Telling Us What To think

There are other words for it, some politer than others. I quite like proselytizing: 5 syllables makes you feel clever for a bit (that wears off very soon in my case); some prefer propaganda or indoctrination - also 5 syllables.

We badly need organisations like the wildlife trusts to stand up bravely for real nature and real wildlife and it's so depressing to see them here waving the flag for exploited land as if it's the best we can expect to get. But this is the content they hope to display on their interpretation board if the planning authorities accept it.

This business of plonking Interpretation Boards across the natural sites around our National Parks is not popular with all people.  Many  would prefer to be left to make up their own minds and  discover for themselves. There's a theory that this obsession with labels on outdoor sites is peculiar to those generations over-exposed at an early age to infant classroom nature tables. Yet I cannot believe anyone would do this to a place they personally loved and valued. And that fits in with what we know.

Whatever the motivation it's telling us how we ought to be thinking and these days we have so many organisations and every lobby group jostling to get their message across that our minds are just as likely to be turned off.

SWT may love their barbed wire, their farm subsidies, their cows and the abundant farmstock defecation proceeding therefrom, not to forget their sheep-scoured grasslands which are the inevitable consequence of their chosen management planning.Some of us prefer the mixed woods and the unpredictable encounters with wildlife most enjoyed where no human projects are forcing themselves on our attentions.

Hard to avoid the impression that these things are really trying to reassure  themselves because, to the extent that they think about it at all, they're not fully convinced. Their doubts mean they simply have to keep telling themselves they are doing what's right (- and using public and charitable funds to force the message home).

These new boards will be in addition to what's already there, not as a replacement. So those arriving at a natural site hoping to leave behind them briefly the world of 'getting your message across' will be disappointed. These new boards are for the those already on board.