The H Word

In May this year somebody wrote a message across SRWT's notice at the entrance to Blacka. It asked for them to stop cutting down trees.

The message was, of course, ignored. Now SRWT is asking Sheffield City Council to .....  guess what?  .... to stop cutting down trees.

I've selected a few pictures from earlier this year to show trees that are under threat from SRWT's policy. And remember nobody will be aware that a tree is shortly to be destroyed. The first anybody finds out about the destruction will be the sight of the severed limbs and the felled tree on the ground. It will be too late. So these trees in this landscape could be gone tomorrow.

This is just a small selection.

Does the Green Party have a view?

http://sheffieldgreenparty.org.uk/2015/06/29/greens-demand-answers-on-streets-ahead-contract/

Bandwagons

Alright, I said no comment was needed, but just in case the message was not obvious  ........

The Blacka Moor Management Plan went through and was signed off by Sheffield's Directors and Cabinet Members. Now if you complain about anything they are doing, such as tree felling,  SRWT refer you to the Management Plan as if to say you've had your chance to have your say.

The Streets Ahead scheme also went ahead after being signed off by Sheffield's Directors and Cabinet Members. This included the plans to fell numerous roadside trees. Once a grass roots campaign got going SRWT jumped on the bandwagon and identified it as a campaign against tree felling that they support. Did they make representations before it went through Cabinet? I'm pretty sure they did not.

They will jump on any bandwagon that helps to raise their profile and may increase membership among people who don't know what they are really like when they are the managers. Smithy Wood is another example. Principles and consistency are not to be expected in those whose main aim is empire building.

I support the need to keep roadside trees, but can anyone claim that the woodland  in this picture with its mix of different trees is of less value than street trees anywhere in Sheffield?

Yet many of the trees there including larch* and pine are rated as undesirable by SRWT and could be for the chain saw. Some pine and larch have already been felled elsewhere on Blacka.

* The larch in the centre was felled last weekend.

No Comment Needed

From Save Sheffield Trees facebook page.

This posting:

"Fantastic turnout, Sheffield Tree Saving People! You made your voices heard today! Prof. Ian Rotherham and Rob McBride, Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust, The Woodland Trust, Dave Dillner and many others spoke out against the indiscriminate felling of street trees, loud and clear from Sheffield Town Hall steps. The message is plain: we are not going away, and we will fight for our street trees!"

But the comment facility is available.

No Hiding Place

Further on the theme that no trees are safe on Blacka, SWT has informed me that they intend to reduce the number of trees on what they call the heathland component to less than 25% of what it is now. This along with a myriad of other interventions was specified in their management plan. I had tried to read and comment on all of this in January but there's a limit to what can be done, knowing they will go ahead anyway. Only mass protests could save many trees and they of course will interpret their words in the way that they like. Which trees they choose to destroy, old or young, mature of saplings will be their decision and probably taken as a whim of the moment. Those within a minute or two's walk of the car park may be most at risk. That's been the story so far.

Chainsaw-man rules.

If anyone chooses to come up onto Blacka and tie yellow ribbons round trees they had better start now. That, I'm told, is what has been happening in Dore where the Streets Ahead programme of tree removal associated with road improvements has been causing controversy. I'm also told one of the organisers of that is a trustee of SWT.

Some of those that could fail to live much longer are these two mature trees.

The advantage of felling large trees to SWT appears to be that it gives a certain extra satisfaction to the wielders of chainsaws who like a job they can get their teeth into. Some more threatened trees:

 

 

 

Too late to save the one above. It was destroyed last weekend.

Danger List

It would be a mistake to think that the plans for Blacka include the removal of only one or two tree species. The following are all in danger sometimes according to where they are growing.

Birch
Larch
Pine
Oak
Beech
Holly
Sycamore
Rowan

To the trees should be added:

Bracken
Deer*
Foxes*

................. the last two can only at the moment be predicted from a reading between the lines of some of the language used in their management plan and from the activities of their partners in the Sheffield Moors Partnership.

None of the above can feel safe from the destructive forces and twisted logic of local 'conservation'.

This list is almost certainly not complete. We also have to factor in the inevitable removal of Ash due to disease spreading across the country. In fact almost the only trees that are not possible targets for the chain sawing fraternity are Alder and Hawthorn, but even with these I'm not confident.

It should be noted that in the case of some trees they might want them to grow in one area but not in others. All amounts to a grotesque top-down rearranging of nature, an exercise for which they are confident of getting funding; and it will have come in one way or another from the public purse. It will also secure a number of their jobs well into the future. But from what we have seen up to now there will be no transparency nor accountability about the process. They consider they have official approval from an ignorant and supine Sheffield Cabinet in a manouevre that comes only just short of corruption.

There's been much talk of rewilding lately. What SRWT and their supporters want is the very antithesis of rewilding. One did not expect rewilding to be part of SRWT's agenda but we did hope that we might get something that acknowledged the value of a wilder landscape. Here it would have been a partly feral landscape developed further from what it is now, its unpredictability being a major part of its appeal. We were right to be alarmed ten years ago at the early signs of prescriptiveness.

Ethnic Cleansing Strikes Again

We naively thought we were getting somewhere when we got the 2006 consulation facilitated by Icarus to agree that Blacka should have only minimal intervention. Perhaps the conservation industry people in attendance calculated that it would not be long before that was forgotten.

The truth is that organisations like SRWT are incapable of leaving things alone for long. Their whole ethos centres around intervention, intervention, intervention; except, it seems, never where we would prefer it. Mainly in fact where it brings in funding. They have the eyes of hawks where it comes to spotting opportunities to draw in public money usually unaccountable and in the form of grants passed down from other unaccountable bodies who've got hold of a sizeable parcel of tax revenue.

The tree felling at the weekend is part of this pattern. Nature cannot be trusted so managers are needed to exert draconian discipline. Trees should grow only where they are told and only those species  offcially sanctioned. This land here is OK as long as you are the trees we like. But any trees over this side must be subject to instant retribution. All points to the deception of the so-called wildlife agenda. Wildness is the antitheseis of this kind of management. For them management is about killing and destruction of wild and feral organisms.

Looks like over a hundred years old.

On SRWT's website their 'commitment' to public engagement has led them to publish their current work programme. We've looked at it and can't say we like much of it. But we expect it to be honest.We know the way they work. Anything we see as urgent can't be done unless it's gone through their work programme process. So why do they saunter over the other day with a chain saw and destroy trees in an activity that's not in their work programme?

Perhaps it's because they suggested it to their 'conservation group' and nobody protested. The same 'conservation group' that is constituted of anonymous people too frightened to be identified and whose deliberations are kept secret.

It's Time ..

This is quite something and in front of the people who have been holding things back!

I do hope that the SRWT trustees get to see this

But let's be clear. People have been saying similar things before and have been ignored. It's just that he is such a great communicator.

 And he's right.