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When you claim landowners burn the vegetation on peat you do realise that's the only reason there is any peat.I don't think the main problem is removing the big landowners from the land. It is a fact that some/many of them have a policy of relentlessly removing much of the biodiversity (often illegally) from that land to benefit just one species - red grouse. It is also said that muirburn is a big problem as well - ie burning the vegetation on deep peat which releases the carbon dioxide stored there. I also think you're overstating the case that walkers and off-roaders would cause as much damage to wildlife that the current regimes do. I do agree with you about off-roaders, they're a real pain here in Wales, and difficult to control. But I couldn't say that walkers would be a big problem. Many of these moorlands are pretty vast and difficult to penetrate on foot.
How would you remove the landowners anyway? It's their land........
Most of these areas would develop scrubby birch and gorse then naturally burn periodically.
But those fires would be much hotter than the quick flash over of controlled burn when peat is wet and the whole lot would go down to subsoil.
Our upland moorland areas have been much as they are since the iron age when people cleared land by cutting the manageable stuff to use and piling brash round bigger trees to burn so they died fell over.
Gradually the climate worsened got colder and wetter and peat overwhelmed any regenerating saplings.
The idea that moorland is a new thing developed entirely for Victorian grouse shooting is pure political drivel - apparently being pushed widely by those with an agenda that the only allowed ecology should be heavy tree cover shading everything else out.
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