"Blacka Moor has been damaged by grazing with cattle", says expert.

Ian Rotherham is “an ‘expert’ on a range of environmental issues” according to the website of Sheffield Hallam University where he is Reader in Tourism and Environmental Change.

In a new book he is damning about SWT’s management of Blacka Moor.

According to Professor Rotherham,
“On Blackamoor, an upland local nature reserve[1] owned by Sheffield City Council but managed by Sheffield Wildlife Trust, the site has been damaged by grazing with cattle at inappropriate times of the year.” ....“One locally rare grassland plant, in part a reason the site was established as a reserve originally, has been virtually eradicated by summer grazing and the associated neutral grassland including several orchid species has been very badly degraded. The rare peat-bog flora, again a major reason for designation as a SSSI, has also been damaged and driven to localized extinction.”[2]

This all comes a bit late to my way of thinking. How long does it take for 'experts' to realise that putting farm livestock on land will turn it into farmland exploiting and ravaging its natural vegetation not to mention its essential character? And we should all know that it was farm-style exploitation that devastated our wildlife over several centuries but especially the last one.

The trouble is that academics in this field, of whom Prof Rotherham is just one, have encouraged students and others over the years to believe places like Blacka must be managed. They have sent these newly qualified and ill-educated young people out into the world believing it’s their mission to intervene here there and everywhere. Even our remote places which deserve to be allowed a break from the mad managing, gardening and farming tendencies have to take more punishment, leading to a miserably degraded vegetation where only those things thrive which serve the often indulgent interests of man.

Rotherham is one of the academics who’s obsessed with the idea of ‘cultural landscapes’, a committee concept if ever there was one, and something I've never seen satisfactorily defined. It comes down to a subjective decision about which landscape types you think are worth keeping and which not. Have grouse moors an absolute right to continue in perpetuity any more than the equally artificial 19th century slum housing or 1930s suburban gardens? All are products of man’s intervention and have their characteristic but limited range of wildlife. What other features qualify to be included in the ‘cultural’ definition? Is herbicide spraying considered to be a feature of cultural landscapes? Are plastic ruminant feed bags blowing about? Barbed wire fences? Mountain bikes and quad bikes? Poaching and fly tipping? Where do you start and where do you finish once you determine that cultural landscapes are the order of the day? An off roader might justifiably claim he is just pursuing his cultural preference. That is the kind of nonsensical position you get into when you devise these phoney concepts, sell your soul to the economy and abandon faith in the integrity of natural processes.

But his concern about poor management at Blacka Moor is unlikely to signal abandonment of his pet subject which is management using grazing. Like all managers he will claim that management going wrong simply means there should be more management. But guess what, this time it will be ‘the right’ kind. That’s why there are so many management theory books on the station bookstall.

[1] A bit misleading: Blacka Moor is a local 'nature reserve’, declared so by SWT, but not a Local Nature Reserve an official designation by Natural England.

[2] Ian D. Rotherham (2013) Summary & Conclusions. In Ian D. Rotherham (Ed.) Trees, Forested Landscapes and Grazing Animals: A European Perspective on Woodlands and Grazed Treescapes