Conservation Matters

[Lat-Literal]

Unesco awards Lake District World Heritage site status:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-40547691

[BBMmk2]

Yes! This is wonderful news! Saw this on the news yesterday and Countryfile

[Pulcinella]

Excellent thread title, Lat-Lit!
Is matters the plural noun or the singular verb?
Both, of course, which is one of the delights of the English language!

[Lat-Literal]

Excellent thread title, Lat-Lit!
Is matters the plural noun or the singular verb?
Both, of course, which is one of the delights of the English language!

Thank you Pulcy.

Deliberately chosen so as to be read two ways.

I like the word "matters".

Have recently submitted something to my l.a entitled "Road Safety Matters".

[MrGongGong]

Not universally welcomed though

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/09/lake-district-world-heritage-site-george-monbiot#comments

It is a man made lanscape as much as Manchester is
Interestingly if you go to the Cévennes you get a bit of an idea of what it would be like if it was left to return to "nature"

The problem is that sheep are rather tasty and wool is a wonderful thing (Theakstons)

[Lat-Literal]

Not universally welcomed though

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/09/lake-district-world-heritage-site-george-monbiot#comments

It is a man made lanscape as much as Manchester is
Interestingly if you go to the Cévennes you get a bit of an idea of what it would be like if it was left to return to "nature"

The problem is that sheep are rather tasty and wool is a wonderful thing (Thekstons)

Oh right.

So internationalism is brilliant if it is the EU and appalling if it is the UN. I don't think so. To the extent that there are the problems he describes those have occurred with membership of the EU and not under any previous recognition of the area as a World Heritage Site. He has a problem with sheep but fails to mention the need for protecting the area from fracking, although those who posted comments have done. He also chooses not to observe that the biggest problem with sheep there of all time was not what the sheep did but what was done to the sheep. Radiation - supposedly from Chenobyl but what often sloshes around in the nearby waters and is also being buried under the National Park might just have a bearing.

Talking of National Parks, he is against them all. In a publicity seeking lecture to the UK National Parks Conference during October 2015, he launched a ferocious attack (that's his phrase) on the dire state of the UK’s National Parks, claiming that they all should be re-designated ecological disaster zones, and offering "my ideas for how they could be improved". This is the problem with many green campaigners. Mostly they are not green as we normal folk see green. And we can do without them. They are just town planners in disguise.

The truth of it is that had it not been a National Park, it would now be mostly about concrete. To remove that status is to risk it being so in the future even if the claim is that it should then become wilder. It was quite interesting actually in yesterday's programme to hear that the truly wild garden had the least number of species and the managed, (to be) slightly wild garden had the most. National Parks are managed, (to be) slightly wild gardens. Sometimes self-appointed gurus could apply their minds more to the scientific evidence than they do!

Thanks.

[Lat-Literal]

"‘First class’ farm at Thaxted sets standard after becoming conservation demonstration site"

An “excellent example” of an operation which is combining commercial farming with nature conservation - it's now a new LEAF (Linking Environment and Farming) demonstration farm:

http://www.dunmowbroadcast.co.uk/news/first-class-farm-at-thaxted-sets-standard-after-becoming-conservation-demonstration-site-1-5102080

[Richard Tarleton]

Monbiot is absolutely right. The landforms in the Lake District are beautiful, but that's down to its geology. Sheep grazing as practised in the UK renders our uplands into ecological deserts, unlike uplands elsewhere in Europe which are repositories of ecological riches, including large predators both mammalian and avian (I've walked some of the long trails in the Pyrenees, French, Italian, Swiss and Slovenian Alps, and the Appennine Trail). I've heard Monbiot slugging it out with Meurig Raymond of the NFU many a time and depressing listening it makes. As Monbiot says in the article

Only on page 535, buried in a table, is the reality acknowledge: three-quarters of the sites that are meant to be protected for nature are in “unfavourable condition”.

He's also right about the condition of our national parks - it is they that are the planning authorities, with remits for recreation and education, but they are never going to be the primary agencies for favourable conservation status. I can't think why you call Monbiot a town planner. Visionary campaigner for wilderness, more like.

And Lat- radiation is a red herring. It didn't harm the sheep - just meant people didn't eat them for a while.

[Lat-Literal]

Monbiot is absolutely right. The landforms in the Lake District are beautiful, but that's down to its geology. Sheep grazing as practised in the UK renders our uplands into ecological deserts, unlike uplands elsewhere in Europe which are repositories of ecological riches, including large predators both mammalian and avian (I've walked some of the long trails in the Pyrenees, French, Italian, Swiss and Slovenian Alps, and the Appennine Trail). I've heard Monbiot slugging it out with Meurig Raymond of the NFU many a time and depressing listening it makes. As Monbiot says in the article He's also right about the condition of our national parks - it is they that are the planning authorities, with remits for recreation and education, but they are never going to be the primary agencies for favourable conservation status. I can't think why you call Monbiot a town planner. Visionary campaigner for wilderness, more like.

And Lat- radiation is a red herring. It didn't harm the sheep - just meant people didn't eat them for a while.

Well, perhaps, RT, and perhaps not. You are considerably more knowledgeable than I am so I have had to look at some of the statistics based on another National Park. That's the Peak District. Remember that he is against all National Parks as they are currently. Sheep numbers rose five fold between 1900 and 2000. The overall percentage of grid squares covered by dwarf shrub moor fluctuated between years but was 21·7% in both 1913 and 2000. A larger percentage than in 1913, 24·9% of squares was recorded as dwarf shrub moor in 1982. While there was a slight decline in the proportion of squares covered by acid grassland from 19·4 to 13·8%, woodland cover increased slightly from 8·2% in 1913 to 8·8% in 2000.

In Britain, the low point in sheep numbers was the 1950s around which time the first National Parks were introduced. But there was also a significant dip in the 1970s when the National Parks were fully established. Rises from the 1980s coincided with far greater subsidies from the EC/EU, an organisation he ironically favours. But let us not be too hard on the EU. Upland sheep farming predates both the National Parks and the EEC/EC/EU by very many years. So does the substantial decline in woodland which in England covered 15% of land in 1086 and just 5.2% by 1905, with a low point during the first world war. As you will know, efforts have been made to reverse the tide since the enlightened Forestry Act of 1951.

I could be wrong but not much of this suggests to me a causal link between what is just a bit of law in the overall round for creating and maintaining National Parks, however much that has improved the lives of many, and what we have today. This may be especially true when the greater factor of scientific advancements in farming such as mechanization are added in. Given that science, the long history and the recent phenomenon of subsidies, it could appear he is choosing the softest of targets on which to place the blame if blame is appropriate.

As I understand it, a key objective of the National Park Authorities is to conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage. He appears to view the current position in terms of the cliche about us giving preference to a quality street box tourism and I think as a radical liberal he may be instinctively against most managed environments. The irony is that so-called re-wilding is a plan. A top-down rather authoritarian transformation rather than to pursue as now modest pragmatic enhancements. I accept I was wrong in some ways to describe such people as town planners in disguise. Certainly he has spoken out against the relaxation of planning laws vis a vis housing as purely a mechanism for economic growth.

However, there is also the law of unintended consequences. So, yes, I fully accept that the amount of trees in this country is pitiful and I do believe that more needs to be done about it. That is, not in the manner in which it was originally undertaken at, say, Kielder. But from what I have seen in my comparatively limited experience of the continent, the greater natural woodland there is regularly accompanied by patches of ugly wild west building. That is because the very limited planning laws enable both woodland and urban developments to thrive.

Consequently to abandon the NPAs would be to welcome in all manner of shanty towns along with vegetation. It is in that way inadvertently a sort of plan for more urbanisation, albeit haphazard, and that would be an irreversible blot on the national landscape. Even he admits elsewhere that sprawl is a feature of Spain and similar countries. I feel that it is politics first and greenery second, especially because he is also so against land-owners. And he never really does explain why now UNESCO as well as the UK National Park Authorities should be considered the bogey men. I put these points forward not as a part of an irrefutable statement but to encourage further discussion including education on how and why I am wrong.

[Lat-Literal]

A farmer's view:

Monbiot is Wrong About Sheep - http://www.fwi.co.uk/farm-life/opini...bout-sheep.htm

Article in the Spectator with the following quote from Rory Stewart:

"Something weird is happening. A group of intellectuals are imposing their fantasies on this landscape, and their fantasy is that they’re living in a wilderness, and they’re trying to create a landscape that hasn’t existed here for 3,000 years. I think it’s a tragedy. There’s a place for bits of forestry, and a place for bits of bird sanctuary. But we have to protect the human."

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2014/01/will-england-ever-see-george-monbiots-sheep-free-fantasy

And, it seems, the folly of reintroducing lynx, a symbol of the other worldly romance in the politically confrontational if ever there was one, is likely to happen within weeks:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...angers-farmers

[Lat-Literal]

Bodmin Moor awarded Dark Sky Landscape status by the International Dark Sky Association:

http://www.cpre.org.uk/media-centre/...+-+non+members

[vinteuil]

... The landforms in the Lake District are beautiful, but that's down to its geology. Sheep grazing as practised in the UK renders our uplands into ecological deserts, unlike uplands elsewhere in Europe which are repositories of ecological riches....

... I understand what you're saying, Richard, I really do. But. But. But what I love abt the Lakes (and other mountainious areas) is precisely the baldness, the lack of trees and undergrowth, the sheep-nibbled turf and boulders. I don't much care (aesthetically, aesthetically) for woodland - I like the stark and skeletal. This is, of course, my aesthetic, which will run counter to the views of others.

Interesting how our aesthetic take on the Lakes varies over time. Famously, prior to the ideas of the pre-romantics and Lake Poets such landskips were considered horrid rather than sublime - 'ugly', because not fertile, not productive as might be the lush fat lands of the south.

And even Wordsworth had views that we might find contrary to our current likes - if I recall, in his 'Guide to the Lakes' [1810] he rails against the 'modern' tendency to paint the cottages white, rather than leaving them as grey stone. Nowadays we see as a joy in the distant landskip little white spots which are those cottages so misprized by WW...





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[Lat-Literal]

Just to confirm I was not placing Richard - who has been kind enough in the past to send me several interesting e-mails - in the same category. An element of re-wilding if it is to be given that name no doubt makes sense, just as I think vinteuil's comments do. My "issues" concern the revolutionary approaches of individuals who revel in a lack of proportion - and how ironic that Mr Monbiot, an individual, should denigrate the UNESCO bid for being submitted by what he considered to be a small group of people - and the sort of language that they use against existing organisational structures which have saved much of our environment from concrete. He opened his lecture to the NPA in 2015 with a statement to the effect that his audience was going to hate him for what he was saying and he did so with the appearance of utmost glee. I'm sorry but to suggest that current bodies are ecological disaster zones and worse is to a large extent inaccurate and almost willfully perverse. There is in motive a destructive strand in the dialogue but it isn't on the side of the National Parks who at most can be criticized for some inadvertent strategic misjudgment on occasions. But anyhow, I didn't anticipate that this would be a controversial thread. It will, I think, mainly focus on good news.

[Richard Tarleton]

... I understand what you're saying, Richard, I really do. But. But. But what I love abt the Lakes (and other mountainious areas) is precisely the baldness, the lack of trees and undergrowth, the sheep-nibbled turf and boulders. I don't much care (aesthetically, aesthetically) for woodland - I like the stark and skeletal. This is, of course, my aesthetic, which will run counter to the views of others.

Interesting how our aesthetic take on the Lakes varies over time. Famously, prior to the ideas of the pre-romantics and Lake Poets such landskips were considered horrid rather than sublime - 'ugly', because not fertile, not productive as might be the lush fat lands of the south.

And even Wordsworth had views that we might find contrary to our current likes - if I recall, in his 'Guide to the Lakes' [1810] he rails against the 'modern' tendency to paint the cottages white, rather than leaving them as grey stone. Nowadays we see as a joy in the distant landskip little white spots which are those cottages so misprized by WW...

Gibbon kept the curtains of his carriage closed when passing through the Alps to spare himself the horridly unruly spectacle outside.....

Admittedly, on the continent, you've got another 4-6,000 feet to play with - you can have a tree line, and still have room for several thousand feet of stark and skeletal on top of that (you only have to listen to Eine Alpensinfonie). But of course with our more northerly climate, the alpine plants start at a lower level (where they can be grazed by sheep ).

I specialised in the history of the 19th century, and indeed was a lodger for 2 years in the house of the author of a book on the European Romantics - so quite a lot rubbed off. I've walked many a high alpine trail. And I've worked for most of my adult life in nature conservation. From this balanced perspective I now come down on the side of biodiversity. Our lowlands are intensively farmed, their natural habitats severely depleted. This is also true in large areas of western Europe. But everywhere else in Europe, the uplands are repositories of biodiversity, of which their human populations are justly proud. We are the only country in Europe where the uplands are even more impoverished than the lowlands, a point Monbiot makes so persuasively. (And we can't stand predators in any shape or form - deer numbers go unchecked, hen harriers are driven to extinction, there is an outcry if the reintroduction of predatory species is mooted.) Of course rewilding is a management choice (although you can choose not to intervene once you've started it off - the Dutch have done this rather well) but I'd take it over the anthropogenic, tea towel-friendly beauty of the Lake District. Beatrix Potter has a lot to answer for. It's far from being the worst example in the UK - don't get me started on the Brecon Beacons.

[vinteuil]

Gibbon kept the curtains of his carriage closed when passing through the Alps to spare himself the horridly unruly spectacle outside...

... he was not alone -


"The classical notions of beauty called for purity, order, restraint, regularity, proportion–perfection. The Alps were disordered, irregular, chaotic, and bad-mannered. The seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn thought them “horrid and fearful.” (His sentiments were published posthumously when discovered in 1817 in a laundry basket.) The early eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison wrote to his friend Edward Wortley, “I am just now arriv’d at Geneva by a very troublesome Journey over the Alpes, where I have bin for some days together shivering among the Eternal Snows.” The monk John de Bremble, one of the earliest English travellers to the mountains of Switzerland, was so horrified by his experience crossing the Great St. Bernard Pass that he prayed, “Lord restore me to my brethren, that I may tell them not to come to this place of torment.” Bishop Berkeley, crossing the Alps in 1714, carped, “Every object that here presents itself is excessively miserable.”
What may be the first travel brochure for Switzerland, Les Délices de la Suisse, published by Abraham Ruchat in 1714, promoted the tidiness of the towns and the happiness and health of the cows but was dismayed with the “eternal snows” of the high Alps. “These great excrescences of the earth,” it declared, “to outward appearance have neither use nor comeliness.” Others cited the Alps as nature’s shames and ills, as boils, blisters, warts, and wens, and even called the peaks the “Devil’s arse” and the steep valleys “Nature’s pudenda.”

A German traveller in 1785 wrote, “What struck me most in Switzerland among the curiosities of nature were those horrid structure the Alps.” Sir Leslie Stephen, the pioneering mountaineer and biographer, and father of novelist Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell, wrote in his 1871 book, The Playground of Europe: “Before the turning-point of the eighteenth century, a civilized being might, if he pleased, regard the Alps with unmitigated horror.” And indeed in 1791 William Gilpin noted that “the generality of people” found wilderness dislikeable. “There are few,” he wrote, “who do not prefer the busy scenes of cultivation to the greatest of nature’s rough productions.” Mountains were things to avoid, or, if one were a merchant, soldier, or pilgrim, to go around. Mountains, as a whole, were anathema."


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