The Scrub Bashers

When you're walking  in the woodland fringe and you come across this stuff barring your progress it's fair enough to wonder who put it there and speculate on their mentality. They would most likely be SRWT's volunteers, people who want to go out and do something they believe to be important for 'conservation' as they might understand it, and at the same time get some healthy exercise. It's an opportunity for SRWT's officers to do a bit of propagandizing, inculcating the dogma that nature can't be allowed to go its own way or what would the world come to?

Time to look back at some words from an article in the press two years ago on the subject of scrub.

"Choked by scrub" is a meme that crops up repeatredly. What you're talking about is a far richer wildlife habitat, full of fascinating niches and a great beauty of its own, than we currently have on the hilltops. But scrub has become a boo-word, used by the NFU and now by many others to try to justify continued universal grazing. Scrub means small trees and bushes. Is that such a terrifying prospect?

My botany tutor who also wrote the flora of Cumbria used to say what does "scrub" mean? He complained that ecologically the term is almost meaningless. His point was that scrub, seems to refer to "shrub", but the term shrub includes everything from small low growing plants, to tall multi-stemmed trees. Unfortunately much conservation is little more than painting by numbers. There are these habitat management manuals, and the management techiques they describe are often used unthinkingly and often inappropiately.
Take this obessession with "scrub" clearance. I've often asked those doing it, what are their management objectives. They will give the standard spiel about letting more light in, encouraging the ground flora. So I ask them which particularly species they are trying to encourage. This is because where they do a lot of this management, there isn't any rare ground flora to benefit. Just the normal wayside vegetation. They are unable to offer any coherent account of what they are actually trying to achieve with their conservation work. As fas as they are concerned, that is what conservationists do.
Nothing worthwhile ever grows after their "management" and it's just management for management's sake. In fact this is the primarily failing of British conservation, it's obsession with management. A lot of conservation work is little more than gardening and tidying up, it has no useful conservation objective.

(words of "Steb1" and George Monbiot, from "Why are Britain's conservation groups so lacking in ambition?" October 2013)