I’ve mentioned before that SWT were banning hang gliding from the pasture land on Blacka Moor. The reason this is important to all of us even people like me who have no interest in hang gliding is that it’s another example of the conservation industry walking all over people and demonstrating that they care only for their own empires and their own management jobs. A meeting on Tuesday afternoon between the interested parties turned out to be fiery at times. This has become a one-sided battle between two huge publicly funded bureaucracies and one small self employed man who has been told that he can’t carry on his business where he says he has done so for more than 20 years. Steve, who runs courses for those learning hang gliding around the Peak District, uses a small section of the pasture land on Blacka Moor as a ‘nursery slope’. He teaches people to hang glide. As far as I can see they never get more than a few feet off the ground and only travel at most 25 metres. It’s not my choice of activity and I would have reservations about it if it dominated the site and if it was happening a lot more often than it does. As it happens I’m on Blacka more than anyone and have only rarely seen him there; as a lover of wildlife, demonstrated I hope in this blog, I believe that his activities have little or no impact on the bird life of the site. The site has a history of being heavily grazed and is totally artificial – not a natural landscape feature - and it’s designated by its legal covenant as being primarily for recreation. The trouble is that it was stuck on to other local areas and included in these as part of a SSSI in a most unsatisfactory way with no consultation. Steve says he has been doing what he does there for 20 or more years without being told by the landowner that there has been any problem. Now the present crop of conservation people, SWT and their controllers Unnatural England, with no pretence of flexibility, are trying to restrict his activities to a degree he finds unacceptable.
Up to now the activity has been carried out at various times scattered through the year. SWT now want to limit him to a few days in only two months in the year. They claim one reason for this is connected with the bird nesting season which has been defined by U.E. as March 1st to July 31st. The other time is the whole winter period because SWT have only now decided to put cattle on the pasture land from September for supposedly conservation reasons in this artificial landscape, and according to SWT the grazier who owns the cattle claims that Steve’s activities spook the cattle. As the pasture land covers over 100 acres and Steve uses only a tiny part of this space, that sounds very unlikely and I have some reasons for believing that it’s nonsense. Anyway this is land put aside for recreation not for farming. The trouble is that conservation people have so muddled their aims to confuse the public and raise the importance of their jobs that conservation and farming are hard to separate especially in the way they are both heavily subsidised from the public purse.
My other fear is that there is a strategy unfolding here. A few years ago a group of senior citizens who had regularly and benignly flown silent radio controlled gliders on the same land for a few days each year were told they were unwelcome except at times which were of no use to them. They were extremely upset but felt they had to accept and anyway were people who were of a generation unused to flouting authority in any form. This place is becoming sanitised by the managers of wildlife who are getting to be an arrogant and unaccountable body which believes itself to be protected by a certain public sentiment towards wildlife. Will they next start attacking dog walkers? If they succeed in removing them then they may well achieve an objective of reducing human activity dramatically because those with dogs seem to be in the majority of visitors. What we are seeing here is another example of people refusing to consider important principles to further their own narrow interests. They are intent on an aggressive promotion of the conservation economy which has grown in momentum since the original land grab. That happened when Blacka Moor, a site given to the public by a benefactor for the purpose of public recreation, was recklessly handed over by Sheffield City Council to an empire-building conservation charity.
Up to now the activity has been carried out at various times scattered through the year. SWT now want to limit him to a few days in only two months in the year. They claim one reason for this is connected with the bird nesting season which has been defined by U.E. as March 1st to July 31st. The other time is the whole winter period because SWT have only now decided to put cattle on the pasture land from September for supposedly conservation reasons in this artificial landscape, and according to SWT the grazier who owns the cattle claims that Steve’s activities spook the cattle. As the pasture land covers over 100 acres and Steve uses only a tiny part of this space, that sounds very unlikely and I have some reasons for believing that it’s nonsense. Anyway this is land put aside for recreation not for farming. The trouble is that conservation people have so muddled their aims to confuse the public and raise the importance of their jobs that conservation and farming are hard to separate especially in the way they are both heavily subsidised from the public purse.
My other fear is that there is a strategy unfolding here. A few years ago a group of senior citizens who had regularly and benignly flown silent radio controlled gliders on the same land for a few days each year were told they were unwelcome except at times which were of no use to them. They were extremely upset but felt they had to accept and anyway were people who were of a generation unused to flouting authority in any form. This place is becoming sanitised by the managers of wildlife who are getting to be an arrogant and unaccountable body which believes itself to be protected by a certain public sentiment towards wildlife. Will they next start attacking dog walkers? If they succeed in removing them then they may well achieve an objective of reducing human activity dramatically because those with dogs seem to be in the majority of visitors. What we are seeing here is another example of people refusing to consider important principles to further their own narrow interests. They are intent on an aggressive promotion of the conservation economy which has grown in momentum since the original land grab. That happened when Blacka Moor, a site given to the public by a benefactor for the purpose of public recreation, was recklessly handed over by Sheffield City Council to an empire-building conservation charity.
No comments:
Post a Comment