I’ve bookmarked the presentation. Given its duration of just over an hour I don’t know if I’ll get round to watching it. By agriculture I don’t mean something that has to be totally distinct from nature, but can be integrated in the form of permaculture.

As for the Celts, they would make ritual sacrifices to their gods of humans and other animals in a wicker man, lighted by the local druid, in the hope that this might lead to a greater harvest. That isn’t a ceremony that I think should be resurrected!

They lived in mud huts in a pre-civilisation that had no roads, other than those in central and southern Britain built by slave labour for the Romans. Their diet also wouldn’t have included many non-indigenous foods such as potatoes which have now become as good as indigenous in terms of now having been part of the staple diet for centuries, as they will grow on marginal land.

The combined populations two millennia ago of Britain, Ireland and the other offshore islands cannot have been more than about a million people if that. Nowadays it is in excess of seventy-five million people, with immigration by far having exceeded emigration for the past few decades.

More than than four-fifths of that total population live in England, which has an average population density of more than a thousand people per square mile, comparable to the Netherlands. I view life from the perspective of being in an overcrowded, under-resourced country, which still needs better land management, but can’t be legitimately compared to how the land is managed in sparsely populated countries that have ample natural resources.