DH LAWRENCE wrote: “The human soul needs beauty as well as bread.”

He might not have been quite right.

Does the soul need bread?

The body definitely does, but what we can now confidently assert is that it, too, needs, or certainly benefits by, a share of beauty. At least that’s if you associate beauty with the natural world, which is very often the case.

Perhaps like me, you might not have noticed that for the past two years the Department of the Environment and Rural Affairs has been beavering away with a host of other government departments and specialist environment agencies on something called the UK National Ecosystems Assessment. Their report has just been published and it states: “The natural world is critically important to our well-being and economic prosperity but is consistently undervalued in conventional analysis and decision-making. Contact with nature gives pleasure, provides recreation and is known to have a positive impact on long-term health and happiness.”

Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, delivers what seems wholehearted support. Stressing that the natural world provides “cultural and health benefits not always fully appreciated” she adds: “I want our children to be the first generation to leave the natural environment in a better state than it was left to them.”

You therefore have to wonder how her government squares this aim with its intention to plant a wind farm on every eminence not in a national park. Or to thrust a high speed rail line through already hard-pressed countryside.

Or to slacken planning rules to make it easier to build power stations or erect pylons.

The Government might reply that much of the opposition to such schemes rests simply on preserving a view. Well, in what is literally a “landmark” moment, the Ecosystems Assessment acknowledges that what it calls “a regular view of a green space” has a benefit. It even puts a monetary value on it – £300 a year.

The scorn that DH Lawrence would have heaped on the very idea of placing a money value on a view – on the beauty he said the soul needed – is easy to guess. Nevertheless, I commend this assessment especially to the people of County Durham. Having nicely got rid of pit heaps, they now face seeing the environmental gains of the past 30 years (which, of course, bring with them economic gains), wiped out by a plague of wind farms.

LAST weekend’s heavy showers brought a benefit other than to parched gardens and farmland.

It was possible to sink into an armchair and enjoy Radio 4’s superb production of Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version with no regret at sacrificing a lovely afternoon.

Mind you, The Browning Version, about the effect the surprise gift of a book from a pupil has on a dried-up unsuccessful schoolmaster, is so compelling, and this BBC version was so moving, that listening to it would have been time well spent even if it had claimed the only decent day of summer.

But this isn’t the place for a drama crit.

Written in 1947, the play gives the schoolmaster, a classics teacher at a private school, a salary of £300. You could safely add two noughts today. At that rate of increase, within another 60 years a future Andrew Crocker- Harris, Rattigan’s tragic schoolmaster, would be a triple millionaire.