To whom...?

Last seen ten days ago on a much pleasanter morning the hinds were back grazing the  parts west of the woods as the rain became serious.

We wondered where they might have got to during the heavy snow but they have a wide choice of sheltered and secret hideouts on Blacka. We might look over towards some of the likeliest of them but can’t explore them all and shouldn’t try. And of course they could have beeen elsewhere entirely on land beyond Blacka, so we cannot claim they are Blacka's deer. They belong to nobody: an interesting state of affairs.

The EMP has a stated intention to manage the deer
“ to a carrying capacity and sex ratio which is optimal for the habitat on the Eastern Moors and the health of the herd themselves, also minimising any potential negative impacts on neighbours.”

Let’s not beat about the bush. This means shooting deer. The statement raises so many questions but experience shows that answers (if you get them at all) raise even more. A good start would be
“to whom do the deer belong that you to have the right to manage them - and kill them - considering that they roam over the land of many different owners?”

Resilience

After a warm spell has set all nature off its guard a foot or so of snow in April can cause serious tree damage. Yet the larch does not carry the surface area of leaf that with other trees will take on excessive weight. And the fallen birch here has no leaf out at all.

Who's to say which will be the ones  to show greater resilience?

Sheltered from the northern blast on the woodland edge some bilberry is already happily flowering, while that growing in more exposed locations sensibly bides its time.

Knowing

The value of actually knowing a place makes a difference to everything. Really knowing means throughout the year in all seasons and in all conditions and watching the changes in wildlife from trees to birds and mammals. There should be some kind of embargo , well limitation, on distant bureaucracies with no local knowledge deciding what goes on, even categorising the landscape type when no committee member has experienced the scene day by day.  This resonates within the cynefin/oikophilia argument Richard Maybe has with Roger Scruton in this New Statesman review.

To one who looks at the scene daily the removal of the power lines from Blacka is enough to make your heart leap as you see in each seasonal change something not seen in the same way before. While the power line was there it was harder to conceive of a landscape free from human influence. Now with it gone the visual intrusion frees the imagination enough to challenge again the 'humanisation' at the heart of the farmland management agenda. To the dwellers at office desks at SWT's headquarters it means nothing.

CPRE's local magazine (Friends of the Peak District) has a page about the removal with a couple of good photos before and after. It describes Blacka as 'amazingly wild'. Well it's certainly better qualified to be called that than most other local public spaces but it has been getting steadily less so over the last ten years. The power line removal does something to restore that but we need to be more and more alert as the conservation lobby gets bolder. The Icarus meetings in 2006 may have been flawed in many ways but they did establish some sort of consensus that Blacka should be managed with 'minimal intervention'. How much the farm subsidy dependent conservation managers must have hated that; and it has shown in their ignoring of it in following years.

Inviting

Trees in snow.

Inviting.

But if I see those words "Wild and open" once more...................

A Model

A model for managing the uplands is what they say. So we have to assume that all the other upland managers are clamouring to fall inline with the E.M.P.'s prescription. Hard to believe. Or is it? You have to consider the conformism and closing of ranks that prevails in the conservation industry. But perhaps that's what they mean. However different the circumstances in other parts of the country all will agree that there's much capital to be made out of farm-management, Higher Level Stewardship and generous handouts with little scrutiny from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Perhaps that's the model. And another part of the model will be the policy on transparency and accountability. Anyway the exchange is here, via the consultation on the E.M.P.'s draft management plan:

Question:  Why no consultation about the Agri Environment Scheme and the other ways of this being funded? Is this public land or is it not? Where is the money coming from? How much from public funds controlled by Natural England? How much from Why no consultation about the Agri Environment Scheme and the other ways of this being funded? Is this public land or not? Where is the money coming from? How much from public funds from PDNPA and how much from members of NT and RSPB? Is EMP a separate charity? Will it submit its accounts to the Charity Commission?

Answer: There is no requirement for the EMP to publish accounts. It is not a separate charity but managed by a collaboration agreement between the NT and RSPB The land is still in public ownership by the PDNPA. They contribute for the next two years. The Charities   both contribute a significant amount. The Eastern Moors will become a model for management of the uplands and in doing that will demonstrate the costs involved in  managing an area like this. The input of agri-environment is vital if we want to continue the public benefits that the Eastern Moors brings.

I daresay "The input of agri-environment is vital if we want to continue the public benefits...." would be echoed by Sheffield Wildlife Trust. Because the public benefits brought to Blacka by agri environment schemes included the following.

Already We Don't

How Favoured We Are

No Farmland Here ?

Little Ideas

Last year E.M.P. stopped taking comments on its draft Management Plan and it has only now published here on its website a resume of those comments. Given the time they've had to respond to comments one might have hoped that they could have made less of a dog's breakfast of presenting some of the responses in the document. At times they are made to look incoherent. The document has a good solid line in presentational graphics and charts laid out with compelling style. But once you get to actually reading, things are different. For the target audience is those who are easily impressed by appearance and prefer quick skimming to close reading. They are in fact the people who dispense public money on behalf of you and me in the form of grants and subsidies and who have criteria in a tick box insisting that a well run consultation has been constructed before the dosh is handed over.

In truth there was never the remotest chance that anything imaginative and inspiring would come out of this process however many times the managers used the word 'inspiring'. Setting the consultation around four themes carefully chosen to reflect their own agenda kept them well in control especially as one of the themes was:

Farming, land management and economics

Understand how land management, particularly farming can be used as a vehicle to deliver a rich and healthy place for nature, while striving for a sustainable economic model that supports the concept of a living landscape.

As the grouse moor style favoured by managers is about as close to dead and frozen in time and as far away from a genuine dynamic natural approach as you can get the words 'living landscape' have a hollow ring. The best comment would be a link to one of the websites that comes up if you google the words living landscape - a picture of a paved patio with spaced out pot plants. As a comment you couldn't beat it. But just note that word 'understand'. It speaks volumes. No blank sheet consultation here then. Educating the public in what the managers want is the aim - (Stand up that person who called out "brainwashing"!). So those who vet the consultation - if any exist - can be shown that nobody thinks outside this particular box; they were not invited to.

Because when you scrape off the hype and the middle management thinking what you're left with is something stale and static. Farming takes much of the essential life out of a landscape. And on a large expanse of upland heather moor grazed by livestock there's not even the compensation of hedgerows that can still be found in traditional lowland farm scenery.

So in response to our call for more ambition and a big idea to inspire future generations we get more of the same:

In relation to being radical the EMP proposed changes are more radical, but this is balanced with a sense of responsibility to enhance not harm the special features of the place. As the Eastern Moors are not managed for their completely natural state (forest), the type of wildlife here is dependant on management.

This is essentially a bureaucratic exercise and should never be expected to produce more than little ideas. A big idea to a bureaucrat is upgrading to new computer operating system. Being radical is.... Well that's an easy game to play

"Back to Nature" ?

Another devastating debunking of the nonsense put out by the conservation industry in this recent article.

As usual there's much food for thought but here's a quote for starters, mentioning the:

....assertion in the fencing and grazing proposal for Padworth Common by Sara McWilliams that rides on the back of a particular perversion of natural reality that has gained a lot of traction in NW Europe (17):
“The most compelling reason for reintroducing grazing must be that it is a traditional way of managing heathland, in essence giving the heath back to nature”
Heathland was never “managed”: the tradition was its extractive use to the point of sucking the life out of it, or as Dr Peter Shaw, Department of Life Sciences at the University of Roehampton, puts it in a lecture on heathland management in his module on Conservation Ecology (29):
“Peasants used the heaths in several ways…… these impoverished and acidified the soil”
Dr Shaw is very frank with his students about how heathland should be managed now, seeing a barrier as being a shortage of modern day peasants:
“But the biggest problem is natural succession. What it really needs is a force of peasants, heating their hovels with peat and grazing their skinny cattle on the heath.
He goes on:
“How to manage a modern heath: (pretend to be a family of peasants)
Killing scrub. Wage incessant war on pine/birch seedlings, by hand (worst), herbicide, or graze with goats/highland cattle”
Is this giving heath back to nature? McWilliams uses a sleight of hand in the fencing and grazing proposal that compares livestock grazing to the mechanical methods of heathland management, such that we are to believe that the former is more natural than the latter.

Mark Fisher goes on to demonstrate in the article, "The revisionism of the conservation industry....",  just how misconceived is the emphasis on grazing and the justifications invented to promote it as a policy. There is some  analysis of the rewilding projects in the Netherlands too and a reminder of the role of predators. Strongly recommended.

I suspect our local conservation people wouldn't even try to justify their shackling of the countryside by invoking nature. That wouldn't be on their agenda at all. To them Blacka and all around it is simply farmland - just that; but they would pick 'n mix from the points of flawed justification used elsewhere to temporarily muddy the waters in any discussion.
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This is all very relevant to the comments we hear from various local conservation workers whose lack of knowledge of the background does not prevent them from stating or implying a kind of golden age in the past of heathland being managed for a landscape good. As the article makes clear, managing just did not happen, certainly not as the word is taken to mean today. Heathland was exploited just as a seam of coal was mined for its short term value. As for moorland, the upland (mainly) northern equivalent that was exploited in an even more ruthless way by privileged people who used it for sport.  Time now to give it back to nature - really: not hand it over to bureaucrats and middle managers with no vision.