I live in a ‘wild’ place – mountains, broken tree-lined shores, deep lochs, forests. I am surrounded by iconic British animals- red squirrels, sea eagles, pine martens, deer. Tourists come here and wonder. Locals are proud. All of us are nature-blind, because this place is anything but wild.

There is this strange thing that happens when we look at the Scottish landscape (or perhaps at any landscape) in that we do not know what we are seeing. Partly this is because we have lost our folk memories of what we are NOT seeing.

Despite every metric pointing to a continual precipitous decline in our ecosystems- a loss of diversity measurable in almost every way, and in different biomes – most of us are not able to grasp just how bad things are here in Scotland. There has been an average 15% decline in abundance of 407 terrestrial and freshwater species since 1994. There has been a 49% decline in average abundance of Scottish seabirds. 11% of species found in Scotland are threatened with extinction from Great Britain. Meanwhile, we thrill to nature propoganda shots of the sea eagles of the noble stag as if all is well.

This film tells a story that we need to hear.

How has it come to this, and what can we do about it?

As mentioned in the video, wealth is at the heart of the problem. Land ownership in Scotland has a particular flavour and pattern that arises from a history that we can not be proud of. This from here.

No other European country has such a narrow base of proprietorship as Scotland. Half of all privately owned rural land is held by 421 people or entities. The roots of such disparities lie in the past. The 18th- and 19th-century Highland clearances emptied the glens and readied them for private takeover. On the continent, and eventually in England, the great estates were broken up by inheritance and land taxes. By comparison, Scotland is still feudal in scale.

There are already fears that Scotland’s new proposed Land Reform Bill has been gutted, ending up with something far less than that recommended by the Scottish Land Commission in their report from 2019. It is hard to escape the power of wealthy elites.

The video above mentions the possible use of a land tax, of the kind proposed by Common Weal.

Land prices in Scotland have risen at a rate
outstripping many other ‘investment assets’ with
stocked commercial forest land in Scotland,
for instance, increasing in value from £8,500
per hectare in 2018 to £21,000 per hectare in
202210 (had such land increased in price only by
general inflation, it would be worth just £9,500
per hectare in 2022). The selling price of such
land has also consistently been over 120% of the
asking price on the market which is indicative
of demand for purchases being substantially
higher than supply. Similar patterns have been
observed in other types of land in Scotland in
recent years so it is not a stretch to say that
communities are simply being ‘priced out’ of land,
even where legislation has made some steps
towards making it theoretically easier for them to
purchase such land assuming they somehow had
the capital to do so. The high profile failure of a
local community to be able to enact a community
buyout of the Tayvallich Estate in Argyll – which
had an asking price of £10.5 million, equivalent
to around £7,800 per hectare – is indicative of
Scotland’s broader failure to enact land reform
and will only be one of many such failures until
reform is embedded. A local land tax can, should,
and must be a part of this reform, not just by
raising revenue which would directly benefit
communities who cannot otherwise access the
land around them but also by acting as a break
or even reversal on the price of land sales (which
would have to factor in the tax burden of the
asset) and, if done right, would bring prices back
down into the range at which communities would
have a better chance of owning the land around
and under their own feet.

Read the whole report here.

For most of us, far from the seats of power in Edinburgh or London, there remains the important, ordinary urgency of learning how to read a landscape.

The photograph above is taken just above my house- one of the many many vast plantations of commercial forest in my home county of Argyll. They are better understand as green-brown deserts.

Here in Scotland, our challenge is mostly NOT preservation, it is the urgent need of restoration and recovery of our ecosystems. Think about that- in contrast to other European countries, we have ALREADY lost much of what should be here. In order to see any recovery, the task required is a mult-generational re-seeding and re-populating of our mountains and valleys.

We have to be able to SEE this and imagine an alternative.