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Ban the Burn campaigners are in St George’s Square this weekend, collecting signatures for their petition to Natural England and Defra to ban burning and draining on blanket bog. Scores of people had signed the petition by mid-Saturday afternoon. Many … Continue reading
All are invited to join a Ban the Burn walk around the Walshaw Dean area of Walshaw Moor Estate on Sunday 23rd September. The walk will be an opportunity for people who want to see the site and haven’t been before.
Here’s Natural England’s map of this unit of the Site of Special Scientific Interest:
The map shows that Heather Hill and units 48 and 51 to each side of it are in unfavourable condition and not recovering (no change)
Ban The Burn launch from Jenny Shepherd on Vimeo.
In a post titled £2.5m uplands agreement seems to sidestep Burning Code, I asked why Natural England has given Walshaw Moor Estate an explicit exemption from the Heather and Grass Burning Code.
I’ve sent an Environmental Information Regulations request to Natural England, asking them why they have done this.
Round 1 – National England fails to answer my question
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Here’s where you can watch the LIFE Active Blanket Bog in Wales from Gorgors Cymru . The LIFE Active Blanket Bog project is restoring active blanket bogs in Berwyn and Migneint Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) in North Wales over a five year period.
I have created a petition on the 38 Degrees website.
Please sign it and pass on the link to others, if you haven’t already.
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Here’s an outline of the key points in the Walshaw Moor Estate (WME) Environmental Stewardship Agreement and the related March 2012 Natural England/WME Notice of Proposal and Consent to Carry Out Operations on a Site of Special Scientific Interest.
Information I have obtained from Environmental Information Regulations requests suggests that the Environmental Stewardship Agreement may be based on a flawed environmental impact assessment (technically called an Appropriate Assessment). If this is in fact the case, this raises the need for an investigation into the appropriateness and legality of the Environmental Stewardship Agreement. Ban the Burn campaigners are asking the European Commission to investigate this question.
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The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee took oral evidence on wildlife crime on Wednesday 16 May 2012, as part of its audit of “how effectively the Environment Agency and Natural England enforce laws about wildlife crime.”
From the transcript, the audit seems pretty lax. The MPs’ superficial questions failed to focus in adequate detail on whether Natural England has effectively enforced wildlife protection laws on Walshaw Moor Estate (WME).
As a result, the European Commission is the next port of call for organisations and individuals who want to investigate whether Natural England has acted unlawfully, in failing to provide adequate conservation protection to the Walshaw Moor Estate Site of Special Scientific Interest and Natura 2000 site.
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Dodging the odd rainstorm the LibDem MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside, Rebecca Taylor, today walked to the blanket bog on Walshaw Moor with Ban the Burn campaigners, to see for herself how draining and burning have damaged this valuable habitat.
Rebecca Taylor MEP (left) hearing about the Ban the Burn campaign from Keith Wilson and Dongria Kondh
Simon Thorp, the Director of the Heather Trust, has blogged about Ban the Burn, under the title National Campaign against moorland bog-burning. The thing I like about his blog is that he responds to comments and there’s a bit of a dialogue in the comments on the post. He says in a reply in the comments section that his work for The Heather Trust includes working with the IUCN UK Peatland Programme and he runs the Peatland Working Group in Scotland, and that
“I am all for healthy peatland and active bogs, but I think we need to be careful about how we achieve this.”