Large Scale Conservation - some 'Clear Thinking'?

A conference begins tomorrow on Large Scale Conservation run by Natural England and to which many people in the conservation industry have been invited.
The remit here is looking at large areas of the country's landscapes and planning to deliver greater 'benefits' than can be achieved in isolated smaller areas.

I remember that the consultation (yes that is a joke) on the Sheffield Moors Partners Master Plan claimed that it was to be model for the uplands across the country. And that we were also being told how important it was to work at a landscape scale rather than just a moderate sized site. The public were really very insignificant in this consultation as minds had been made up beforehand. The person in charge of putting something together that was actually no consultation at all but could be made to look like a consultation if you manipulated the presentation enough and prevented real discussion happening was a certain Pete Spriggs. He is not one of SMP's partners being himself the man behind a facilitation business called Clearer Thinking. My clear thought about this is that its role is often as a fixing outfit for organisations that want to get a public consultation that comes up with the results they want. Icarus is another of these. I remember when I let it be known I considered he was part of the in crowd of SMP he sort of bridled as if he felt it important to be seen to appear to be impartial and aloof in case anything contentious came up. As with the Icarus consultation on Blacka Moor the mind of the 'faciltator' had already been made up. He was one of them and his job was to get what they wanted. In general these people think that those who respond to consultations like this are woefully ignorant and not worth taking much time over. That is self fulfilling. The well-informed and perceptive will not bother attending if they are treated as stupid.

Confirmation of the role of Pete Spriggs is that he is one of those on the list of those invited to attend the conference on Large Scale Conservation. There are no others that I can see from Sheffield Moors Partnership nor from the other Peak District consultation on the High Peak. Yet Pete Spriggs, a facilitator, is attending. Does that mean he's there in a facilitating role - to get the others who attend to fall into line through sundry well-tried manipulations? Or is he there to learn just what he's got to put across in the expected range of coming consultations  - or even to show those from other parts of the country how the consultation for the SMP was fixed and pass on some valuable tips?