Jim Dixon and Leopards.

Jim Dixon is the Chief Executive of Peak District National Park Authority. He has a blog. I made a comment under one of his posts which I thought might start off a response from him or his supporters. That was eight days ago and so far he has declined to publish it. It can't be seen by others. He may eventually moderate it and let it be seen. But by then all momentum will be lost and thus the opportunity to debate serious issues. I'm not the only one who's commented but we can't see how many others have. This is the kind of drag on debate that the local land managing class like to use. Starve the discussion of all its life and you bolster up the status quo. Where have we seen this attitude to debate before?? The conservation industry locally has numerous people who read this blog but choose not to comment. Maybe other people think I operate a similar censorship policy here? I don't.

The post by Dixon was a long one and followed an exchange on Twitter (which I don't use) with George Monbiot who had been criticising the management of the uplands in the Peak District, especially burning of heather on the moors. He also made some comments on Monbiot's book which he had not read! The really appallingly stupid thing that Dixon said was that rewilding in this national park would lead to the farming community having to be 'resettled' and he went on to talk about 'historic clearances' and other such garbage.

Here's a sample:

We could re-wild our landscape, but there would be little for the farming community to do and we would need to ‘resettle’ them in a move disturbingly similar to the historic clearances in some overseas national parks.  The managed landscapes of our deer-parks, grouse moors and semi-natural grasslands would be lost to the succession of trees and scrub alongside the buildings, settlements and historic artefacts resulting from thousands of years of settlement............ And it’s difficult to see the Well-dressings in Tideswell or Youlgreave surviving the grazing moose and antelopes.  I doubt many residents would be able to keep cats or dogs as leopards would feed off them.

Is it any wonder there's so much ignorance in the wider public when people in his position produce such nonsense. Leopards indeed.

For the record my comment is here:

What a muddled and depressing post. To read this one would think that the modest ‘rewilding’ proposed was an alien intervention when it is actually the very opposite. How can allowing a more natural landscape to develop produce such a reactionary response? You’re trying, using specious arguments, to justify the very intervention that seeks to keep nature at bay and expecting to get massive farming subsidies for it while at the same time managers are claiming the public like ‘wilderness’. Parts of the national park, for which you have responsibility, have been gradually becoming more wild and more natural over many years and the result has been a resurgence of wildlife and raw natural beauty. To the writer of this post that is contrary to the dogma of cultural landscapes which holds that everywhere has to be farmed and managed. For ‘managed’ read exploited, and that should be a betrayal of any national park worthy of the name. This message is what the grouse moor landowners love to hear. But it’s simply cowardly for a public servant to fail to stand up to the well funded spin and PR machine of the shooting industry. You should be advocating that the public land of the Sheffield and High Peak moors could have an inspiring future in which genuine wildlife could find a home rather than the limited range that can survive in the burned, scarred and repressed vegetation of grouse moors where all predators have been wiped out. The ridiculous claims about ‘resettlings’ and ‘historic clearances’ make one seriously question the judgement of this writer. This is not about the largest area of Peak District farmland. It’s about the uninhabited moors. Presumably the writer does not know that farmers providing the livestock to graze the moors and destroy the natural vegetation are rarely from nearby. It’s often the case that they live 20 miles away and have been sought out by the managers. I know of one who lives as far away as Halifax! So much for local communities and the local economy.It’s sometimes a good idea to read the book before you dismiss it.