Opposing Visions

A further blast of domestication has returned to Blacka with a group of six cows plonked in the pasture land. It is interesting that the cows were first seen this week on a morning that also brought us a beautiful, early-morning view of real wildness the sort of thing that gets one out of bed in the morning.

Sheffield Wildlife Trust has contributed a short piece for the local Dore to Door publication, part of their commitment to getting that message across in the face of the alternative vision put forward by others including this blog. From it I extract this paragraph:

"The heathland of Backa Moor has a wonderful mosaic of dwarf shrubs (heather bilberry and cowberry), birch and rowan copses scattered trees, mires and grassland. The development of the heathland is due to human intervention - mainly forest clearance and livestock grazing. To conserve the valuable habitats and the landscape, management is needed to prevent the encroachment of bracken and birch scrub that would displace the heather bilberry and other heathland plants. Cattle grazing is a traditional form of management that ensures that the heathland mosaic is conserved for future generations of wildlife and people to enjoy.”

It has taken SWT quite a number of years to come up with a coherent defence of their management plans for Blacka Moor. It’s possible that they have only now done so because they have been challenged by local people including this blog and been found wanting. The passage quoted above was submitted for the Autumn edition of Dore to Door and is carefully worded, testament to some hours of heartsearching to justify their own role.

The first thing to say about this is that they are intent on making a connection based on management. They have correctly identified that the coherent view of their critics is based on the simplicity of our vision – that this is not any longer land that has an economic purpose so it should be allowed to go whatever way nature wishes. Our position is a little more nuanced than that but I’m happy for it to stand for the moment. The problem for SWT is that once they concede our view that nature’s choice should be respected, then their own role becomes redundant. What do you do (outside the tasks associated with access maintenance) when all the key decisions are out of your hands? So their propaganda tactic revolves around denying the validity of our position by claiming that the land has ‘always’ been managed therefore they are simply continuing in that age-old and highly respectable tradition of land management that has made the countryside what it is today. So they say that “The development of the heathland is due to human intervention”. The trouble here is that the human intervention did not make Blacka what it is today. It contributed of course because it’s undoubtedly true, as they say, that forests were cleared and livestock was grazed. But much of the condition of Blacka today that people so value owes little to that process and a great deal to the random unplanned wilding that has occurred over much of the last century. Anyone who walks here with eyes open can see that. It also needs to be pointed out that the land management of the past certainly was not setting out to be benign, simply to exploit what the land had to offer, with no concern for wildlife or natural beauty and it rarely left the land in an attractive state. A grouse moor is probably the dullest and most monotonous landscape known to many people a purely utilitarian affair designed to exclude anything that worked against the production of birds for shooting. So, when you actually start to look at it, using the management of the past to justify management today hardly seems wise.
We should also query the assumption implicit in their position that because something has always (or continuously for a time) been managed in a certain way then that must necessarily continue. Once you are into artificial landscapes like grouse moors then you would need stronger reasons than they can muster for simply doing something because it’s been done before. That other artificial landscape - the industrial and desolate area of eastern Sheffield - was wiped away with few regrets over the later part of the last century. In relation to the industrial past and its pollution I look upon the desolate, over -exploited moorland of the grouse moors as the reverse side of the coin. The early ramblers enjoyed the moors for a complex group of reasons, maybe principally for the remoteness and because they represented an escape from the smoky industrial city. But the chance for these moors to regenerate as genuinely wild natural and romantic landscapes was not taken as it should have been when the urban regeneration happened. Now these areas are targeted by conservation groups who see their potential for everlasting management and job opportunities for the expanding numbers of graduates coming from land management courses. In the passage above I love the use (twice) of that favoured word of the wildlife trusts – ‘mosaic’. They use it at moments of stress when desperate for a weapon to counter the arguments of others - as a magic word, a talisman before which all bow down and all critical judgement is suspended.