You Slag!

I don't watch Eastenders, but turning over lumps of slag looking for invertebrates on an abandoned post-industrial site recently started me musing on post-industrial conservation.

When I talked about the spiders of Leicestershire and Rutland at the Leicester Literary and Philosophical Society recently I found myself slipping into a familiar rant about the management of "nature" reserves and the deathly grip of "wildflower meadows" on all other taxa. Close mowing in August is "good for the flowers" and the only thought given to insects stops with the limited concept of "pollinators" - by which they mean "bees". No thought is given to the damage done to other taxa by close mowing. We've all seen examples of this on road verges and other sites. Yet these sites have to be managed and in most instances, grazing is not an available option. The best compromise would be only to mow part of the reserve on an annual rotation, with the rest being left alone. At the end of my talk a friend popped up and told me to go to Asfordby Hill (where the slag comes from) - so I did.

In 1985 I was living in California and only dimly aware of the final stages of the miner's strike playing out. It was only a decade later visiting ex-mining communities when the enormity of the societal change dawned on me. In January 2020 I sit here fretting about the next big one, the post-CAP agricultural future. Asfordby Colliery was the last deep coal mine sunk in England and at it's peak employed nearly 500 people. After investing close to half a billion pounds, the mine closed in 1997. On a rare sunny day in January, Asfordby Hill looks almost lovely, with huge swathes of Cladonia rangiformis glistening between the nursery forest of self-seeded Birch. I haven't had chance to complete my entomological analysis yet, but even in January it's looking like an exceptional site. In the denuded Watsonian vice county of VC55 all our finest conservation sites are post-industrial - Bloody Oaks, Ketton, Holwell, Eyebrook. Bagworth Heath was my (belated) discovery of 2019, and has been a delight - Marbled Whites, Sand Martins and Heather. Trudging across the biodiversity agrideserts that industrial farming has wrought on Leicestershire makes me wonder about the coming era of post-subsidy, post-industrial farming. It's not clear to me where rewilding is going in the lowlands and to me the post-agricultural future looks a lot more like solar farms and yoga yurts than packs of wolves sweeping majestically across the plains of Leicestershire. Rewilding Leicestershire looks a lot more like birches and lichens than bison and brown bears.