A Peak District landowner dismissed rewilding as "just a fad" in response to calls for better land management ahead of Brexit and the 'Glorious Twelfth'.
Geoff Eyre, owner of Mill Farm in the Hope Valley area of the Peak District, said he would be open to changing his farming practices were he paid for it, but he felt unmanaged rewilding - allowing nature to reclaim a piece of land independent of human intervention - would be impractical:
"If I just left a piece of ground some of the year it would just go to scrubby trees.
"You wouldn't see anything, it would be boring. There'd be no little birds. Grey squirrels would take over," he said.
Mr Eyre, who owns a grouse moor himself and runs another for the National Trust, was speaking ahead of the grouse shooting season which begins on 12 August (the 'Glorious Twelfth').
Campaigners have criticised the style of intensive land management used on grouse moors as bad for biodiversity and the ecosystem. Indeed, practices such as the routine burning of heather - which allows newer shoots, on which the grouse feed, to grow - as well as drainage of the land and the legal and illegal persecution of predators, have proved controversial.
Dr Alexander Lees, a lecturer in tropical ecology at Manchester Metropolitan University, said:
"If you wanted to go for maximised biodervisity then you would start to let natural processes take over.
"At the moment I live in the Peak District. I wouldn't choose to go there if I didn't live there, because there's very little to see. If you want to go and see exciting wildlife you have to go to the Białowieża Forest in Poland or somewhere else these days."
Dr Lees, who gained attention in February for his "avian rewilding manifesto" (below), added: "It's important to specify driven grouse shooting rather than just any old shooting. Driven grouse shooting is an extremely intensive management process, because you have to generate a huge surplus of birds."
In driven grouse shooting, a line of human 'beaters' flush the birds out, and chase them towards stationary shooters (or 'Guns'). There are other incarnations of the sport, such as 'walked-up' shoots, where the Guns themselves flush the grouse out. These typically involve less intensive habitat management.
Mark Avery, an environmental campaigner whose book Inglorious calls for an outright ban on driven grouse shooting, argues that the management of grouse moors hinders the provision of ecosystem services. These are the benefits provided to humans by ecosystems - examples of such benefits, described by Mr Avery, are represented in the infographic below:
Mr Avery, former Conservation Director of the RSPB, added that the Peak District and similar areas should also offer a greater variety of wildlife:
"National parks ought to be great places to see wild Britain. And at the moment, that isn't what you see in them," he said.
However, according to Mr Eyre, land management is important for biodiversity:
"It's a no-brainer. If you don't manage a piece of ground, there'd be no wildlife there. All you'd get are predators.
"I've got some land that I’ve let go all wild. You can’t get through it. It’s all bracken and dense scrub," he said.
An opportunity?
As part of Brexit, the UK will be leaving the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which subsidises farmers in its member states.
Therefore, the way in which financial support is given to UK farmers will need to be reconsidered.
In its '25 Year Environment Plan', published in January of this year, the government stated its overall intention to create a "cleaner, greener country for us all" and to "arrest the decline in native species and improve our biodiversity."
These proposals include a system of paying "public money for public goods" which will, in theory, reward farmers for working in a way which helps to enhance and restore the environment. However, it appears that this scheme will only be in operation in England.
Mr Avery said: "If we're going to leave the European Union then we will have more opportunity to make our own decisions about how we support upland land use, and what type of upland land use we want, than we've ever had before.
"I would like to see landowners being rewarded for delivering the public goods, such as carbon storage in forests but also in peat bogs, clean water, and reduced flood risk.
"And that could well be money for old rope for them. Because rewilding, which often means not doing anything like as much as you're doing at the moment in the uplands, would deliver that stuff, and they would get paid for it."
Mr Avery added that any change to land management practices would need to begin with politicians rather than landowners:
"We're not going to change the future of the uplands very quickly by chatting to the people who own the uplands. I've tried that for years and years and years, and haven't got very far. We need political change," he said.
However, Mr Eyre said he would be open to a discussion about the environment, and recently joined the Peak District's first Farmer Cluster, a concept backed by Natural England. His particular cluster - the 'Hope Valley Farmers' - are a group of about 25 private landowners aiming to deliver bottom-up environmental management in the face of Brexit and increasing public pressure more generally.
Mr Eyre added: "All the people that have joined it [the cluster] understand that there might be a change to more environmentally-friendly crops, things like that.
"If the NGOs [Non-Governmental Organisations] can get loads of money for managing the environment, why can't we manage the environment? Once we know what people are willing to pay out of their own taxes, it can be produced."
Dr Lees, of Manchester Metropolitan University, agreed that discussion and compromise on both sides of the rewilding debate is necessary:
"We live in a more and more polarising world. And I think the media probably has a lot to do with that, for trying to stir up the hornet's nest.
"There's kind of an old guard on both sides. And maybe there's new blood coming through and realising we have to have more nuanced arguments," he said.
