Gradgrind Lives On At Sheffield Wildlife Trust

Readers of Dickens will remember one of his characters, Mr Gradgrind, for whom material things were so important that they blinded him to qualities that called for imagination and vision such as appreciation of beauty, poetry and compassion. He appears in Dickens' Hard Times a quick guide to which is available here for those who are not widely read - I guess that includes most conservation workers.

Observation over many years suggests that to the workers and managers of SWT what matters is not the beauty or character of the countryside but the blind adherence to conservation dogma and targets. It is of course easier to follow this line if you don't actually know the place well. The policies that are being pursued are formulated remotely by committees of distant bureaucrats manipulating the current orthodoxy and then applied over the whole country with little reference to individual sites and their users.

Take grazing for instance. A line has been taken and stuck to whatever or wherever the circumstances. Our countryside must be farmed - that's what the countryside is for, and that means putting livestock on it. So, whether the farmers themselves are intelligent, thoughtful and sensitive - and one or two of them probably are, or narrow minded thickos, they are to be in charge of managing the landscape. When they own the land that's hard to oppose. On public land it's another matter. So why do we have to accept all this farmification and livestock grazing on Blacka? Blacka is public land and SWT may have been given a lease of 30 years on it by our utterly stupid council, but wasn't there a time when we might have expected people in charge of what they called a 'nature reserve' to care first about the natural beauty of the place and not blind dogma?

One of the unfortunate spin-offs of the current concentration on Biodiversity Action Plans (BAPS) is to dehumanise our interaction with the countryside. All becomes a matter of what can be measured or rather converted into statistics, however dubious those may be - and they can be very suspect indeed. And to quote statistics you don't need to actually know the site, understand its character or respond to nature and the elements at all. Philistines can do it very well.

I challenge anybody who is inclined to disbelieve me to visit Blacka and disagree with me if they can. Please use the comments facility.



Incidentally I've had some praise for the above picture which I now believe to be my most successful photo yet. Nevertheless the view it gives still fails to fully represent the pleasure of being present when the pattern itself was being created, something that sums up much of the experience we get from being in managed countryside and that for which wildlife trusts are responsible. In fact I'm thinking of asking the wildlife trusts whether they would wish to purchase the rights to this picture. It most certainly would be a much more suitable image than their present logo of a badger.