The head agister of the New Forest commoners has praised the role of controlled burning in preventing wildfires at the national park, which contains large areas of heather moorland.
Speaking on a recent episode of Countryfile, Jonathan Gerelli told presenter Adam Henson that burning small patches of gorse and heather was invaluable in preventing the fires and promoting the growth of new gorse plants, which are a vital food source for the Forest’s iconic ponies.
“Forestry England have a great team that do all this controlled burning and it’s a really, really important thing to help regenerate the gorse and the heather within the Forest. And then we create that firebreak in between so it’s a really important tool for helping managing wildfires,” Girelli said.
The comments yet again undermine the position of groups like the RSPB and Natural England, who have turned against prescribed burning in the uplands in favour of more modish techniques like rewilding.
The results have been disastrous. The wildfire that broke out on Saddleworth Moor in 2018 ignited on land where Natural England had imposed a de facto ban, with heather burning only permissible every 23 years. The fire destroyed some 2,400 acres of moorland, releasing 40,000 tonnes of CO2 and exposing 5 million people to toxic pollution including lead and cadmium.
Nevertheless, Natural England persists in outlawing techniques in the northern uplands that are actively praised in the south of England. New regulations imposed by the quango in 2021 have led to a 73% reduction in fuel load management on moorlands, leaving these landscapes even more at risk from wildfires.
Gerelli goes on to praise the ancient wisdom of controlled burning, which has been practiced on areas of heather moorland in both the north and south of the country for centuries.
“We benefit from those generations of knowledge. The commoners have been here for many, many hundreds of years and when you look round, we’ve not done too bad a job of maintaining this marvellous place here, so hopefully it’ll be here for many hundreds of years to come,” he explains.
Natural England and the RSPB are of course aware of the success that groups like the New Forest commoners and Forestry England are experiecing in preventing wildfire through traditional management techniques. The crucial difference is that in the north of England, controlled burning helps to support driven grouse shooting – so obviously this evidence is ignored.
Nor is this wilful blindness restricted to wildfires. In 2023, a groundbreaking report by Prof. Andreas Heinemeyer from the University of York showed that controlled burning actually results in greater levels of carbon capture on moorlands over a ten year period than alternative management techniques like mowing. Nevertheless, the RSPB has ceased all burning on its moorlands and called on the government for even tighter regulations on the practice.
Failure to listen to upland practitioners, including agisters and gamekeepers, could have ruinous consequences for wildfires in Britain. Last week, the Moorland Association wrote to the Home Secretary (who is responsible for wildfire management) to warn her of the threat posed by increasing fuel loads on Britain’s moorlands.
“Huge wildfires are inevitable when vegetation is allowed to grow unchecked. Sooner or later there will be a spark. Add low humidity and strong winds and the horrors of Los Angeles follow,” wrote Andrew Gilruth, Chief Executive of the Moorland Association.
Unlike California, where low water levels and unmanaged scrubland was the result of political neglect, in Britain the growing risk of wildfires is the result of conscious policy decisions aimed at undermining driven grouse shooting. How long until we all start to feel the heat?