Telegraph Letter

From one Dr Simon Queenborough. (not to my knowledge ever been involved in Blacka consultations)

NEIL Fitzmaurice may worry about the key ingredient for his Cosmic Explosion Bilberry Pie disappearing from Blacka Moor (May 11) but a more thorough under­standing of the ecology and management of the British countryside would lead him to support the use of Highland cattle by Sheffield Wildlife Trust in their attempts to prevent the spread of bracken from out-com­peting the plant he claims to-love so much.
There are a number of inconsistencies in his arguments against the cattle. Firstly his justifiably obvious passion for nature and wildlife lead him to confuse management with manicure.
Unfortunately, there are now very few parts of the globe'that are unaffected by human activities and the British countryside is among some of the most intensively man­aged land in the world.
The heathland that provides the acidic nutrient-poor habitat for bilberry is entirely anthropogenic in origin and its continued persistence depends on effective manage­ment by humans.
However, this management does not mean that it has to become a theme park. If King Nature was allowed to continue in its usual course of events, bracken and trees would take over and Blacka Moor would eventually become unbridled woodland. However, bil­berry would then be unable to survive in such an environment.
Cattle provide one of the most effective tools for simulating the grazing that was pre­viously 'naturally' undertaken by rabbits, deer and suchlike that is necessary to main­tain bracken and other aggressive plants at low levels and ensure that the site is suitable for the species for which it was granted SSSI status.
Adequate control and removal of the cut vegetation by a single on-site worker would likely be far less cost-effective.
I would also suggest that the total carbon footprint of 10 or so cattle is unlikely to exceed that of even a single person living in the UK. The average carbon footprint for a UK citizen is I 1,000kg of CO' per year, compared to 2,500kg of CO' equivalent (cattle actually produce methane rather than CO') per year for beef cattle.
However, humans live considerably longer than cattle and so over the course of their life contribute far more to the green­house effect that cattle, with the added neg­ative that it is currently illegal to eat them, once they come to the end of it.
I would encourage Mr Fitzmaurice to put his energies into supporting SWT in the sci­entific conservation measures being imple­mented at Blacka Moor and other reserves so that he, and all the other residents of South Yorkshire who enjoy the moor so much, may continue to have their spirits refreshed by these wild places and their stomachs filled with bilberry pie.

Apart from the condescending tone, much here to get one's teeth into:

No More “King Nature” … We Are The Masters Now

They hate to be thought of as landscape gardeners but essentially this is what these conservationists/ecologists/landscape managers are …….. encouraging the species they like, eradicating unfashionable plants and trees with one form or another of weed control……….sometimes with poison, sometimes with surgery and sometimes with direct enforcement using cattle or sheep as proxies supplemented with access control measures like barbed wire.

And as for nature that is now all old hat. The story is that nothing is ’natural’ any more because thousands of years of human intervention has so changed the erstwhile natural balance that if indeed it ever existed it can never be replaced. The advantage of all this to the conservationist/landscape manager is easy to see. Man, they say, will always be necessary to control nature because man’s actions in the past have so distorted things that only man himself can be relied upon to put them right or to act as some kind of arbiter of 'good' and 'bad' nature. So not nature, not God (my God, no!) but it’s a case of “we are the masters now”. The sneering reference to “King Nature” - Orwell would have fastened on that. Once man has been put firmly in charge this is a job opportunity for life. And those in higher education who train the managers can feel secure that they have a role educating suitably qualified candidates who will be sent into the world to seek out all unmanaged plots of land to be restored to the fold. This is essentially what has happened here. The overwheening arrogance of all this is only surpassed by their astonishing faith that anyone will trust humans to manage what they've made such a hash of in the past.