With all the hullabaloo over planning reforms in Northern Ireland, the anticipation over Defra's biodiversity offsetting announcement, and the England cricket team's heroics at Trent Bridge, I neglected to report on some good news.
Monday's guest blogger, George Monbiot may not be a fan of farm subsidies, but I hope that even he would be pleased to know that last week the Secretary of State, Owen Paterson, confirmed his commitment to funding for wildlife friendly farming in England. He said in the House of Commons that he would make use of the full flexibility allowed by the CAP and EU Budget deals to move 15% of CAP funding in Pillar 1 (the direct payments to farmers) into the next England Rural Development Programme, made up largely of agri-environment schemes.
This is good news for the natural environment and for those farmers that want to help recover the c60% of farmland species which have declined in recent decades. This is the benchmark against which Mr Paterson's counterparts in the devolved administrations should be judged.
The CAP reform deal fell a long way short of our aspirations for a Sustainable Land Management Policy but we now need to make the best of what we have. That means working with Defra and Natural England to help design agri-environment schemes to deliver as much for the environment as the funding allows and then supporting farmers put the right management in place.
And this makes me reflect on what George was saying in his blog this week. He wants us, and other conservation organisations, to go further and fast to remove human intervention from landscapes. I admire this aspiration - I know that I am not alone in finding wild landscapes and big predators awe inspiring. But it just isn't always possible or perhaps desirable in a highly fragmented and managed landscape like ours where there are so many demands from the land.
Our brilliant site managers have responsibility for looking after over 200 nature reserves and 150,000 hectares across the UK. They face constant choices, balancing objectives for the 15,000 species on our land as well as the needs and values of our neighbours and visitors. Whether they are restoring climax communities, such as at Abernethy and Mawddach Valley, managing semi-natural habitats like heathland and grasslands or creating new habitats at places like Lakenheath or Wallasea, I think our site managers do a remarkable job and our wildlife benefits as a result. It's worth noting that even in very big National Parks like Yellowstone, which is about half the size of Wales, there is still a fair amount of habitat management, including burning, but I'd hope that George celebrates what they have been able to do including, for example, reintroducing wolf.
And, as I have written previously, we do have to take some tough choices when trying to protect threatened species often struggling to survive on tiny postage stamps of land. Sometimes this may even mean trying to protect every individual. Crisis conservation sometimes demands intensive intervention and sadly this is what we face in parts of the country. So, yes, in extreme circumstances, we may try to find ways to minimise predation of lapwing chicks from buzzards by removing potential nesting habitat outside of the nesting season while enabling the buzzards to look for suitable habitat elsewhere. But to be clear, this certainly does NOT mean killing buzzards, or destroying active nests. We take action while still wanting to address the ultimate causes of species decline and investigating why predation is a problem. Our ambition is always to recover populations to such a level so that predation is no longer a problem.
I'd go further, our ambition is to go as wild as we can, working out what we can realistically do help restore natural processes for wildlife and, yes, for people as well. I hope that you, perhaps even George, would share this aspiration.
This does seem unexpectedly good news - my calculation is 15% could be c £500m per annum - is that about right ? It is a lot. It is doubly good news because it backs the farmers who have committed through HLS to manage their land for the environment - a commitment that can leave them exposed to sudden reductions in Government funding.
On George's thoughts & your response, I'd suggest you don't have to go with them - but equally surely we should be discussing ideas like this openly ? I sense some defensiveness - and in other discussions of big land use have started to pick up a 'we're quite happy in our hole, we know its not a very good hole, but its familiar and we like it here' - and I don't think its good enough. There are many shades of management - in the case of woodland, for example, it is a history of interaction between the natural and human that has created a unique and special environment in our lowland ancient woods (in contrast to Native Pinewoods which were raped for money like destroyed rainforest). George Peterken has clearly shown, as only George can, that simply doing nothing doesn't return you to a 'natural' woodland. In our work in the Forestry Commission we never claimed to be going back to something that was exactly the same as what was there before - but rather to be creating future landscapes within quite clearly defined paramaters.