Powerful Lobbies

The grouse moor owners, their gamekeepers and their farming allies are the key people in the campaign against the ban on Asulox which comes into force at the end of this year. Others who gain from a U turn are surely pitching in to the campaign from behind the lines, people related in one way or another to the pesticide, herbicide and chemical industries, in numerous roles including that of scientific advisers. The decision to ban it was taken at European level and the squeals of rage have largely been orchestrated by those who earn their living from the raising and shooting of ground nesting birds. Their fingers are firmly crossed each time they tell us how valuable shooting is for the environment; the mutterings about the ‘rural economy’ and problems for hill farming are played up only because there is hope of harvesting public sympathy. The wealthy shooting moor owners and their friends in the city control access to prime opinion forming resources through media contacts and public relations strategies. The BBC are like putty in their hands as are the rest of the media including The Guardian who either have no time to look beyond the cynical press release or maybe their Media Group has executives with a concern for the welfare of the grouse extending up until the ‘glorious twelfth’. The Moorland Association are rampant after their successes in campaigns to overturn Natural England’s action against blanket bog burning and NE’s Vital Uplands earlier this year. Now they have the EU in their sights and are gunning for another policy reversal.

Wildlife Trusts you might think would not argue about the banning of chemicals but as we have found this story is not so simple. Links between the countryside vested interests and the conservationists are well entrenched in some places even if they fall out in others and there’s not a great deal of difference in the way the groups look at the land: both the grouse moor owners and the conservation industry are command and control managers.

So I’m not surprised that SWT are going ahead with spraying this year even though they won’t be allowed to do a repeat dose next year which makes the exercise largely futile. There’s also the little matter of their vision which they quote when it suits them but ignore when it doesn’t. ‘Minimal intervention’ is supposed to be part of that vision but minimal according to their definition still includes installing barbed wire costing many thousands of pounds, also stone walling for many more, bringing in farm animals to crap all over the paths, cutting down trees and now spraying with banned herbicides which turn green areas into defoliated brown ones.   It would be interesting to see a comparable area managed with 'normal intervention'.

This year the bracken spraying has started earlier than in previous years. The criticism from this blog may have had an effect in that the cattle were taken off and put on the pasture area. In other years they have been wandering among the newly sprayed bracken only two hours later. Official advice seen refers to several days. Other firm guidelines were just ignored. This is the measure of our problem in dealing with Sheffield Wildlife Trust. It's not just that they make policy decisions that we don't agree with. They are simply so useless that they can't even implement their own policy properly. If they came along driving a bus I would phone for a taxi or buy a bike.

But then we always knew we could trust a wildlife trust. Slug pellets next?