Moonstruck

We have to fear for the future of this land and expect to see its character steadily eroding over coming years. The obsession with more management has become an unstoppable force, spawning more and more derivatives just as surely as the banking industry before the crash.

We have now begun to put pennies in a jar to save the 1.4 billion dollars needed to take two of us to the moon hoping to find somewhere free from the influence of land managers and conservationists. There’s a chance that on arrival we will find a post decorated with A4 laminated notices among which will be one telling us that the place is a SSSI in unfavourable condition. It may also say that barbed wire fencing will soon be installed as a prelude to a ten years agri-environmental scheme based on conservation grazing.

So it might be better to devote our energies to raising the cost of sending all conservationists, there to indulge their empire building compulsions, thus leaving this country for us and for nature. It’s worth investigating whether this would save the public money from farming subsidies but that is predicated on an optimistic belief that there is a finite number of these people. The total EU farm budget is £62 billion about 40% of total spending. But the growth in conservation managers is alarming. Already moon fares for the 32 who attended the recent SMP event would take us well into that unless a block booking could be made on generous terms.

Meanwhile the imaginatively challenged local functionaries are already charging ahead relentlessly with plans for Higher Level Stewardship with wall to wall and fence to fence sheep and cow grazing. One bird watcher, for whom no other words are adequate, supports this because, so he claims, deer tread on the nests of birds !

Thus it's imperative we protect the wildlife from the, er, wildlife!  How on earth did nature exist before man came along?