You Gotta Have Friends

SRWT worked out long ago that they wouldn't find many friends in the local community on account of their unpopular and interventionist policies. So they went out and found some. This went beyond the moral blackmail of pensioners on the doorstep to reach membership targets; and very few indeed of these had any direct experience of SWT's work on the ground.

The other aspect of their getting friends was with younger folk. This part is all about volunteering. It has to be emphasised that these volunteers were brought in - just as migrant labour is brought into the country to harvest vegetables and pick fruit. Local people play no part, in fact are dissociated from the process completely. The importance of this is that it can be spun to show that this is 'community' based and the implication is that it reflects wide community support for what they do. Don't bother to condemn this as dishonest or fraudulent. Nobody, as far as I can see, bothers at all about that these days, certainly not our council or its elected members. The constant push on volunteering is part of a marketing and branding exercise with stress on the jolly friendly atmosphere all cooperating on splendid environmental work (such as destruction of trees). Putting notices up onsite helps this. Here's a picture on the latest propaganda sheet.

These look like freshers at uni, probably anxious to join something so will sign up in response to publicity because it might help them make new friends at a fairly vulnerable time. For SRWT easy material to work with. They will almost certainly not have been here before so it won't have 'twigged' (!) with them that regular Blacka users might disapprove of tree felling. This is the notice pinned to the gate.

 The interesting thing is that this notice went up yesterday but by today had been replaced by a similar one with a quite different picture? One could speculate that the people in the picture were identifiable and maybe their permission to be used in this sort of propaganda had not been obtained. The new picture shows people at work on the Wimble Holme Hill bridleway (not on Blacka). They were almost certainly mountain bikers from Ride Sheffield of whom more later. Try this link.

Meanwhile it's been discovered that the trees, branches etc. recently cut near the Strawberry Lee Plantation have been, as is now expected, shoved in any  odd corner the workers or volunteers could find.

Their answer to any raised eyebrow in relation to this is that piles of timber are scrub are excellent shelter for various wildlife. In reality it's because they can't be bothered to do a half-decent job.