Deserved Sympathy ?

Blacka Blogger has always felt a measure of sympathy for Sheffield Wildlife Trust whose mistakes and indiscretions one would like to ascribe to youth and inexperience. It is also their misfortune to find themselves in an area of the conservation economy that has become dominated by blinkered and inflexible approaches that are nervous and intolerant of alternative visions. So it's with mixed feelings that one hears that Sheffield Wildlife Trust continue to have difficulties in keeping their more experienced staff and are struggling to manage even their not very ambitious programme. Although our impression is that experienced staff in Sheffield Wildlife Trust means anyone aged 27 who has been in job for two years. It is precisely in those areas of land management which deal with the caprices of nature and people and the supremely important values of our national landscape that we need experience, flexibility and wisdom.

The lack of experienced staff is evident in the fact that they are rarely to be seen on Blacka and when the staff are there they seem unfamiliar with the place - to the extent of often not knowing their way around. Hence when complaints are made about trees being cut down we are told that the team have cut down the wrong trees, just one of a number of examples that could be given. Yet the city council gave SWT a lease on this special area of land because they were considered to have more chance of accessing funds and resources to the benefit of the site. In fact they have struggled to perform even minor tasks to a competent level and much of this must be due to a lack of experienced and capable staff, alongside some poor policy decisions.

It would have been easier to sympathise with Sheffield Wildlife Trust if they had approached the business of consultation in a different spirit, been more open and prepared to discuss honestly their plans and difficulties and if they had adopted more of a partnership role with local people. Instead of listening to those whose history of valuing the site over many years was a matter of record they chose to draw closer to their conservatist allies and directed their energies to marginalising all with another point of view. Perhaps it was ever thus. The opposition to their plans, persistently and calmly expressed, set up an institutional panic in the ranks of their oragnisation leading to behaviour more suited to the playground Unable to deal with what they interpreted as a challenge to the underlying principles of their strategy and philosophy, they set out shamelessly to discredit local people. Many staff do not like working in this sort of atmosphere and it would be no surprise if some of them began to question not just the approach which set out to antagonise local people but also the management strategy that led to the discontent in the first place.

There can be no honour in dealing with disunity by smearing all dissenters as troublemakers. Some would say it happens all the time and not just in politics and the universities but in other places where the workforce have little experience of ‘proper jobs’. But it’s seen at its clumsiest when manipulated by the inexperienced in the role of puppets of a conservation establishment controlled by those in universities and the self referencing conservation bureaucracy.

Which brings us back to the accountability of those who took the decision to hand over responsibilities like these to such a raw and untried organization, namely the Sheffield Council and those officers and others who advised it. But the suspicion remains that this could in fact be the role that Sheffield Wildlife Trust was intended for, i.e. a kind of first job for those just out of university who had been persuaded into doing degrees in subjects like conservation and ecology. Those academics in these new disciplines anxious to promote their courses would happily be able to point to such opportunities for their potential students when recruiting. And of course these days they can also say the job is at least as secure as working in a bank.

These comments are only the conjectures and musings of one who’s not been privy to the internal politics of all this. Blacka Blogger has simply seen it all from the outside. Anyone who can shed more light on all this is welcome to use this site to comment, even if it is to put a different point of view. All we ask is that comments should be made in a manner untainted by personal rancour.