Debate Paused?

Today’s Sheffield Telegraph has nothing about Blacka Moor. This could be for any one of a number of reasons
1 The editor has decided the story has run its course and there are plenty of letters on other subjects, or
2 The people who didn’t like my letter last week were away on holiday and may respond in next week’s edition or
3 They judged it to be beneath them to respond to someone who clearly has no qualifications in the subject, or
4 They decided they couldn’t win and it was best to keep quiet.

For the record the letter in last weeks Telegraph is below. It responds to this letter from the previous week which in turn responds to this article the week before. (I think that’s right)

Simon Queenborough’s prescription for Blacka Moor (May18th) may not be as manicured as a well weeded flowerbed. But it’s not ‘wild with minimal intervention’ either - as preferred by those involved in the recent consultation. Wildness is not consistent with spending vast sums of public money installing barbed wire and other intrusive barriers. Nor with the poisoning of scores of mature trees which are then left standing - as a lesson in what might happen if nature does not behave itself in future.

I am happy to plead guilty to his accusation of inconsistency because that, along with contradiction and unpredictability, is what helps give nature, left to itself, the special magic which Richard Mabey has described more eloquently than I can:

“Don’t we all want revelation, surprise, inspiration from the wild?........But conservation orthodoxy is beginning to resemble the credo of a business studies course. Everything must be managed.”

On Blacka nature, going its own way has produced a heartening change on what had previously been an over-managed grouse moor. It is still a changing landscape and, left largely to itself, will continue to evolve unpredictably. Sometimes this will annoy and sometimes it will delight but I’m happy to take the rough with the smooth. The tendency to woodland and the spread of bracken eventually produce a response from other areas of nature. He refers to deer as a phenomenon of the past helping to “manage” our countryside. Does he not know that red deer have increasingly returned to Blacka responding to the greening of the moor and that they spend much of their time quietly and unobtrusively browsing. The heresy of this is that these wonderful animals, our largest wild mammal, came unpredictably without any prompting from a management plan.

The bilberry pie issue is a (well-disguised) red herring. All who walk the moors know that bilberry does not fruit in abundance where farm animals have grazed for years. So the idea that grazing preserves the bilberry is a ‘heads I lose tails you win’ situation. And in certain parts of the Peak they put fences around the plants so that livestock cannot get to the fruit, thus leaving some for the ring ouzels and other birds.

But let’s not beat about the bilberry bush. Both Dr Queenborough and I know that this is really about control and the conservation economy. ‘King Nature’, as he dismissively terms it, cannot be allowed to have its own way. People may actually like it and ask questions about the need for so many managers paid from public funds.

I simply and moderately ask for one or two places like Blacka to be largely left alone as has happened in recent years. This wish is widely shared among the general public and some conservationists but seems to be anathema to those professionals who insist on top-down control on all countryside everywhere.