Vision Expressed

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppresséd brain?

Visions are cropping up all over the place. To some of us who were educated before the days of MBAs and the appearance of sundry, astute, top-down managerial strategies to control our lives a vision was a different kind of thing. Then a vision was something lofty, implying noble aspiration beyond the confines of the material world. Now the managing class has purloined the word hoping that some faint aura of the old meaning will remain to bewitch and bamboozle the simple punter. So we have to consider the 2025 Vision for the Sheffield Moors for the consultation on the Eastern Peak Moors in this context. At the same time some of us are wondering how to respond to Sheffield’s latest consultation inspiringly called a Bus Vision! It can’t be long before we have a Wheelie Bin Vision or even a Dog Walking Vision. The currency of this word is rapidly being debased.

The draft vision displayed at recent consultation meetings for the Eastern Moors Partnership of RSPB and NT can be accessed by clicking here. It was apparently put together via a brainstorming session involving the usual suspects in the local conservation world and despite the well-manured hyperbole (or because of it) it promises to deliver merely a humdrum landscape planned by managers, distant farmed by remote graziers and repressed and mowed by dejected looking sheep and cattle.

The extent and sweep of this area and the potential for allowing a genuine, more natural vegetation to evolve mean that there is an opportunity now to start reining back the management in the hope that a more romantic and wild atmosphere and appearance can inspire future generations. That is not what will happen if we get habitat creation and a theme park fit for the Dartford Warbler. This is, depressingly, the height of ambition for the RSPB bird gardening fraternity. And it is increasingly the justification for the high intervention management that is proposed. Again why should we be surprised that managers propose more management? And this is why the teachers of managers remain silent in their university posts counting the new entrants to their courses in wildlife and conservation management all of whom will need places in the conservation industry when they graduate.

It is in fact the educational component of the vision that I find most distasteful. Note the emphasis on education and interpretation:

“A co-ordinated programme of participative learning.......will....enable even more diverse groups of people to enjoy, appreciate and ultimately support the area.”

Despite fashionable largely meaningless educational jargon about participation and implying we discover for ourselves the real purpose is to teach groups of schoolchildren to understand that all must be managed otherwise things might go badly wrong and that it must be done through farming, maintaining an artificial landscape via intervention. Who will be telling them this? Surely not managers? And if they do not also tell these children that there are other ways of looking at this and alternative interpretations what else could you call it but indoctrination?