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NATURE CONTESTED:
Environmental History in Scotland and Northern England since 1600
T.C. Smout
Pages: 256
ISBN 0-7486-1411-7 paperback (£14.99)
ISBN 0-7486-1411-9 hardback (£45.00)
This Review by Ian Mitchell
was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 10 August 2001
(Reproduced with permission)
In Nature Contested,
Professor Smout has written the first comprehensive but accessible
history of the politics of the environment in Scotland (Pace
the title, the references to northern England are occasional and
contribute little to the argument). This book will be welcomed by
all who believe that by the comprehensive application of bureaucratic
controls on countryside activities, a new world can be created in
which gentle, suburbanized man can live in harmony with refulgent,
resurgent nature. Well maintained paths will snake though cool,
scented pine forests, where capercailzie display and crossbills
pose coyly within range of stake-holders' binoculars. The serpent,
greed, will have been banished from this Eden so that harmony envelops
it like the warm shadows of undarkened evening. No-one will grow
old there; no-one will die. Metaphorically-speaking it will be a
land of everlasting youth: Tir nan-Og for townies.
This is the vision which informs the labours of
Scottish Natural Heritage, the government's executive agency responsible
for advice on, and management of, nature in Scotland. Professor
Smout was Deputy Chairman of this body for five years in the 1990s,
and sat on the board of SNH's predecessor, the Nature Conservancy
Council, for five years before that.
Smout's point of departure is that, where nature
is concerned, there is a fundamental conflict between what he calls
"use and delight". For the last three centuries, agricultural
improvement along with rural civil engineering projects for urban
development--to provide clean water, for example--have threatened
the aesthetic integrity of pre-industrial landscapes. It was not
until the 1920s that the first voices were raised proposing overall
national control of development in country areas, initially of ribbon
development, then, with the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947,
of all development, except agriculture and forestry. England was
also given national parks, which Scotland managed to avoid. To the
extent that this book puts an argument, it is that Scotland should
also have national parks.
In this, Smout has been overtaken by history since
legislation to that effect was recently passed by the Scottish parliament,
though it was bitterly opposed by almost everybody outside the nature
conservation bureaucracy. There is a principle at stake, and it
is one which has been at issue throughout the four centuries of
Smout's survey: should freedom be sacrificed for virtue? Must we
all be forced to act in what the powers that be, first the lairds
and now the bureaucrats, see as our own best interests?
If we should not, then national parks or any other
form of nature conservation become purely matters of taste; if we
should, then historians like Smout are wasting their time writing
history unless it helps bring about the moral uplift of those who
do not share his vision. Smout confess his difficulty here:
"There is a preacher in me, which the historian in me needs
to distrust. Those years in the NCC and SNH confirmed a desire
to write what the Scottish Enlightenment would call 'useful history'.
To admit as much is almost tantamount to disqualifying oneself
as a serious academic, for surely useful history becomes 'Whig
history', vitiated by a desire to justify the attitudes of the
present by mining the past for facts that suit a predetermined
case. It could easily slip into being so, yet few in the historical
profession would want to admit to writing totally useless history."
The uncomfortable reality for all those trying
to build Tir nan-Og north of the Trossachs is that the inhabitants
of rural Scotland resent being told what they should think about
the land they variously love, live in and labour on by outsiders,
like Professor Smout, who do not have its dirt under their fingernails.
One of the main reasons is that outsiders rarely have any deep sense
of the region's past. How can they, when they rarely speak what
was until very recently the language of the land, Gaelic?
Since one of Smout's main purposes is to describe
the attitude of the common people to nature, it is relevant that
he has no Gaelic, despite having spent a professional lifetime writing
social history in Scotland. For most of the period he covers, the
majority of Highlanders were Gaelic speakers, most of them monoglot.
So universal was the language that at the beginning of Smout's period,
King James found it necessary to compel the clan chieftains to have
their heirs educated in English so that there would be at least
one person within each clan's domain who spoke the language of the
court in Edinburgh. Prior to that, hardly a word of English, or
even Braid Scots, would have been heard from one year's end to the
next between Kintyre and Caithness. Yet all this is terra
nullius to Smout. The reality is that he is writing a modern,
deceptively sleekit form of imperial history which is little more
than "useful".
Smout not only quotes other people's translations
of Gaelic, he quotes other authors' interpretations of translated
Gaelic literature. This is typical of his approach to sources generally:
everything is second-hand. He cites newspaper reports of parliamentary
debates which he could have looked up in Hansard; and magazine references
to court cases which he should have read in the Law Reports. Much
worse is his habit of taking at face value the unreliable assertions
about nature put out by partisan outsiders like the RSPB, when a
summer tramping the hills and talking to hill folk would have revealed
their falseness.
Smout says of the corncrake, for example, that
it is "a species of traditional hay meadows reduced to final
refuge in the Hebrides." This was exactly what the RSPB used
to say in the mid-1990s when it was raising money to buy land in
the Hebrides, ostensibly to protect the bird. In fact, corncrakes
exist in huge numbers in the former eastern bloc countries which
do not have "traditional hay meadows", simply lots of
gloriously untidy countryside. Consider figures which Smout does
not give: Britain has perhaps
600 calling male corncrakes; the comparable population of Russia
alone is estimated at 2.5 million. "Reduced to final refuge
in the Hebrides": how un-"global" can you get?
Neither does Smout mention the RSPB's dismal record
of corncrake "production" on its own reserves. If he had
looked into that, he would have learned that the hay meadow claim
is bogus, made largely for agricultural policy lobbying purposes.
The main Irish expert on the bird, Michael O'Meara, whom the RSPB's
(English) researchers preferred not to consult when they conducted
their survey in Ireland in 1993, found corncrakes nesting in sand
dunes, golf courses, town edges etc. But, O'Meara says, "Sheppard
and Green ignored such places. It was almost as if they did not
want to find anything that would upset the agricultural theory."
Writing about the environment requires first-hand
experience to counter the claims of the conservation industry which
survives by peddling misleading statistics in return for cash, either
from the general public or from government. The basic problem with
Professor Smout's book is illustrated by the fact that the RSPB--an
Anglo-centric body which is mistrusted from Kintyre to Caithness--is
the most often quoted authority. Local knowledge is almost completely
absent from these pages. Administrators are described by the dozen,
but the ordinary people of rural Scotland, like their Gaelic-speaking
ancestors, are ignored.
Maybe this should not be surprising. Smout is
the Director of the Institute of Environmental History at the University
of St Andrews and Historiographer Royal in Scotland. Imperial history
has traditionally been written by the administrative class for an
audience of its own clients.
This is the root of the great injustice which
is currently being perpetrated by SNH, the RSPB and their fellow
travellers: the reward of the Highlander and Hebridean for sensitive
stewardship of the land has been to have control of it taken away
from him or her by alien bureaucrats. Smout himself hails from Cambridge;
the Chairman of SNH comes from Lancashire and the Chief Executive
from Leicestershire; the Director for Scotland of the RSPB grew
up in Croydon. Beyond these bodies, the Chief Executive of the Scottish
Wildlife Trust comes from Lancashire; the Chairman of the National
Trust for Scotland comes from Sussex and the Director from Yorkshire.
Even the Director of the Scottish Landowners' Federation is an Englishman,
as is the Chairman of the Deer Commission, and most of the Board
of the Scottish Biodiversity Group. The only notable exception to
the rule is the Director-General of the Forestry Commission, who
is a Tasmanian.
The battle between alien bureaucracy and local
democracy is best illustrated by recent events on Islay, where there
is a seal colony which SNH wants to protect by creating a marine
Special Area of Conservation. Neither on Islay nor anywhere else
in the British Isles are seal numbers under threat. The colony which
SNH has its eyes on has doubled in numbers over the last twenty
years or so. Everybody leaves them alone. The local people have
no quarrel with the seals, just with the bureaucrats. They are dead
set against the proposed designation since they do not want any
further interference in an island already hog-tied by compulsory
paradise protection measures. Every single elected body or person
representing Islay has come out against it. SNH say the seals have
to be protected because there are so many of them; the islanders
say that because there are so many of them, they clearly are protected
already; why increase red tape?
Smout's gloss on the seal issue (p. 35) is that
it is a conflict between fishermen and suburban sentimentalists,
which is half true. But it omits to mention SNH's own aggressive,
manipulative and deeply unpopular role in the controversy. Why?
Because at the other end of the book (p. 169) we read that SNH espouses
"a corporate ethos that deliberately seeks consensus and partnership
rather than confrontation". The unwary reader would never realise
that SNH had, by intentionally withholding press releases from the
Islay newspaper, prevented islanders from finding out about its
plans until after the closing date for the submission of public
objections to government. This was bureaucratic malfeasance of an
unusually naked sort. Many people complained, but SNH would not
reopen the consultation, sitting smugly on its hands and criticising
the editor of the local newspaper for not having discovered its
plans on her own initiative.
When a representative of a local landowner challenged
SNH's scientific case through a special procedure which had been
open to the islanders all along but which SNH chose not to tell
them about, it transpired that it was based, and rather inaccurately
based, on statistics produced by the Sea Mammal Research Unit in
St Andrews. These were adjudged incomplete by the government's independent
committee of scientists chosen to investigate the designation. The
government committee also criticised SNH's use of the SMRU data
as sloppy and misleading.
When describing the status of seals in Nature
Contested, Smout does not even give the questionable SMRU
figures, he relies on an SNH glossy publication which manages to
cover all aspects of the ecology and status of both common and grey
seals in 97 doubtless very well-chosen words. The SMRU's rather
more complete data can hardly have been inaccessible to Smout, since
the Unit is actually part of his own University. But it is ignored,
and preference given to the SNH brochure which lists amongst its
"principle authors" none other than "Smout T.C.".
Despite the lack of either scientific or democratic
legitimacy, SNH is still pressing ahead with the designation. Last
year it co-hosted, with English Nature, the first ever academic
conference on marine SACs. The press release announcing the two-day
get-together in Edinburgh was headed: "Marine treasures: local
people get hooked". Journalists were invited "to hear
how specialists have pushed back the frontier of knowledge about
underwater life, with the help of local communities." Clearly
the almost complete eclipse of local influence was an embarrassment.
Yet when the Islay person who discovered the flaws
in the SNH statistics and who has done the most to clarify the facts
of the case asked to attend the conference so that he could report
it in the island's newspaper, he was told he would not be allowed
in since he would not understand the scientist's deliberations.
Such are the nasty realities of the Historiographer Royal's "consensus
and partnership".
Ian Mitchell's book about the politics of nature conservation,
"Isles of the West: a Hebridean Voyage" is published
by Canongate in Edinburgh.
Ian Mitchell
Xanadubh
86 Lennox Street
Isle of Islay PA42 7BW
01496 302252
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