SWT's Agenda 1

BEAUTIFUL BEASTS!

Sheffield Wildlife Trust have produced a new version of their leaflet left in green boxes at entrance points about Blacka. I've read this one and also other statements published by the trust in recent months. There's little doubt that they are now pushing a different angle in the story they tell after being bruised in their consultations.

When local people who walk regularly on Blacka told them that they valued the wildness they found there and that this was compromised by intrusions such as SWT's barbed wire and farm animal grazing they were stuck for how to respond. This was not good news for SWT who get little benefit from a policy that allows nature to largely go its own way. After all they earn a living managing things and nobody must be allowed to get away with the idea that nature can manage things very well for itself, thank you.

Obviously a sense of crisis led them to decide on a more determined effort to get the message across that management was vital to the running of Blacka Moor. You can see the results of this in recent articles in Dore to Door and Totley Independent and also in the text of this new leaflet. The propaganda ('sales pitch' may be more apt) has to be that SWT's management is necessary because the land has always been 'managed' in the past. So the use of the land by humans at odd times in the past is talked up constantly while the wild nature is mostly ignored. Odd for a group calling themselves a wildlife trust.

So the new leaflet talks about woodlands being managed with coppicing and the Spring Dore to Door article waxes lyrical about the farm which used to be at Strawberry Lee. The Totley Independent article last year was headed "Beautiful Beasts of Blacka Moor" and described not the wonderful red deer but SWT's newly imported cattle!!!

Now the oddest thing of all is that during lengthy consultations at the RAG meetings and the Icarus Process in 2006 when a vision was being discussed, SWT made no attempt to put across this kind of vision. In fact they seemed quite nonplussed and unable to deal with the vision that local people put forward of a wild landscape with minimal intervention and without farmification.

So why is this all happening now? Does it mean they have only recently dreamed up this way of dealing with the difficulty they have got into? Blacka's red deer have brought this difference of view into sharp focus. Wild animals are influencing the landscape in a wholly natural way illustrating the bankruptcy of farm style management on this land.