"Felling for Wilderness"

The misspelling just about sums it up. Freudian. It’s what SWT will be up to this autumn with their uglification tree cutting and coppicing. But “wilderness”? God almighty where do they get them? Thinking again I reckon that the error is more likely to be that ‘for’ has accidentally substituted for ‘of’. But this mention of wild and wilderness just boggles the mind. It's about as wild as a garden cabbage patch

Do we attribute this sort of thing to poverty of imagination and experience or to an institutional culture of mendacity? But the implications are too great to pull more punches.
The Sheffield Moors Partnership Action Planning Workshop Report reveals many of the things that are wrong with the local conservation industry. Here are just a few:

1 Total insincerity. The use of words like wild and wilderness, occasionally adjusted to ‘feel of wildness’ etc indicate that they know just what they are about but want to still capitalise on the deception. How can anyone trust people who wilfully mislead. When will this industry start to be honest and simple?

2 The accent on archaeology speaks volumes. Here is a backup justification for management and intervention. And they vaguely suspect that somewhere in the archaeology they will pick up some useful reasons for sticking to their anti-nature and pro-grazing agenda. You know the sort of thing – tree roots might disturb the hitherto undiscovered bit of rock that ancient man could possibly have sat on (when texting his pal on the other side of the hill.)

3 Cultural Heritage is another of these ploys to use as a justification for intervention and keeping an artificial (but boring) feature just the same (and just as boring).

4 A nauseating surfeit of verbal hype and adjectival diarrhoea in the 2025 Vision and the Guiding Management Principles. In a few years time this will look like the pre-2008 financial products prospectuses from the banking industry. Much of this is where the horrors lie and will have to be returned to later.

5 Participation. This sets the tone of the proposed consultation. It will need watching carefully. Some previous criticisms, perhaps even some of ours, seem acknowledged but they will find a way of concocting a model which brings them what they want. Otherwise why decide everything beforehand? If they were genuine and sincere about consulting they would start with something like a blank sheet and ask people what they want. Never a chance of that.