Managed Ugliness

Blacka's Countryside Stewardship Scheme (CSS) has now come to an end,  Sheffield Wildlife Trust (SWT)badly want a nice easy transition into another lucrative scheme, that of Higher Level Stewardship (HLS).
The result of the CSS has been quite a lot of money coming the way of SWT and quite a lot of managed ugliness being visited upon Blacka Moor. HLS we have to assume will bring more of both. That is the way of it.
The stock in trade of the conservation industry is jargonized bamboozlement. If we need to see examples of this kind of stuff we might try reading an ecological assessment of the land under CSS, such as this one. By the time we've finished with this we will have had the wool pulled over our eyes. There really is nothing to be beat academics in the service of bureaucracy. Alternatively we might use our own eyes minus the wool, even that flying around the pasture land that seems unable to stick to the backs of the livestock these days.  Protecting their own backs is what conservation bureaucrats like to do. So we need to do our own assessments. See what you actually see is good practice. Very few people do so. NE officers are prone to see no evil and therefore no ugliness. If they did look critically it would cast doubts on their initial judgement. I must try a freedom of information request on the subject of how many CSS schemes have been deemed to have failed because of poor initial presciption. Prediction - nil. Follow up question: who did the evaluation?

So, we should create our own evaluation based on what has been ugly during the CSS and what has been beneficial. Already there's a problem of balance. But we must try.