Bog Off

How important are blanket bogs? Depends on who you are it seems.

The conservation industry is engaged in a constant search for more and more ways of justifying its role in managing every aspect of our countryside. The more things that they can come up with that are ‘vital’ or ‘endangered’ or close to extinction, or playing a key role in our cultural heritage, or of prime conservation importance, the more evidence they can provide for their jobs being secured for life. And the more power they can wield over the landscape and the more bureaucracy that ensues.

Moors for the Future is an example. Why on earth anyone would want to keep utterly boring grotesquely artificial treeless grouse moor landscapes looking exactly the same for another 500 years, when there are much better alternatives, would be inexplicable to most people. But when they explain to us that there is a crucial environmental reason for doing so then we’re all supposed to fall in line and accept it. Blanket bogs provide just one of these alleged crucial environmental reasons for keeping this landscape frozen in time and tedium and we are expected to believe this. And many of us do because we’re trusting of the so called science which we have no way of evaluating without spending years sceptically examining it. So we fall back on our instinctive acceptance of anything ‘scientific’ which dovetails well with a similar instinctive approval of anything to do with ‘nature’ or wildlife that supposed experts in the field tell us.

Blanket Bogs are supposed to be a major weapon in the war against climate change. Well who could possibly argue against that? All right-thinking folk want to do their best for the planet don’t we? Well it’s Natural England that tells us this and they will always find the scientists to back this up. But if it were not so we can be sure that they would have another reason for managing that feature of moorland in the same way, some kind of vegetation or species of this or that with varying levels of preciousness. They will always find a reason for managing. It is what bureaucracies do. And they do it pretty well. They are persuasive – but mainly because we don’t understand the arguments. We rely on the ‘experts’. And experts are always right are they not? Of course.

So the moors must be maintained as they are now in their artificial state in perpetuity, managed by the conservation industry and paid for by the public because of the prime environmental, wildlife and cultural importance in the form of Higher level Stewardship and landscape wide grant schemes from the Lottery etcetera. And there’s no way that we should leave the moors to nature – nature just doesn’t know how to get things right. They must stay as they are.

Unless of course there’s money and influence at work somewhere that effectively trumps these principles. The shooting industry for instance can damage blanket bogs. They can do what they want on the moors. But nature is another thing. Trees growing on grouse moors cannot be allowed to happen. Nature and wildlife are all very well in odd places but the moors must be protected from nature taking over. Blanket bogs are a perfect illustration. We must protect them. Unless the grouse shooting industry can show that they can make more money by burning them. And N.E. goes along with it.

And they wonder why I call them Unnatural England.