'Treasure' and Pillage

As we discovered after the 2^nd World War, interesting things grew and thrived on bomb sites. But then there was no call for a policy of conserving bomb sites and making more. Mainly perhaps because nobody had been canny enough to identify an opportunity to make a personal profit.

If you want evidence of just how hard the brainwashers have been working in rural England you could do not much better than study comments below the line (and sometimes above it) in The Times, Guardian etc. The better news is that you may also find evidence that some voices are beginning to resist it. There may be a parallel with antibiotics. You can only use the same arguments so much before they get rumbled.

Our regular narrative about preferring tree planting to tree destruction has over the last year or so been reflected in articles in national media. The latest I've seen is this one from Alice Thomson in the The Times of Wednesday 29th March and it's closely related to things frequently touched on here. It's headed:

For the love of Britain, plant more trees

Commenters below the line in The Times often like to point out what they consider to be fallacies and misconceptions in the main article and in the responses of fellow commenters. One comment I spotted was this:

"I wish the bodies concerned ( the Forestry Commission, the National Trust, the National Park Authority) would start planting trees in the New Forest National Park rather than just cutting them down. However clearing the 'forest' to create more of the euphemistically named Open Forest (heathland) takes priority and enables ever more intensive meat farming (commoning) of the New Forest".

Which predictably resulted in a put-down along the usual lines from a ‘know-all’ who is either part of the interested rural industry or has been propagandised by one, i.e. Countryside Alliance, B.A.S.C., NFU, Natural England or various conservation interests reliant on environmental grant funding. Here it comes:

"Sorry Richard, but no ……  'open forest' is not a silly euphemism, but a very fair description of how this habitat was historically. Heathland has become a rare habitat, and needs to be treasured. Lastly you can hardly call this intensive meat farming, not when the animals are roaming around outside. Again, this is traditional, and an integral part of how our forests were managed historically."
(boldtype from me)

This narrative crops up time and again, so consistent in using the same tediously repeated terms that it’s easily identifiable as a case of brainwashing underpinned by self-interest. Each of these key words deserves to be scrutinised with the utmost rigour. Heathland, far from being a treasure, originates in exploitation sometimes akin to ravaging whereby the severely reduced quality of the land becomes only fit for a limited range of wildlife and even then has to have constant intervention to stay the same. i.e. exploitation in perpetuity. Treasured or pillaged?

The question demands to be asked yet rarely is: how come that a model of artificial landscape that depends on the land being for many years plundered and crushed and all its most majestic wildlife persecuted and expelled, namely 'heathland' gets to be given such status? The inescapable answer is that it has happened and continues to be through the self-interest and profit of powerful groups.

But the basis of their power is often public money that enables these groups to maintain their grip on this undoubtedly most perverse of narratives i.e. that when it comes to nature it is not nature itself that knows best but man, the very agent responsible for the land's original and continuing exploitation. 

Not for the first and surely not the last time, we ask: How the hell did nature cope before man, specifically ‘management man’, with his chain-saw and herd of cattle, came along to show it the ‘right way’?