"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.