Roam rights have their limits

For our part, Right to Roam as a campaign supports exclusion in instances where access rights cannot be reconciled with the flourishing of highly vulnerable species of conservation concern: think places like salt marshes, seabird colonies, and some beaches too.

We could also agree to go further as a society, and incorporate some areas of exclusion for its own sake – perhaps to gather baseline data on what the absence of people does and doesn’t achieve. 

Democracy

The crucial thing is that such projects be transparent and socially just; not simply a get out clause to perpetuate arbitrary exclusion via the back door. Indeed, a non-arbitrary model is key to ensuring such projects are perceived as legitimate, which – far more than the ‘Keep Out!’ sign – is what is needed to reinforce compliance with any justified restrictions and rules.

But I don’t think we should accept the negative framing of access as it’s presented by the authors. We have become too accustomed to viewing the presence of people in the land as a problem to be managed, not an asset to be embraced. 

In Britain, such ideas enjoy a long and dubious history; used over the centuries to justify the extinguishment of common right or to preserve the gentry’s game. 

Later, in the early 20th century, preservationists developed their own haughty class-based morality to bemoan the re-entry of plebs into the countryside, inventing weird terms like “disobedient bathing” and calling for the “prosecution of the loud”. 

As one person pithily summarised in the 1930s, shortly after the extension of the franchise, “the only way to save the countryside for democracy is to keep democracy out of the countryside.” 

Critics

Today, such arguments are often given a conservationist gloss (which gamekeeper hasn’t now rebranded as a “practical conservationist”, whether spuriously or not?) but the roots are much the same. Then as now, these narratives prove a convenient distraction from the real causes of ecological loss. 

We’re asked by Lloyd et al  what the last curlew on Dartmoor might think about the “tourism onslaught” every Easter, as though that had anything much to do with the species’ precipitous decline. 

We need only glance at the fate of the curlew in Ireland, where populations have declined by 98 per cent in the past three decades in a country with no right to roam, no equivalent of the CRoW Act, and not even a proper network of rights of way. 

The factors are little different to those driving curlew declines in England: silage harvesting, commercial afforestation destroying habitat and facilitating predator abundance, the draining of bog and wet fields. The odd walker has vanishingly little to do with it.

Okay, but could people – by which we nearly always mean their dogs – make a bad situation worse? Here there’s common ground between access campaigners and their critics. 

Ecosystems

We don’t believe all access rights should extend to pets, and intervention on dog ownership and its associated industries is long overdue for the sake of wildlife and farmed animals alike. 

To my knowledge, Right to Roam activists are actually the pioneers on this issue, having developed a raft of comprehensive measures on dogs we believe should accompany any access reform [full list: here]. 

For those who want the former without the latter: fine, but how are you going to achieve it? Packaging specific and sensible regulations within a popular expansion of rights is a way to motivate politicians and offset any political risks. A strong offer on access reform could be precisely the vehicle such legislation needs.

And for those concerned about the impacts of access, it’s hard to see why the status quo is so amenable. Its effect is already to squash public access together with sites for nature protection: with over half of our existing access land (which covers nearly eight per cent of land in England) is designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest, a National Nature Reserve, or a Local Nature Reserve. 

Initial monitoring of those sites by Natural England following the implementation of the CRoW Act (which introduced a ‘right to roam’ for walkers and climbers predominantly in the uplands) found the ecosystems little changed by the experience. 

Protection

But for those who still object: surely a flexible, non-habitat specific model which alleviates access pressure on earmarked sites offers more potential. And, while honeypots are always going to exist, greater doorstep access is likely to reduce the number of visitors driving hours to distant national parks just to walk and swim.

That’s important for nature too, because our locality is where we have the strongest influence and agency. Like ourselves, the authors support the rights of nature. 

Yet they seem to show antipathy for the very people most likely to uphold them. Even our current modest means of access have been showing us what’s possible, with communities all around the country rising to the defence of their natural heritage – a concept we call Wild Service.

We’ve seen it in Sheffield, in Wellingborough. On the Wharfe and the Wye, the Cam and the Avon. In myriad other places across the country where connection has served as a precursor to protection. 

Connection

These acts are almost never counted as conservation benefits of access, but that’s precisely what they are. In fact it’s becoming central to our environmental politics, as the pollution of rivers soars to the forefront of the political agenda; even as we’re forced to contest the basic right to swim.

All these grassroots nature guardians, and I suspect the authors themselves, have been motivated by formative experiences they’ve had with the natural world – the basic precondition of which is access to the outdoors. 

But with more and more micro-enclosures taking place around the country, and the attempted restriction of even long-standing rights on places like Dartmoor, we’re making such foundational experiences harder than ever. In the words of Chris Packham, the most endangered species in the countryside today is the young naturalist. 

The authors too express their anxiety that “many in our urban communities particularly have lost their sense of being live participants integral to the natural world” while implausibly arguing that “access does not in and of itself, however, lead to connection.” Well, no. But it’s a damn sight harder without it.

Policing

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the authors’ convictions, or that they’re motivated by anything other than the plight of the natural world that advocates for the right to roam fiercely share. But piggybacking their agenda onto a fundamentally unjust system is a dangerous wager. 

Doing so will weaken conservation’s legitimacy in the long term, and galvanise those who seek profit from trading humanity’s interests off against nature’s, as though their fate wasn’t woven together.

Ultimately, we who identify as environmentalists need to stop imagining we’re somehow better, more unique, more special than those who, for now, do not. 

Given the means, time and experience, everyone – everyone – has the same capacity to become nature’s defenders. The future of conservation relies on making each of those elements more available. Not in policing who we do and don’t think can care.

This Author

Jon Moses is a freelance writer and the organiser of campaign group Right to Roam – a group fighting for free, fair and informed access to land and water throughout England.