It doesn’t feel right to start a new year in a spirit of bleak expectations, especially this one. Dickens bicentenary is in February and to be celebrated, but the prospect is bleak for those who deplore the spread of manageritis across the local countryside. Not that we’ve yet come across Magwitch in wanderings across the moors but is the dreary prospect of S.M.P. any more attractive? Would it be any better if the managers themselves were more imaginative and more competent or would that make it worse? It’s unlikely anyway because they live and work and think in an inflexible culture sustained by a mix of self interest and institutional dogma. The only hope is that the storm will break early rather than later: a storm must surely come as it has with other groups in recent years who have tried to mystify the public with secrecy and complexity to make themselves unaccountable. We’ve had bankers with their derivatives, sub primes and credit default swaps; we’ve had the MPs with their impenetrable expense claims, the tabloid hackers with their cynical and dubious definitions of 'public interest': for at some time the wider public consciousness will be directed to people who have pretensions to a sort of god role prescribing the shape of our landscape to benefit from the cash cows of European farming grants.
This year conservation cronies that constitute the SMP will devise their local plan to secure their overall strategy. They will call this their “Master Plan”. Some of us shudder when we hear phrases like this and sense that it will lead to a final solution. Perhaps we should put these associations to one side and concentrate on what is local. But we should be clear about what the motivation is for this master plan. It is definitely not to promote a big idea that unifies several sites into one landscape where nature and wildlife take precedence; because these people have no big idea. They are actually seeking to erect a barrier against public consultation and calls for accountability. This is the way of unchecked bureaucracy.
An important part of the Master Plan role is to be the salvation of Sheffield Wildlife Trust’s Blacka Moor management. SWT are completely up against it There’s no way they can show that their chosen strategy has been a success – the strategy that they have sunk their reputation in – and importantly that the conservation industry has become totally committed to, so the stakes are high- when they see the results of what they have been doing on Blacka. The present use of farm animals on Blacka was meant to be for a trial period after disagreement in 2006. At the end of this trial period (2011) there would need to be a review – that was the understanding and it was built into the summary of the Icarus conclusions. While no details of this were ‘laid down’ you have to consider that this would involve more than just a decision by SWT themselves whether the cattle grazing had ‘worked’ or not or whether there had been too many problems after which they would have to consult on whether it has been ‘successful’. So they have two schemes to get them out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.
1 Get a form of words agreed within the "Master Plan" for the SMP allowing them to claim that from now they have to fit in with what all the others are doing – which, guess what?, will mean more and more farm management.
2 Do their own evaluation of the farm cattle project which will fraudulently show it’s been a success, or possibly buy in a report from an outside, friendly firm (such as Penny Andersen) who will be paid to come up with just what the wildlife trust want them to come up with.
No comments:
Post a Comment