Danger List

It would be a mistake to think that the plans for Blacka include the removal of only one or two tree species. The following are all in danger sometimes according to where they are growing.

Birch
Larch
Pine
Oak
Beech
Holly
Sycamore
Rowan

To the trees should be added:

Bracken
Deer*
Foxes*

................. the last two can only at the moment be predicted from a reading between the lines of some of the language used in their management plan and from the activities of their partners in the Sheffield Moors Partnership.

None of the above can feel safe from the destructive forces and twisted logic of local 'conservation'.

This list is almost certainly not complete. We also have to factor in the inevitable removal of Ash due to disease spreading across the country. In fact almost the only trees that are not possible targets for the chain sawing fraternity are Alder and Hawthorn, but even with these I'm not confident.

It should be noted that in the case of some trees they might want them to grow in one area but not in others. All amounts to a grotesque top-down rearranging of nature, an exercise for which they are confident of getting funding; and it will have come in one way or another from the public purse. It will also secure a number of their jobs well into the future. But from what we have seen up to now there will be no transparency nor accountability about the process. They consider they have official approval from an ignorant and supine Sheffield Cabinet in a manouevre that comes only just short of corruption.

There's been much talk of rewilding lately. What SRWT and their supporters want is the very antithesis of rewilding. One did not expect rewilding to be part of SRWT's agenda but we did hope that we might get something that acknowledged the value of a wilder landscape. Here it would have been a partly feral landscape developed further from what it is now, its unpredictability being a major part of its appeal. We were right to be alarmed ten years ago at the early signs of prescriptiveness.