Enough

Speaking with one of the local conservation officers recently I realised that our different points of view were so entrenched that there was just no coming together at all. Those who try to bring about consensus (such as the growing tribe of professional facilitators) would have torn down their flip charts and tearfully gone off to seek counselling. It’s no surprise that I consider I was right and naturally he thinks he was. The major obstacle for him is that he saw his view as solidly backed up by a well established consensus in which he works – something that can only be shaken by a seismic cultural upheaval. Mine is simply the result of direct and regular observation.

Nevertheless I’ve reconsidered my position and then tried hard to think from his, and it simply doesn’t work. Each time I step out onto the ground the nonsense of the cosy conformity confronts me again and I have to conclude that life seen from the office by those who dwell in offices is subject to collective delusion, if not hallucination.

We’re talking about a position that looks remarkably like dogma born of ideology. And we’re back with what’s been the theme of this blog from the start – management. Obviously it’s no shocking revelation that people who are managers will think that managing is necessary. My point is: – not everywhere, and particularly not in areas of land which should be allowed to ‘be themselves’. Is that a dogmatic position? I don’t think so. It’s as if one of the early quack medico-entrepreneurs had decided to travel the country prescribing aspirin for every condition known. But these conservation managers have somehow convinced one another and some others beside that our countryside is, has been and ever more must remain ‘a managed countryside’ in its entirety. Management for them is the ‘wonder drug’ for the whole English countryside, whether it be your local park, the arable farm along the valley and the dairy farm next door, the grounds of each stately home and the mountains and moors that occupy large portions of the landscape. Prescribed and taken regularly after meals it will cure all problems. And don’t forget, folks, it’s on the National Health – CAP subsidised giving comfortable employment for all dispensers. This opinion has been beefed up into a doctrinal view which we hear all the time with very little change even in the vocabulary. One can only assume this became establishment policy at the behest of those whose Vested Interests have the ear of the boards and committees of Natural England and the National Park Authorities. Perhaps those very VIs actually sit on those boards. (Scope for more research there.)


But did this management ideology at the point of its adoption get a full public examination or was it deemed to have received that favourite tool of the status quo – a stakeholder consultation? Nobody who looks at or listens to coverage of wildlife and countryside matters on the BBC can fail to notice this. The land manager in a National Park never misses an opportunity to come out with it – this countryside that you all love he parrots, wouldn’t be like this if men had not created it like this – implying and even stating that the consequence of going away and leaving it for a while would not be worth contemplating. No less than ecological disaster presumably! But wouldn’t ecological disaster be a fair working definition of a grouse moor?