Ruskin's fears for the polluted and darkening skies over Cumbria have proved strangely prescient. A full century after his death, thousands of animal carcasses are burned in open pyres, black smoke covering the same fells. For as I make the final changes to this book, Britain is in the grip of its first foot and mouth outbreak for over thirty years. The government seems impotent, hemmed in by legislation, bureaucratic bumbling, and its obsessive concern, particularly in an election year, to do nothing until certain that its decision will command widespread support. And so, as the science is too little understood, and as the different interests are confused and conflicting, new cases continue to be reported. The very survival not only of livestock farming, but of much of the countryside in anything like its recognisable form, is now seriously under threat.

This isn't hyperbole. Foot and mouth comes when the vast majority of farmers are already feeling the effects of a year-long collapse in prices, when the Europe-wide pattern of subsidies – and this alone protects many from bankruptcy – is being seriously questioned, and when meat-eating, after a string of diseases – BSE, swine fever, now this – is showing signs of a substantial and irreversible decline. There will be sheep and cattle farming in the future, but its scale may well be much reduced.