A Management Industry

There has been no Blacka Moor Advisory Group meeting since October and no message to those on their advisory group mailing list. There has been no word about their new management plan nor their Higher Level Stewardship. Cattle grazing, their daft fixation was expected to continue from Spring but so far no cows – and how thankful we are for that! Where are the managers? What are they scheming? Important consultations were supposed to happen last year and half way through this year have still not been mentioned. Flags should not be waved yet nor street parties planned. Any idea that they may have decamped like an itinerant community are sure to be just wishful thinking.

Management relies on keeping key information close to its chest. So the rule is: don’t tell the public until  ready. Speculation is pretty pointless but happens anyway. Are there serious staffing problems? Has the funding dried up? Has word gone out from those higher up that the whole strategy must be revised? Are they scared that they have been rumbled? Has the rising tide of national questioning led to a secret defensive manoeuvre being hatched. Would any of these surprise us?

We’ve mentioned here - many times - the activities of the wildlife conservation industry with varying levels of bewilderment, annoyance and even amusement. But maybe we should see it less as a 'Conservation Industry' than as a Management Industry much as it is across the rest of national life and the economy. It’s hardly at all about conservation less still about wildlife but a hell of a lot about management. That is the only way to understand what we’re up against. 

Management is their job, managing is their business: managing public perception, damage limitation, financial matters and all that goes with it. They are a group apart from the particular niche they are working in separable from what we might think as the ‘core business’. It’s a desk job with a primary focus on public relations run by people whose mission is to control everything but most of all to control what the public thinks of them, hence the need to control the flow of information.