Paths to Relish

Certain walkers paths on Blacka call you back time and again. Part of it is the way they bring new natural views every few paces; part too is the way they gain a new character with each season. Today it's the patterns made by fallen birch leaves and the shades of dying bracken.

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Another....

It Must Be The Uplands

The place where we absolutely must get more genuine wildlife is the uplands. As quoted in George Monbiot's recent article that is where there are fewer people where it's furthest from large concentrations of population and conditions are less favourable for farming. Frankly, re-wilding lowland areas is poor stuff because there's bound to be conflict with farmers.

On Blacka Moor we are lucky -we have small numbers of wild red deer which have returned to a wilder landscape they like, one where trees are re-colonising. In parts of Scotland they are unlucky - they have too many red deer, because people want to stalk and shoot them so keep the numbers artificially high in a bare landscape without trees where it's easier to follow them; that is almost as bad as covering the hillsides with sheep.

Sheffield Moors Partnership composed of organisations little better than the farming dogma dominated SWT chose to make their key statement in their Master Plan that their management was to be a model for the uplands across the whole country. In other words their view was that all Britain's uplands should be farm managed and that they should be managed in the way that the Sheffield Moors managers wanted to manage this area, i.e. with farming strategies, putting domestic livestock on the land, the animals usually being provided by distant farmers living a long way from the grazed land.

There is no credibility in this and nobody who thinks about it for more than a few seconds could agree with this. Yet it is quoted in the minutes of the Sheffield City Council's Cabinet Meeting of July 2013. The Cabinet seemingly applauds this sketchily ill-thought- through nonsense admiring
 "the vision of the SMP area as the UK’s leading model on how the uplands should be managed in the future"

What a useless collection of gullible place holders, people with no commitment to public scrutiny or indeed democratic process:

What is worse, the minutes show that the Cabinet authorises the disposal of Burbage and Houndkirk and Hathersage Moors to the RSPB and the National Trust and that the Director of Capital and Major Projects should start negotiating with these charities to that effect.

This is of course disgraceful. It means that there will in future be no facility for the public who own this land to have any influence or indeed any timely information on what is happening or planned because those charities are not public bodies. That is what happened when SWT was handed Blacka Moor and is now set to be extended to Burbage.

Anti-Nature and Anti-Democratic = Sheffield Wildlife Trust

..... about sums them up.  The Sheffield Wildlife Trust management of Blacka Moor is now tied to a Higher Level Stewardship agreement that continues their policy of treating the land as farmland. This is on public land with no discussion with the public in a national park which is already dominated by farmland and where there was an opportunity for a genuinely natural landscape to emerge: that represents a gross failure of imagination and lack of ambition for a charity that claims to put wildlife first. It is also cynically anti- democratic: Several years ago, in 2006, when the previous management policies were decided on, against the wishes of many regular users, they contrived to leave us with an understanding that the previous policy was to be subject to  public examination and evaluation after a period of 5 years. That commitment has been swept aside by people who have no interest in the site apart from the job it gives them because they simply do not want to subject their policy to any degree of public scrutiny. They hate being put on the spot to defend their self interested decision making because they know their own guilt like children caught sticky fingered from the sweetie jar.To call this shameful is to be more polite than any of the local conservation managers deserve; because something similar is happening across all the local tree starved environments of the Sheffield Moors. Elsewhere this has been called immoral and corrupt and it's hard to disagree. But the deepest guilt should be with those who should be holding these people to account. Politicians locally and nationally are just not up to the job of scrutinising the behaviour of managers in the conservation industry; they are either too gullible or afraid to ask obvious questions because they believe nodding gormlessly makes them appear well informed.

Why is this 'anti-democratic' rather than 'undemocratic'? For the reason that these conservation managers try to deliberately to deceive large sections of the public by claiming that a bona fide consultation has been held. Yet they never engage in meaningful discussions at all. In some cases they make deliberately false and misleading statements. In other words they claim to be democratic while being anything but. To me that is anti-democratic.  It has to be said that anyone taken in by this deception must be easily fooled or reluctant to speak out because they themselves have been engaging in a similar game in another field. There's no argument in their book to beat "they're/we're all at it "; the ultimate corrosion. It follows therefore that those in the conservation industry are not the only holders of public money and public office who are guilty of these tricks; it is getting increasingly common throughout public bodies who play on the gullibility and apathy of the majority. Why do they do this? Our local and national politicians and the national and local media who should be holding these appalling people to account have been silent and uncritical on this scandal seduced by a constant stream of wildlife charities' press releases and media management which the politicians swallow gruel on a baby's spoon.

Now at last this year there has emerged the beginning of a debate we've waited for far too long. This is a quote from the latest contribution in a national newspaper.

"So why does Britain lag so far behind the rest of the world? Why do our conservation groups appear to be so lacking in ambition and aspiration? ......................................................................................I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: the entire basis of upland conservation, as pursued on most of the upland reserves owned or managed by the Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB, the National Trust, Natural England, Natural Resources Wales, Scottish Natural Heritage and other bodies, is based on a misconception: that in keeping them open and largely devoid of trees, they are best protecting wildlife. This belief, which is largely unexamined by the groups that propound it, is diametrically wrong. It explains why many upland reserves are about as biodiverse and ecologically inspiring as the average car park.

(For more on British conservationists' obsession with keeping habitats open, see the devastating set of slides compiled by Mark Fisher. Some of the policies he has unearthed are so strange you hardly know whether to laugh or cry.).

Our conservation groups are obsessed with the vegetation that results from repeated deforestation: primarily heather moorland. Heather thrives on burnt ground and depleted soils. Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB, the National Trust and Natural England all advocate "cutting and burning" to maintain these ecological disaster zones and prevent the restoration of the cleared forests. Need I point out that a conservation movement which believes that cutting and burning is the best means of protecting the natural world, is one that finds itself in a very strange place?"

George Monbiot,   The Guardian

So Sheffield Wildlife Trust in common with the other conservation and wildlife charities is not simply being timid and lacking real commitment to making more nature happen. It is guilty of that, prioritising farming management practice where there is a wonderful opportunity to develop a wildlife friendly self managing landscape with little intervention. But it is worse than that because it does not consult: this year there has been no attempt to engage people in discussion even in their unsatisfactory RAG meetings; none have been held. And yet to read their website, their documents and publications and reports presented to council and other bodies you would receive the message that consulting is just what they do. And this, it has to be repeated, is on public land. They are anti-democratic.

Hindmost

Conservation Industry Damned Again (and deservedly!)

"Unfortunately much conservation is little more than painting by numbers. There are these habitat management manuals, and the management techniques they describe are often used unthinkingly and often inappropriately."

from here.

And the whole article is desperately needed. And should be read again and again especially each time the NFU/NT/Wildlife Trusts push their propaganda via press release and spurious education programmes at us.

Why are Britain's conservation groups so lacking in ambition?

I completely agree with the following comment:

"The places in which you would expect to find most wildlife, and in which you would expect a significant ecological recovery, are those:
a. where the human population is lowest
b. which are furthest from the cities
c. which are the least favourable for farming.

In Britain this means the uplands. This is why I have become obsessed with the way they are managed. But wildlife in the uplands, amazingly, is faring worse than it is in the crowded, intensively farmed lowlands. The State of Nature report, published in May, revealed that while 60% of wildlife species in Britain as a whole are in decline, in the uplands the rate is 65%.
The primary reason is that almost all the trees and scrub – on which the majority of species depend – have been removed, mostly by sheep farming. On the continent, the uplands are now largely forested, while the lowlands are largely bare. That is what you would expect. Upland soils tend to be much poorer than lowland soils, so farming is less productive there: generally many times less productive. But in Britain, while the lowlands are largely bare, the uplands are even barer. The places that should be our wildlife reservoirs are in fact wildlife deserts.
This state of depletion has been maintained by three means, in escalating order of importance:
a. Stalking estates artificially boosting the population of deer
b. Grouse moor owners cutting and burning the land (and killing hen harriers and other predators) to maximise the population of the upland chickens people pay to shoot
c. Governments spending public money to sustain farming – almost entirely sheep grazing – in the hills.
There would be no hill farming in Britain or anywhere in Europe were it not for subsidies."

Gestures

He spends a lot of his time in vocal exercises interspersed with sudden rushes, the point of which being to let all of us know he's around.

But he did find time for this quieter moment though the young calf wasn't sure it helped efforts to relax.

Visitors

Somewhere in here are numerous migrating thrushes. It's coincidence they arrived in the trees above the Old Wall Caff just before opening time.