Last week the Moorland Association released a joke response to the Climate Change Committee report on land use which recommended an end to rotational burning on peatlands this year. Now you wouldn’t think that would be exactly what the Moorland Association would want but they still have the brass neck to write;
The Moorland Association said today that moorland managers are wholly committed to combating climate change…
https://www.moorlandassociation.org/2020/01/moorland-association-response-to-committee-for-climate-change-report/
…which sounds quite promising until they finish the sentence;
… and [I think that should be a ‘but’] the government should not rush into an outright ban on controlled heather burning over peatland.
https://www.moorlandassociation.org/2020/01/moorland-association-response-to-committee-for-climate-change-report/
Ah, so that’s what the Moorland Association’s idea of wholly committed is? In fact, not really committed at all. I suppose that is a bit like the Moorland Association’s complete commitment to ending illegal killing of raptors except ‘If we let the hen harrier in, we will soon have nothing else.‘.
The ‘wholly committed’ Moorland Association’s Amanda Anderson attempts to correct the Climate Change Committee’s phalanx of professors on the ins and outs of peatland ecology and its impact on climate change (which is very funny). Amanda says it’s all very complicated and we shouldn’t rush into anything, when it’s all very simple and nobody is rushing into anything – in fact the pace of government action is very slow, partly I fear, because of the close relationship between government and the Moorland Association.
Remember, those keenest on driven grouse shooting are rather sceptical about the existence of climate change and whether we can or should do anything about it – click here.
Although acting on burning of peatland is a low-regret approach to tackling greenhouse gas emissions through land use measures we find, as predicted, that the Moorland Association does have regrets.
A quick recap: grouse moors are hotspots of illegal raptor killing; grouse moor burning has damaged protected habitats; grouse moor burning should cease to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For any of these reasons we ought to end intensive grouse moor management – in combination these three reasons (and there are plenty of others too) form a damning indictment of a nineteenth century sport which has no place in our twenty-first century uplands.
The Werritty report was so poor that you wouldn’t have realised that any of this was going on.
DEFRA has been wilfully blind to these issues for so long that it is an absolute disgrace.
[registration_form]
It’s not blindness. It’s corruption.
Perhaps Amanda Anderson should be the new environment secretary, she seems to know more about Climate change and peat uplands than a host of learned professors and academics— Then Perhaps not.
I was up in Yorkshire for a long weekend and witnessed heather burning on Agra Moor part of Lord Downshires Jervaulx Estate, lots of smoke for a long time. I was on another moor a couple of days later and watched 6 Hen Harriers go to roost, Magic. Grouse management and driven shooting is of course anything but magic and should have ceased permanently long ago. It would of course have also put a stop to the misleading and pointless utterances of one Amanda Anderson.
I see Andrew ” Kill truth” Gilruth of GWCT infamy has joined the argument calling those who are opposed to routine burning “ecological fundamentalists.” His argument to my mind fails entirely because routine burning is not at all about preventing wildfires as he claims but about making the ground ideal for the production of high grouse densities. In there is also the heather moorland is a world rare habitat argument—– Wake up and smell the coffee Andrew it is man made.
I filled in the GWCT survey as mentioned here and now I get the newsletter which is interesting.
Today’s features a letter to the Times about burning
“An important time to apply common sense to conservation”: Our letter to The Times
Sir,
The unintended consequence of increasing wildfire risk by allowing the views of ecological fundamentalists to replace the common sense approach of indigenous peoples (Comment, Jan 20) is not limited to Australia. In this country we have also used fire for 5,000 years to help produce some of the rarest habitat on earth – heather moorland. The new fashion to reduce controlled burning in the winter to ‘protect’ these landscapes ignores the reality that the intense heat of a summer wildfire can release all the carbon locked up over the last 200 years, in a single night. There has never been a more important time to apply common sense to conservation.
Andrew Gilruth, Director of Communications, GWCT
The comments are interesting as well ,where was the fire in Scotland ? and who is this Chris Packham who gets free airtime (actually I think he gets paid as well).
I’m still hoping for a compromise solution but I may be kidding myself.