Dissatisfied

SWT are not satisfied with Blacka Moor. The conservationists generally are on record as considering it unsatisfactory. It makes you wonder at times why they don't go away and leave it to the rest of us who like it very much, or at least we liked it before they came along and started altering it. "Unfavourable condition recovering" is Unnatural England's official verdict and the 'recovering' bit is only added on at the end because someone's produced a stack of boring paperwork after many hours sitting at a desk miles away from the site and called it a Management Plan. This is actually true - you don't have to do anything on the ground to get the accolade 'recovering'. You just have to get yourself a management plan. Once that's in place NE can rest assured that the real aim of conservation has been achieved i.e. a net increase in bureaucracy.

But every so often SWT do get out of their offices in a distant part of Sheffield and do something. They usually choose a fine day and they usually bring along some heavy plant or machinery - they would feel naked without it. Hence the 'scrapes' that have appeared in the pasture land. The intention is to allow them to fill with water to create small muddy pools that could just persuade curlews to stay around here instead of going somewhere else. Or perhaps lapwings.



The point here is that nature itself is not good enough to provide for itself. This is the consequence of making biodiversity the prime criterion for countryside management. The project is to show that you have more species on the land than there were before which is why so many of them are to be seen with clipboards ticking boxes. You sometimes feel with wildlife trusts and conservationists generally that they would quite welcome a small block of flats being plonked in the middle of a beauty spot if the developer agreed to having a butterfly garden on the roof. After all that is what they are doing already - wildlife trusts reach an accommodation with the quarrying, landfill and aggregates industries who make considerable contributions to their funds and their projects. The whole thing is more about opportunism and meddling than old style nature conservation. Welcome to the 21st century.