Friday 13 August 2010

Response


A commenter says,

There has been sheep grazing on Strawberry lea for over 600 years and the wild flowers are still there.
What is your earliest memory of Blacka?

The point that this blog has been making about the Strawberry Lea pastures is that the farm livestock have been removed and it has been much more attractive for visitors. I don’t see how that can be seriously disputed.
There are other things that can be said.
I assume that the comment implies that 600 years of something going on means it should continue for another 600 even if people never get to see the flowers. If the grazing has been continuous all that time with the same stocking levels or greater than used recently under HLS or ELS or whatever agri-environment scheme, then there will have been no benefit to people who will have not seen the flowers. Even if the plants had been there they would have been repressed by grazing and other management practices just as a grouse moor is. So what’s the value to people especially on land where recreation is supposed to have a high priority?

Some other ways of looking at it:

1) 600 years of one kind of top-down management. Isn’t it time to try something else? If so why not remove the shackles and let nature decide?
2) Did anyone ask the same question 600 years ago at the point that grazing was about to start? If there had been an institution around then like Natural England is now, charged with overseeing the landscape, would they not have been saying in circa 1400 that it had been more or less unchanged for
x thousand years before that….so why change it?

Finally on this: the present grazing regime appears to be inflexible. This could be to suit the needs of the grazier rather than the needs of the people who visit. It could also be connected with the rigidity and bureaucracy of the agri-environment scheme.
An alternative and very mild suggestion could be that something different is tried, going nowhere near my own preferred solution but doing something that other, more timid, people might approve of; thus: every other year leave the pastures free of sheep and cattle. What is the argument against that?

The other question from the commenter I accept defeat on. No I can’t equal the record of remembering 600 years ago. If one is only allowed to comment from the perspective of that degree of longevity then none of us have the authority to make decisions. So we would be better off leaving nature to its own way rather than trusting to highly fallible humanity.

(I sometimes think even humanity itself would never have got as far as it has today if it had been overseen every step of the way by top down management schemes. But that’s another debate.)

1 comment:

Neanderthal Ned said...

600 years, 600days or 6,000years? The landscape is constantly changing. Attempts to put a particular or era of land use into a glass case are doomed to failure. Once the economic need for land management has ceased, nature should be allowed to reclaim the land.