A sort of national property?

On Sunday, UNESCO will make a decision about whether or not to make the Lake District a World Heritage Site (WHS). Not for the first time - two attempts to recognise it as a site with outstanding natural heritage failed because, well, ecologically it's pretty poor. So this bid is based instead of cultural heritage, pinned firmly and foremost on hill farming, the area's overwhelming land use.

Read the National Park Partnership's management plan and you'd be drawn into believing that our rosy-cheeked 'guardians of the countryside' live in harmony with nature, tending to their flocks amongst the wild flowers and with the utmost of sensitivity. They're responsible for looking after this beautiful landscape, with its 'naturally' open hills and smattering of copses of mature trees.

Hmmm. Dig a bit deeper. The agro-pastoral tradition celebrated by the plan and the bid is, in reality, ranching sheep in every last corner of the Lakes that isn't a town. Rosy-cheeked farmers are propped up by our tax money, because they make a loss on every sheep they own. But that's OK, because it's cultural heritage, right? Well, no doubt that hill farming has a long history in the Lakes - but so too does mining, quarrying, coppicing and even planting larch blocks. And they're not celebrated, and certainly not continued at public expense; perhaps they don't have as good links to the Conservative government as agricultural and land-owning lobbyists.

Well, OK, but we need sheep for nature conservation right? Maintaining vital semi-natural habitats? Wrong - that same old argument gets trotted out time after time, not only by National Park Authorities but also by those utterly unbiased landowner organisations like the Countryside Alliance. But it's a fallacy - biodiversity in the Lakes has fallen, water quality deteriorated, soils destroyed, habitats degraded. Why are there so many mature, lovely trees, but no young ones growing to replace them? Anything to do with sheep, perhaps?

Dig deeper into that management plan, find the stats buried under picture after picture of Herdwick sheep, and they paint a different picture. That 'natural' beauty? Completely unnatural. Have a walk up Loughrigg in spring and see the woodland wild flowers clinging on in what is now grazed common - it tells you all you need to know about the natural ecosystem that should be there. The "wealth of wildlife" lacks any predator bigger than a fox (and even they get shot), let alone creatures like pine martens, hen harriers, polecats, and even now golden eagles.

So it's back to the cultural heritage argument; it's worth subsidising a loss-making industry causing huge ecological problems because of our rosy-cheeked guardians of the countryside. But I see little shepherding out there in the Lakes, few hay meadows or mixed farming systems; I see bright-green, over-fertilised fields, farmers doing the bare minimum they can whilst claiming subsidy for every last square-metre, sheep chucked out on hills all year round. 

The fact that this bid exists is laughable; the fact it may become reality is frightening, legitimising continued, unprofitable, damaging sheep everywhere, as far as the eye can see. Paranoia? As the Federation of Cumbria Commoners said, WHS status would give hill farming "a powerful weapon" to fight for its continuation, whilst the Lakes floods again and again, woodlands become moribund and disappear, and wildlife in what is still technically an IUCN protected area remains a shadow of what it could be. Protected areas that should protect natural ecosystems, not areas where the land is completely managed by a non-native and arguably invasive woolly species and where little if any land is left to follow natural dynamics.

Ironically, the third "outstanding universal value" of the Lakes is the conservation movement that started with Wordsworth and Ruskin, fighting to protect what they perceived as a natural and wild landscape from industrial threats. Let's celebrate that conservation movement now... Oh, hang on, it's villified for buying land to farm more sensitively, for trying to re-naturalise rivers, for trying some form of land management other than sheep farming. What about industrial threats to the Lake District today? Well, come Monday we may be internationally celebrating the biggest one there is - sheep farming.