Conservation wisdom: Looking back to look forward

Conservation wisdom
Looking back to look forward
People helping wildlife have worked the land for generations with commitment, passion and wisdom. State conservation action has been well intentioned but its formulaic processes have stifled initiative and endeavour. The best of the old needs to combine with what we trust in the new.

I live and work in an ancient landscape. I can feel its time-depth every day. Its Early Medieval origins are written in place names and are tangible in the grasslands, woodlands and trees. In the first half of the Twentieth Century, some of the early movers and shakers of what was to become the conservation movement lived in this area. They were an eclectic bunch: academics, soldiers, writers and landowners. They had been through a world war or two and learned the value of life. They had a massive enthusiasm for, and fascination about, our wildlife, our heritage and our nation. Many of them were deeply conservative and mistrustful of change, challenging the policies and accepted wisdom of the day. Their passion for nature lead to the formation of some of the organisations we know today such as the Soil Association and the Farming & Wildlife Advisory Group. One of the things they strove for was an acceptance that a responsible government should look after our environment on our behalf.

State wildlife support - a process not a passion?

As government started to take action for nature, people were encouraged to leave it up to ‘Them’. This elite cadre was created of people and organisations entrusted with making policy and who were uniquely qualified to turn it into action. On the whole, everyone else was happy to let them get on with it and it certainly worked well in many respects. In hindsight, two things went wrong. Firstly, nature reserves and protected areas for wildlife are mostly privately owned by farmers and charities. The designation of protected areas has a minimal approach. Certain activities are discouraged or regulated within them, so government limits the extent over which those restrictions to private enterprise apply. If we had gone the other way and made protected areas into zones of opportunity, where special tax reliefs or incentives applied, we would be in a different place now. Secondly, we came to rely on paying farmers to produce wildlife through tax-payer funded schemes and regulation. The result of this has been that, for many land owners, nature conservation is no longer the great passion that it once was. They are invested in the process and not the outcome. Government money and regulation have taken the passion out of nature conservation: now it’s a scheme, not a vocation; it’s a deal to be brokered, not a personal responsibility. Every pro-nature decision on the farm needs financial justification through a payment scheme; so when the deal ends so does the good work. We have created a situation where small ‘non-departmental government bodies’ run UK nature conservation. Mostly, this is done remotely by desk-bound officers who do not have the time or the freedom to get out on the ground. They just manage the process.

We have spent the best part of a century trying to get governments to accept limited responsibility for our wildlife with a light touch in delivery. My question is, now we have got what we asked for, did we ask for the right thing? We have ended up in a world that we created, but none of us wanted.

Degraded by unintended consequences

It’s not just the public and charitable sector that seems to have gone down a blind alley. There was a time when game animals were reared and released to supplement wild populations. Gamekeepers were employed to manage habitat. However, we have traded in our cherished game animals such as brown trout, salmon, grey partridge and wild duck for poor facsimiles; pouring thousands of tons of stock fish of into our rivers and 40 million pheasants and 35 million red-legged partridges into our countryside every year. Feeding them costs £80 million in wheat alone. Wild game habitats are degraded because they are no longer needed. Field edges where partridges once nested are ‘sterile strips’ that reduce weed incursion, our wonderful chalk streams are little more than dredged ditches teeming with super-sized rainbow trout. Our woodlands are increasingly devoid of wildlife interest because the deer have eaten it all and we have to grow trees inside fences or in tiny plastic tree-prisons. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Species-rich meadows beside a chalk stream in Wiltshire

Signs of hope

The big picture seems to me to be all wrong and the direction of travel for nature conservation inexorably towards failure and collapse. But in the fine grain there is so much to inspire, celebrate and cheer for. If I just think about the last few months:

• ·      I have been photographing otters on the Hampshire Avon and watching them munch signal crayfish in a local pond. Otters! Right on my doorstep! I still get the same thrill that I got when I first saw one in the distance on Loch Arkaig.
• ·      I sat on the chalk downs near my home, surrounded by what I think is one of the most diverse grassland swards in the country, in a waving sea of orchids, yellow rattle and herbs.
• ·      I see peregrines cutting circles around the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. This is still utterly marvelous to me.
• ·      In the spring, I was able to show one of my photography clients a great bustard powering across the dawn skies of Cranborne Chase.
• ·      Every day on the way to work I see red kites swirling over the downs, pursued by ravens whose croak can be heard all over the Wiltshire Downs. Thirty years ago, we used to get very excited about a buzzard’s nest!
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But are all these steps in the right direction just too small: too little, too late?

A red kite soars over the Nadder Valley

Changing mindsets?

We have got to get back to what we wanted to do thirty or forty years ago, but now we need to restore as well as conserve and enhance. On Cranborne Chase, we are trying to do what we can by bringing groups of farmers together to act in concert regardless of schemes and incentives.

We need to stop accepting the failed solutions offered by many nature conservation organisations and the governmental, charitable and private vested interests. We need to incentivise private landowners in ways that will embed nature conservation in the warp and weft of how they farm and manage the land for decades to come, not these temporary deals with the tax payer. The hunters should cry out for wild fishing, demand fair chase hunting of wild birds and mammals so that we can get back to managing habitat instead of feeding artificial populations of stocked game.

We need to spend our money on the right things. There is no shortage of money, that is a myth and a poor excuse. We spend untold millions on ineffective and inefficient protection of European Protected Species and nationally protected species when we could spend that money far more wisely. For instance, how much newt fencing do we actually need and would it not be better spent on securing landscape scale wetland projects into the future? What more could we achieve for bats if we could take the money that is spent on surveys and spend it on managing foraging habitat?