worked on the Countryside and Rights of Way Bill and the Labour leader of Calderdale Council she can clearly do diplomacy when it’s needed, but most of the time she prefers to tell it how it is.

“I’m not entirely sure what more the Government could have ever wanted from us,” she says, still proudly wearing an Forestry Commission fleece and still talking as though she is very much a part of the organisation. “It operates on very little money – in fact I’ve never engaged with a group of foresters who weren’t determined to make a pound go further than anyone I’ve ever met before.

“I won’t miss, how can I say it, some of the challenges. I will miss the people, but I think the commission is in a pretty healthy state. Before I announced I was stepping down, I was incredibly proud to be able to announce a new apprenticeship scheme which each year will see 20 young people taken on and trained by the commission. It’s about keeping the lifeblood of the place going and it has never been more important.

“The commission was set up in 1919 to deal with a national emergency. We were facing a crippling shortage of timber. That may no longer be the case, but we are facing an equally important emergency. Climate change is happening and our trees are incredibly important in managing temperature and preventing flooding, but that’s not all. We will need to be increasingly self-sufficient and managed well our forests are a vital source of wood fuel. A good environment makes all our lives better, but it’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity.”

Pam has form when it comes to beating the drum for natural habitats. After starting her working life in a textile company, in the late 1980s she set up the Bear health food shop and vegetarian cafe in Todmorden. It was the kind of place easily lampooned for its unashamed love of lentils, but today the co-operative is still going strong with Pam’s daughter behind the counter. Born with her sleeves rolled up, it was the 1992 Rio Earth Summit which kick started her mission to raise awareness of what she calls our “natural life support system”.

“In some way it’s nothing new, look at the Rochdale pioneers,” she says, referring to the group of Lancashire weavers who back in the mid 19th-century pooled their limited resources and unwittingly started the co-operative movement. “There must have been a moment when one of them must have said, ‘What if we just try this?’ I’ve always been a great believer in small actions.

“Incredible Edible found that little bit of wiggle room by trusting people to do things for themselves and food was the perfect way of bringing people together. Every parent wants to create a better life for their children, but often they don’t know where to start. Incredible Edible gave them a way to do that.

“We didn’t wait for a report or permission or funding to make it happen, we just decided to run with it.”

Almost 40 towns are now involved in the project, but Pam has bigger plans. Before I can ask about her plans post Forestry Commission, she’s already talking about rolling Incredible Edible out across Yorkshire. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Run by a loose coalition of interested residents, the lack of any organised hierarchy means there’s no glossy step by step plan to follow.

“You’ve just got to be ballsy, when we first said we were going to plant vegetables in plots on the street and encourage members of the public to take whatever they wanted, people thought we were mad. They thought within a couple of weeks the whole thing would have been vandalised. In fact the reverse happened. In the first two years of Incredible Edible incidents of anti-social behaviour in public places dropped by 18 per cent and they have continued to drop year on year ever since.

“You can’t impose it on anyone, it’s not the Magna Carta and no one has ever said it will work everywhere, but it can have a very significant impact on a great many places. There’s no reason why it couldn’t work in every market town in Yorkshire, which are after all the county’s historic commercial centres.

“We’ve shown that it is possible to reconnect consumers to farmers through local markets and we have demonstrated that there is money to be made in producing local food. Like the forests, it’s a long game, but one which will reap its own rewards.”

Strolling round the streets of Todmorden in winter, it may not be entirely obvious how much has changed. Yes, it boasts more organic cafés and eateries than many cities, but it’s the not so visible infrastructure which is really impressive. Todmorden High School has now become a centre for aquaponics – a sustainable food growing technique – which will see some of the students move straight from the classroom into full time apprenticeships and come the spring, even the smallest corner of once waste land will once again be showing the first signs of growth.

“Every single week there’s a tour for what we call the vegetable tourists,” says Pam, describing an unexpected spin off from Incredible Edible. “We’ve had film crews from Japan and New Zealand and the latest thing was a double page spread in a Chinese magazine. It seems to have tapped into a vein and we’ve had help from some unlikely places. There was the Brighton architect who designed the first trail through Todmorden which takes visitors on a route to the various exhibition gardens pass the cafés and now a former Italian councillor has come over to work out the financial impact Incredible Edible has made.”

That report will make interesting 
reading, but commercial benefits are only one small part of the pie. Like her work with Pennine Prospects, the organisation which promotes the landscape and the people of the South Pennines, it is much more about people taking charge of their own destiny.

“I think we are all reasonably justified to be disappointed that the future of the environment is not being debated with the same urgency as the future of the economy. Thirty years from now, people will be saying, ‘Thank God they started Incredible Edible when they did’ I really do think we are at a watershed moment. W e can’t just cross our fingers and hope it will be okay.”

Pam’s successor at the Forestry Commission has still to be appointed, but whoever it is will find they have very big shoes to fill.