Will They Get It - One Day ?

It was suggested, at SWT's RAG meeting last week, that the wildlife trust still do not understand what regular users of Blacka Moor value about the place. As they do not spend a great deal of time on the site themselves it's perhaps not surprising. To them it must be a matter of bread and butter. It enables them to set up projects which draw down grants from bureaucratic organisations to finance work and hence jobs. Those of us who have no economic need to be here are simply here because we like it. But the reason we like it is precisely because, as a place, it defies the criteria set up by those grant dispensers. It's a place defined by nature, not by man. It goes its own way, often untidily but characterful. It's wild, as far as that's possible under the recent pressures of conservation dogma and intrusive management. SWT and Natural England want to 'manage' for their own list of approved wildlife in order to be able to show that what they've done is useful. They want the wildlife to be prescribed and predicatable because they've managed for it. We prefer to leave it to nature and be surprised by the unpredictable. Their approach brings in farm animals, barbed wire, poisons and chain saws. Ours steps back and trusts to nature. A lady from Natural England explained that red deer would not do the same job as cattle. Was she incapable of seeing that her top-down prescriptive vision of Blacka left us feeling utterly depressed?