Interest in the countryside

Alex emails this comment:

It's also the case, isn't it, that Madeleine Bunting has written a column in which she seems surprised that Britons are interested in the countryside. Yet a yearning for a pastoral ideal and a fascination with the rhythms (and supposed "authenticity") of rural life has only been one of the most significant elements of British literary culture for, oh, more than two hundred years. In fact it's been that way ever since people started moving to the city. Chap called Shakespeare wrote some stuff about this. Big concern in Georgian Britain too, to say nothing of the Victorians. Indeed, interest in the countryside increases as the proportion of the population actually living in the country decreases. This is not surprising.

Odd too that she should conclude her column with a quotation from John Muir (complete with sloppy use of "legendary"). She seems unaware that Muir was British too (Scottish if one wants to be more specific) and that his writing therefore demonstrates continuity, not change. Nothing new here.

Now as it happens I'm all for cultivating an aesthetic appreciation for the countryside (though not at all or any cost), but I defy anyone to explain what this means:

The floods in Yorkshire last month were a sharp reminder of what happens when we don't understand the land on which we live. The sight of thousands of flooded homes made us realise what many previous generations would never have forgotten about the way in which water has to move through land.

What's that about?