Chain Saw Massacre

Can they really be wanting to cut down all birch on Blacka Moor? This would be fundamentalism gone mad. But every so often a group of SWT assassins appear armed with power tools and indulge themselves at the expense of natural evolution.

It amounts to a kind of control freakery of which there's much around in the conservation and land management movement and not enough trusting of nature to know best. Also playing a part are centralised decision making and policy funded by major business interests via opaque quangos .

30 years ago the Ramblers Association commemorated one of its long serving officers by planting a small grove of trees alongside the top area of a stream (Blacka Dyke). This has become a pleasant area through which an informal path meanders and a number of healthy birch trees have reached full maturity to supplement the planted ones. They are not in the middle of the heathland which has become a fixation of Wildlife Trusts because of the funds they can rely on accessing to maintain it.

Mature Birches on Blacka Moor

But that's to no avail because at least a dozen of these mature birches were cut down by scoundrels with chainsaws last week. There's no knowing with these people because they keep their motivation close to their chests. But they could have been planning to do this for some time. Or they could have been simply sent up to cut some birch scrub and decided that it was better working here where there was more shelter rather than in the cold wind in the middle of the heather. Any protest will I'm sure be greeted with some convoluted self justification which you will struggle to be able to repeat at a later date or even after five minutes.

I've now been back to this spot several times and just cannot begin to understand why these trees were removed. In landscape terms, for visual appeal they were there looking natural and fulfilled a valuable role. Apart from anything else the close presence in certain parts of the site aid the shading out of bracken and that was certainly observable here. The birch will regrow from the base unless a considerable amount of strong herbicide is applied - a process which I oppose and which SWT themselves had not supported earlier. And there has been no clear notification that this was about to happen.

Perhaps this represents a new phase of hard nosed management from these people who have decided that they have weathered the criticism and no longer care what local people think of them. Their exclusion of Blacka's most loyal users from their consultations at a key point of evolving the new management plan was part of this, 'justified' by storytelling which was pure invention of a kind only previously found in the school playground.