Bracken and the Bashers

Sheffield Wildlife Trust, addicted to self justification as are all who have serious doubts, deal with the anxiety in their habitual way: they bung up a few sheets of laminated A4 telling us that they are about to do something they’re not sure they really believe in. This is the latest phase of SWT’s ‘A4-itis’ to afflict Blacka.
Perhaps we should be grateful that this time the paper has been printed in landscape rather than portrait format; that could be the first sign of a coming realisation that there is a world outside the office.

This notice tells us that they are about to spray an area of bracken. They claim this is a good thing, believing nobody could surely be in favour of bracken. But bracken is a natural plant with a place of its own in the rich pattern the country's native vegetation. Yes it’s dominating and it causes some annoyance. But its dominance lasts for only a small part of the year. The question has to be “what will it look like when the bracken is dead?" They say that this year they will target an area where it’s growing through bilberry. We shall see what the results are. The area targeted for the last two years looks a mess with tractor wheelmarks still visible and nothing at all growing.
Once again the only interest on the ground is just how much ordure the cattle have been able to deposit in that spot.


The one most likely strategy that could help control bracken they have ruled themselves against: allowing the whole site to develop naturally will give birch trees a chance to shade out the most vigorous growth of bracken. Instead SWT cut birch thus encouraging more of the ferns. Deer are happy with bracken. It provides them with excellent cover. Which is another reason to recommend that the interventionists stay in their offices and content themselves with sticking up notices on the wall reminding colleagues to wash up their own teacups.

With wild nature you either accept it or reject it. Once you become selective you’re no longer promoting wildness. That is the unambiguous purist position. Few people take the purist route in this (or any) argument but the problem is that the moment you take the theoretical leap into permitting intervention you risk coming to ground on a slippery slope. I’ve intervened here, so what’s wrong with intervening there? If you say you’re drawing a line here what are the chances that the line will have moved on after a time? So you start off with fine intentions and then move on to bashing everything in sight that doesn't suit you. I tend to think the greater danger in pursuing intervention is not the inability of individuals to stick to a line but the disposition of institutions and organisations which develop momentums of their own; they have employees whose job descriptions need tweaking, and who need to be kept occupied and properly remunerated and whose appraisals need to be addressed annually.

No division of the public sector can exist without a raison d’etre, or rationale or set of underlying principles. One of the conservation industry’s more convoluted guiding philosophical positions – one rarely discussed in public forums- runs so: “man has had such an influence on the ground and on the landscape that just leaving places alone will no longer suffice; nature can often cure itself but not the damage its most powerful player causes. Man, himself, now has to make amends for the change and harm he has caused to the previous natural balance that prevailed before man’s influence became so powerful. Man must now ‘play God’ through more intervention, but this time a benign intervention, to save species that man himself has threatened.” This is the biodiversity or saving species agenda that is a cornucopia for the UK conservation industry – a licence to meddle and tweak and intervene and create habitats, generally play God and soak up every environmental grant available.