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Today I find I am sick of armchair pundits who view this intensively farmed and forestry plantation landscape, a shooting industry, drainage engineers blasted landscape of intensive utilisation and declare conservation has failed.
I doubt hardly any of the “expert” commentators, farmers, foresters, drainage engineers can name virtually any of the species conservation has saved from UK extinction. Just imagine how bad this would be without the far sighted creators of SSSI & NNR, think of the rage and anger
amongst landowners that they can not do as they wish with “their” land, apart from a few honourable exceptions without designation those sites would be lost along with 99% of native grassland, and all the other great losses of habitat.
When we talk about dartford warblers, sand lizards, woodlarks, we talk of an entire complex myriad of habitats, to say it is not wild as human influence drove habitat development 5000 years ago is ridiculous, as with down the diversity of species highlighted by adonis blue and
many others is astounding, these ancient habitats, wood pastures, commons, fens, dunes, rhos so many others are not part of modern farming & forestry. They may be managed via agreements as part of a farm or in forestry but they are no longer part of the productive norm.
These habitats survive because of conservation designation and management, many grazed with conservationists livestock not farmers, or as part of ancient commoners systems not farming as most know it, just as woodland crafts people coppice as do conservationists.
Biodiversity in this country would be immensely poorer without 70 years of voluntary organisations and state land purchase, designation, management. Bitterns in a reedbed, bearded tits they represent a rich community in reed, a habitat not often seen away from nature reserves.
To say conservation has failed when it has had to fight against a monolithic block of incredibly powerful and influential land owners, state promoted intensive farming, forestry, shooting industry, state funded river engineers, fisheries. In a country in which development rules
in which such simple guidelines as not building on flood plain (or converting it to intensive arable), not building in depleted aquifers, not building on grade 1 land needed for food production. It is beyond ridiculous, without 70 years of struggle, innovation and punching well
beyond weight this new fledgling human idea nature conservation we would have very little left, fortunately a few far sighted landowners have been part of this and have themselves protected considerable habitat, some have managed it traditionally others at least offered
relatively benign neglect, even if over time this has caused species loss.
It feels as if the people who have warning, been ignored, starved of resources, had every gain weakened by political interference based on lobbying by industries are now being told you have failed. No we have not we have managed to in the face of indifference, contempt, and
interference and outright criminality to achieve much more than could have been imagined, from a new human activity to robust science and technique in a human life span.
Do not mistake me this is no criticism of those be they farmer, forester, hunter, drainage engineer who know we need radical change, yes we do, my life work was building conservation ethos into unified estate management, distilling core knowledge into more general management
we certainly need radical change which brings ecology and dynamic process into food, timber production, flood management, water conservation and all aspects of life in a densely populated modern country, just as we will also need core nature reserves.
