Before somebody turns my last post on its head I'll do it myself. You can hardly read an article on the countryside or watch a TV programme without finding that someone's telling you that the precious English countryside is under threat from those who will stand aside and not prevent it from going wild. Only the most naive surely will fail to see that this all comes from defending a privileged and usually subsidised position.
Mark Fisher in a recent article on his wonderful Self Willed Land website quotes some examples:
“National parks say that if the sheep and cattle go, there will be a knock-on effect on precious environments. The high moors are effectively a manmade environment and if grazing stops and is not replaced by other management, scrub and trees will begin to grow”
and a farmer from Dartmoor with 500 cattle and 200 sheep says:
"The vegetation will grow and it won't be accessible for the walkers. The birds that thrive on the moor will vanish. Water quality will be affected – the water that comes off Dartmoor is some of the cleanest in the country. The walls won't be maintained, communities will die and the tourists will stop coming"
....as Mark says:
"This is a dreadful litany of self-serving nonsense. What if, instead, we paid for that rewilding of the uplands as a mechanism of securing improved ecosystem services - water quality, flood protection, carbon stores/sequestration, recreational landscapes, habitat and biodiversity improvements, etc. - instead of using the money to subsidise marginal agriculture? Because of cultural conditioning, it may be that this will only be achievable through a nationalisation of critical areas of the uplands, but this would move the UK system of protected areas to a level consistent with almost all other European countries where their National Parks are publicly owned wildlands, practically free of agricultural exploitation."
(see Threestoneburn Forest on Mark Fisher's website)
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