Wednesday 28 May 2014

Calling The Shots

Ian Rotherham's package of comments on the issue of Wilding and Rewilding includes a substantial nine page article titled The Call of the Wild.  It's a good title echoing the Jack London book of that name. Rotherham's article is published in a shorter version in the journal of the British Ecological Society. It appears that the purpose of the article is, perhaps, an attempt to take control of the debate that fired up last year with the publication of George Monbiot's book. In the context of the enthusiasm of those wishing for a more exciting vision of our uplands for landscape and wildlife, Rotherham aims to reclaim the high ground for humanised landscapes managed by professionals claiming that abandonment just will not do. That's quite a task for him at a time when traditional practices are dying out and only kept going with massive subsidies. He’s keen on local history fitting in with his support of the concept of cultural landscapes, something I find vague and ill-defined.

Ian Rotherham's article attempts to present his take on the debate as a neutral, weighty and responsible corrective to other elements in the discourse. He might consider them as simplistic, impulsive and populist. He might also have concerns that any change in emphasis within conservation and wildlife might threaten the role of the professionals, he being one as will be his students.

To accept his argument you might need to see it as cautionary rather than reactionary. It’s also as well to have full confidence in the reliability of observations and anecdotal evidence he gives in the article and in his contribution to the conference. As accuracy and reliability is a big issue with the wider conservation industry we should be looking out for exaggeration and problems of judgement. That’s where my confidence in the content flags. The narrative seems credible until it comes to something I’ve direct experience of. I’ve now read his article twice and listened to much that he said at the conference and new doubts keep cropping up. As with SWT and the other NGOs and even SCC I’m getting the idea that we’re presented with desktop judgements based on second hand hearsay evidence.

So here are examples, some major, others quite small but they add to the picture:

1 The Action for Involvement Event. I don’t recognise the event he describes. I was there.  For some time I read on, thinking he must have been referring to another event, but he wasn't. I conclude it’s either badly remembered or he calculates that it’s worth misrepresenting it. He makes it out to be a bigger event than it was – as it happened each speaker only got 10 minutes. He mentions ‘case studies’ and I can’t remember seeing any. He wonders about the absence of representatives of NGOs – yet they were there. He must have known that this was in the context of the SMP Master Plan. SMP had refused to discuss these serious issues in relation their feeble Master Plan consultation and that this event was a late effort to independently raise these issues that ‘officials’ had refused to discuss themselves. He doesn't mention the SMP. Had Rotherham himself got involved in any public debate over the SMP Master Plan? If he did, I didn’t see it.  He himself was consulted before the A For I event by the facilitator. What did he advise? He was in attendance and I didn’t hear him say anything. His account of this event and the prominence he gives it justifies a sceptical reading of the rest of his article.

2 Rotherham has made himself something of an 'expert' on the deer in this area by virtue of publishing a paper on them. The survey would appear to be a desktop survey relying on reports from others in the field. He claims that there are far more red deer on the eastern moors than other organisations believe – they being the PDNPA, RSPB, NT. I’m more inclined to believe the latter having observed them hundreds of times. If farmers are reporting to him then errors are understandable. But anyone can get numbers wrong. Deer are very easy to double count in this way: someone tells you they’ve seen 20 and someone else says they’ve seen 20 somewhere else. Is that 40 or the same 20? They move about – quite a lot. I mean to come back to this but his piece is not about direct observation of deer but more a modelling exercise about recording reports, predicting from assumptions and calculating populations. If there’s anything that matches my own observations of one area over 10 years I haven’t yet seen it. In fact it's a bit cold and statistical without observational evidence of deer behaviour and habits.

He raised safety issues about the deer – on the roads and during the rut. This sounded like scaremongering to me especially as the biggest problems with animals on the roads around here are caused by farm animals (part of his cultural landscape?) and there have been several bad incidents in the Peak District of cows injuring people – one very serious and very recent - that he did not mention. So far there have been no serious road incidents with deer though it’s likely there will be eventually if nobody does something about the speeding traffic on the roads. The really dangerous animals on the roads are behind the wheel.

3 Flowers damaged by cattle. Rotherham is against summer grazing on the moor and in this I agree with him. But he overstates the case by exaggerating. SWTs cows trampled and wrecked the display on the bog but they did not wipe out the Bog Asphodel which you might conclude from what he's said. Sheep grazing in the 1980s, so we were told, destroyed the bluebells in the nearby woods. I’ve seen no evidence that there were bluebells in those woods and I’m sure they would have returned 30 years later. There are lots of bluebells where sheep have been grazing on the pastures for many years. So I'm sceptical about other things he says.

4 What the public wants. The suggestion is made that people like the moors as they are and won’t come if they change. Frankly that's garbage and there's no evidence for it. Quite the reverse. It’s not true of Blacka where the public love the trees and the deer that come because of the trees and the bilberries that grow because of abandonment of management. It was even implied that more trees in the Lake District’s uplands would cause a decline in tourism. You simply can’t say that. I believe that’s scaremongering.

There’s no doubt to my mind that Rotherham is instinctively a top-down manager where it comes to wildlife and landscape.  His message is: someone up there must call the shots. Comfort for the conservation industry and its supporters and educators.

 5 Another example of scaremongering and manipulation comes in two mentions of George Osborne. The straining for a convincing argument shows when you have to claim you must be on the right side because Osborne is on the other side. Though that's doubtful anyway because we know which side grouse moor owners are on in the intervention/non-intervention debate; and Osborne will be more likely to listen to them. And I'm sure Rotherham's consultancy work has led him into association with gamekeepers.


TBC 

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