Wild land charity the John Muir Trust (JMT) recently published the results of a poll that showed that 80 per cent of us want continued protection of the 42 Wild Land Areas as defined on the map produced by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH).
Also that 52 per cent ‘strongly agree’ they should continue to be protected from large-scale infrastructure such as "industrial-scale wind farms, major electricity transmission and super-quarries”.
It is perfectly understandable for the JMT to do this. Protecting wild land is its raison d'être, and no reasonable citizen could really support a chemical plant in Glen Affric or a waste recycling facility in Strathnaver.
As JMT points out since the Wild Land Areas map was approved in June 2014, requiring "significant protection" in national planning policy, seven major wind farms on Wild Land Areas have been refused consent. “However, a decision late last year to consent the Creag Rhiabhach wind farm at Altnaharra (Sutherland) has left the status of wild land in doubt. “ But there is another side to this debate as the Herald letters columns have shown in the last week or so. One submission to the original SNH consultation was particularly telling. It came from the community land owners on the Knoydart Peninsula, an area which suffered cruelly in the aftermath of the Culloden and the 19th century clearances. It said “It appears the designation of 'wild land' is essentially about the perception of those from outwith the area and pays no heed of the views or perceptions of those people who live and work there."
Knoydart, like so much of the Highlands and Islands, lost its people. But under the community ownership of the Knoydart Foundation it is reversing population decline - a solemn mission for all the community landowners.
Indeed it is known that their umbrella organisation Community Land Scotland is developing a plan to encourage the resettlement of those vast stretches of land emptied by the clearances. Central to this could be a ‘Settlement Clearances Map’ with a presumption in favour of the developments that can deliver re-population hand in hand with environmental renewal.
There would be a strong argument that such a document should have equal status in government policy-making as the wild land map. It is something that ministers, so often under fire for their timidity, should seriously consider if they truly want to reshape a new Scotland.
Last month Highland historian Professor Jim Hunter delivered Edinburgh University’s Geography Department Lecture on “Wild Land, Rewilding and Re-peopling", made the case.
He said “Recently, wild land’s been mapped, described and analysed extensively. But in all of this, I think, one key dimension’s missing.A sense of history … a sense of what’s been altered, often radically, over time. A sense that much that’s now thought wild was made the way it is by human action … not so very long ago.
“Around and inside wild land areas is a deal of archaeology. From medieval times, the iron age, the bronze age, even earlier. Archaeology that shows our empty landscapes were lived among, and occupied, by people for maybe five millennia. What’s being preserved in wild land areas, then, is very often something that – in fifty centuries – has existed for just two.”
One man's wildness is another's sad history.
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