For whom are our national parks?

It's funny what image the term 'national park' conjures up - an area of thriving nature, of protected ecosystems perhaps? Look beneath the aesthetics of a landscape, and think about the ecology, and suddenly our national parks look a lot less worthy of that title.

Browsed oak seedling on Loughrigg Fell.

Is this what we want from our national parks? An oak seedling, a struggling reminder of the ancient woodland that once covered the hills - in this instance, Loughrigg in the Lake District - being browsed repeatedly and doomed never to become a tree. Consider the ancient woodland flowers earlier in the year, which manage to persist only because of bracken providing a surrogate canopy - they tell you all about what the natural ecosystem was before sheep prevented the forest from regenerating.

Lesser celandine on Loughrigg Fell, indicating the previously wooded landscape.

It's interesting how in our national parks, the landscape is generally devoid of wildlife and instead dominated by a single species of non-native, destructive animal called 'sheep'. That's no exaggeration - the only other 'wildlife' I saw on a walk up Loughrigg last month was a raven. Is this what a national park should be like?

Our national parks, arguably our most cherished areas and supposedly most protected, are far removed from the "thriving natural environments" Defra claims they are. I wonder what John Muir, one of the founders of the national parks as an idea, would think of ours dominated by what he termed "hoofed locusts"? Would they even be considered worthy of the title?

These areas, supposedly for everyone, are actually managed by, and for, a tiny minority of land-owners and farmers who bear no-one's interests in mind except their own. Lets look at the facts. Sheep farming is uneconomical and entirely supported by taxpayer money - the average upland farm actually loses £10,000 farming sheep before managing to gain £30,000 in taxpayer-funded subsidy. Yes, that's right, in a time of austerity our tax money is the only thing keeping sheep farming continuing, unlike most other industries that became unprofitable.

Ah, but we need it for food security. Or do we? According to Defra, lamb is a declining in popularity and makes up a mere 1% of our diets. Diets that, we are increasingly aware, should have less meat in them. So, our national parks are widely devoted to farming an animal that we don't actually need, hardly a 'staple crop'.

OK, well it's ecologically beneficial, right? Well, if you listen to the agricultural lobby, and their pawns like the National Park Authorities, you could be mistaken for thinking this. But it's simply not true. Read peer-reviewed, independent journals, or buy a pint for anyone working in conservation or land management and promise them anonymity, and you'll find no-one who believes that one iota. Look at the bracken, tormentil and foxgloves that are the only things that manage to survive among the grass of the grazed uplands, and tell me that's nature conservation. For those of us who want to plant trees, help peatbogs recover, well this needs bribery in the form of even more subsidy to achieve even modest gains, rather than being part and parcel of being a national park.

A single juniper bush on Loughrigg, shredded of lower foliage thanks to
sheep and deer, is the sole survivor of a previous patch of upland juniper scrub

So it's uneconomical, ecologically detrimental, and unnecessary - and yet agriculturalists successfully take the landscape as theirs in what should be the most highly protected of all areas. They're not naturally bare and devoid of woodland - they're like this because of farming, pure and simple. It's for no-one's benefit but theirs. If you believe that's an overstatement, consider this from the Farmers Guardian: "Despite farmer fears ‘extreme conservationists’ could reverse the work of the industry". Or statements that "if the land wasn't grazed by sheep it would be just scrub or woodland", without questioning why that is a bad thing or what wider society would like - an arrogant assumption that farming is doing the public a favour, despite surveys finding that the public would like to see wilder national parks with more trees and woodland. If this isn't not the industry considering the landscape 'theirs', I don't know what is. That's not to say there should be no farming in national parks, but should it be so dominant, from the valley bottoms to the top of the hills, at the detriment of nature? 

Wordsworth considered the Lake District "a sort of national property". In reality, it and other national parks belong to the agricultural lobby (or grouse-shooting landowners), regardless of the needs of both nature and the wider human society. What a betrayal of the idea behind national parks.