BY BEN O’ROURKE

The fuses have been lit. Does Bruce Willis still have time to save the countryside?

There’s a popular trope in films where authorities are convinced of one thing and people in the know telling them they’re wrong get ignored. A good example is Die Hard.

In the 1988 blockbuster, terrorists take over a building in Los Angeles and their leader, Alan Rickman, threatens to kill everyone inside unless some ‘freedom fighters’ are released from prison. Unknown to him, veteran New York cop Bruce Willis is trapped in the tower and doing everything he can to save the hostages.

Throughout the film, the cops and FBI are constantly questioning Willis’s motives, ignoring his decades of police work and insisting they know better, even though they’re outside and have no idea what’s going on inside the building. Everything they do makes things worse.

In real life in the UK, Natural England is demanding farmers and landowners follow rules about cutting CO2 emissions to thwart a climate change apocalypse. More recently, it has been pushing rewilding schemes to supposedly save biodiversity.

These policies are based on flawed research and the effects they have are the opposite of what is intended. They amount to lighting a fuse for the slow-motion demolition of the countryside, which will take down countless people’s livelihoods and lots of wildlife.

Gamekeepers and farmers, real-life action heroes of the countryside, have known this for years and been telling Natural England, but their skills and experience are overlooked. Instead, the quasi-authority is influenced by the likes of the RSPB, which has been waving around junk research reports like red flags.

A summary of the situation in the Peak District, exposing these problems and the techniques used to dupe the public, politicians and policy makers, can be found in the report Burning Money: How nature groups cash in on disastrous policies they helped create to fix imaginary problems.

In it, we find that farmers have been told there will be no more sheep on the moors by 2030. Natural England has been swayed by IUCN UK Peatland Programme researcher Richard Lindsay’s study that says sheep are overgrazing and a threat to wildlife. Obviously they are considered more of a threat than fires the little fluffy white clouds help prevent by nibbling away at heather, reducing the fuel load.

Add to that Natural England’s moves towards a ban on controlled burning to manage that fuel load and you get the wildfires we’ve seen this year on moors across the UK. Hotspots tend to be areas owned and managed by National Trust and RSPB, which have pre-emptively introduced zero-burn policies and, according to one farmer, are treating sheep “like a skippable product”.

These organisations pretend that cutting the heather and expensive schemes that involve planting moss to keep peat wet will prevent fires. There is no research to support this claim and the idea they don’t know this is ludicrous. It’s nonsense, according to ecologist Andreas Heinemeyer, who is doing the only study ever to compare cutting heather to controlled burning. Agreeing with Heinemeyer is agronomist Geoff Eyre, who was awarded for his work turning Howden Moor from mainly bracken into heather.

In an effort to make the sheep removal permanent, rhododendrons are being planted on Howden, which is owned by the National Trust. The plants, which are poisonous to sheep, are part of rewilding schemes that wildfire operations specialist Steve Gibson describes as “refuelling fire prone areas and rebuilding the level of risk”.

Moors for the Future (MFF) is a quango of the Peak District National Park, National Trust, RSPB, Environment Agency and water companies that does peat restoration work on moors. Natural England consults MFF to calculate the cost of restoration projects, then recommends landowners use it to do the work. It’s essentially writing its own cheques and slapping a whopping management fee on top.

Ecologist James Fenton points out that since peat bogs have a lifetime of thousands of years, short-term maintenance projects will have no effect. “I think people don’t have an understanding of long-term nature ecology.” If that’s the case, he adds, they shouldn’t be doing anything, let alone expensive restoration projects on land that naturally erodes.

In the topsy-turvy world of Natural England, the bad ideas don’t stop there. Farmers are being told to produce less food and instead, create nature. At the same time, nature groups like the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust are trying their hands at “nature-friendly” farming that doesn’t focus on food, but diversity.

Shoddy research based on inaccurate data has convinced Natural England there is a biodiversity crisis, so it’s paying companies across the country millions of pounds of public money to dig ditches for farmers and fill them with water. Very little of that money filters down to the farmer, who is pressured into getting the ponds to attract newts, thus creating biodiversity net gain (BNG) credits that developers buy so they can build houses.

That system has been pushed by RSPB for about a decade. While it’s supposed to target major developers, anyone wanting to build a track on their land to allow access for fire vehicles, for example, may have to buy the same amount of BNG credits as the number of houses that would fill the same space.

Nature groups, which own some of the companies that are digging the ponds, are directly competing with their company’s clients for the same BNG payments. There is no transparency.

“If it was any other industry, there would be competition and conflict,” says Meredyth, who is involved in the BNG system. “It just seems that when someone’s a charity and doing something for conservation, that immediately the assumption is they couldn’t possibly be doing anything wrong.”

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Ben O’Rourke worked as Assistant International Editor of the South China Morning Post and as a journalist for Fieldsports Britain. Ben now works as a freelance journalist and investigator. His Substack can be found here.