What is it about wildfires that they don't get?

We have been blessed with a dry spring – the first one for 3 years. Unfortunately, every silver lining has a cloud and in the uplands, that cloud has mostly been smoke.

The last two springs were wet, which flattered the rewilders and management abandoners. Their theory that you can re-wet moorland and then forget about management because wildfire is 'impossible' seemed to be working. Indeed, we think it is fair to say that the strategy of the RSPB, and consequently of the National Trust, the Wildlife Trusts, the Water Companies and Natural England, has been proved to work splendidly – as long as it is pouring with rain.

Unfortunately, this spring it stopped raining and the fires started. One wildfire after another has broken out in the uplands where the 're-wet and walk away' strategy is in place. There are so many that it would be boring to list them. So let's look at one, in the Derwent Valley in the Peak District that took out an area described to us by a local expert as, 'Scrub rewilding'.

The particular plot of moorland has an interesting history. In the 1990s the shooting tenant trialled his theory for converting rank molinia grassland into heather dominated heath. The scale was initially small, and the trial funded from his own pocket with support from the Heather Trust and then supported by the government through the ESA, largely for compensating the tenant farmer for his temporary loss of grazing.

By the end of the decade the results were so extraordinary that the ESA agreed further grant funding to extend the temporary exclusion of the sheep while the moorland was restored and the biodiversity increased. By 2006, the wildlife and habitat recovery were at a level that no one thought even possible when the journey had started on a landscape dominated by species poor molinia, and the people involved were encouraged to take part in the Purdey conservation awards. To no-one's surprise, they walked away with the top award.

From the outset of this amazing example of nature restoration – turning species poor molinia into species rich heather moorland – the landlords (the National Trust (NT)), had been enthusiastic supporters of the project. In the years following the Purdey Award the NT were delighted to welcome all and sundry to the site to show off the manifestly wonderful achievements that they were part of. Government ministers, conservation organisations, television companies and more beat a path to the site and all said that they were amazed and impressed. It became the place to go to in the Peak District to see wildlife. When Ray Mears wanted to film short-eared owls and mountain hares, the place that was chosen was the NT nature restoration site.

By 2006, when the recovered area won the Purdey Award for conservation, around half a million pounds had been spent by the tenant, the government and various backers. In comparison with the money wasted by the conservation industry this expenditure represented amazing value. The place teemed with wildlife. It had lots of curlew, lapwing and the greatest concentration of mountain hares in England. It was an SPA for golden plover and merlin, and had good populations of all upland species. It also had a shootable surplus of grouse and was subject to cool rotational burning. Interestingly, in the early years the tenant only received his grant from the ESA on the understanding that 10% of the moor was burnt every year.

The wonderful record of successful moorland restoration, increased biodiversity and species abundance began its steady decline when the personnel changed at both NE and the National Trust (NT), and it was decided in 2013 that neither sheep grazing or rotational cool burning were to be allowed. Then, to make bad even worse, most predator control activity was also stopped by the NT. However that did not stop money being spent and an estimated 100K was spent putting sphagnum plugs into the peat and planting trees.

Wonderful open landscapes and the rare wildlife they support don't disappear overnight and it took over a decade for everything to reach the moment last week when the long-predicted wildfire put the final touches to this little tragedy. Most of the upland birds and the mountain hares had already gone when the blaze tore through the once beautiful and rich moorland. They went when the vegetation became too rank for them, or they were predated by crows and stoats.

What also went was the money. Half a million or more went up in smoke. Having achieved so much, it was in the end entirely wasted by the genius of NE and NT, who knew that the moor, replete with its thousands of little sphagnum plugs, could not burn, because they said it couldn't. Well, it did and the only people they can blame are themselves.

Even worse is the waste of humanity. The people who made all this possible did not do it for profit. They did it for love. Their love of grouse shooting, of course, but also their love of the rare and precious landscape and the unique wildlife it supports. Imagine what is like to know how to create a little paradise, and to then see it come into being and function perfectly for a few years. But then also imagine being told that your views don't matter, that your skill and knowledge is of no interest, and to get out of the way. That would be a bitter thing.

But then to have to watch while a toxic mixture of arrogance and ignorance destroys the paradise you made, and finally to see the night sky red with fire and realise that what you told them would happen has come to pass. That is beyond, way beyond, bitter.

Will this abject failure of stewardship make any difference? Of course not. In any sensible industry the people responsible would expect to be disciplined or demoted. That is not the way the conservation industry works. Incompetence is rewarded. The NT have already had the green light from NE for a multimillion-pound Nature Restoration Project for the Peak District. If the usual suspects get to restore the burnt and blackened land, the few hundred thousand the sporting tenant did the work for will be peanuts. It will be millions.

It is of course a disgrace. It is a scandalous waste of scarce of money and time. It is another conservation disaster, caused by the arrogance and incompetence of the new conservation elite. If it were a one off it would be shocking, but it isn't; it is repeating itself wherever their re-wet and walk away policy is applied. Even worse, their staff on the ground know it is wrong, and will say so in private, but they will tell you that they dare not say such a thing to the people they work for.

Perhaps worst of all, the RSPB and its fellow travellers are trying to persuade government to stop all heather management by rotational cool burning. It seems likely that they are aware that the system they operate is a disaster, but rather than admit it, they will pull everyone else down to their level. Shocking doesn't begin to cover it.