EarthFirst Eco-Activists descend on tinder-dry moorland in August in a move of staggering hypocrisy driving outrage from local community.

For years, activist groups have lectured the moorland communities about fire. Controlled burning, they claim, is vandalism. The uplands, they tell anyone who will listen, must be protected from those who actually live and work on them.

This week, many of those same activists pitched tents on a moor in the Peak District, in August, during one of the driest summers on record, with wildfires already burning elsewhere in the National Park.

Earth First!, the self-described radical environmental network, announced on Wednesday morning that it had illegally occupied part of the Moscar Estate for its annual "Summer Gathering", a five-day festival of workshops on subjects ranging from green anarchism to "action climbing".

The site was chosen deliberately: the group says it is there to support the Reclaim Our Moors campaign, which is demanding that the estate be handed over to the public for £1.

The consequences were immediate. The fire and rescue service has been required to attend the scene to monitor the encampment and guard against any outbreak of wildfire.

Firefighters who should be available to respond to genuine emergencies across South Yorkshire and Derbyshire are instead standing watch over a field of tents, because a protest group decided that the middle of a heatwave was the right moment to install a temporary settlement of several hundred people on deep peat.

Consider what that means in practice. Fire and rescue services across the Pennines have spent this summer stretched to their limits. Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service has repeatedly warned that moorland fires are labour intensive and take vital emergency resources away from other incidents. The last major wildfire in the South Pennines took 32 days to extinguish and cost the fire service in the region of £1 million, an incident traced back to a single disposable barbecue. Every hour a crew spends parked beside an activist camp is an hour of public money and emergency capacity spent underwriting a publicity stunt.

The organisers know exactly how dangerous their choice of venue is. Their own website admits it. In a post published before the gathering, Earth First! acknowledged that "there are wildfires all over the world, and currently several burning in the Peak District", before issuing attendees with a list of rules: no camping stoves, no glass bottles, no barbecues, no campfires, and smoking only in designated areas with sand buckets and extinguishers on hand.

Read that list again. It is an admission, in the group's own words, of the very point moorland managers have been making for years: that people are the overwhelming cause of wildfire in the uplands, and that hot, dry moorland in August is no place for mass gatherings, naked flames or carelessness. The difference is that gamekeepers manage that risk every day of the year, through firebreaks, fuel load reduction, wildfire response equipment and constant vigilance, while Earth First! has imported several hundred strangers onto the moor and asked them nicely to be careful.

And who will respond first if something does go wrong? The same gamekeepers and estate staff the campers have spent the week vilifying, who hold the fogging units, the water bowsers, the all-terrain vehicles and, above all, the local knowledge that fire crews rely on when moorland ignites. It is a pattern seen time and again across the uplands: those who condemn moorland management loudest are the first to depend on it when the smoke rises.

None of this appears to trouble the organisers, who describe the occupation as reclaiming land "for the good of all life".

It is difficult to see what good is served by trampling ground-nesting bird habitat at the end of the breeding season, diverting emergency services during peak wildfire risk, and treating a working landscape as a festival site. Nor is it clear how a movement whose listed campaign issues have historically been HS2, coal, fracking and nuclear power came to decide that the gravest environmental threat in Britain is a managed grouse moor. The answer, of course, is that this was never about fire, carbon or curlew. It is about land ownership, and a squatted field makes for better content than a policy paper.

Guy Shrubsole and the class war dressed up as conservation

Which brings us to the people in whose name this stunt is being staged, and to one man in particular. Earth First! is explicit that it chose Moscar "in part to support" Reclaim Our Moors, the campaign launched in June 2025 that demands the estate be sold to the public for £1. The camp is hosting a Reclaim Our Moors workshop on Saturday and joining the campaign's annual protest march on Sunday.

At the core of Reclaim Our Moors, named in its own launch coverage, is Guy Shrubsole: author, campaigner, and the closest thing the anti-moorland movement has to an intellectual figurehead. His latest book was celebrated by the campaign's own allies as a "take-down of elite landowners". And it is Mr Shrubsole, more than anyone, who has taught this movement to treat wildfire not as a risk to be managed but as a debating point to be scored.

Consider his record. When the Moorland Association asked its members to pause burning in 2020 precisely because of elevated wildfire risk, Mr Shrubsole's response, as a Friends of the Earth spokesperson, was not to welcome the caution but to spin it as a gotcha, calling it an admission that heather burning increases the chances of wildfire.

When Defra consulted on extending the burning ban, he summed up the stakes in his own words: good news for nature and carbon, "bad news for dukes and billionaires who own grouse moors".

Read that again. Not bad news for wildfire resilience. Not a difficult trade-off between fuel loads and peat condition that serious fire scientists across the world are actively debating. Dukes and billionaires.

For Mr Shrubsole, upland fire policy is not a question of evidence but a question of who owns the land, and the answer to every question is the same: take it off them. His campaigning has never engaged seriously with the fuel load problem, the mounting evidence from this summer's fires that unmanaged, rank vegetation burns hotter, deeper and longer, or the testimony of the fire and rescue services who rely on moorland managers' equipment and knowledge when the uplands ignite.

Those inconvenient realities are waved away, because acknowledging them would mean acknowledging that the gamekeepers he has built a career vilifying might know something he does not.

That is the worldview that has now borne fruit on Moscar Moor. A movement schooled to believe that wildfire warnings are merely propaganda for dukes will naturally see nothing wrong with planting several hundred tents on tinder-dry peat in August. Why would they worry? Their intellectual leadership has spent years telling them that fire risk is a smokescreen, that the only real problem on the moors is who holds the title deeds.

The fire crews now standing watch over the camp are the practical consequence of that rhetoric. So the question for Mr Shrubsole, for the councillors who lent Reclaim Our Moors their credibility, and for every politician who has engaged with it, is straightforward: do you condemn this occupation, or do you accept it being carried out in your campaign's name?

Silence will be an answer in itself. And distancing may not come easily.

Mr Shrubsole is no stranger to trespass as a campaigning tool, having helped organise a mass trespass on the Sussex Downs in 2021 as part of the Right to Roam campaign. Those who have spent years arguing that trespass is legitimate, that landowners are the enemy, and that fire risk is a fiction invented by dukes can hardly feign surprise when a movement with fewer scruples takes the argument to its logical conclusion and simply moves in.

This is the difficulty with building a land campaign on resentment of who owns the moors rather than care for how they are kept: sooner or later, somebody takes you literally.

If Reclaim Our Moors wants to be taken seriously as a community campaign rather than a front for direct action, the path is obvious. Condemn the occupation. Acknowledge the fire risk and the burden on the emergency services. And explain to the people of Sheffield why a campaign supposedly about protecting peatland is being cheered on by several hundred people camping on it in a drought.

The people of Sheffield were rightly angry when smoke drifted over the city in 2023. They are entitled to ask a harder question now: why their fire service is spending its time and their money babysitting a protest camp on a bone-dry moor, at the invitation of a group that claims to speak for the environment.

When the tents come down on Monday, the campers will go home. The fire risk they created, the emergency service hours they consumed and the habitat they flattened will be left behind, on a moor that will be cared for, as it always has been, by the people they came to condemn.

The gamekeepers, farmers and rural families who make up moorland communities do not have the option of packing up and leaving when the weekend is over. They will still be there in September, and in the depths of winter, doing the unglamorous work of managing fuel loads, maintaining firebreaks and watching the horizon for smoke. It is long past time that those who claim to care about the uplands started listening to them.