Natural Beauty Doesn't Count

'Nature Counts' is one of SRWT's 'initiatives' to get themselves noticed. It is reductive.

Being essentially a bubble organisation inflated by publicity and office based public relations, they like to keep in the public eye. A vital part of their operations is the need to come up with new projects. In this they resemble commercial businesses driven  to create new lines and improved packaging; except in the case of SRWT everything looks strained and amateurish, all duff marketing and no content, relying heavily on vacuous facebook likes.

You get a good picture of this from their use of social media where mini project ideas surface and then fade away. This one may carry on a bit longer because it's central to their whole approach, and explains what's wrong with it. To emphasise what is countable is to reduce the beauty and complexity of nature and natural sites to a clipboard and tick list.

Counting, as with statistics, gives a false sense of security to those who struggle to make a judgement, who have no education in evaluating beyond the bare fact of a figure or a percentage.  And it's already part of what they do. e.g.  ...the target is to destroy ten trees, say, so the one that stands out as of stunning elegance goes along with others less distinctive. Eighty deer need to be slaughtered and the process is about numbers again. What about what things look like?

Volunteers and supporters are encouraged to count nature too. So some simple arithmetical suggestions.
1 Try adding up the cowpats and then see how the numbers compare with what the wildlife leaves behind, if you can find any of the latter at all.
2 Do the same with sheep defecation in the enclosure.
3 Get hold of the figures relating to farm subsidies and Higher Level Stewardship and add it all up.
4 Find out how much public money has been spent on walling and barbed wire  - and who's benefited from it.


A bit of the hype from their website:

"Through collaborative citizen science involving volunteers, the general public and expert biological recorders, our exciting two-year project will collect and collate data on Sheffield’s key species and habitats to produce an innovative State Of Nature report for Sheffield"