Another voice
Conservationist menace
Auberon Waugh
For most of us, the 1960s ended 15 years ago, on 20 June 1970, with the emerg-
ence of Mr Edward Heath and Mr Peter Walker at the nation's helm. A new horror had arrived to replace the old rubbish. Peace, love and organic farming made way for the new spectre of salvation through.
efficiency. Gritty modern methods and an unsentimental abrasive approach to all problems were the order of the day. 'After a few years of that, we all saw it was a dreadful mistake. Grocer Heath was put in a corner in the dunce's cap he has been wearing ever since and Peter Walker, having destroyed the English counties, is allowed to exhibit himself from time to time in some ridiculous pose or other — torturing badgers or sticking up for Ed- ward Heath and Old-Fashioned Toryism — as a terrible example to us all.
The new message, as we all know, is Salvation through Greed. We must simply eat and drink our way out of the problems of overproduction inherited from the Grocerist deviation. But even as we opinion-formers, trend-setters and Thatch- erite groupies buckle down to our patriotic task, we are aware that other parts of the country are dragging their feet. There are still farmers and small businessmen out there grocerising, as they should have done in the 1970s, just as there are still country cottages where middle-aged hippies sit around calling each other 'man', smoking pot and hoping to get magical vibrations from some disused silage pit or beet store which they have identified as an ancient burial ground. We may have moved on, but others have chosen to stay behind at various stages of the odyssey.
Irritated as we may be by those institu- tions which seem immoveably stuck in the Sixties, like the Catholic Church, there is something distinctly endearing about peo- ple like the Prince of Wales who suddenly appear to have discovered that confusing decade a quarter of a century after every- one else. His latest outbreak is against farmers who despoil the countryside in the interests of agricultural productivity — or 'greed' as it was more fashionably called before 'greed' became a cheer-word. He was speaking to an agricultural college near Newton Abbot last week in his role as Duke of Cornwall.
'Fascinating places, wetlands, moorlands and hedgerows have been lost, often in response to greed,' he said. 'We have come to look on the land as an almost endless source of increasing income . . .
Of course it is absolutely true that many farmers, left to themselves, will behave like pigs, leaving horrible plastic sacks all over the countryside and putting up hideous metal barns and grain-dryers as well as tearing up hedgerows and chopping down trees. Other farmers prefer not to live in a pigsty and keep their hedgerows and trees, at some cost to themselves. Until very recently, the Government was paying farmers to plough up moorland and pull down hedgerows. It was called land reclamation and improvement. Now, in some cases, it pays them not to do so and leave the land untilled. That is called conservation. I do not see how any great issue of morality is involved. It rather depended on how many people were going to be fascinated by a particular piece of wetland, as against the rather larger num- ber who might have had to pay an extra penny on their loaf of bread for allowing a sedge warbler to warble on his own patch — possibly delighting the soul of some bearded creep hiding behind the reeds, possibly not.
The Prince of Wales urged farmers to develop new skills, specifying tourism, light industry and forestry, in order to discourage them from destroying what is called 'the environment'. This would seem to confirm the countryside in the role of recreation area for townspeople — who are themselves exiled from the countryside by their own greed for money — rather than as an area dedicated to agriculture and its own pursuits. The farmer's role is to show misty-eyed townspeople his sedge warblers and possibly serve them a cream tea afterwards. It does not seem to occur to these bird-fanciers and nature fanatics that they are as much a pest as the voles, rabbits and squirrels they admire, and that any farmer who took his job really seriously would poison their cream'teas as surely as he pours cyanide into a wasps' nest.
Two developments show the way the wind is. The first is the decision of an elderly judge in Bristol Crown Court to allow the League Against Cruel Sports an injunction against the Devon and Somerset Staghounds from trespasssing on one of the 33 plots of land the League has bought on Exmoor for no reason except to exclude the hunt from them. There is no law of trespass which farmers can invoke against animal sentimentalists wishing to gape at their own countryside.
Even worse than this is what has been happening in Orkney. There a quango called the Nature Conservancy Council, hand in glove with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, has declared vast areas of agricultural land virtually out of bounds for farmers: no cattle may graze there and sheep only under the most stringent conditions. They now control vast tracts of land all over the islands. In addition to 13,000 acres on the island of Hoy, another 7,000 acres have just been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest in order to protect some 400 black-backed gulls and 800 skuas. When these wretched gulls — not to mention the 30,000 pairs of guillemots, razor-bills and other pests — kill lambs, the RSPB, driving around in Land- rover Safari Trucks and green wellies, talks of a 'management problem'.
Dr John Francis, the Nature Conservan- cy Council Director for Scotland, says that his objective is to 'ensure that our natural heritage of flora and fauna, animals and plants, is maintained as fully as possible . . . for the future of the community at large.'
What community, one wonders, and what future? Orkney has a shrinking population of some 17,000 humans, 75,000 beef cattle. Its only important industry is the raising of beef on poor land in a poor climate. When, in saner times, the Navy used the north of Eday as a gunnery range, it killed many cattle (and paid suitable compensation) but did not succeed in frightening away the birds. Now the birds are being given the run of the island for 'their own fatuous pursuits and the cattle are being driven off.
'Despite misunderstandings great stress is placed on the fact that we must work through a voluntary approach and that is very much the central remit of our struc- ture,' says Dr Francis. 'The alternative would be statutory controls.'
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