Britain’s national parks are not protecting nature

UntilSSSISAC 2019 Derek Gow farmed 121 hectares of Dartmoor, in Devon, with 1,500 breeding sheep and 120 cows. But he abandoned traditional agriculture after the last of the curlews, a type of bird, vanished. “In the end, you just begin to realise that everything you’re doing is wrong,” says the farmer-turned-conservationist. He has since “rewilded”, emptying his fields and restocking them with much smaller numbers of cattle, pigs, water buffalo and wild horses—as well as reintroducing species ranging from Eurasian beavers to wildcats.Dartmoor is one of 15 national parks in Britain. To the untrained eye it looks like one of the country’s finest wild spaces: 954 square kilometres of rugged, sweeping moorland punctuated by tors. A third of it is protected as either a site of special scientific interest (), meaning it is of special biological or geological interest, or a special area of conservation (), meaning its biodiversity is of international importance by European Union standards.