Intervention and Non Intervention

Again the evidence piles up that decision making in the management of the moors is done following very little thinking. That's an activity the conservation industry on the land is very nervous of. What thought goes on happens behind closed doors. Thinking by and with the public is strongly discouraged.

Quoted in this post was the National Trust's response to comments on the High Peak management plan, and comments from people asking for more non-intervention.

Why did they reject the call for more non-intervention?

            "........because of the cultural, historical and social importance of the moors."

They don't claim that non intervention would mean the landscape would look worse,  nor that fewer people would enjoy it and that recreation would suffer. As for the shibboleth of biodiversity management, they say that the present species on the moors are dependent on the habitat created by grazing.  But they don't refer to the other species that would move in when a slow return to a more natural landscape happened, although there's an implied value judgement there that leads them adopting the god-role. 

The key argument they make is cultural: the words historical and social are superfluous because cultural embraces both. No definition is offered of what culture they mean so it has to be assumed it's the culture of the status quo, namely gun culture. When the National Trust take over a vast country house they make a choice of which historical/cultural period to restore it to. They rarely opt to go for just managing the property as it is left to them and just polish it up a bit. But here, in the great outdoors, they choose to do just that Why? Is it that same answer to most questions about land management: money and vested interests? It would seem so.

So we're back with the same conclusions. Our remote landscapes where nobody lives are managed because it serves the interests of a privileged group who live somewhere else. They don't look out on the place when they draw their curtains int he morning, which would at least ensure they would be keen for it to look pleasant.Because they have somewhere else which they own that they think about more. The pressure for keeping these places as they are, even going so far as to get them classified as a certain desirable landscape character, is driven by the wish of these distant people to have somewhere where they can spend a few hours each year to fire their guns at ground nesting birds in a place where there are no trees to get in the way.

That landscape character conveniently cobbled together to suit then becomes an established and immutable benchmark whereby other areas are judged. The influence of the shooting lobby then extends even onto public land, land owned not by the privileged but by the urban majority most of whom would be not very pleased to learn of the influence of those driving the policy. Hence the need for pumping resources into propaganda, slanted 'education' projects, sundry press releases and carefully structured consultation events orchestrated by conservation managers. 

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Next time you see one of those notices up on the moors telling people to 'get a grip' on their dog in the interests of ground nesting birds remember that those who lobby for these notices to be put up are those  who want the same ground-nesting birds to be around later in the year so they can be shot. It's alright for them to shoot them but not for your dog to disturb them. I've sometimes wondered why people ignore these notices. I'm beginning to understand. It's not much different to what happens with sheep. People are happy to have lambs collected together and slaughtered once they've become fat during the summer. They can then appear on their dinner plates; in the interests of those same lambs farmers may become very hostile to people exercising their dogs on the moors. In fact they are known to get very sentimental about lambs - but only when it doesn't interfere with their interests: a blind eye is often turned to what happens in the final days of the lives of farm animals. Out of sight out of mind.