Further Confirmation

Businesses often start up to satisfy a public need or perform an important service identified as a public good - something that otherwise would not get done leaving us all the poorer for it. Not so with the wildlife trusts it would seem. In their case judging by recent examples it would seem they conform to the alternative model - of those who go into business to provide profitable employment for those who run the business: i.e. the self-serving model.

It's further confirmation that the only justification for the existence of Sheffield Wildlife Trust is to receive grants that can be used to perform tasks that have the sole purpose of giving them a role in life and a rake-off to keep their organisation going. Following on from the last post which pointed to one of those job creation tasks, this morning presents us with another even more disputable example: building a new 700 metre long livestock wall.

The trouble with this is: first  it spends more public money on a job which there was never public demand for. It also reinforces the trust's flawed ideology that says farming and human intervention is the be all and end all of our landscape; they would like to educate the public, from the smallest infant, into accepting their dogma that wildlife could not thrive on the land without wildlife trust intervention, a palpable nonsense as what on earth did wildlife do before they came along? And the crowning insult to our intelligence comes when they tell us that 'favourable condition' of the kind they claim to aspire to for this land can only be achieved if they spread cow defecation all over it. What kind of idiots they must think we are. The bankers pre-2008 had the same view of their customers.

Not many years ago SWT arranged for an itinerant RAG meeting onsite which I and others attended some of those there being members and trustees of SWT. At one point on the walk the Reserve Manager stopped everyone and asked whether anyone thought it a good idea to restore and rebuild the stone wall between the sheep enclosure and the moor. Nobody could find a good word for the idea and all agreed that it would be a waste of public money. The SWT people there agreed. That work is now precisely what the wildlife trust proposes to do and it will be funded by Higher Level Stewardship funds.

700 metres of stone walling to facilitate cattle and sheep grazing. The sheer hypocrisy of the notice informing us of this is hard to take. Talk of mice and voles and lizards is just so much office dishwater.. Small animals don't need rebuilt walls -it's more than likely their preferred homes, made for themselves in the old piles of stones will be disturbed in the process.  Have they been surveyed? Knowing SWT's record it would be no surprise to find they had concocted such a survey showing a majority of the  local wildlife are in favour of the plan. And some of the people who have come to consultations in the past would not bat an eyelid.