Those People Again

Another year and another brace of A4 laminated notices from Sheffield Wildlife Trust. It would be nice not to have to mention SWT again. If only we could ignore them. There have been  times when it’s been almost possible to ignore them. When their grazier took off his cattle and sheep and there was a hiatus in their conservation crap and crop management, a sense of beauty descended on the place, the deer made the most of it and were in constant occupation. When they take their long Christmas and Easter vacations and forget about the place demonstrating that their stewardship goes only as deep as the money they can make out of Blacka,  then we seem temporarily back to the halcyon days before they arrived.

It’s not just that they are annoying --- they are actually deeply, even spiritually, disturbing because of their being so disconnected to all the values that some of us have always held dear. How else should one describe a group who are incapable of empathising or sharing one’s sense of natural beauty.

That Sheffield Wildlife Trust are aliens whose barbarian streak means they don’t share our values is of course true. So is the fact that there can be no engagement because no communication is possible without some common understanding.  But if only we could dismiss them from our thoughts. That is their true horror: they simply do not go away.  Civilisations  come and go but the barbarous seems always to be not far off.   The abject failure is one of education and vision. They simply do not have the eyes to appreciate what is worthwhile. They are in fact an outlandish species for whom there is more joy in a cowpat and a barbed wire fence than in the exhilaration of wild nature because of … because of what? … because of an idea or it could be seen as a doctrine. It’s something that’s been drilled into their susceptible minds. That idea corresponds to a creed that's articulating the driving force for everything they do: it can be summarised as: all land must be managed, it must not be allowed to express its own identity. Not far from the premise of all authoritarian regimes.