Cattle or Deer? - or the Elephant in the Room?

I said in the preceding post that I would try to explain the reason why SWT make so much of domestic cattle in their publicity and so little (or nothing) of wild red deer. On the face of it you would expect just about the opposite. After all they call themselves a Wildlife Trust, not a farmlife trust. But the explanation goes to the heart of the differences between them and the local opponents of their management strategy. It's all about the priority given to heather moorland by the conservation industry. Those like me who have loved Blacka through all the years during which it has become splendidly wild are, to SWT, annoying distractions, non-believers who threaten their mission to take back much of the recent wildness so they can manage the place much as it would have been when a grouse shooting estate. years ago. Their role mapped out for themselves is therefore unremittingly interventionist and it conflicts absolutely with the parts of the vision that local people supported at the Icarus process - one which values a landscape with minimum intervention.

There's no doubt that when they found out that this is what local people wanted it sent a cold shiver down the spines of SWT and also their conservation professional allies. For once the conservation movement was on the defensive and its future was under threat. Wild landscapes with wild animals and nature going its own way left a doubtful future for those who had expected to earn a living following a career in just the kind of intervention that was suddenly being questioned.

If it became a more widely held view that places like Blacka could mostly go along very well without all those grant funded projects where did this leave the wildlife trust movement and all the graduates from courses that kept university teachers of these new conservation disciplines in employment?

Now, needless to say, those of us who supported a wilder approach - not going against nature - had not seen the implications of this for the conservation professionals, not initially anyway. It was only when we witnessed the reactions of SWT that we started to put two and two together.

Along with this we became amazed at the lack of presence of SWT on Blacka. You could visit the site every day for a fortnight and not see one of them; and they simply did not know much about it, even going so far as to ask us where things were. This didn't seem to fit with the determined approach to acquiring the Blacka lease from Sheffield Council that we saw eight years ago. And yet we kept being told that they had as many as a hundred employees! So what were they all doing? This is where we began to understand just what the modern wildlife trust approach to conservation entailed. The employees of the trust were spending most of their time doing desk jobs, applying for funds and grants which would then be spent using contractors and leasing out grazing to local farmers.

In response to the perceived challenge to their modus operandi an element of panic set in. One strategy was to delve back into history to try to find evidence they could publicise to show that Blacka was extensively used by man for much of its history. It had to be shown to be essentially a managed landscape to justify what they wanted to do so they looked back hundreds of years no matter what has happened to it over the last hundred of those years. Whatever benefits for wildlife it had accumulated during the years of wilding - summer bird visitors and red deer for example - the key thing for them had to be that man's intervention must be shown to be vital. Otherwise their own future was open to question.

Hence the bankrupt ideology of heath and moorland promotion a thoroughly artificial habitat utterly predictable and lacking the romance, imagination and surprise of wild land. They were instructed by their director and Natural England to espouse the artificial cause with zeal and enthusiasm although all seemed as forced and contrived as the landscape they were promoting. Cattle that they wanted to bring in to control the wildness were lovingly described in local papers as sure to attract sightseeing visitors. They told the council and attenders at their meetings that people had phoned their offices complaining that they were disappointed if they couldn't see them. Yet never a word about the red deer. Why is that? Because red deer came to Blacka not because it was managed by man but because the landscape was becoming more wild. To SWT the deer were the elephant in the room. They came in spite of their painstakingly written management plan. What did that say about management plans? That the single most exciting wildlife experience resulted from a lack of management! The more people thought about that the more they would be prone to question SWT's management.

SWT thought it was really clever to acquire highland cattle because they are considered to be cute. Mr and Mrs Joe Public, helpfully ignorant of the issues, would be sure to love them - after all there were familiar cuddly toys in the shops for their children. Hence the synthetic values of their approach became firmly entrenched.

Their desperation took an even more dishonourable turn when, last year, they wilfully defamed a group of the most regular attenders at their meetings - but that story has been told. Suffice to say that a genuine and powerful vision of a more wild landscape so unsettled their ill thought-out philosophy that it exposed something unpleasant. Who would have thought it?