Nature Conservation. Peter Marren
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Название: Nature Conservation

Автор: Peter Marren

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Природа и животные

Серия:

isbn: 9780007406029

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СКАЧАТЬ countries have advantages denied to larger ones. People know one another; there is a lot of cross-participation and a pervading sense of identity. It is important to ‘belong’, and to be seen to be ‘people-centred’. CCW might have been straining a little too hard in describing its goal as ‘a beautiful land washed by clean seas and streams, under a clear sky; supporting its full diversity of life, including our own, each species in its proper abundance, for the enjoyment of everybody and the contented work of its rural and sea-faring people’. But behind this embarrassing guff there was an open-faced willingness to start afresh, and in a spirit of community.

      CCW is much the smallest of the three country agencies, and began life with a relatively miserly budget of £14.5 million. With that it has to administer over 1,000 SSSIs covering about 10 per cent of the land surface of Wales, attend to all matters of rural access and carry out government policy on environment-sensitive farming. Its governing council was, like the others, well stuffed with farmers, businessmen and ‘portfolio collectors’, but scarcely anyone whom a conservationist would regard as a conservationist. Presumably CCW relied on their worldly wisdom more than their knowledge of the natural world. CCW’s chairman for the first ten years, Michael Griffith, was a Welsh establishment figure with farming interests and, it is said, a gift for getting on with ministers of all hues and opinions. The present chairman is another prominent farmer, a former chairman of the NFU in Wales. CCW’s first two chief executives both had a professional background in countryside planning rather than nature conservation, Ian Mercer in local government and National Parks, Paul Loveluck in the Welsh Office and the Welsh Tourist Board. Inevitably, therefore, it was the ‘holistic’ view of things that prevailed (‘I work for the rural communities of Wales, not for wildlife,’ was a phrase often heard on CCW corridors, perhaps to annoy the ‘Victorian naturalists’ from the former NCC). Senior posts were found for people with no background in nature conservation. People who ran processes were more highly valued than those who worked on the product. Some believed that core wildlife activities were being neglected at the expense of access work that overlapped with the remit of local authorities. Any blurring of functional boundaries held political dangers for a small, newly established body.

      CCW went through much the same time-consuming reorganisations as its big sisters in Scotland and England. It organised its staff into Area Teams and Policy Groups, and delegated authority downwards while reserving all important decisions (and, it is said, many trivial ones also) to headquarters. Like English Nature, CCW was keener on mitigation than confrontation, especially where jobs were at stake. For example, it bent over backwards to accommodate the development of the ‘Lucky Goldstar’ electronics factory on part of the Gwent Levels SSSI. On the other hand a series of high-profile cases gave CCW a chance to make itself useful, such as the proposed orimulsion plant in Pembrokeshire, which it successfully opposed, and the wreck of the Sea Empress, from which it drew worthwhile lessons. CCW’s bilingual reports generally seem more down-to-earth and better written than the grammatically strained productions of English Nature and Scottish Natural Heritage, perhaps because they are concerned more with events and issues than with internal administration.

      John Lloyd Jones, chairman of CCW. (CCW)

      Among CCW’s most distinctive policies are its championing of environment-friendly schemes such as Coed Cymru, introduced in 1985 to regenerate Wales’ scattered natural woodlands, and its administration of Tir Cymen (now renamed Tir Gofal), Wales’ integrated agri-environmental scheme. Judging by the desire of the Welsh Office, and later the Welsh Assembly, to take over Tir Cymen, it has been a success. Like SNH,

      CCW has also done its best to promote the Welsh countryside as ‘a leisure resource’, producing a stream of colourful publications, and devoting loving attention to matters like footpaths and signs. Some grumble that in its determined wooing of ‘customers’ and ‘partners’, CCW has been neglecting its statutory role of protecting wildlife. Possible signs of weakness are CCW’s failure to publish comprehensive data on the condition of SSSIs (although it admits that most of the National Nature Reserves in its care are in unfavourable condition), and its slow progress on Biodiversity Action compared with its sister agencies, earning it a black mark in the review, Biodiversity Counts. It has had to struggle hard to retain its authority, and seems much less firmly entrenched in Welsh affairs than its English and Scottish sisters.

      The relationship of CCW with the turbulent political climate of Wales in the 1990s is a story in itself, which I continue on p. 54.

       Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC)

      Headquarters: Monkstone House, City Road, Peterborough PE1 1JY Mission: it is not allowed to have one.

      The JNCC is the forum through which the three country nature conservation agencies deliver their statutory responsibilities for Great Britain as a whole, and internationally. These are primarily the drawing up of ‘Euro-sites’ for the Natura 2000 network (SPAs, SACs), the setting of common standards, and advising government on Great Britain-related nature conservation matters. Its committee, chaired by Sir Angus Stirling, formerly the National Trust’s director, consists of three independent members, along with two representatives from each of the country agencies, and one each from the Countryside Agency and the ‘Council for Nature Conservation and the Countryside’ (CNCC) in Northern Ireland. The JNCC is based in Peterborough, with a small sub office in Aberdeen, specialising in seabirds and cetaceans. All members of its staff are assigned from one of the three country agencies. In 2000, it had 84 staff and a budget of £4,735,000. Among the Committee’s projects were some grand-scale surveys inherited from the NCC, especially the Marine Nature Conservation Review, the Geological Conservation Review and the Seabirds at Sea project. JNCC also runs the National Biodiversity Network and publishes British Red Data Books, as well as a stream of scientific reports. Its most important task was co-ordinating the UK proposals for Special Areas of Conservation (SACs), based on submissions by the four country agencies (including Northern Ireland). Denied any real corporate identity, the JNCC is nonetheless the principal centre of scientific know-how in British nature conservation.

      The JNCC has a problem: it lacks an independent budget and its own staff. Its annual grant has to be ‘ring-fenced’ from the three agencies, who, along with their control of the purse strings, also dominate its committee. Their influence has not been benign. From the start, the JNCC was seen as a refuge for reactionaries from the old NCC who refused to move with the times. Senior refugees from the NCC’s scientific team quickly discovered how much they had lost influence. People with international reputations found themselves pitched into low status jobs, or dispensed with altogether once a Treasury review, brought at the request of English Nature, had scrapped half of the JNCC’s senior posts and humiliatingly downgraded its director’s post. The JNCC’s first chairman, Sir Fred Holliday, a former NCC chairman, resigned after five months, complaining that he had been kept in the dark over the Scottish SSSI appeals procedure. In 1996, its new chairman, Lord Selborne, traded a leaner structure – downsizing its staff from 104 to 66 – for more autonomy within its core responsibilities. Even so, the JNCC was visibly struggling against the devolution tide. The four country agencies often failed to reach a consensus view, or indeed take much interest in matters of UK concern. As this book went to press, a government review body has recommended that the JNCC became a separate body within the newly organised government department, DEFRA (the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs).

      Sir Angus Stirling, chairman of the JNCC. (JNCC)

       The whip hand: the agencies and their budgets

      As СКАЧАТЬ