There is nothing sadder than seeing two teams of ‘the good guys’ squaring up for a ruckus. Heaven knows there are enough bad guys out there – let’s fight them! Or, even better, get them to wage an internal war of attrition. Instead, this weekend brought us another friendly fire incident – or at least the reporting of one – in Magnus Linklater’s Guardian article ‘Why the claws are out for the RSPB’.
The hook of the article is that the RSPB is under attack from some quarters for being overbearing absentee landlords (they own 300,000 acres and are Scotland’s eighth-largest landowner) who are riding rough-shod over rural communities’ needs in the name of bird conservation. An RSPB spokesman returns fire – ‘… 70% of people convicted of offences relating to bird of prey persecution since 1990 were employed as gamekeepers.’
It’s a wonderful cocktail of all the things we love to hate – on the one hand, an apparently urban-centred bureaucracy messing with the lives of country people; on the other hand, the big bad estate owners and lairds poisoning our magnificent birds of prey for the sake of their filthy-rich guns, out from the city for a weekend of fresh blood. Somewhere along the line a few crofters and hill farmers get caught up in this catastrophic crossfire for making it known that the recently reintroduced sea eagle is taking some of their lambs. Who do they think they are? But what it might be more interesting to ask is – who do we think they are? Are they the salt of the earth who cherish and nurture the land for precious little thanks and reward? Or are they a venal peasantry who would kill anything and everything just to send an extra lamb to the mart come September?
As many small voices in Mr Linklater’s article were keen to point out – none of this mud-slinging does the birds any good. (But to hell with the birds, right? – there are principles at stake here …)
Of course there are some bad guys in the mix. There are some atrocious people with large sporting estates who shouldn’t be left in charge of a window box, let alone a few thousand acres of upland Britain. But there are plenty of estate owners who know fine well the cost of land-management and that a paid gamekeeper keeping fox numbers in check benefits the curlew and the plover as much as they protect the grouse. There are no doubt some hill farmers so bludgeoned by our industrial demand for cheap food that they’d gladly kill every bird on the moor. But for the most part these are the very people who know the value, not the price, of a drumming snipe at dusk. And yes, I daresay there are both distant bureaucrats within the RSPB and some wardens on the ground who’d gladly clear the people and their damned livestock off the land for a single calling corncrake (though it’s important too to note that crofting produces better habitat for such birds than any liveried Landrover ever will). But let’s also be real – the RSPB as a whole is a one of the great custodians of our wildlife and our wild places.
Apart from the bad apples in each of these boxes – and by all means go and individually prosecute them or run them out of town – there’s the other, more important, lot of bad guys. They are the quiet faceless ones who turn the good guys’ fire inwards. They have no principles of their own – just a perpetual desire for the freedom to go on making money. And there’s nothing they like more than turning the principled against the principled.
We are all more or less comfortable in the company of the three archetypes presented in the Guardian article – the RSPB member, the landowner and the hill farmer. But the land and the wildlife, at least for the foreseeable future, need all three. It is our job to get out of our comfortable trenches and do the far more difficult work of forming durable partnerships.
David Knowles
Ouch. Have done some ranting at both absentee landlords and the ‘sporting’ use of land which seems anything but sporting in the past. And not the very distant past. So, okay, I hear you. I am climbing out of my trench. I don’t really understand who the bad guys are as you describe them (maybe because they’re faceless, which sounds horrific), but I know I don’t want to join them. And I know I cannot, in my own life, live as I do without someone else owning and paying for the upkeep of the land on which I live. It is a gift to have a thought cracked open. Thank you.
I think the call to form “durable partnerships” is an admirable one, a seeking of common ground which isn’t at all easy in light of sometimes radically different perspectives of what land is, what wildlife is for. But what is so dismaying about Linklater’s article is its utter misinformation, its dubious correlations and untruths, its lack of basic ecological understanding. It is an article so charged with bias – ironically the same charge he levels at the RSPB, an organisation which over the years I haven’t always agreed with – that he makes himself essentially irrelevant to any real discussion of common ground. It’s hard to believe that he was an editor after reading the litany of distortions here. Or maybe it isn’t. The point is that articles like these aren’t about fostering partnerships; they’re about shoring up a divide, and as George Monbiot says about Linklater’s massive Scottish estate, among other things, that he amazingly neglected to mention in the article, there are powerful forces at play, keen to retain their privileges. Judging from his complete lack of understanding regarding bird life (sparrowhawks and golden eagles come to mind from the article, as well as his neat sidestepping of Defra’s plans to destroy buzzard nests by suggesting they intended only to “relocate” them) and fundamental principles of ecology, it’s difficult to believe that birds were a concern of his at all, unless they’re the types that can be shot. Crofters play an important role in the preservation and sustainabiity of British landscapes, but articles like this only weaken the connections between wildlife organisations and rural communities, casting aspersions and lies that end up sticking at times.
I certainly agree re. Linklater’s article, Julian, and this clearly wasn’t intended as a full critique of that (I think Mark Avery has done much better on a recent blog (http://markavery.info/2012/08/17/raptor-haters-magnus-linklater/). It was intended as a very simple perspective from people who live on a croft in a wild place (and crofters are sometimes are tarred with the same brush as big landowners) and who care deeply about protecting the land and its wildlife and admire what RSPB does in that respect very deeply too.
But regardless of the distortions in Linklater’s particularly bad piece of writing, it is also true that when you travel Scotland and the islands you do hear concern about the way RSPB manages its business from people who actually live here! – rather than a bunch of people in the Guardian offices in London, or smart Edinburgh houses, or elsewhere – and who both have direct experience of it AND who are as ‘ecological’ in their thinking as can be. Generally that gets worked out along the way, because we all recognise that RSPB have been hugely important in protecting places that no-one else has the will to protect, and we love them for that and continue to need them badly as a powerful force for good.
Our point here is simply as ever to say that Linklater paints a picture of an apparent divide, and it isn’t that straightforward. At the risk of over-simplifying, yes, maybe sometimes landowners who are seen as the bad guys can be good, and RSPB who are seen as the good guys can be bad. Or maybe it’s usually the other way around. Whatever! That’s always the way of things, and what’s more important is to get on with protecting the birds and the wild places, and stop bickering. Landowners, big and small, and crofters can and have joined forces very successfully with RSPB before. There doesn’t have to be a war. And looking at it from a perspective actually on the ground in one of the places Linklater’s talking about, surrounded by sea eagles, ravens and vast numbers of other protected birds, there isn’t.