The Threat of Minimalism

Always we have to remember that the landscape managers must have their landscape to manage and that they cannot allow anyone to get away with suggesting that landscape should be left to its own natural salvation. Nature is the enemy and without the all powerful manager all is disaster. That is why the SRWT is really the SRAWT the Sheffield and Rotherham Anti-Wildlife Trust. And that is why a disproportionate amount of office time is spent by wildlife trust employees in trying to find reasons for stopping natural processes and very little on protecting nature. It sounds perverse and it is perverse but so much resource is put into propaganda that a surprising number of gullible people are taken in by it.

We've discovered from their DAFT management plan that the key statement in the 2006 Vision has been changed from the simplicity of Wild with Minimal Interference to something much more ambivalent:

A feeling of wildness, with minimal interference; there will be as little management as possible, but as much as required to realise the vision.

The document then goes on to describe page after page of projects to interfere in innumerable ways that change the character of Blacka. In every way they can they look out for ways of interfering because that is what they do. Time and again they identify natural regeneration as a threat - to views, to archaeology, to women's safety.  They make the most they can of the scope it offers for management - normally an excuse for attacking the natural regeneration of wildlife, ie the trees and the bracken which from autumn through winter is one of the most beautiful sights on Blacka.