What makes a wildfire wild? In the first SideCountry episode, Richard Prideaux, George Browne and Amy Green follow that deceptively simple question into the increasingly urgent problem of fire in the British countryside. The conversation begins with a peregrine hitting George’s window and Australia’s alleged fire-spreading raptors, before turning to the fires that have affected moorland, woodland, farmland and communities across Britain. They discuss human ignition, disposable barbecues and campfires; the appeal of ‘voluntary outlawdom’ outdoors; and the difficult balance between greater access, personal freedom and responsibility. There are no neat answers. Rewetting, prescribed burning, cutting, grazing and changes in land management all enter the argument, along with climate change, fuel load, deep-burning peat and the tribal politics surrounding rewilding and grouse-moor management. The result is a wide-ranging discussion about risk, blame and what a more fire-resilient countryside might actually require — with a flaming buzzard, cultural burning and the Theft Act taking the occasional supporting role.
In this episode
- Firehawks, peregrines and opportunistic wildlife
- What British agencies and the public mean by ‘wildfire’
- Human ignition, disposable barbecues, lanterns and campfires
- Climate change, dry weather and increasingly unpredictable conditions
- Rewetting, prescribed burning, cutting, grazing and fuel management
- Cool burns, deep peat fires and ecological damage
- Access, freedom, responsibility and enforcement
- Why the wildfire debate so quickly becomes ecopolitical
Links
Credits
Presented by Richard Prideaux, George Browne and Amy Green
Edited and Produced for SideCountry by Amy Green.
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This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.
George Browne: So do you know what happened to me earlier this week?
Richard Prideaux: I'm sure you're going to tell us.
George Browne: Well, I am. I was sitting in my kitchen slash living room slash office minding my own business. And one side of the whole building is plate glass windows and there was a sort of thump against the glass. And I turned around and what I’m 90% sure was a juvenile peregrine had crashed into the glass and was sitting atop my barbecue looking a bit baffled. And it only really sat there for a couple of seconds and I didn't get a proper look at it, but I'm almost certain it was a peregrine.
Richard Prideaux: So hang on, you're in this sort of barn-like space that you call a house and you now have herds of prey throwing themselves to the window. What have you got inside that you're trying to lure them in with?
George Browne: Well, I'm not specifically trying to lure them in there, although there was also a mouse in here the other day, so it could have been that. But I don't think it was.
Amy Green: Well, I mean, if it ended up on your barbecue, maybe it was just trying to tell you something.
Richard Prideaux: Actually, that's a point. Yeah. Is it asking for an invite?
George Browne: Yeah. It would like a sausage, please.
Amy Green: Some smoked mouse, if you will.
Richard Prideaux: That's the thing. Maybe the birds of prey are getting fed up of raw food and they want to actually cook something. I mean, that's what's happening with those firehawks. Is that they're trying to invent barbecue.
George Browne: Yeah, they're barbecuing them.
Richard Prideaux: These firehawks, are they real?
George Browne: I think it’s unclear. It's sort of culturally documented, I think. It's specifically in Australia, isn't it? Where there's sort of two or three species that definitely sort of use fire to hunt, but whether they're actually deliberately spreading the fire, I think is a bit less certain.
Richard Prideaux: Because, I mean, it just is an evolutionary thing. They would have had to have They're not doing fire by friction. They're not sat there with a bow drill or a fire plough for getting a spark initially. So they must be finding wildfire. Are they then spreading that wildfire to somewhere else?
George Browne: Well, certainly that's what I've been given to understand is that they will pick up a burning stick and fly with it and then drop it somewhere in order to spread the fire. So yes, it's a wildfire caused by lightning or whatever, but they then spread it further by picking up these burning sticks and dropping them. But that has to be, if that is what they're doing, that has to be a learned thing, right? That's not an instinctive action.
Richard Prideaux: I mean, Australia is weird anyway. They have all of the weirdest animals. They have all the animals that just decide we're going to do things differently. Amy, you did actual conservation work in Australia. Did you?
Amy Green: I did.
Richard Prideaux: A firehawk’s a thing? A fire bat’s a thing.
Amy Green: Okay, so firehawks, I don't know. It wasn't something I came across, but I was very much focused in on bats, as you mentioned. And bats do not like fire, so fire bats are not going to exist. I mean, the bats are fantastic in that they spread seed because they eat fruit, and so they fly around following, similar to monkeys and things like that in rainforests where they know when the different flowers and the different fruits are going to be in season and then they travel around to them. So they pollinate flowers and they eat fruits and spread the seeds of different fruits and things. So they do that, but that's not, that's because they need the food. That's not a behaviour that creates, I don't know, it's just not the same as a firehawk plucking a burning branch out of somewhere, flying until presumably until its feet start burning and then dropping it to create more fire.
Richard Prideaux: So is that the thing, is it the sort of difference between intentional behaviour because it's trying to achieve a certain outcome versus accidental effect from some other activity, a firehawks seeing flickering, moving thing, thinking, well, that must be prey. I'm going to grab this end of it, fly off with it. Oh, God, that's hot.
Amy Green: Maybe that's it. I mean, because the other alternative is that they saw indigenous peoples using fire to flush prey out and then they copied that behaviour or something like that.
George Browne: Would be a very intelligent thing for a bird to be doing.
Amy Green: But you do see crows using sticks to pull things out of trees and things. They use them to get grubs, don't they? They smash up snails and all sorts of things like that to get to what's inside. So it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
Richard Prideaux: Isn't that thing of getting something out of a jar or out of a tube one of the tests they use for animal intelligence? So it's the... They give it to chimps where they put food inside a jar that has a narrower neck. And if they put their hand in, they can put their hand in, but if they make a fist around the object, they can't withdraw their fist holding the object. And the test is to see whether they tip the jar up to pour things out. So there's a base level intelligence. Although I notice actually it's something I fail quite often when we're doing sort of work on different things. If I put my hand in something, I'll grab that. Oh, I can't get my hand. Oh, wait, no, And it does sort of give me pause as to what my base level intelligence is.
George Browne: But of course, we've got firehawks in the UK as well. Do you see this? Well, this is a slightly different thing, but there was a buzzard that has been blamed for a field fire, I think because it crashed into the electrical cables.
Richard Prideaux: So was that sort of it was blamed for the field fire in the same way that a burning Messerschmitt in the summer of 1940 crashing into a field would have been? It was on fire.
George Browne: Exactly, yes, it was either the buzzard was on fire or the, you know, the thrashing electrical cables started the fire.
Richard Prideaux: Was it witnessed, this buzzard?
Amy Green: Yeah, there was somebody combining or something in the neighbouring field and they heard a bang turned around and saw a flaming buzzard drop from the electrical wires into the crop below and then it all set ablaze. That's the story that I've seen anyway. Does that correlate? Because that sounds feasible.
Richard Prideaux: Well, being scientific about it, spontaneous buzzard combustion could still be a thing, and it just happened to be near power lines when it spontaneously combusted.
George Browne: It has been really hot.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. I don't know, there's been a few times in the last few weeks in even here in North Wales where I felt like I might spontaneously combust at any second.
George Browne: It could have been a phoenix. It's a proper firehawk.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, that's true, actually. Was Dumbledore anywhere nearby?
Amy Green: When you said about spontaneous combustion, I thought, what did it recite some sign kind of? Magic words and just decide, right, I don't like this farmer. He's cutting down all the crop. He's getting rid of my prey. I'm just going to set his field on fire.
Richard Prideaux: Well, suppose that's the ultimate wildlife protest. You know, I don't like arable farming. I don't like edge-to-edge arable farming. You should have wildflower margins. Therefore, I'm going to set myself on fire and crash into it.
George Browne: Crikey, yeah. But I mean, it's interesting, you know, I think it was... I can't remember where I saw this, but somebody sent a photo of a little owl that had been eating barbecued insects from one of the wildfires in the UK recently. So it's interesting how, you know, although these fires are pretty devastating, you know, they do have this sort of, they do present an opportunity for some species as well.
Amy Green: To sample different food types.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: I suppose we found that wildlife has become very adaptive to human activity. And well, the last couple of days we've been working at an estate in Herefordshire and yesterday we were on top of a hill and they were doing the wheat, combining the wheat below us. And you can see a lag of about four strips. They'd sort of combined behind that, about four strips behind, so it was a bit quieter. You were starting to get all of the crows and the corvids coming down to presumably eat, well, what was left of the wheat, but also every small mammal that had been minced by the combine. You get this in stubble fields after a combine has been through. You do get inevitably something has been killed or something's been exposed out to the elements where it used to have four feet of, well, hopefully four feet of crop above it. And now it's It's just exposed to every predator and every opportunistic thing that comes through.
George Browne: Yeah, it's just another means of, and fire is just another example of that. The cover is gone and everything has been incinerated. So you come along and hoover up behind if you're an opportunistic carnivore.
Richard Prideaux: I like to think of myself as an opportunistic carnivore, but it's mostly sort of the clearance section in the supermarket as well.
George Browne: Yes, well, I'm an obligate carnivore.
Richard Prideaux: Another thing at this estate yesterday, because even though we've had a bit of rain, there was basically a no fire policy across the whole estate, but everywhere because They would really rather their woodlands and wildflower strips and hedgerows and things didn't go on fire. So even down to the group we were working with policing whether they were smoking or not and sort of exposed electronic devices, they were taking it very seriously. And it's really easy to see why, because big chunks of the UK seem to have been on fire recently.
George Browne: Yes, and we talk about wildfire, don't we? But the reality is that it's not really wild. We don't have wildfires that are started by lightning strikes, really. Nearly all wildfires in this country are anthropogenic in origin, aren't they?
Richard Prideaux: Yes.
George Browne: [unclear] butts or barbecues or—how was that one this year—somebody setting off fireworks?
Richard Prideaux: Fireworks in memory of somebody who drowned at the nearby reservoir, wasn't it?
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So that wildfire definition, you don't have to go very far into the comment section on any social media post about any one of these things to find somebody saying, well, it's not a wildfire, a human started it, which annoys me at almost cellular level, but I can't express entirely why.
George Browne: I think it sort of misses the point because actually, okay, so the fire was started by someone doing something dumb. That's nearly always the case. And that's, I think we can be rightfully annoyed about that. But then it's wild in the sense that it's out of control, not in the sense that it is not human generated, I think. And I think this is where, you know, the word wild is a bit of a foxy one, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: You've got wild camping and wild swimming and wild camping is camping but not on a campsite with sort of a leave no trace ethic, hopefully. And wild swimming is swimming but in a pool or a river or a lake or something like that away from a designated swimming area. So is wildfire just fire but outside of a designated area? It's not in a house, it's not in an industrial estate.
George Browne: Or I guess in someone's garden, it's out of control fire, isn't it? So outside of the bit that we consider civilised. And I guess this is slightly why, there's a big campaign right now, isn't there, to ban disposable barbecues, which everybody has decided are the principal cause of wildfire.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. I think some of the supermarkets have actually just said last night that they're going to do it.
Amy Green: I think some already had.
George Browne: Yeah, that's what I thought.
Amy Green: Is it Morrisons I think might be one that had already banned disposable barbecues. I mean, the other thing are those Chinese lanterns which often get set off as remembrance or celebrations and the number of images that you can find if you search online of things like cows or horses with a ring around them where a Chinese lantern has basically landed on them afterwards. It does kind of baffle me how these things still exist. And I say this having released them when I was younger at one point in time. In my defence, it was on the coast and they went out to sea, so they weren't going to do much harm.
Richard Prideaux: Well, say that to a sea turtle or a mackerel.
Amy Green: What, off the coast of Cardiff? No.
George Browne: Every now and again you see a video of them, don't you, being someone releasing them in a sort of suburban garden and they haven't thought about which way the wind's going and it just crashes into the neighbour's roof.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, I always think of stuff like this, that there's people have decided. Across at a national level, even though it's never been discussed, that if it's in an unofficial place, so if it's for sale in a shop or if it's on social media and it's a named account or you see an organisation doing it, therefore it must be allowed. It must be permitted. It's part of accepted behaviour.
George Browne: I think there's also a sense of a right to do it as well. Who are you to tell me not to? And I guess there's, so wild camping is another, I'm not a wild camper, but I know Richard, it's, you know, you have existed in that world and have done that. There's a bit of me that kind of understands the appeal of wild camping, going somewhere far away from everybody else and sort of, you know, doing the wild man thing. And quite a big part of that, in your romantic image of what that is, that involves a campfire. Without question. And I guess if you're the sort of person who doesn't like to be told you can't camp somewhere, you're probably also going to be a bit miffed about being told you can't have a campfire.
Richard Prideaux: I think for a lot of people, the outdoor space, oh God, I'm not to use terms like that. If I say green space, can you please eject me from the podcast immediately? The outdoor space, people go there because it is sort of a place you can exercise a level of agency. You can do something that you have a choice about what you're doing, whereas everything else feels like it has a lot of rules. It has a lot of either legal or cultural or just financial limitations.
George Browne: Sort of voluntary outlawdom, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: Yes. I don't think although sort of TV shows and media has helped with this. Sort of, you know, the hero sat dramatically in a forest with a lone campfire on their way to do the thing. Well, you're not doing that. It's a Thursday night and you're an accountant. You're not off to slay the dragon or whatever.
George Browne: Yeah.
Amy Green: That's a very good point. I mean, going back to this word wild, do you think that's part of the issue with all of these things is that the word wild has so many meanings nowadays. If you think of rewilding, wild landscapes, going off out into the wild, doing wild swimming, wild camping, and then wildfires, which almost seem to fall into a completely separate category of wild. It just seems to have far too many different definitions just for this one little word that, it gets very confusing. And I think that's possibly part of the problem with the conversation around all of this.
George Browne: Yes, and I think, particularly, with regard to wildfire, the commentary around these things is so predictable. You will have the rewilding lobby will immediately say, well, this wouldn't have happened if everything was rewilded because we'd have more resilient landscapes and everything would be wetter and it would all be fine. And the other side of the argument is, well, if the fuel load had been managed properly, this wouldn't have happened. Yeah, it is such a predictable thing. But this idea that wildness is inherently better than not wild is an interesting one.
Richard Prideaux: There's a just a very boring definition that just come up in the back of my brain, which, you know, it's too early and I haven't had enough caffeine yet, so maybe it should have been there earlier. The fire and rescue services sort of have a definition of wildfire, which is that they can't get their normal apparatus and people there in the normal kit. So they have wildfire fighting protective layers, which is not the same as the breathing apparatus kit and all the really heavy stuff that you use for going into a structure fire. So they have separate kits and separate designation or separate management plans for it. So I wonder whether some of that definition is sort of translated down. They do a press briefing with their media team to the whatever BBC News to talk about this fire. And they say we deployed a wildfire team and this was a wildfire and blah, blah, blah, blah. That becomes now that's a wildfire. Whereas something else, other bit of vegetation on fire in a garden wasn't a wildfire because they can get a fire engine there.
George Browne: That's very interesting. Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: I should have thought of that earlier. If I was a smarter person, I would have done, but I'm not.
George Browne: But I mean, obviously they do take a completely different, approach to say a house fire to tackle because they very quickly cover a vast area of land. And, you're sort of fighting the front of it, aren't you?
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. Or getting ahead of it.
George Browne: Or getting ahead of it, yeah. And the dangers are unbelievable. I said, is it Nethy Bridge was the village in Scotland that was evacuated because they didn't think they could slow the fire down and stop it ahead of the village? I mean, that is terrifying.
Amy Green: It is. It reminds me of, I often say this to Richard that Whenever there's all these reports coming from America, from the wildfires over there, from fires in California and what have you, or tornadoes or whatever it is, it always makes me more grateful to be living where we do, that we don't have so many natural weather events that cause so much destruction and that we don't have that as a problem here. But it does seem to be that this whole fires happening on, I was going to say, how do we not say wildfires, but wildfires effectively occurring is bringing that more and more. And is it just me or are they happening more nowadays than they did say 10 years ago?
George Browne: It's hard to say, isn't it? Because I think, you know, doing the work that we all do, they are so front and centre of our mind. So I would say that I have paid more attention to them in the last five years as well as I'm reasonably confident that there are more of them. I think sort of 2018 was the big, was it Saddleworth Moor in 2018 that caught fire and was, the smoke was in Manchester and it was really quite a big one. And I think that was the first one that I was sort of really aware of in a big way. I mean, I remember as a kid, we had a field fire here which is actually caused by someone chucking a fag butt out of the train window as it went past. But I think that I probably didn't think about wildfires in that sense until 2018 again. But I mean, we've talked about it already. It's been bloody hot. Everything is brown. Everything is dry. It was the same last year.
Richard Prideaux: I think it's the point of for this first episode, we are at the official point of the podcast being that climate change is real, although there is more discussion to be had. Is that where we are?
George Browne: Climate change is definitely real. I mean, there's no doubt about that.
Richard Prideaux: Because there are some corners though that you go to and you still have to have that discussion.
George Browne: Yeah, it's about 5% of our listeners have just switched off.
Richard Prideaux: But.
George Browne: It's about the all the while, is there an increase in wildfires because climate change exclusively? I don't think you can say that because although it's a factor in that everything is drier, there are other factors in play. Like I do think there are more people out doing dumb things. Management practices have changed in recent years. I think you have to factor all of those things in as well.
Richard Prideaux: There was a lot of talk when we were younger, because we're all sort of a similar age, that the climate was definitely heading in one direction, that change was going to be this and this and this, and by 2025 it would look like this. What has transpired is that actually what we have is a lot more unpredictability. We don't know, next year could be floods or summer and we could have a very dry winter.
George Browne: Much more chaotic weather systems.
Richard Prideaux: So the term I see a lot in sort of land management now is being climate resilient so that you are better able to handle the sort of swings from one extreme to the other. But this year, we've definitely had a lot more wildfire. We've had a lot more fuel load as well because of the previous years. There's more thing, there's been more vegetation growth in places, whether that's due to management or lack of management or just better climatic conditions. I know just in the woodlands that we manage, there's a lot more undergrowth in places than there were in the five years previously because we've had quite good growing conditions for wild plants and wild things. Just looking at the hills around here as well, we've got the Clwydian Range, National Landscape. I keep trying to say AONB, Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but they're not called that anymore.
George Browne: No, Why did they change that? I thought AONB was a perfectly decent descriptor.
Richard Prideaux: Because it's for the nation, I think. It's not beautiful, it's for the nation. It's a landscape for the nation.
George Browne: I see.
Amy Green: I think they might also want it to sound a bit more like National Park. That's part of my theory.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. But they manage that quite heavily upon the top with mowing for the heather and things like that to reduce the amount of heather there and to provide young growth, because there’s a black grouse project up there and a few other things. But just overall, there's way more vegetation there than there was say in 2010 when I was stomping around there with Mountain Rescue. There’s just more there now than there used to be. And if you look at old photos, we've been doing a lot of comparative photos of farms we're working with and what they look like in 1950 and aerial photos then compared to now. We have a hell of a lot more trees around. We have a hell of a lot more. So the hedgerows are bigger. The hedgerows are more extensive and you've got all the wildflower margins and sort of the unkept corners. There's a lot more of those now than there were in the middle of the 20th century. So more vegetation, more fuel load. When it does get dry and crispy, there's more to burn maybe.
George Browne: Yes. So is that because I mean, obviously the trees and the hedges is due to, you know, the changes in the way people are farming and the different incentives and so on. But fuel load management, I think there's been, I think we're still on the journey as far as fuel load management is concerned. So I think in the States and in Canada, they went really hard on just putting out all forest fires no matter what.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, fire suppression I think it's called or something like that.
George Browne: Yeah, and you know I think that they have now not completely reversed that policy, but they're doing a lot more sort of controlled burns, prescribed burning. And have you come across this idea of cultural burning?
Richard Prideaux: Yes. I mean, it's just back to the firehawks. Is this back to the cultural rights of the Northern Australian black kite?
George Browne: I wondered where you were going there. It is sort of cultural rights because humans have been using fire as a management tool almost since before we were humans. When people talk about, forests being cleared or clearings being made in forests in the south of England in prehistory, they weren't using stone axes. That would have been too difficult. You know, they'd have been burning. And I think, burning happens in the Savannah, in Africa, to encourage new growth. It happens in Australia. And I think in, various bits of North America, Canada and places like that, the indigenous tribes have now got a right to burn for cultural reasons, which is, the same thing. It's to encourage fresh growth and manage the landscape.
Richard Prideaux: It's also, the whole thing about the Amazon basin being so fertile and the soil being this black gold, this wonderful fertile soil. One of the more modern theories about that is that it's effectively thousands of thousands of years of biochar built up from burning and tradition and burning through there at lower levels. So you get a bit of canopy collapse, you get some open area developing and then you, when that is on fire, either through true wildfire or through human managed fire, you then get all of the charcoal, the very fine charcoal goes back into the soil and creates a very fine structure in the soil that makes it incredibly fertile. So it's this constant cycle of burn is actually what made the Amazon rainforest so fertile in the first place.
George Browne: That's fascinating. That's so interesting.
Richard Prideaux: I should have remembered that and put that in the show notes, shouldn't I? Can't pull these things out ahead of time. They are in my brain somewhere.
George Browne: I mean, I'm just old enough to remember when people would still burn stubbles after harvest, which was a method of controlling black grass and that kind of stuff. But I guess it must also have been putting some nutrients back into the soil in a different form than they otherwise, instead of ploughing it in. I mean, it's still a ploughing.
Richard Prideaux: This argument that the indigenous wildfire management for the British Isles is actually particularly if you look at the uplands, it is things like management of grouse moors and rotational burning on grouse moors, which is an argument that's starting to be made increasingly to provide another defence for traditional land management there.
George Browne: It's an interesting idea, isn't it? I think there's a slightly dangerous thing there that it perhaps gets tied in with some of the slightly more unhinged ends of our political spectrum, Rupert Lowe was on the radio the other day talking about indigenous Britons or whatever. I think that needs quite careful handling, but it is if you’re looking at it in terms of cultural practice. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Richard Prideaux: Does. I think it's sort of, that's the problem with when you talk about the word indigenous on anything to do with Britain, it either ends up being a discussion about colonial practices and where the wealth for that stately home came from and things like that. Or it becomes something about immigration immediately. And sort of, you know, well, I'm an ethnic native. Okay, well, are you Welsh? Are you Brythonic? I mean, how far back are we going for this indigenous practice? But if you were to look at how indigenous practices are evaluated by the UN, say, how long has that thing been happening in that country by this distinct people? Then I think there is an argument to be made for the sort of game management because it is only something like 200 years or something that something has to have been done for it to be an indigenous practice. It's just we're one of the oldest settled and civilised parts of the world in terms of continuous habitation. So we kind of got a head start. So everything here is an indigenous practice. Baking bread is an indigenous practice. Shouting at the French is an indigenous practice here.
Amy Green: I mean, ecologically speaking, it's quite interesting to think that in places like Australia, there are species which are completely reliant on fire in order to survive and to pass their genes down to the next generation for their seeds to actually germinate, etc, etc. In the UK, I can't think of ever hearing anybody talk about something which is reliant on fire. Which kind of shows that in the past we haven't had wildfires in this sense that has created a reliance on them that's made an evolutionary mark.
Richard Prideaux: Oh, I see what you mean. We don't have a certain species of pine trees that need to have heat in order to activate the cone to scatter the seeds and things like that.
Amy Green: Exactly that, yeah. So that kind of, it's an indication that like natural wildfires, as you were talking about before with lightning strike and things. Where those would have happened in places like Australia and South Africa and America. We don't have those here, but we do have species like grouse, which really are reliant on management to create the right sort of habitat for them to survive in upland areas.
George Browne: Yeah, fresh new growth is what they need, isn't it? So how does that come about without fire?
Amy Green: Because that wasn't a natural adaptation. That wasn't a natural co-evolution with wildfire’s presence or anything. That's something more human-made, maybe.
Richard Prideaux: Well, when you were working for the council team that became part of the National Landscape, wasn’t that when they started to move from heather burning to heather mowing somewhere in that time.
Amy Green: Yeah, it was. And that was it was for multiple reasons. Part of it was to do with number of people that they could actually have out on the ground to manage a controlled burn. You’re also very restricted by the weather. The conditions have got to be just right. You've got to have a firebreak cut. You've got to have people there on the ground to manage the fire, all of the kits, the fire fogger, all these kind of things. What’s that? A fire fogger is a water bowser on a trailer that's taken up by a pickup or a quad or something like that. And it has a special attachment on it that instead of it being like a jet of water, like a fire hose, it puts out more of a powerful mist. And that's better at suppressing the fire than having just a continuous stream of water for if you're doing a controlled burn.
Richard Prideaux: If I was ever to come back as a weather phenomenon, I'd like to come back as a powerful mist. But that's a lot of people to have there just to do one sort of relatively small acreage of management then?
Amy Green: Yes, exactly. Whereas with cutting, you can just pay one contractor, which could be the farmer who also grazes that hillside, to go out and cut some strips of heather. And also a benefit with cutting is that you could do it at any time of year that is suitable for that habitat and that species is found that obviously you want to avoid ground-nesting season and things like that but they would sometimes cut at a time where there were seeds on the heather. And then they could collect the heather seeds. They would bale it and then they would take it to areas which had been damaged by off-roading, illegal off-roading, and they would spread the heather bales out there in an attempt to try and get heather growing on these areas that had been eroded.
Richard Prideaux: That's quite cool. And the removal of the vegetation there is one of the key things I suppose that for burning you are converting the sort of the woody stems of the heather over into ash and combustible gases and heat and light. All the energy is going out that way whereas when you mow it you're left with effectively the clippings then you have to go take somewhere else.
Amy Green: Yeah and a lot of the time the clippings do just get left in place and there's I've seen recently with the current fire issues that we've been having that people have said cutting and leaving the clippings in place has been adding to the fuel load.
George Browne: Well, that makes logical sense, doesn't it? Because it just dries out. Yeah.
Amy Green: Especially in this weather that we've had recently.
Richard Prideaux: I think a lot of people have an idea that a certain way is correct and every other way is wrong. And you can find every point of the sort of ecopolitical spectrum to cover that. They all believe that their way of doing the thing is correct. But I suppose you have to reframe it to being, does this thing achieve a certain aim? If your aim is to reduce fuel load on the mountain, then you have to remove the fuel somehow, whether it's baling or whether it's burning away. But that's not rewilding in the, that doesn't also achieve the complete hands-off natural regeneration, let nature do its thing.
George Browne: Yes, I think that's, everybody sees everything in such binaries. It's either do it this way and this will result in the outcome that we want or do it this way. And it's never, well, what if we do both?
Richard Prideaux: Yes. Or here's the wheel of options, choose three. Because some of these things, you can't do management and complete hands off. At the same time. The moment you do one, you're not doing the other.
George Browne: Yes, they are a zero-sum game, aren't they?
Richard Prideaux: I suppose there's also a gamble with this because most land management experiments take at least five to ten years to sort of come to fruition. And if it's forestry, then it's fifty years. And if you're saying we should change, radically change this practice or re-adopt this practice or go over to doing this thing, you are effectively saying, I think, based on the evidence I can gather, that this will be the outcome if we do this thing. But it might not be. And no one sort of wants to say and stick their political career to, yeah, it might not be, and I'll take the blame, lads. You sort of sell it on the benefits, but no one really wants to take the long-term penalty if it does go wrong.
Amy Green: And I mean, for some things as well, when they do go wrong, they go badly wrong and they can go badly wrong very quickly. So take heather burning as an example that if it doesn't go to plan, that can create a fire that goes deep into the peat and lasts for weeks. And that's when the kind of the immediate effects are seen and the press tend to get hold of it and it then just tars every single responsible cool burn with the brush of doing prescribed burns, doing controlled burns is going to result in them going to deep peat and causing problems. So I saw somebody I know works in the Peak District National Park and she just posted on Instagram that the fire they've been tackling since the 24th of June, which wasn't a prescribed fire, it wasn't a controlled fire, it was started by some other means, I can't remember exactly what, but that's been going since 24th of June and they have hot spots deep in the peat, which are still 400 to 700°C. Holy [inaudible]. Yes. And that is a massive issue because the whole point of heather burning when done right, when taking place in winter is that it's what they call a cool burn and it just takes the top of the heather off. The whole point of it is that if there are any animals, particularly I'm thinking of reptiles, which would be overwintering underneath the sorts of leaf, not leaf litter, but underneath the debris on the top of the peat, they don't get affected by it. There's videos out there of people laying down Mars Bars, having a cool burn go over the top and the chocolate inside that packet is still untouched, basically. It's not melted, it's not damaged. And that's how they should be. And the problems for wildlife and the problems for the peat and the ecology of that area, because if you're getting the peat to that sort of temperature, all of the biology in that peat, everything that makes that peat a good habitat for heather and bilberry and all the other different heathland species to survive, that will be destroyed at those temperatures and that will take years and years to recover and come back.
Richard Prideaux: And if using the Mars bar index then of heat, that makes a cool burn of heather in winter a more favourable environment than the dashboard of my truck.
Amy Green: Yes, yeah.
George Browne: Is there a lot of life on the dashboard of your truck?
Richard Prideaux: More than there should be. But isn't that, that's the muirburn thing in Scotland, which is, where are we at with ours? Is that now banned? And what's the, or is it licensed?
George Browne: I think it's licensed and I think they're quite strict about where you can get a licence and it's all about the depth of the peat and all this sort of stuff, which is a whole other can of worms.
Richard Prideaux: Well, it's this thing about rewetting as well, which is another thing that comes up a lot for upland management, that if you keep the water on the hillside, if you keep the water up on the top of the plateau or wherever it is, then it won't burn, has been something that I've heard sort of spoken about or being the better model of management for a long time. Places like Kinder Scout in the Peak District are sort of putting in leaky dams to still allow the water to drain away slowly, but it keeps a residual amount on the moorland at any one time. It sort of doesn't work when you have a 50-year drought and all of the water eventually evaporates, even if it's behind the dam, but it's evaporated off.
George Browne: Yeah. I also think, you know, it's all very good keeping the water on the plateau, but plateaus have sides and the water will just run off them. So I don't think, I mean, rewetting makes perfect sense. It's, I think, useful for flood management as well. But I just don't see any of these things on their own as being solutions to the wildfire problem. I also, you know, there is a, there is always an undercurrent to all of these things about, is muirburn unpopular in certain circles because it is associated with grouse shooting? Is rewetting unpopular in other circles because it is associated with rewilding? And it's quite difficult to divorce those conversations from the management conversations, I think, or lack of management conversations.
Richard Prideaux: You sort of, I think I might have coined the term ecopolitical, which if anyone else has used that, please let me know. If not, I want a million pounds every time someone else uses that term now. Please time stamp this podcast episode. It seems very difficult to have any conversation around rewilding upland management, wildfire management, conservation in upland spaces, access and anything like that without it immediately descending into, but your lot do this and I don't like that from any side. It always becomes a, well, I just don't like you.
George Browne: It becomes a culture war thing rather than an outcomes thing.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, and if you just need to, I suppose I need to look at this slightly more autistically sort of, yes, but that thing doesn't work if you want to achieve that aim. I don't care about who does it or how you feel about it. Does this thing seem to work, yes or no, but also being willing to be wrong and then spend five lifetimes working that out, which is, I suppose, how you end up with a defined culture, maybe?
George Browne: Well, you used a very good phrase a little while ago about something completely different. You said that if you care about conservation, outcomes have to matter more than ideology. That is a very sensible approach to all of these things.
Richard Prideaux: If you want more of that thing, okay, let's try five different ways of achieving that thing and then look at the one that produces more of that thing.
George Browne: Which is, or indeed less of it if what you want is less wildfire.
Amy Green: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: If it was a sports thing where you were trying to find different ways of training, different ways to run faster, different ways to achieve this physical activity, you might as a coach try half a dozen different ways of doing things across all of your athletes. And then say, okay, this group seemed to be performing better by having these inputs. Let's put you all over to that input and see what happens. And everyone trains in this way or has this particular diet or whatever. That will be completely acceptable in other worlds. But when it comes to conservation, a sort of, it seems to be this real belief of, no, this is the good way of doing things. There can be no good from doing predator control because that involves killing and killing is not conservation. You can buy t-shirts that say that. So that ideological belief is sort of endemic in any kind of conservation it seems, but again, from every side.
George Browne: Yes, and I think there's a, you know, this ties into the other big debate around the countryside, which is access as well. It is often said that, greater access will result in people behaving more responsibly. And there's some evidence to suggest that that's true. But it is also true that huge numbers of these fires are created by people thinking they can have a barbecue wherever they want. And so how do you square those two things off?
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, it's maybe it's the thing about. You have to look at how people do behave rather than how you want them to behave. I'd like to live in a world where education was the only thing that needed to matter. And we told as long as you got the right message out there that lighting a barbecue in the middle of the driest area of Heathland in Suffolk is not a good idea. As long as you can get that message out there, people will stop doing it. But that doesn't include the idea that Yeah, but someone's going to go, you can't tell me what to do. And we'll be more likely to try and set fire to a ground-nesting bird because you told them not to. Those people do exist.
Amy Green: Those people do exist. It's like, again, something else that you've said in the past, Richard, is that if you give people the free rein if you say, if you're advocating for access for all, you're not advocating for access for all the people who will act responsibly. You're advocating for access for everybody, whether they act responsibly or not. And you've got to accept that is what you're arguing for in those cases. The same with free speech and everything like that. If you say that is the thing that you think everybody should have, you've got to accept that there are people out there in the world who are going to use that and have different opinions to you and that's what they're going to voice.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, I used to use that in debates and articles, this thing about the right to roam and access for all is sort of equivalent to the right to free speech that if you want access for everyone, you're sort of advocating for access for stuff you don't like. But if you say free speech means you should be advocating for free speech you don't want to hear. The problem is Elon Musk kind of came in and ruined the argument for me a little bit, because I think all of these things…
George Browne: Broadly, I would like people to have greater access to the countryside. I'd like people to have greater freedom to do things in the countryside.
Richard Prideaux: Yes.
George Browne: But I think the bit of this that gets missed out in the freedom of speech conversation and the freedom of access or the freedom of activity. If these things are rights, rights come with responsibilities and they also come with consequences. So freedom of speech is fine, but it doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Similarly, if you are the one who started that barbecue that got out of control and set fire to the landscape, there should be consequences for that. And I don't know if there are sufficiently discouraging consequences.
Richard Prideaux: How could we police that? I mean, is it literally the police? Is it more patrols? Is it more people wandering through areas? Or how do you ensure that consequence?
George Browne: Well, I'm not a fire investigator, so I don't know how you'd go about proving that individual A started the fire. And the uplands aren't replete with CCTV cameras. So I think it is difficult. If you could be prosecuted in theory, would that have an impact?
Richard Prideaux: I suppose that's the thing of do people not do things because they fear prosecution or do they not do things because they think it's a bad idea?
George Browne: Yeah. But also is there negligent management as well? Is that a problem?
Richard Prideaux: I just want to point out this is a completely unplanned debate on the podcast.
George Browne: Can you tell?
Amy Green: I mean, my experience of, or my knowledge of prosecutions for wildlife crimes, which is what it would fall under most likely, is that there are far fewer prosecutions for wildlife crime than there are wildlife crimes committed. Because it's very difficult to gather evidence. It's very difficult to prove that something has happened. And the police have so much else on their plates that, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: It's like the public interest to, well, okay, so there's an example of this already. So one of the big wildfires we had here in Wales was in the Rhinogydd mountain range, which is sort of north of Harlech, sort of, no, sorry, south of Harlech, north of Dolgellau, so that strip there. And the fire was started by a stove. Getting tipped over or out of control from a wild camper. So somebody camping in the wild with a gas stove, some sort of an open flame, but not a fire on the ground. But it started a fire there. But they also raised the alarm about the wildfire. And as far as I'm aware, there's no prosecution taking place for it. Even though that was one person doing it, I don't think there, unless you don't know who it is. That's the only other thing. But they raised the alarm and it was wild camping that caused that fire directly, but also the reason the fire is so out of control is because there has been possibly very little management on that mountain range as well. So which is it policy, is it land ownership or is it the ignition source? Was there always going to be an ignition source at some point? So does the management need to take that into account because blame itself won't necessarily turn people off setting fire to things?
Amy Green: I suppose it becomes whether it's like criminal damage to property and things like that as well. Like if it was a farmer's field that somebody was camping in without permission and they were the cause of a fire in that field, say that was a crop, then that farmer would probably have more cause to try and prosecute than The National Trust would if their heather moorland got set on fire by somebody wild camping there.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, that's the point. Yeah, wildlife doesn’t have inherent value, then, in property.
Amy Green: Whereas your crop, you can value a crop. You can say this is worth this much money and you've now taken that away from me. So it's a tricky one. This maybe is where the whole wild thing comes into it as well. Do you call it wildfire if it's in a farmer's field or is that reserved for if it's in... Yeah, does that become a field fire? Yeah, because that was the other thing. Yeah. Because that's the other thing I was thinking that sort of when I said earlier about are there more wildfires now than there were 10 years ago? Is it just that terminology 10 years ago was it's a grassland fire that's been started by bored youths who've just gone up and set fire to something with a magnifying glass? Or is it a crop fire that's the result of a combine sparking or something and going on fire? Or what?
Richard Prideaux: I mean, I'm not a barrister, as you may tell. I mean, I'm barely literate at times. But there are, if you sort of looking at how property is viewed in English law, there's, if you look at something like the 1968 Theft Act, that says that if a plant is growing wild, it is not theft if you pick it, if you are not the landowner, but if you try to make money from the picking of it, then it becomes theft. Sort of it's like the transfer of value is at the act of commerce. So if you're not trying to sell it, then it can't be property.
George Browne: This is a complete diversion. How does that work if you are, for example, YouTubing? Is that you making money from the act of picking that wild plant?
Richard Prideaux: It'd be an interesting one to test. I mean, it's the thing we had with running foraging courses. If you're on someone else's bit, if I'm sharing, I'm being paid to share the knowledge. But am I picking it? Is that a commercial act there?
George Browne: Fascinating.
Richard Prideaux: I think it's back to that thing of probably no one could be arsed to prosecute.
Amy Green: Well, this has taken a turn.
George Browne: It has.
Richard Prideaux: Where were we? Firehawks. So did the peregrine falcon survive?
George Browne: It flew off, yeah, before I could properly ID it. So I assume it was okay.
Richard Prideaux: This is the thing we've had several times whilst I've been on the phone with you. You're just doing wildlife spotting through your kitchen window whilst on the phone, which is quite distracting. You're in the mid-sentence and go, oh, is that a muntjac?
George Browne: Oh, a hummingbird hawk moth.
Richard Prideaux: Yes. I fully expect the George Browne book of things I spotted from my kitchen window whilst I was meant to be working.
George Browne: Some people I'm on the phone to get to experience live grey squirrel control.
Richard Prideaux: Nice. Is that sort of, and another thing? THUNK
George Browne: Pretty much, yeah. Oh, hang on, excuse me a minute, there's a squirrel.
Richard Prideaux: Well, this is something I wanted to do with the fish and game podcast at some point that I want to do commentary on some kind of field sports activity where we do two people fishing and you sort of give live sports-ball type commentary on just what they're doing, every single aspect.
George Browne: Yes, very good. You could have, obviously, you know, you have golf commentary, which everyone's whispering all of the time, hearing, oh, and he sunk that putt. Or you have the sort of slightly more energetic football style commentary and different field sports type things will have different commentary styles. That would be fun.
Amy Green: Yeah.
George Browne: That would be fun.
Richard Prideaux: So this is the part of why we're doing this as a separate show because there are other shows on the SideCountry Network and this is episode the first, I think, of SideCountry. If you're listening through to the end, you're probably pretty committed to listening to this. Most people have turned off by now. We've already got episode 2 recorded because George and Richard recorded that at the Game Fair, which was two weeks ago now, which seems like only yesterday. So that will be coming out. I think that's ready to listen to now. Actually, you can go straight and listen to episode 2. We're not going to number the episodes, though. I think we decided. So me calling it episode 2 really doesn't help.
George Browne: The next one in the list.
Richard Prideaux: Yes. Scroll down a little bit further. But there are other shows on the SideCountry network as we are now. So there's more for you to listen to there. But Let us know what your thoughts are on Wildfire on land management. I think there's a couple of good articles on Scribehound.com at the moment on Wildfire.
George Browne: There are one from Owen Williams recently, another one a little bit longer ago from Ian Coghill, one from Charlie Jacoby. So yeah, I mean, Wildfire gets a lot of coverage on Scribehound one way or another.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, but I think it's going to be the big discussion of the year until we start getting floods and then flood management comes back in as being the next thing that everyone talks about.
George Browne: It always seems to be the same places, doesn't it? Suffolk flooded a couple of years ago or 18 months ago and it's always, you know, bits of Yorkshire that are flooding. It's interesting that.
Richard Prideaux: Do we have to start examining whether God likes certain parts of the UK and really sort of judges others like, no, you've been naughty, have another fire, have a flood. I mean, it's like Bedfordshire just seems to get away with things, really.
George Browne: Well, on that note.
Richard Prideaux: So is there any other contentious area we can go into? We haven't mentioned veganism throughout this, so I think we've managed to stay safe on that regard at least.
George Browne: Yes, I think we should congratulate ourselves.
Richard Prideaux: Well done. So another successful episode in the bag. Thank you everyone for listening. If you go and have a look at the show notes, we'll put some interesting links in there. And also let us know your thoughts. There's an email address on there if you'd like to get in touch. And there's also our social media, so leave some comments there on this episode. Let us know your thoughts on wildfire upland management and maybe your thoughts on how we can solve the whole problem. I'd be interested to see them. Bye everyone. Bye.
George Browne: Bye.
George Browne: So do you know what happened to me earlier this week?
Richard Prideaux: I'm sure you're going to tell us.
George Browne: Well, I am. I was sitting in my kitchen slash living room slash office minding my own business. And one side of the whole building is plate glass windows and there was a sort of thump against the glass. And I turned around and what I’m 90% sure was a juvenile peregrine had crashed into the glass and was sitting atop my barbecue looking a bit baffled. And it only really sat there for a couple of seconds and I didn't get a proper look at it, but I'm almost certain it was a peregrine.
Richard Prideaux: So hang on, you're in this sort of barn-like space that you call a house and you now have herds of prey throwing themselves to the window. What have you got inside that you're trying to lure them in with?
George Browne: Well, I'm not specifically trying to lure them in there, although there was also a mouse in here the other day, so it could have been that. But I don't think it was.
Amy Green: Well, I mean, if it ended up on your barbecue, maybe it was just trying to tell you something.
Richard Prideaux: Actually, that's a point. Yeah. Is it asking for an invite?
George Browne: Yeah. It would like a sausage, please.
Amy Green: Some smoked mouse, if you will.
Richard Prideaux: That's the thing. Maybe the birds of prey are getting fed up of raw food and they want to actually cook something. I mean, that's what's happening with those firehawks. Is that they're trying to invent barbecue.
George Browne: Yeah, they're barbecuing them.
Richard Prideaux: These firehawks, are they real?
George Browne: I think it’s unclear. It's sort of culturally documented, I think. It's specifically in Australia, isn't it? Where there's sort of two or three species that definitely sort of use fire to hunt, but whether they're actually deliberately spreading the fire, I think is a bit less certain.
Richard Prideaux: Because, I mean, it just is an evolutionary thing. They would have had to have They're not doing fire by friction. They're not sat there with a bow drill or a fire plough for getting a spark initially. So they must be finding wildfire. Are they then spreading that wildfire to somewhere else?
George Browne: Well, certainly that's what I've been given to understand is that they will pick up a burning stick and fly with it and then drop it somewhere in order to spread the fire. So yes, it's a wildfire caused by lightning or whatever, but they then spread it further by picking up these burning sticks and dropping them. But that has to be, if that is what they're doing, that has to be a learned thing, right? That's not an instinctive action.
Richard Prideaux: I mean, Australia is weird anyway. They have all of the weirdest animals. They have all the animals that just decide we're going to do things differently. Amy, you did actual conservation work in Australia. Did you?
Amy Green: I did.
Richard Prideaux: A firehawk’s a thing? A fire bat’s a thing.
Amy Green: Okay, so firehawks, I don't know. It wasn't something I came across, but I was very much focused in on bats, as you mentioned. And bats do not like fire, so fire bats are not going to exist. I mean, the bats are fantastic in that they spread seed because they eat fruit, and so they fly around following, similar to monkeys and things like that in rainforests where they know when the different flowers and the different fruits are going to be in season and then they travel around to them. So they pollinate flowers and they eat fruits and spread the seeds of different fruits and things. So they do that, but that's not, that's because they need the food. That's not a behaviour that creates, I don't know, it's just not the same as a firehawk plucking a burning branch out of somewhere, flying until presumably until its feet start burning and then dropping it to create more fire.
Richard Prideaux: So is that the thing, is it the sort of difference between intentional behaviour because it's trying to achieve a certain outcome versus accidental effect from some other activity, a firehawks seeing flickering, moving thing, thinking, well, that must be prey. I'm going to grab this end of it, fly off with it. Oh, God, that's hot.
Amy Green: Maybe that's it. I mean, because the other alternative is that they saw indigenous peoples using fire to flush prey out and then they copied that behaviour or something like that.
George Browne: Would be a very intelligent thing for a bird to be doing.
Amy Green: But you do see crows using sticks to pull things out of trees and things. They use them to get grubs, don't they? They smash up snails and all sorts of things like that to get to what's inside. So it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
Richard Prideaux: Isn't that thing of getting something out of a jar or out of a tube one of the tests they use for animal intelligence? So it's the... They give it to chimps where they put food inside a jar that has a narrower neck. And if they put their hand in, they can put their hand in, but if they make a fist around the object, they can't withdraw their fist holding the object. And the test is to see whether they tip the jar up to pour things out. So there's a base level intelligence. Although I notice actually it's something I fail quite often when we're doing sort of work on different things. If I put my hand in something, I'll grab that. Oh, I can't get my hand. Oh, wait, no, And it does sort of give me pause as to what my base level intelligence is.
George Browne: But of course, we've got firehawks in the UK as well. Do you see this? Well, this is a slightly different thing, but there was a buzzard that has been blamed for a field fire, I think because it crashed into the electrical cables.
Richard Prideaux: So was that sort of it was blamed for the field fire in the same way that a burning Messerschmitt in the summer of 1940 crashing into a field would have been? It was on fire.
George Browne: Exactly, yes, it was either the buzzard was on fire or the, you know, the thrashing electrical cables started the fire.
Richard Prideaux: Was it witnessed, this buzzard?
Amy Green: Yeah, there was somebody combining or something in the neighbouring field and they heard a bang turned around and saw a flaming buzzard drop from the electrical wires into the crop below and then it all set ablaze. That's the story that I've seen anyway. Does that correlate? Because that sounds feasible.
Richard Prideaux: Well, being scientific about it, spontaneous buzzard combustion could still be a thing, and it just happened to be near power lines when it spontaneously combusted.
George Browne: It has been really hot.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. I don't know, there's been a few times in the last few weeks in even here in North Wales where I felt like I might spontaneously combust at any second.
George Browne: It could have been a phoenix. It's a proper firehawk.
Richard Prideaux: Yes, that's true, actually. Was Dumbledore anywhere nearby?
Amy Green: When you said about spontaneous combustion, I thought, what did it recite some sign kind of? Magic words and just decide, right, I don't like this farmer. He's cutting down all the crop. He's getting rid of my prey. I'm just going to set his field on fire.
Richard Prideaux: Well, suppose that's the ultimate wildlife protest. You know, I don't like arable farming. I don't like edge-to-edge arable farming. You should have wildflower margins. Therefore, I'm going to set myself on fire and crash into it.
George Browne: Crikey, yeah. But I mean, it's interesting, you know, I think it was... I can't remember where I saw this, but somebody sent a photo of a little owl that had been eating barbecued insects from one of the wildfires in the UK recently. So it's interesting how, you know, although these fires are pretty devastating, you know, they do have this sort of, they do present an opportunity for some species as well.
Amy Green: To sample different food types.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: I suppose we found that wildlife has become very adaptive to human activity. And well, the last couple of days we've been working at an estate in Herefordshire and yesterday we were on top of a hill and they were doing the wheat, combining the wheat below us. And you can see a lag of about four strips. They'd sort of combined behind that, about four strips behind, so it was a bit quieter. You were starting to get all of the crows and the corvids coming down to presumably eat, well, what was left of the wheat, but also every small mammal that had been minced by the combine. You get this in stubble fields after a combine has been through. You do get inevitably something has been killed or something's been exposed out to the elements where it used to have four feet of, well, hopefully four feet of crop above it. And now it's It's just exposed to every predator and every opportunistic thing that comes through.
George Browne: Yeah, it's just another means of, and fire is just another example of that. The cover is gone and everything has been incinerated. So you come along and hoover up behind if you're an opportunistic carnivore.
Richard Prideaux: I like to think of myself as an opportunistic carnivore, but it's mostly sort of the clearance section in the supermarket as well.
George Browne: Yes, well, I'm an obligate carnivore.
Richard Prideaux: Another thing at this estate yesterday, because even though we've had a bit of rain, there was basically a no fire policy across the whole estate, but everywhere because They would really rather their woodlands and wildflower strips and hedgerows and things didn't go on fire. So even down to the group we were working with policing whether they were smoking or not and sort of exposed electronic devices, they were taking it very seriously. And it's really easy to see why, because big chunks of the UK seem to have been on fire recently.
George Browne: Yes, and we talk about wildfire, don't we? But the reality is that it's not really wild. We don't have wildfires that are started by lightning strikes, really. Nearly all wildfires in this country are anthropogenic in origin, aren't they?
Richard Prideaux: Yes.
George Browne: [unclear] butts or barbecues or—how was that one this year—somebody setting off fireworks?
Richard Prideaux: Fireworks in memory of somebody who drowned at the nearby reservoir, wasn't it?
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So that wildfire definition, you don't have to go very far into the comment section on any social media post about any one of these things to find somebody saying, well, it's not a wildfire, a human started it, which annoys me at almost cellular level, but I can't express entirely why.
George Browne: I think it sort of misses the point because actually, okay, so the fire was started by someone doing something dumb. That's nearly always the case. And that's, I think we can be rightfully annoyed about that. But then it's wild in the sense that it's out of control, not in the sense that it is not human generated, I think. And I think this is where, you know, the word wild is a bit of a foxy one, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: You've got wild camping and wild swimming and wild camping is camping but not on a campsite with sort of a leave no trace ethic, hopefully. And wild swimming is swimming but in a pool or a river or a lake or something like that away from a designated swimming area. So is wildfire just fire but outside of a designated area? It's not in a house, it's not in an industrial estate.
George Browne: Or I guess in someone's garden, it's out of control fire, isn't it? So outside of the bit that we consider civilised. And I guess this is slightly why, there's a big campaign right now, isn't there, to ban disposable barbecues, which everybody has decided are the principal cause of wildfire.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. I think some of the supermarkets have actually just said last night that they're going to do it.
Amy Green: I think some already had.
George Browne: Yeah, that's what I thought.
Amy Green: Is it Morrisons I think might be one that had already banned disposable barbecues. I mean, the other thing are those Chinese lanterns which often get set off as remembrance or celebrations and the number of images that you can find if you search online of things like cows or horses with a ring around them where a Chinese lantern has basically landed on them afterwards. It does kind of baffle me how these things still exist. And I say this having released them when I was younger at one point in time. In my defence, it was on the coast and they went out to sea, so they weren't going to do much harm.
Richard Prideaux: Well, say that to a sea turtle or a mackerel.
Amy Green: What, off the coast of Cardiff? No.
George Browne: Every now and again you see a video of them, don't you, being someone releasing them in a sort of suburban garden and they haven't thought about which way the wind's going and it just crashes into the neighbour's roof.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, I always think of stuff like this, that there's people have decided. Across at a national level, even though it's never been discussed, that if it's in an unofficial place, so if it's for sale in a shop or if it's on social media and it's a named account or you see an organisation doing it, therefore it must be allowed. It must be permitted. It's part of accepted behaviour.
George Browne: I think there's also a sense of a right to do it as well. Who are you to tell me not to? And I guess there's, so wild camping is another, I'm not a wild camper, but I know Richard, it's, you know, you have existed in that world and have done that. There's a bit of me that kind of understands the appeal of wild camping, going somewhere far away from everybody else and sort of, you know, doing the wild man thing. And quite a big part of that, in your romantic image of what that is, that involves a campfire. Without question. And I guess if you're the sort of person who doesn't like to be told you can't camp somewhere, you're probably also going to be a bit miffed about being told you can't have a campfire.
Richard Prideaux: I think for a lot of people, the outdoor space, oh God, I'm not to use terms like that. If I say green space, can you please eject me from the podcast immediately? The outdoor space, people go there because it is sort of a place you can exercise a level of agency. You can do something that you have a choice about what you're doing, whereas everything else feels like it has a lot of rules. It has a lot of either legal or cultural or just financial limitations.
George Browne: Sort of voluntary outlawdom, isn't it?
Richard Prideaux: Yes. I don't think although sort of TV shows and media has helped with this. Sort of, you know, the hero sat dramatically in a forest with a lone campfire on their way to do the thing. Well, you're not doing that. It's a Thursday night and you're an accountant. You're not off to slay the dragon or whatever.
George Browne: Yeah.
Amy Green: That's a very good point. I mean, going back to this word wild, do you think that's part of the issue with all of these things is that the word wild has so many meanings nowadays. If you think of rewilding, wild landscapes, going off out into the wild, doing wild swimming, wild camping, and then wildfires, which almost seem to fall into a completely separate category of wild. It just seems to have far too many different definitions just for this one little word that, it gets very confusing. And I think that's possibly part of the problem with the conversation around all of this.
George Browne: Yes, and I think, particularly, with regard to wildfire, the commentary around these things is so predictable. You will have the rewilding lobby will immediately say, well, this wouldn't have happened if everything was rewilded because we'd have more resilient landscapes and everything would be wetter and it would all be fine. And the other side of the argument is, well, if the fuel load had been managed properly, this wouldn't have happened. Yeah, it is such a predictable thing. But this idea that wildness is inherently better than not wild is an interesting one.
Richard Prideaux: There's a just a very boring definition that just come up in the back of my brain, which, you know, it's too early and I haven't had enough caffeine yet, so maybe it should have been there earlier. The fire and rescue services sort of have a definition of wildfire, which is that they can't get their normal apparatus and people there in the normal kit. So they have wildfire fighting protective layers, which is not the same as the breathing apparatus kit and all the really heavy stuff that you use for going into a structure fire. So they have separate kits and separate designation or separate management plans for it. So I wonder whether some of that definition is sort of translated down. They do a press briefing with their media team to the whatever BBC News to talk about this fire. And they say we deployed a wildfire team and this was a wildfire and blah, blah, blah, blah. That becomes now that's a wildfire. Whereas something else, other bit of vegetation on fire in a garden wasn't a wildfire because they can get a fire engine there.
George Browne: That's very interesting. Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: I should have thought of that earlier. If I was a smarter person, I would have done, but I'm not.
George Browne: But I mean, obviously they do take a completely different, approach to say a house fire to tackle because they very quickly cover a vast area of land. And, you're sort of fighting the front of it, aren't you?
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. Or getting ahead of it.
George Browne: Or getting ahead of it, yeah. And the dangers are unbelievable. I said, is it Nethy Bridge was the village in Scotland that was evacuated because they didn't think they could slow the fire down and stop it ahead of the village? I mean, that is terrifying.
Amy Green: It is. It reminds me of, I often say this to Richard that Whenever there's all these reports coming from America, from the wildfires over there, from fires in California and what have you, or tornadoes or whatever it is, it always makes me more grateful to be living where we do, that we don't have so many natural weather events that cause so much destruction and that we don't have that as a problem here. But it does seem to be that this whole fires happening on, I was going to say, how do we not say wildfires, but wildfires effectively occurring is bringing that more and more. And is it just me or are they happening more nowadays than they did say 10 years ago?
George Browne: It's hard to say, isn't it? Because I think, you know, doing the work that we all do, they are so front and centre of our mind. So I would say that I have paid more attention to them in the last five years as well as I'm reasonably confident that there are more of them. I think sort of 2018 was the big, was it Saddleworth Moor in 2018 that caught fire and was, the smoke was in Manchester and it was really quite a big one. And I think that was the first one that I was sort of really aware of in a big way. I mean, I remember as a kid, we had a field fire here which is actually caused by someone chucking a fag butt out of the train window as it went past. But I think that I probably didn't think about wildfires in that sense until 2018 again. But I mean, we've talked about it already. It's been bloody hot. Everything is brown. Everything is dry. It was the same last year.
Richard Prideaux: I think it's the point of for this first episode, we are at the official point of the podcast being that climate change is real, although there is more discussion to be had. Is that where we are?
George Browne: Climate change is definitely real. I mean, there's no doubt about that.
Richard Prideaux: Because there are some corners though that you go to and you still have to have that discussion.
George Browne: Yeah, it's about 5% of our listeners have just switched off.
Richard Prideaux: But.
George Browne: It's about the all the while, is there an increase in wildfires because climate change exclusively? I don't think you can say that because although it's a factor in that everything is drier, there are other factors in play. Like I do think there are more people out doing dumb things. Management practices have changed in recent years. I think you have to factor all of those things in as well.
Richard Prideaux: There was a lot of talk when we were younger, because we're all sort of a similar age, that the climate was definitely heading in one direction, that change was going to be this and this and this, and by 2025 it would look like this. What has transpired is that actually what we have is a lot more unpredictability. We don't know, next year could be floods or summer and we could have a very dry winter.
George Browne: Much more chaotic weather systems.
Richard Prideaux: So the term I see a lot in sort of land management now is being climate resilient so that you are better able to handle the sort of swings from one extreme to the other. But this year, we've definitely had a lot more wildfire. We've had a lot more fuel load as well because of the previous years. There's more thing, there's been more vegetation growth in places, whether that's due to management or lack of management or just better climatic conditions. I know just in the woodlands that we manage, there's a lot more undergrowth in places than there were in the five years previously because we've had quite good growing conditions for wild plants and wild things. Just looking at the hills around here as well, we've got the Clwydian Range, National Landscape. I keep trying to say AONB, Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but they're not called that anymore.
George Browne: No, Why did they change that? I thought AONB was a perfectly decent descriptor.
Richard Prideaux: Because it's for the nation, I think. It's not beautiful, it's for the nation. It's a landscape for the nation.
George Browne: I see.
Amy Green: I think they might also want it to sound a bit more like National Park. That's part of my theory.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. But they manage that quite heavily upon the top with mowing for the heather and things like that to reduce the amount of heather there and to provide young growth, because there’s a black grouse project up there and a few other things. But just overall, there's way more vegetation there than there was say in 2010 when I was stomping around there with Mountain Rescue. There’s just more there now than there used to be. And if you look at old photos, we've been doing a lot of comparative photos of farms we're working with and what they look like in 1950 and aerial photos then compared to now. We have a hell of a lot more trees around. We have a hell of a lot more. So the hedgerows are bigger. The hedgerows are more extensive and you've got all the wildflower margins and sort of the unkept corners. There's a lot more of those now than there were in the middle of the 20th century. So more vegetation, more fuel load. When it does get dry and crispy, there's more to burn maybe.
George Browne: Yes. So is that because I mean, obviously the trees and the hedges is due to, you know, the changes in the way people are farming and the different incentives and so on. But fuel load management, I think there's been, I think we're still on the journey as far as fuel load management is concerned. So I think in the States and in Canada, they went really hard on just putting out all forest fires no matter what.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, fire suppression I think it's called or something like that.
George Browne: Yeah, and you know I think that they have now not completely reversed that policy, but they're doing a lot more sort of controlled burns, prescribed burning. And have you come across this idea of cultural burning?
Richard Prideaux: Yes. I mean, it's just back to the firehawks. Is this back to the cultural rights of the Northern Australian black kite?
George Browne: I wondered where you were going there. It is sort of cultural rights because humans have been using fire as a management tool almost since before we were humans. When people talk about, forests being cleared or clearings being made in forests in the south of England in prehistory, they weren't using stone axes. That would have been too difficult. You know, they'd have been burning. And I think, burning happens in the Savannah, in Africa, to encourage new growth. It happens in Australia. And I think in, various bits of North America, Canada and places like that, the indigenous tribes have now got a right to burn for cultural reasons, which is, the same thing. It's to encourage fresh growth and manage the landscape.
Richard Prideaux: It's also, the whole thing about the Amazon basin being so fertile and the soil being this black gold, this wonderful fertile soil. One of the more modern theories about that is that it's effectively thousands of thousands of years of biochar built up from burning and tradition and burning through there at lower levels. So you get a bit of canopy collapse, you get some open area developing and then you, when that is on fire, either through true wildfire or through human managed fire, you then get all of the charcoal, the very fine charcoal goes back into the soil and creates a very fine structure in the soil that makes it incredibly fertile. So it's this constant cycle of burn is actually what made the Amazon rainforest so fertile in the first place.
George Browne: That's fascinating. That's so interesting.
Richard Prideaux: I should have remembered that and put that in the show notes, shouldn't I? Can't pull these things out ahead of time. They are in my brain somewhere.
George Browne: I mean, I'm just old enough to remember when people would still burn stubbles after harvest, which was a method of controlling black grass and that kind of stuff. But I guess it must also have been putting some nutrients back into the soil in a different form than they otherwise, instead of ploughing it in. I mean, it's still a ploughing.
Richard Prideaux: This argument that the indigenous wildfire management for the British Isles is actually particularly if you look at the uplands, it is things like management of grouse moors and rotational burning on grouse moors, which is an argument that's starting to be made increasingly to provide another defence for traditional land management there.
George Browne: It's an interesting idea, isn't it? I think there's a slightly dangerous thing there that it perhaps gets tied in with some of the slightly more unhinged ends of our political spectrum, Rupert Lowe was on the radio the other day talking about indigenous Britons or whatever. I think that needs quite careful handling, but it is if you’re looking at it in terms of cultural practice. It makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
Richard Prideaux: Does. I think it's sort of, that's the problem with when you talk about the word indigenous on anything to do with Britain, it either ends up being a discussion about colonial practices and where the wealth for that stately home came from and things like that. Or it becomes something about immigration immediately. And sort of, you know, well, I'm an ethnic native. Okay, well, are you Welsh? Are you Brythonic? I mean, how far back are we going for this indigenous practice? But if you were to look at how indigenous practices are evaluated by the UN, say, how long has that thing been happening in that country by this distinct people? Then I think there is an argument to be made for the sort of game management because it is only something like 200 years or something that something has to have been done for it to be an indigenous practice. It's just we're one of the oldest settled and civilised parts of the world in terms of continuous habitation. So we kind of got a head start. So everything here is an indigenous practice. Baking bread is an indigenous practice. Shouting at the French is an indigenous practice here.
Amy Green: I mean, ecologically speaking, it's quite interesting to think that in places like Australia, there are species which are completely reliant on fire in order to survive and to pass their genes down to the next generation for their seeds to actually germinate, etc, etc. In the UK, I can't think of ever hearing anybody talk about something which is reliant on fire. Which kind of shows that in the past we haven't had wildfires in this sense that has created a reliance on them that's made an evolutionary mark.
Richard Prideaux: Oh, I see what you mean. We don't have a certain species of pine trees that need to have heat in order to activate the cone to scatter the seeds and things like that.
Amy Green: Exactly that, yeah. So that kind of, it's an indication that like natural wildfires, as you were talking about before with lightning strike and things. Where those would have happened in places like Australia and South Africa and America. We don't have those here, but we do have species like grouse, which really are reliant on management to create the right sort of habitat for them to survive in upland areas.
George Browne: Yeah, fresh new growth is what they need, isn't it? So how does that come about without fire?
Amy Green: Because that wasn't a natural adaptation. That wasn't a natural co-evolution with wildfire’s presence or anything. That's something more human-made, maybe.
Richard Prideaux: Well, when you were working for the council team that became part of the National Landscape, wasn’t that when they started to move from heather burning to heather mowing somewhere in that time.
Amy Green: Yeah, it was. And that was it was for multiple reasons. Part of it was to do with number of people that they could actually have out on the ground to manage a controlled burn. You’re also very restricted by the weather. The conditions have got to be just right. You've got to have a firebreak cut. You've got to have people there on the ground to manage the fire, all of the kits, the fire fogger, all these kind of things. What’s that? A fire fogger is a water bowser on a trailer that's taken up by a pickup or a quad or something like that. And it has a special attachment on it that instead of it being like a jet of water, like a fire hose, it puts out more of a powerful mist. And that's better at suppressing the fire than having just a continuous stream of water for if you're doing a controlled burn.
Richard Prideaux: If I was ever to come back as a weather phenomenon, I'd like to come back as a powerful mist. But that's a lot of people to have there just to do one sort of relatively small acreage of management then?
Amy Green: Yes, exactly. Whereas with cutting, you can just pay one contractor, which could be the farmer who also grazes that hillside, to go out and cut some strips of heather. And also a benefit with cutting is that you could do it at any time of year that is suitable for that habitat and that species is found that obviously you want to avoid ground-nesting season and things like that but they would sometimes cut at a time where there were seeds on the heather. And then they could collect the heather seeds. They would bale it and then they would take it to areas which had been damaged by off-roading, illegal off-roading, and they would spread the heather bales out there in an attempt to try and get heather growing on these areas that had been eroded.
Richard Prideaux: That's quite cool. And the removal of the vegetation there is one of the key things I suppose that for burning you are converting the sort of the woody stems of the heather over into ash and combustible gases and heat and light. All the energy is going out that way whereas when you mow it you're left with effectively the clippings then you have to go take somewhere else.
Amy Green: Yeah and a lot of the time the clippings do just get left in place and there's I've seen recently with the current fire issues that we've been having that people have said cutting and leaving the clippings in place has been adding to the fuel load.
George Browne: Well, that makes logical sense, doesn't it? Because it just dries out. Yeah.
Amy Green: Especially in this weather that we've had recently.
Richard Prideaux: I think a lot of people have an idea that a certain way is correct and every other way is wrong. And you can find every point of the sort of ecopolitical spectrum to cover that. They all believe that their way of doing the thing is correct. But I suppose you have to reframe it to being, does this thing achieve a certain aim? If your aim is to reduce fuel load on the mountain, then you have to remove the fuel somehow, whether it's baling or whether it's burning away. But that's not rewilding in the, that doesn't also achieve the complete hands-off natural regeneration, let nature do its thing.
George Browne: Yes, I think that's, everybody sees everything in such binaries. It's either do it this way and this will result in the outcome that we want or do it this way. And it's never, well, what if we do both?
Richard Prideaux: Yes. Or here's the wheel of options, choose three. Because some of these things, you can't do management and complete hands off. At the same time. The moment you do one, you're not doing the other.
George Browne: Yes, they are a zero-sum game, aren't they?
Richard Prideaux: I suppose there's also a gamble with this because most land management experiments take at least five to ten years to sort of come to fruition. And if it's forestry, then it's fifty years. And if you're saying we should change, radically change this practice or re-adopt this practice or go over to doing this thing, you are effectively saying, I think, based on the evidence I can gather, that this will be the outcome if we do this thing. But it might not be. And no one sort of wants to say and stick their political career to, yeah, it might not be, and I'll take the blame, lads. You sort of sell it on the benefits, but no one really wants to take the long-term penalty if it does go wrong.
Amy Green: And I mean, for some things as well, when they do go wrong, they go badly wrong and they can go badly wrong very quickly. So take heather burning as an example that if it doesn't go to plan, that can create a fire that goes deep into the peat and lasts for weeks. And that's when the kind of the immediate effects are seen and the press tend to get hold of it and it then just tars every single responsible cool burn with the brush of doing prescribed burns, doing controlled burns is going to result in them going to deep peat and causing problems. So I saw somebody I know works in the Peak District National Park and she just posted on Instagram that the fire they've been tackling since the 24th of June, which wasn't a prescribed fire, it wasn't a controlled fire, it was started by some other means, I can't remember exactly what, but that's been going since 24th of June and they have hot spots deep in the peat, which are still 400 to 700°C. Holy [inaudible]. Yes. And that is a massive issue because the whole point of heather burning when done right, when taking place in winter is that it's what they call a cool burn and it just takes the top of the heather off. The whole point of it is that if there are any animals, particularly I'm thinking of reptiles, which would be overwintering underneath the sorts of leaf, not leaf litter, but underneath the debris on the top of the peat, they don't get affected by it. There's videos out there of people laying down Mars Bars, having a cool burn go over the top and the chocolate inside that packet is still untouched, basically. It's not melted, it's not damaged. And that's how they should be. And the problems for wildlife and the problems for the peat and the ecology of that area, because if you're getting the peat to that sort of temperature, all of the biology in that peat, everything that makes that peat a good habitat for heather and bilberry and all the other different heathland species to survive, that will be destroyed at those temperatures and that will take years and years to recover and come back.
Richard Prideaux: And if using the Mars bar index then of heat, that makes a cool burn of heather in winter a more favourable environment than the dashboard of my truck.
Amy Green: Yes, yeah.
George Browne: Is there a lot of life on the dashboard of your truck?
Richard Prideaux: More than there should be. But isn't that, that's the muirburn thing in Scotland, which is, where are we at with ours? Is that now banned? And what's the, or is it licensed?
George Browne: I think it's licensed and I think they're quite strict about where you can get a licence and it's all about the depth of the peat and all this sort of stuff, which is a whole other can of worms.
Richard Prideaux: Well, it's this thing about rewetting as well, which is another thing that comes up a lot for upland management, that if you keep the water on the hillside, if you keep the water up on the top of the plateau or wherever it is, then it won't burn, has been something that I've heard sort of spoken about or being the better model of management for a long time. Places like Kinder Scout in the Peak District are sort of putting in leaky dams to still allow the water to drain away slowly, but it keeps a residual amount on the moorland at any one time. It sort of doesn't work when you have a 50-year drought and all of the water eventually evaporates, even if it's behind the dam, but it's evaporated off.
George Browne: Yeah. I also think, you know, it's all very good keeping the water on the plateau, but plateaus have sides and the water will just run off them. So I don't think, I mean, rewetting makes perfect sense. It's, I think, useful for flood management as well. But I just don't see any of these things on their own as being solutions to the wildfire problem. I also, you know, there is a, there is always an undercurrent to all of these things about, is muirburn unpopular in certain circles because it is associated with grouse shooting? Is rewetting unpopular in other circles because it is associated with rewilding? And it's quite difficult to divorce those conversations from the management conversations, I think, or lack of management conversations.
Richard Prideaux: You sort of, I think I might have coined the term ecopolitical, which if anyone else has used that, please let me know. If not, I want a million pounds every time someone else uses that term now. Please time stamp this podcast episode. It seems very difficult to have any conversation around rewilding upland management, wildfire management, conservation in upland spaces, access and anything like that without it immediately descending into, but your lot do this and I don't like that from any side. It always becomes a, well, I just don't like you.
George Browne: It becomes a culture war thing rather than an outcomes thing.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, and if you just need to, I suppose I need to look at this slightly more autistically sort of, yes, but that thing doesn't work if you want to achieve that aim. I don't care about who does it or how you feel about it. Does this thing seem to work, yes or no, but also being willing to be wrong and then spend five lifetimes working that out, which is, I suppose, how you end up with a defined culture, maybe?
George Browne: Well, you used a very good phrase a little while ago about something completely different. You said that if you care about conservation, outcomes have to matter more than ideology. That is a very sensible approach to all of these things.
Richard Prideaux: If you want more of that thing, okay, let's try five different ways of achieving that thing and then look at the one that produces more of that thing.
George Browne: Which is, or indeed less of it if what you want is less wildfire.
Amy Green: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: If it was a sports thing where you were trying to find different ways of training, different ways to run faster, different ways to achieve this physical activity, you might as a coach try half a dozen different ways of doing things across all of your athletes. And then say, okay, this group seemed to be performing better by having these inputs. Let's put you all over to that input and see what happens. And everyone trains in this way or has this particular diet or whatever. That will be completely acceptable in other worlds. But when it comes to conservation, a sort of, it seems to be this real belief of, no, this is the good way of doing things. There can be no good from doing predator control because that involves killing and killing is not conservation. You can buy t-shirts that say that. So that ideological belief is sort of endemic in any kind of conservation it seems, but again, from every side.
George Browne: Yes, and I think there's a, you know, this ties into the other big debate around the countryside, which is access as well. It is often said that, greater access will result in people behaving more responsibly. And there's some evidence to suggest that that's true. But it is also true that huge numbers of these fires are created by people thinking they can have a barbecue wherever they want. And so how do you square those two things off?
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, it's maybe it's the thing about. You have to look at how people do behave rather than how you want them to behave. I'd like to live in a world where education was the only thing that needed to matter. And we told as long as you got the right message out there that lighting a barbecue in the middle of the driest area of Heathland in Suffolk is not a good idea. As long as you can get that message out there, people will stop doing it. But that doesn't include the idea that Yeah, but someone's going to go, you can't tell me what to do. And we'll be more likely to try and set fire to a ground-nesting bird because you told them not to. Those people do exist.
Amy Green: Those people do exist. It's like, again, something else that you've said in the past, Richard, is that if you give people the free rein if you say, if you're advocating for access for all, you're not advocating for access for all the people who will act responsibly. You're advocating for access for everybody, whether they act responsibly or not. And you've got to accept that is what you're arguing for in those cases. The same with free speech and everything like that. If you say that is the thing that you think everybody should have, you've got to accept that there are people out there in the world who are going to use that and have different opinions to you and that's what they're going to voice.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, I used to use that in debates and articles, this thing about the right to roam and access for all is sort of equivalent to the right to free speech that if you want access for everyone, you're sort of advocating for access for stuff you don't like. But if you say free speech means you should be advocating for free speech you don't want to hear. The problem is Elon Musk kind of came in and ruined the argument for me a little bit, because I think all of these things…
George Browne: Broadly, I would like people to have greater access to the countryside. I'd like people to have greater freedom to do things in the countryside.
Richard Prideaux: Yes.
George Browne: But I think the bit of this that gets missed out in the freedom of speech conversation and the freedom of access or the freedom of activity. If these things are rights, rights come with responsibilities and they also come with consequences. So freedom of speech is fine, but it doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Similarly, if you are the one who started that barbecue that got out of control and set fire to the landscape, there should be consequences for that. And I don't know if there are sufficiently discouraging consequences.
Richard Prideaux: How could we police that? I mean, is it literally the police? Is it more patrols? Is it more people wandering through areas? Or how do you ensure that consequence?
George Browne: Well, I'm not a fire investigator, so I don't know how you'd go about proving that individual A started the fire. And the uplands aren't replete with CCTV cameras. So I think it is difficult. If you could be prosecuted in theory, would that have an impact?
Richard Prideaux: I suppose that's the thing of do people not do things because they fear prosecution or do they not do things because they think it's a bad idea?
George Browne: Yeah. But also is there negligent management as well? Is that a problem?
Richard Prideaux: I just want to point out this is a completely unplanned debate on the podcast.
George Browne: Can you tell?
Amy Green: I mean, my experience of, or my knowledge of prosecutions for wildlife crimes, which is what it would fall under most likely, is that there are far fewer prosecutions for wildlife crime than there are wildlife crimes committed. Because it's very difficult to gather evidence. It's very difficult to prove that something has happened. And the police have so much else on their plates that, yeah.
Richard Prideaux: It's like the public interest to, well, okay, so there's an example of this already. So one of the big wildfires we had here in Wales was in the Rhinogydd mountain range, which is sort of north of Harlech, sort of, no, sorry, south of Harlech, north of Dolgellau, so that strip there. And the fire was started by a stove. Getting tipped over or out of control from a wild camper. So somebody camping in the wild with a gas stove, some sort of an open flame, but not a fire on the ground. But it started a fire there. But they also raised the alarm about the wildfire. And as far as I'm aware, there's no prosecution taking place for it. Even though that was one person doing it, I don't think there, unless you don't know who it is. That's the only other thing. But they raised the alarm and it was wild camping that caused that fire directly, but also the reason the fire is so out of control is because there has been possibly very little management on that mountain range as well. So which is it policy, is it land ownership or is it the ignition source? Was there always going to be an ignition source at some point? So does the management need to take that into account because blame itself won't necessarily turn people off setting fire to things?
Amy Green: I suppose it becomes whether it's like criminal damage to property and things like that as well. Like if it was a farmer's field that somebody was camping in without permission and they were the cause of a fire in that field, say that was a crop, then that farmer would probably have more cause to try and prosecute than The National Trust would if their heather moorland got set on fire by somebody wild camping there.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, that's the point. Yeah, wildlife doesn’t have inherent value, then, in property.
Amy Green: Whereas your crop, you can value a crop. You can say this is worth this much money and you've now taken that away from me. So it's a tricky one. This maybe is where the whole wild thing comes into it as well. Do you call it wildfire if it's in a farmer's field or is that reserved for if it's in... Yeah, does that become a field fire? Yeah, because that was the other thing. Yeah. Because that's the other thing I was thinking that sort of when I said earlier about are there more wildfires now than there were 10 years ago? Is it just that terminology 10 years ago was it's a grassland fire that's been started by bored youths who've just gone up and set fire to something with a magnifying glass? Or is it a crop fire that's the result of a combine sparking or something and going on fire? Or what?
Richard Prideaux: I mean, I'm not a barrister, as you may tell. I mean, I'm barely literate at times. But there are, if you sort of looking at how property is viewed in English law, there's, if you look at something like the 1968 Theft Act, that says that if a plant is growing wild, it is not theft if you pick it, if you are not the landowner, but if you try to make money from the picking of it, then it becomes theft. Sort of it's like the transfer of value is at the act of commerce. So if you're not trying to sell it, then it can't be property.
George Browne: This is a complete diversion. How does that work if you are, for example, YouTubing? Is that you making money from the act of picking that wild plant?
Richard Prideaux: It'd be an interesting one to test. I mean, it's the thing we had with running foraging courses. If you're on someone else's bit, if I'm sharing, I'm being paid to share the knowledge. But am I picking it? Is that a commercial act there?
George Browne: Fascinating.
Richard Prideaux: I think it's back to that thing of probably no one could be arsed to prosecute.
Amy Green: Well, this has taken a turn.
George Browne: It has.
Richard Prideaux: Where were we? Firehawks. So did the peregrine falcon survive?
George Browne: It flew off, yeah, before I could properly ID it. So I assume it was okay.
Richard Prideaux: This is the thing we've had several times whilst I've been on the phone with you. You're just doing wildlife spotting through your kitchen window whilst on the phone, which is quite distracting. You're in the mid-sentence and go, oh, is that a muntjac?
George Browne: Oh, a hummingbird hawk moth.
Richard Prideaux: Yes. I fully expect the George Browne book of things I spotted from my kitchen window whilst I was meant to be working.
George Browne: Some people I'm on the phone to get to experience live grey squirrel control.
Richard Prideaux: Nice. Is that sort of, and another thing? THUNK
George Browne: Pretty much, yeah. Oh, hang on, excuse me a minute, there's a squirrel.
Richard Prideaux: Well, this is something I wanted to do with the fish and game podcast at some point that I want to do commentary on some kind of field sports activity where we do two people fishing and you sort of give live sports-ball type commentary on just what they're doing, every single aspect.
George Browne: Yes, very good. You could have, obviously, you know, you have golf commentary, which everyone's whispering all of the time, hearing, oh, and he sunk that putt. Or you have the sort of slightly more energetic football style commentary and different field sports type things will have different commentary styles. That would be fun.
Amy Green: Yeah.
George Browne: That would be fun.
Richard Prideaux: So this is the part of why we're doing this as a separate show because there are other shows on the SideCountry Network and this is episode the first, I think, of SideCountry. If you're listening through to the end, you're probably pretty committed to listening to this. Most people have turned off by now. We've already got episode 2 recorded because George and Richard recorded that at the Game Fair, which was two weeks ago now, which seems like only yesterday. So that will be coming out. I think that's ready to listen to now. Actually, you can go straight and listen to episode 2. We're not going to number the episodes, though. I think we decided. So me calling it episode 2 really doesn't help.
George Browne: The next one in the list.
Richard Prideaux: Yes. Scroll down a little bit further. But there are other shows on the SideCountry network as we are now. So there's more for you to listen to there. But Let us know what your thoughts are on Wildfire on land management. I think there's a couple of good articles on Scribehound.com at the moment on Wildfire.
George Browne: There are one from Owen Williams recently, another one a little bit longer ago from Ian Coghill, one from Charlie Jacoby. So yeah, I mean, Wildfire gets a lot of coverage on Scribehound one way or another.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, but I think it's going to be the big discussion of the year until we start getting floods and then flood management comes back in as being the next thing that everyone talks about.
George Browne: It always seems to be the same places, doesn't it? Suffolk flooded a couple of years ago or 18 months ago and it's always, you know, bits of Yorkshire that are flooding. It's interesting that.
Richard Prideaux: Do we have to start examining whether God likes certain parts of the UK and really sort of judges others like, no, you've been naughty, have another fire, have a flood. I mean, it's like Bedfordshire just seems to get away with things, really.
George Browne: Well, on that note.
Richard Prideaux: So is there any other contentious area we can go into? We haven't mentioned veganism throughout this, so I think we've managed to stay safe on that regard at least.
George Browne: Yes, I think we should congratulate ourselves.
Richard Prideaux: Well done. So another successful episode in the bag. Thank you everyone for listening. If you go and have a look at the show notes, we'll put some interesting links in there. And also let us know your thoughts. There's an email address on there if you'd like to get in touch. And there's also our social media, so leave some comments there on this episode. Let us know your thoughts on wildfire upland management and maybe your thoughts on how we can solve the whole problem. I'd be interested to see them. Bye everyone. Bye.
George Browne: Bye.