Virtual Elegance - Actual Squalor

Take a look at Sheffield Wildlife Trust's impressive new website - now that must have cost a small fortune. And it's designed to tell just the story that reassures the public and their corporate supporters that this is a superior organization, one that really knows what it's doing.

Now put away your screens and get out into the real world. Maybe try a visit to Blacka Moor itself, SWT's premier managed site, or 'nature reserve' as they choose to call it.

Most people enter Blacka via the small car park near Stony Ridge. This is the main entry point for their most important site so you would expect that some care and thought would be given to its presentation. The first thing you see are the old power line poles that have been there for more than a month.

They were brought here after lying out on the moor conspicuously for several months previously after being sawn off before Christmas. Do you wonder that nobody from SWT seems bothered? Regulars on Blacka don’t wonder at all. It’s what they expect. Move on through the gate in the direction of the attractive woodland. The rhododendron along the track here has been discussed a number of times with SWT including more than once at the RAG meetings. The conclusion of these discussions was that any shrub removal would be done gradually and sensitively with attention paid to the visual appearance of the area and the unique contribution the evergreens make to sheltering the excellent woodland on the other side. It had been agreed that no work would be done to rhododendron at this side.

What we thought was decided has been ignored and large amounts have been cut and unsightly piles left as they dropped. It's been like this for months. A few yards on as the stream comes in from the side you can see a wide assortment of litter.

They choose not to have a regular warden preferring to put their human resources into other things, presumably administration and office duties including developing a wonderful website, expanding their organization and general management priorities such as promoting their ‘brand’. In this age of the screen virtuality takes precedence and those who you need to impress (and persuade to donate funds) may never visit Stony Ridge car park and experience the cold draughty world of reality. It is a fact of today’s management approach that the virtual is more important – and crucially easier to control.

Another 50 yards takes you inside the woodland and here you see the full impact of work done to remove rhododendron. The woodland was delightful before they started. Now we’re presented with another of SWT’s trademark unfinished projects – and they usually go on being unfinished for ages while they go off to do other things.

This job was begun before Christmas and having laid waste the rhododendron they have stopped, leaving wood piles everywhere. I’ve mentioned these piles of wood before comparing them to leg-cocking.

There is a mystical significance for SWT in these piles: a talisman or a fetish perhaps. If any student of heraldry should design a coat of arms for SWT it would have a pile of wood in one section a giant cowpat in another, a tree stump in a third and the whole linked decoratively with twists of barbed wire. Alternatively replace their badger logo with a cowpat and a pile of sticks.