Canute Can’t Stop the Tide

Saturday July 28th 2035

Our house is 400 feet above sea level, and over 20 miles from the sea, a location unlikely to be affected by sea level rise in the near future. So far, the main issues for coastal communities have been tidal surges when land has been deluged by heavy rains, like last year down the east coast of England all the way from East Yorkshire to Essex. My friend Sally’s house on the shore at Wilton-on-Sea was under water to the first-floor windows. Sally and her husband Matt were evacuated by lifeboat from the RNLI station at the end of the road. They haven’t been back to live, they know that extreme events will be more frequent. They can’t find anyone willing to insure their home, and neither can they find anyone to buy it. They cannot afford to buy another house – Matt is 80 now and no one will sell him a mortgage, especially as he has no equity to release. He and Sally are in a caravan ten miles inland, in their son Philip’s garden. Even around here in inland Wales, there are caravans and tents dotted all over the countryside, their occupants seeking refuge from dangerous situations, and somewhere where they can at least think about providing their own food. The county council object, but they don’t have the resources to move the squatters on. And where could they go? Thinking back, in 2020 a book called A Small Farm Future, by Chris Smaje, I think, argued for a back to the land movement, for new small farms and smallholdings and for the countryside to be repopulated. I thought it a great idea, but most landowners did not. Round here the landowners exert a lot of pressure on the county council and they tried to keep out interlopers, as they saw them, but their King Canute attitude was defeated by sheer pressure of numbers. I’m pleased about that.

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