There’s plenty of debate about the uplands these days – including issues of land ownership, raptor persecution, re-wilding, deer and grouse moor management, plantation forestry, renewables and peatland restoration.
Much of this is about keeping the hills as they are, in all their loveliness. Only the more extreme advocates of land reform and rewilding invoke any radical visions of change – in somewhat opposing directions depending on the presence or absence of people.
But there’s an elephant in the room – degradation. Much of the land is wrecked. There is a magnificent beauty in that open, elemental combination of water, mountain and sky which somehow excuses the desperate state of the vegetation. This land has been grazed and burnt to a shadow of its former self by these unsustainable practices, tolerated for so long that many people think the resulting landscape is natural.
This is a matter of immense significance to the rural economy, raised repeatedly by others in the past – Frank Fraser Darling, Ron Greer and Derek Pretswell, Reforesting Scotland, and others – but greeted with deaf ears and blind tradition.
To be clear, much of this land is naturally poor and beaten by lashing rain for much of the year; there’s little prospect of wheat and barley on these hillsides. But it doesn’t need to be a wet desert.
Helen Armstrong’s excellent two-part paper for Forest Policy Group invites a fresh appraisal of the potential contrast. The fact is that the uplands could support much more natural woodland – always allowing for elements of the other habitats that make the uplands special – heathland, mire, herb rich grassland and scrub – preferably in a rich mosaic. As Helen shows with abundant evidence, trees are extraordinarily good for this kind of land – they belong there. They enrich the soil, stabilise slopes, capture carbon, regulate water flows, diversify the habitat, improve river fisheries, provide shelter for livestock, and energy and materials for people.
How could this happen? We don’t need more costly blanket planting schemes with unsightly mounding and fencing, all at the public expense; this just endorses and perpetuates the status quo on the rest of the land. Instead, we need bold resolve at a policy level to regulate the intensity of grazing and burning so that trees can get on with doing what they are good at – regeneration.
This would require a re-think on sporting estates, obliging them to adopt practices which reflect more of the public good. Contrary to popular myth, there would be no less need for the gamekeeper – deer will thrive better in these landscapes and need to be controlled and harvested. There would be more to sustain the livelihoods of farmers, foresters, fishermen and others; this is restoration for people.
Where this has been done by landscape restoration projects across Scotland and in much of south west Norway, it is outstandingly successful. We just need much, much more of it. The unwilling, by contrast, would be wise to note the First Minister’s recent emphasis of the Scottish Government’s view that Scotland’s land should be ‘an asset which benefits the many, not the few’.
Looking at the full range of issues – social, environmental and economic – it’s hard to find evidence to support the perpetuation of the current model of land use which dominates the uplands. An alternative vision is required. The sooner we allow our imaginations to be inspired, the sooner those landscapes – caustically described by some as MAMBA (miles and miles of b—– all) – could be on their slow road to recovery, restoring the natural capital of the land and its ability to yield benefits for generations to come.
Simon Pepper June 2015
I work with two native woodland landscapes, Glenmore and Glen Affric, where nature is showing us that given enough of a respite from grazing and browsing, trees can regenerate from seemingly moribund remnants and the forest can march up the hill; well beyond 500m asl.
Having just come back from a study trip in Norway hosted by Duncan Halley, the evidence stares us in the face. Their woodlands have bounced back from a long period of deforestation.
The secret? They did not have large landed estates that locked up the resource and they ate their deer population. But today, they have quite superb woodlands and a very healthy hunting culture for deer, moose and grouse.
Interestingly, the Norwegians also now have a voluntary scheme in place where they are buying out the landowners rights to cut timber off their land, to protect the resource in some key areas – in perpetuity.
Giles,
You might find this article of interest and a main part of the reason why the planting trials were a success is lessons learned from Norway and Iceland 30+ years ago. Those of us who made the study trips ( Derek Pretswell, Angus McHattie, Reforesting Scotland and myself etc) all those years ago, sometimes forget that a whole generation has grown up who are largely unaware of them. The frustration for us, for reasons Simon Pepper has explained above, never got the chance to fully apply and expand on them. Perhaps your generation might fare better.
http://www.andwightman.com/?=3291 My advice is don’t re-invent the wheel—just push it 200metres higher up the hill!
Sorry for the typo, it should be http://www.andywightman.com/?p=3291
Interesting blog – but the UK is the 3rd largest timber importer in the world and an article on forestry which doesn’t mention timber once, seems slightly strange.
I would love to see much, much more natural woodland in Scotland, and for us to approach European levels of tree cover, i am not hugely concerned whether this is achieved by planting, or natural regeneration, but the sooner it is done the better.
It is worth pointing out that there has been no “blanket planting” in Scotland since the late ’80’s, and the largest new native woodland planted in Scotland this year, was part of a new commercial conifer scheme in the Ochills. The vast majority of the funding for which was by an Oxfordshire based investment company.
We need to move beyond a binary approach to forest management – regen vs planting, natives vs conifer,or timber vs biodiversity – and look at the bigger picture and focus on managing our uplands for the maximum ecosystem services.
Scotland wants to build thousands of new affordable homes, lets build them out of renewable Scottish timber, not un-renewable concrete or imported timber.
I would add a proviso to that in that we have to look at why we are using so much timber in the first place. The ludicrous amount of ‘waste’ that is still going for landfill and incineration instead of recycling in Scotland may go some way to explaining why we import so much wood. We could cut our paper use considerably and use far more recycled fibre, but even green organisations are too often reluctant to use recycled paper. Hell of a lot more jobs could be created by reprocessing than material extraction. To take pressure of wilderness here and abroad we need to look at managing demand rather than automatically meeting it.