Dark World of Conservation Industry Dogma

The conservation industry appears to be fixated on the dogma that it has created to justify what should be unacceptable. The total fusion of farming and conservation is the guiding principle behind all policies of land management even on public land which has been free from farming for many years. In his latest article Mark Fisher refers to

the unbending dogma of British conservation that wildlife has to coexist within farmed landscapes, and is never given space of its own where farming is removed

Dogma is what underpins and justifies (for those taken in by it) what would otherwise be questioned and rejected. Who would have thought that an area like Blacka, thriving for so many years in its freedom from intrusion and exploitation would have to suffer the indignity of a return to the status of managed farmland strewn with dung, cut across by barbed wire and where wildlife has to find what odd corners it can?




Dogma is a resource supplying a convenient comfort zone of belief for those who prefer not to recognise their own self-serving agenda for what it truly is. All must be top-down and in the hands of those to whom we rashly entrusted such decisions and who now consider themselves qualified to play God. Can any other group outside bankers and royalty itself have been entrusted with such privilege? Nothing, according to current conservation thinking, can be left to nature. Thus the word 'nature' itself has to be redefined in 'newspeak' fashion to mean something compatible with livestock farming. All of the time this convenient redefining takes place remote from the muck around the Blacka gateways and in committee rooms well away from the public whose scrutiny might force them to see the absurdity of their position.

So for the many who have wondered why we have to have cows and their waste on what was previously farm-free, the answer is: because it's in the interest of the managers and the farmers and the whole industry that declares that our landscape is 'nothing without conservation' - should that now be conservationists?

Remember these are protected areas - protected from development perhaps, but who protects from conservationists and their self-serving, grant-harvesting dogma?