Knowing

The value of actually knowing a place makes a difference to everything. Really knowing means throughout the year in all seasons and in all conditions and watching the changes in wildlife from trees to birds and mammals. There should be some kind of embargo , well limitation, on distant bureaucracies with no local knowledge deciding what goes on, even categorising the landscape type when no committee member has experienced the scene day by day.  This resonates within the cynefin/oikophilia argument Richard Maybe has with Roger Scruton in this New Statesman review.

To one who looks at the scene daily the removal of the power lines from Blacka is enough to make your heart leap as you see in each seasonal change something not seen in the same way before. While the power line was there it was harder to conceive of a landscape free from human influence. Now with it gone the visual intrusion frees the imagination enough to challenge again the 'humanisation' at the heart of the farmland management agenda. To the dwellers at office desks at SWT's headquarters it means nothing.

CPRE's local magazine (Friends of the Peak District) has a page about the removal with a couple of good photos before and after. It describes Blacka as 'amazingly wild'. Well it's certainly better qualified to be called that than most other local public spaces but it has been getting steadily less so over the last ten years. The power line removal does something to restore that but we need to be more and more alert as the conservation lobby gets bolder. The Icarus meetings in 2006 may have been flawed in many ways but they did establish some sort of consensus that Blacka should be managed with 'minimal intervention'. How much the farm subsidy dependent conservation managers must have hated that; and it has shown in their ignoring of it in following years.