Where's the Imagination?

Failure is an interesting subject. Most of us have some personal experience of it.

The great financial crash of 2008 happened despite there being many immensely talented and highly respected economists telling us that everything was just fine. They failed and the results were catastrophic. When the Queen visited LSE shortly afterwards she asked a simple question: How is it that nobody saw it coming?  Being the monarch she eventually got a letter replying to her question from two top academics who told her it was all due to a failure of imagination.

Imagination is underrated today and it costs us dear. When vested interests wave their cheques and demand to have their way imagination takes a very poor second place to money and greed. Wilful blindness sets in.

And that's where we are in the state of our upland landscapes. Places which should and could be marvellous stimuli to the imagination are fought over by those who are obsessed with following a route that rakes in the subsidies and the jobs. To hell with what it all looks like.

Actually what the academics wrote to the Queen was a little more than that. The words used were: a failure of the collective imagination. Here there's particular relevance to the conservation industry. They listen only to themselves and when that happens the loudest voices always belong to those who stand to gain most.

But imagination or the lack of it is a major concern with the people we have to deal with in the local conservation sector in other ways. There's something very disturbing about their whole approach to thinking about this land. They lean heavily on a very utilitarian analysis - the land being what man can make of it, its economic value and those things that can be put on a balance sheet. Even when they talk about nature it is through a statistical interpretation of biodiversity - one which I'm sure is badly flawed even in its own terms. You simply cannot conceive that they might see a magnificent view or a thrilling natural phenomenon as being paramount in any way. One of the ways they dismiss other people's concerns is by reference to just these priorities of their own, which of course protect their jobs. I've heard the word 'romantic' applied to those with a more imaginative and less venal way of looking at landscape as if that was enough to dismiss them from serious consideration.  This attitude is not that far from that of Mr Gradgrind: if it doesn't pay it's got no value.