While the wood no longer has the burden of a productive purpose, the Wildlife Trust and their volunteers are nevertheless driven to industrialise the woodland through sanitary logging and coppicing, leaving the evidence of their intervention as piles of saw-chained logs and brash, as well as the ludicrous dead hedges, none of which are in anyway analogous of structures found within woodland in wild nature. Constructing dead hedges is a method of stock proofing that has no contemporary context in Grass Wood, but which is a common way of the conservation industry in disposing of large amounts of coppice material that would have been taken away when the wood was worked for poles and charcoal-making.
Wednesday 15 February 2012
Humanisation
My comments in the previous post "Leg Cocking" are not the only criticisms made of the way the wildlife trusts go about stamping their brand label on woodland. Mark Fisher writes of the way Yorkshire Wildlife Trust are damaging the character of woods near Grassington insistently practising a'humanisation' of the experience.
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2 comments:
What a coincidence. We went up through Grass Wood the other day to get to Bastow Wood. Grass Wood was horrible - the work parties have been at it this winter, more coppice, more "dead wood piles" of sticks and little logic. These arisings from coppicing will never provide the same deadwood habitat as a decaying tree, dead from old age. They don't have the mass or variety of physical circumstance. It is painfully obvious to see this from the few older trees that are in the different stages of deterioation. It is very appropriate that I awarded YWT with the Stink Up a Woodland raspberry award as the smell of muck spreading next to the wood pervaded most of Grass Wood. It was unpleasant, and particularly galling as I go to woodland to get away from farming. Fortunately, the smell didn't get up to Bastow. Lots of woodcock in Bastow, some woodpeckers, primroses in bud, and one magnificent roe deer buck. So lithe. It seemed the buck relied on the woodcock to know whether to be spooked. Interesting.
It's an important point that management cannot do as well what nature does itself so much better and in an infinity of ways going through stages that can't be replicated. (Though I'm sure they'll try.) But those chain sawn edges are a horror.
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