It Must Be The Uplands

The place where we absolutely must get more genuine wildlife is the uplands. As quoted in George Monbiot's recent article that is where there are fewer people where it's furthest from large concentrations of population and conditions are less favourable for farming. Frankly, re-wilding lowland areas is poor stuff because there's bound to be conflict with farmers.

On Blacka Moor we are lucky -we have small numbers of wild red deer which have returned to a wilder landscape they like, one where trees are re-colonising. In parts of Scotland they are unlucky - they have too many red deer, because people want to stalk and shoot them so keep the numbers artificially high in a bare landscape without trees where it's easier to follow them; that is almost as bad as covering the hillsides with sheep.

Sheffield Moors Partnership composed of organisations little better than the farming dogma dominated SWT chose to make their key statement in their Master Plan that their management was to be a model for the uplands across the whole country. In other words their view was that all Britain's uplands should be farm managed and that they should be managed in the way that the Sheffield Moors managers wanted to manage this area, i.e. with farming strategies, putting domestic livestock on the land, the animals usually being provided by distant farmers living a long way from the grazed land.

There is no credibility in this and nobody who thinks about it for more than a few seconds could agree with this. Yet it is quoted in the minutes of the Sheffield City Council's Cabinet Meeting of July 2013. The Cabinet seemingly applauds this sketchily ill-thought- through nonsense admiring
 "the vision of the SMP area as the UK’s leading model on how the uplands should be managed in the future"

What a useless collection of gullible place holders, people with no commitment to public scrutiny or indeed democratic process:

What is worse, the minutes show that the Cabinet authorises the disposal of Burbage and Houndkirk and Hathersage Moors to the RSPB and the National Trust and that the Director of Capital and Major Projects should start negotiating with these charities to that effect.

This is of course disgraceful. It means that there will in future be no facility for the public who own this land to have any influence or indeed any timely information on what is happening or planned because those charities are not public bodies. That is what happened when SWT was handed Blacka Moor and is now set to be extended to Burbage.