Scottish nature is alive

August 18 2019

Scottish Nature is Alive

It is Lovely to enjoy it

The picturesque Highland vistas much admired by visitors to the Highlands today, are the consequence of giving the land over to sheep, to forestry, and to sporting estates

(such as grouse and deer shooting).

The landscape is denuded of folk.

Dotted across the Highland landscape are ruined settlements: sometimes their walls are still evident, at other times there can be seen just a jumble of stones.

'All was silence and devastation,' runs a contemporary account of the eradication of one Highland community.

'Blackened and roofless huts still enveloped in smoke, articles of furniture cast away . . . and a few domestic fowls, scraping for food among hills of ashes,

were the only objects that told us of man.

A few days had sufficed to change a countryside teeming with the cheeriest sounds of rural life, into a desert.'

there is a process of denuding the land of thriving communities and turning it over to sheep runs and deer shooting estates, with a socio-economic consequences today (as well as trying to find out who actually owns the Highlands today) is written by one who loves wild places, but the West Highlands and the Islands are "wild" today because of a terrible, shattering injustice visited upon the native peoples in pursuit of a capitalist economic rationale.

One good thing did come from the Clearances.

In Canada those exiles found land of their own and carried on the Gaelic culture that was wiped out so comprehensively in the land they were forced from. The chance to own land simply did not exist for them at home and they were not about to give it up as Lord Selkirk discovered when he arrived at what he thought was going to be his own feudal estate in what became Manitoba.
Sadly, what this meant for displaced indigenous populations is only too well known. However, I do believe the original Scottish approach was one of integration and trade. It is no accident that so many of the Métis Nation of the Northwest carry Scottish patromyms. Many Métis people have travelled back to Scotland to seek out the abandoned graves and villages of their ancestors.

A Scottish bare windswept landscape is a result of human removal of the woodland cover. Not unlike what is happening in the Amazon today.

Spruce plantations are actually closer to the "natural" landscape of every island in in the UK than the bleak man-made boggy deserts.

Strategy to increase forest to cover 20% of Scotland's land area by 2030, and more appropriately than has sometimes been the case in the past. Details here:

https://www.gov.scot/publications/scotlands-forestry-strategy-20192029/pages/3/

Much woodland is being panted in gardens and croftland Lewis.Despite it’s wild and windy weather trees grow well if kept away from deer and sheep

China is planting trees on a massive scale.

forests should be replanted....Ethiopia planted a million tree in one day, so Scotland could reforest its barren slopes with enough effort and volunteers.

We can aim to end pollution. And clear the smog.

Then we can allow everyone a luxury only small rural towns can in the present. To switch off the light-pollution of entire cities. So that everyone can walk out into the streets and parks to see the stars of the sky. To see the glory of our own Milkyway swipe across the sky for one night in the year.

To be able to truly see how amazing the sky is - how beautiful the Milkyway is - once a year when the lights and turned off would allow it.

Imagine Londoners and people in Los Angeles, Beijing, Mexico City, Berlin (etc) being allowed out on the streets in clear air and total darkness to see how humanity used to see the night sky for the first 300,000 years of our species?

Maybe then we would all understand better - deeply instinctively - how important it is to care for all this beauty - all this home? After a few centuries when it became typical to never to have seen the night-sky once in a life-time.

The right to see the galaxy we belong to.

The really sad thing, there is no true wilderness left! Humans have touched every part of this wonderful earth of ours! True wilderness doesn't exist! The highest mountain, to the depths of the ocean, human interference is seen! The thing that keeps me going is that whatever humans do, at the end of the day, mother nature will take back her earth! The volcano eruption in America, Mount At Helens, has proved this! Even humans destroying themselves, Mother nature will survive! Goffers and lupins! How cool is that. I just hope the powers that control our destiny, and there are very few, in the great scheme of things, get their act together, and stop their war games!! Because they are just playing war games with this wonderful earth of ours and her people!!

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