Being Candid

Recipe for Intrusive Dullness: The Eastern Moors Prescription

Now to cash in those credit tokens accumulated so far by pulling punches on the Eastern Moors Partnership's draft management plan.

Those hoping for an exciting vision leading to a landscape that thrills, that captures the imagination, that delivers the unexpected, an experience of a lifetime, will be disappointed but wearily unsurprised given the record of the conservation industry. Anyone wanting much the same as we've always had, but lightly dusted and spruced up, may be content. But there's nothing here to inspire a new generation to enthuse about wildlife on a landscape scale. Instead it's all about management, management and more management. That and "extensive grazing" which is what managers do. No wonder that the conservation workers I see are so keen to end their working week early on a Friday afternoon. If they do get out and about in the weekend they'll be as likely as anything to be getting their thrills from active sports like mountain biking for lack of anything thrilling on the ground. Much of this area is boring and dull for being artificially planned to exclude trees. It lacks secrets and a sense of wonder. What You See Is What You Get: The old fashioned northern industrialist virtues of Gradgrind so caricatured by Dickens. Any excuse for a bit more management protection - this species of caterpillar, that potential bird resident several thousand desperately uninteresting archaeological features that amount to little more than a few stones and a glut of speculation. By some clumsy implication the message is put across that all this will be irretrievably lost to the detriment of mankind if we allow the land to become a heart-warmingly romantic expression of the natural integrity that is latent within it waiting to escape the stranglehold of extensive grazing.

Of course you will find people who want it to be the same as when they were children with no natural change. Even power stations and pylons can affect some people like that. Well paid public employees in the natural conservation sector are rewarded to see beyond that. It’s as if Christopher Wren surveying the smouldering ruins of old St Paul’s and the streets around had said “Nothing that a couple of coats of paint can’t put right.”

Every professional vested interest seeks ways of embedding itself into the fabric of our culture and society. The law is saturated with examples and recent instances include the codified compliances of the health and safety industry. Intrusive as these can be they are intended to prevent people doing things which are deemed to be not in the interests of society. The conservation industry is unique in taking this even further: it seeks to stop nature doing what it wants to do! If this prompts a double take its justified: there’s scope here for a new comedy series. It is so amazingly arrogant. Artificial man made (and man-ruined) landscape types have to be protected – from nature! And the EMP management plan is full of the bumph all giving supposed pretext why essentially self serving plans have to be followed to the exclusion of anything remotely imaginative.
Sites of Special Scientific Interest
Special Protection Areas
Birds of Conservation Concern
Special Area of Conservation
International Union of ………. etc. etc. (contd on page 94)

Many of these don’t bear looking into. Every one is or should be disputable by the public and each embeds more and more strongly the controlling position of a defined interest group – the conservation mafia.

Not having all the time in the world I now append below my (draft) response to the (draft) consultation on the management plan of EMP. Anyone wanting to suggest other things please comment.

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Eastern Moors Partnership Management Plan

1 A missed opportunity: Three areas of contiguous public land could have been considered as one. There could finally have been a chance for nature and wildlife to develop and for the land to evolve with integrity over a substantial area in which there is freedom for wildlife to roam. A tragic failure of vision and ambition. This is a sad day.

2 "Wild and Open". Utterly perplexed at the continuing use and juxtaposition of these two words relating to this landscape. Yet their use here is key to what is wrong with this management plan. It is comparable to saying a man is tall and short, fat and thin, at the same time. It is forgivable for strangers with no knowledge of the landscape to make the mistake of calling this land wild, but for people claiming authority or expertise to quote them in an official document is bringing the language into disrepute.
When you call this land wild it suggests that wildness is something you value. It evokes a sense of anticipation and a sense of otherness, and a sense of mystery - something which captures the imagination as only a self motivating landscape with its free spirited unshackled wildlife could do. So why do you then produce plans to make it look just like you want it to look, with details of all sorts of farming style interventions designed to manage and impose human prescriptions? I’m struggling for suitable acceptable words to describe this – what do you call somebody who says one thing and then does the opposite? But this is an official document from an organisation managing a public asset. Micro managed wildness? Incomprehensible!

3 Why no proper consultation about the Agri Environment Scheme and the other ways of this being funded? Is this public land or is it not? Where is the money coming from? How much from public funds controlled by Natural England? How much from public funds from PDNPA and how much from members of NT and RSPB ?
Is EMP a charity? Will it submit its accounts to the Charity Commission?

4 Why is it necessary to cut trees below climbing edges? What next? Ladders and lifts? Surely climbing is an adventure sport with participants getting a kick out of tackling natural features? And seeing as the trees ought really to come over the top why not let them? Is nature wrong? How does one get to qualify to be god?

5 How do you justify doing something not mentioned in this management plan – but shouldn’t it be? – using a grazier from far outside the area, in Halifax!!? He will be one of two used and this seems utterly perverse. Speaking as one who wants no grazing at all and a purer natural and unfarmed landscape here, I’m told that I should remember the needs of the ‘local economy’. How local is this?

6 The process of supposed consultation has been calculated to guide the responses along certain desired channels. Despite a statement that EMP is ‘very transparent’ there was a refusal to disclose the names of organisations playing a key stakeholder role in this process. That is shameful. What exactly are the perspectives that are too problematic to even consider?
7 The "clear and transparent" policy promised for managing the red deer. They've done well without one for many years and have thrilled visitors. Leave them alone. Why does everything wild have to be managed?