Change for the Better and for the Worse

To sit and listen to people telling us that we must accept, even embrace, change from those with no sense of irony is the kind of thing that makes attending meetings purgatory. It starts off bewildering but finally seems simply laughable. You get the impression that many people may be unaware of the irony.

At the Re-visioning Parks event we were treated to a talk from Parks Department the gist of which is that we must accept change. Yet this comes from people who, in their role in the Sheffield Moors Partnership, produced the most conservative and unadventurous 'master plan' imaginable. All calls for a more exciting and innovative approach were brushed aside foundering on their reliance on the agenda of the grouse moor lobby and the lure of grants and farm subsidies. Yet the officer talking to us last Thursday was blithely telling us about his old granny getting older and so her garden became some kind of obscure metaphor for what the public have to accept, namely 'change'. It rubbed in the salt to find he ran over his allotted time so much that the schedule did not allow time for proper questioning.

Here on Blacka Moor we have had change over a hundred years, change that is natural and wholly worthwhile bringing with it a regeneration of an exploited land area and the recolonisation of native wildlife that everyone surely must welcome. So we thought. Yet we were wrong.  The return of native wildlife served only to have them label the place as being in 'unfavourable condition', i.e. too much nature and not enough management.

Wildlife management, if there's any place for it at all, should be all about helping along natural change not stonewalling in the hope that nature will go away.

Who does not love the change to bracken in the autumn? - genuinely unmanaged and at its best as the sun rises.