Ian
Rotherham's package of comments on the issue of Wilding and Rewilding includes
a substantial nine page article titled The Call of the Wild. It's a good
title echoing the Jack London book of that name. Rotherham's article is
published in a shorter version in the journal of the British Ecological
Society. It appears that the purpose of the article is, perhaps, an attempt to
take control of the debate that fired up last year with the publication of
George Monbiot's book. In the context of the enthusiasm of those wishing for a
more exciting vision of our uplands for landscape and wildlife, Rotherham aims
to reclaim the high ground for humanised landscapes managed by professionals
claiming that abandonment just will not do. That's quite a task for him at a
time when traditional practices are dying out and only kept going with massive
subsidies. He’s keen on local history fitting in with his support of the
concept of cultural landscapes, something I find vague and ill-defined.
Ian Rotherham's article attempts to present his take on the debate as a neutral, weighty and
responsible corrective to other elements in the discourse. He might consider
them as simplistic, impulsive and populist. He might also have concerns that
any change in emphasis within conservation and wildlife might threaten the role
of the professionals, he being one as will be his students.
To
accept his argument you might need to see it as cautionary rather than
reactionary. It’s also as well to have full confidence in the reliability of
observations and anecdotal evidence he gives in the article and in his
contribution to the conference. As accuracy and reliability is a big issue with
the wider conservation industry we should be looking out for exaggeration and
problems of judgement. That’s where my confidence in the content flags.
The narrative seems credible until it comes to something I’ve direct experience
of. I’ve now read his article twice and listened to much that he said at the
conference and new doubts keep cropping up. As with SWT and the other NGOs and
even SCC I’m getting the idea that we’re presented with desktop judgements
based on second hand hearsay evidence.
So
here are examples, some major, others quite small but they add to the
picture:
1
The Action for Involvement Event. I don’t recognise the event he
describes. I was there. For some time I read on, thinking he must have been referring to another event, but he wasn't. I conclude it’s either badly
remembered or he calculates that it’s worth misrepresenting it. He makes it out
to be a bigger event than it was – as it happened each speaker only got 10 minutes. He
mentions ‘case studies’ and I can’t remember seeing any. He wonders about the
absence of representatives of NGOs – yet they were there. He must have known
that this was in the context of the SMP Master Plan. SMP had refused to discuss
these serious issues in relation their feeble Master Plan consultation and that
this event was a late effort to independently raise these issues that ‘officials’
had refused to discuss themselves. He doesn't mention the SMP. Had Rotherham himself got involved in any
public debate over the SMP Master Plan? If he did, I didn’t see it. He himself was consulted before the A For I
event by the facilitator. What did he advise? He was in attendance and I didn’t
hear him say anything. His account of this event and the prominence he gives it
justifies a sceptical reading of the rest of his article.
2
Rotherham has made himself something of an 'expert' on the deer in this area
by virtue of publishing a paper on them. The survey would appear to be a
desktop survey relying on reports from others in the field. He claims that
there are far more red deer on the eastern moors than other organisations
believe – they being the PDNPA, RSPB, NT. I’m more inclined to believe the
latter having observed them hundreds of times. If farmers are reporting to him
then errors are understandable. But anyone can get numbers wrong. Deer are very easy to double count in this way:
someone tells you they’ve seen 20 and someone else says they’ve seen 20 somewhere
else. Is that 40 or the same 20? They move about – quite a lot. I mean to come back to this but his piece
is not about direct observation of deer but more a modelling exercise about recording reports, predicting from assumptions and calculating populations. If there’s anything
that matches my own observations of one area over 10 years I haven’t yet seen
it. In fact it's a bit cold and statistical without observational evidence of deer behaviour and habits.
He
raised safety issues about the deer – on the roads and during the rut. This
sounded like scaremongering to me especially as the biggest problems with
animals on the roads around here are caused by farm animals (part of his
cultural landscape?) and there have been several bad incidents in the Peak
District of cows injuring people – one very serious and very recent - that he did
not mention. So far there have been no serious road incidents with deer though
it’s likely there will be eventually if nobody does something about the
speeding traffic on the roads. The really dangerous animals on the roads are behind the wheel.
3
Flowers damaged by cattle. Rotherham is against summer grazing on the moor and
in this I agree with him. But he overstates the case by exaggerating. SWTs cows
trampled and wrecked the display on the bog but they did not wipe out the Bog Asphodel which you might conclude from what he's said.
Sheep grazing in the 1980s, so we were told, destroyed the bluebells in the
nearby woods. I’ve seen no evidence that there were bluebells in those woods
and I’m sure they would have returned 30 years later. There are lots of
bluebells where sheep have been grazing on the pastures for many years. So I'm sceptical about other things he says.
4
What the public wants. The suggestion is made that people like the moors as
they are and won’t come if they change. Frankly that's garbage and there's no evidence for it. Quite the reverse. It’s not true of Blacka where the
public love the trees and the deer that come because of the trees and the
bilberries that grow because of abandonment of management. It was even implied
that more trees in the Lake District’s uplands would cause a decline in
tourism. You simply can’t say that. I believe that’s scaremongering.
There’s
no doubt to my mind that Rotherham is instinctively a top-down manager where it
comes to wildlife and landscape. His message is: someone
up there must call the shots. Comfort for the conservation industry and its supporters and educators.
5 Another example of scaremongering and manipulation comes in two mentions of George Osborne. The straining for a convincing argument shows when you have to claim you must be on the right side because Osborne is on the other side. Though that's doubtful anyway because we know which side grouse moor owners are on in the intervention/non-intervention debate; and Osborne will be more likely to listen to them. And I'm sure Rotherham's consultancy work has led him into association with gamekeepers.
TBC
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