The fragmented catchment is effectively the adaptive catchment gone wrong. This is a future where the drive towards more open systems of global trade has been met with passive indifference. It is one that has left us with an agricultural industry on its knees, at least as we understand it today. Smaller and medium sized enterprises are no longer viable propositions. Efforts to reinvigorate the agricultural economy around more localized systems of production and exchange didn’t work. Consumers simply continued to buy cheap imports from the big supermarket chains.  Instead, a handful of “super-farms” have emerged in the Catchment that can generate sufficient economies of scale to exploit emerging energy and food markets.

These changes have come with few environmental guarantees, not least because incentives for stewardship are no longer in place. Some areas of land are simply abandoned. The farm properties and out-buildings that populate this rural landscape have been redeveloped, partitioned and sold off to private individuals. Such developments, like others in urban areas, have often been ‘intelligent’, reflecting the environmental tastes, values and work requirements of those who dwell in them. Yet this is a scenario in which land use controls are also weak in the face of market signals.  Unsympathetic ribbon development is common, as is the building of homes on flood plains.  Protected areas of high environmental value in the Catchment remain, but access to them is limited to those who are prepared to pay directly for them.  In the fragmented catchment scenario, social cohesion and environmental equity is poor. On the one hand we have the people who occupy these landscapes of tranquility and leisure. On the other we have the people whose job it is to service their aspirations and desires. This latter group are people who live, of course, in the Catchment’s most environmentally vulnerable areas.