The Moor Knows Best
5th June 2026
First, consider the trail of unintended consequences that follows environmental policy like a shadow. The case of Wild Justice, the activist group co-founded by Chris Packham, provides a perfect, if gruesome, example. Their (fortunately, mostly failed) legal campaigns have not only tightened corvid shooting licenses across the countryside—making it nearly impossible for land managers to control burgeoning populations of crows and magpies—but have directly led to a spike in horrific animal welfare incidents. In 2019, following Wild Justice’s legal challenge that forced Natural England to revoke general licences for shooting carrion crows, farmers across the country reported lambs having their eyes pecked out by emboldened corvids. The policy, born of a simplistic urban notion that all wild birds are equally sacred, ignored the real-world consequence: a slow, agonising death for livestock that no court in London will ever have to witness. This is the hallmark of ideology untethered from practical land management.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth about these environmental pressure groups: they are not scientific bodies nor serious land managers, but a religious cult dressed in waterproofs made from oil—the very fossil fuel they claim to despise yet don without a flicker of hypocrisy. They operate on faith, not data. Their central dogma is that nature left entirely alone is a pure, static Eden—a belief that would collapse instantly if any of them had to spend a winter feeding stock on a marginal moor. They have outlier high priests who survive by conjuring audiences through triggering (Packham, George Monbiot), holy texts (rewilding manifestos and ‘peer review’ nonsense heralding from redbrick universities), and a concept of original sin (human intervention).