De-Wilding Scotland

The Scottish Government has been one of the greenest in Europe for decades. Its initiatives to drive down carbon emissions and promote renewable energy have received international praise, especially the Climate Change Act of 2019. Other measures to protect the environment, however, may prove to be misguided: calls for ‘rewilding’ Scotland have emerged in the last few years from local NGOs and charities as a way of restoring Scottish biodiversity. Organisations like the Scottish Rewilding Alliance and Scotland: Big Picture argue not only for the protection of Scotland’s wild spaces, but the reintroduction of species like beavers, wolves, and lynxes in order to “enable nature’s recovery.” These are well-intentioned programs but are often based on aesthetic notions of what nature should look like rather than what might actually benefit Scottish wildlife. 

Scotland’s natural environment rightfully deserves its reputation as sublime, but it is not a pristine wilderness. Since the first humans established themselves permanently on this island nearly 5,000 years ago, the landscape has been radically transformed by layers of civilisation. The Picts hunted the bears, the Gaels burned tracts of peat, and the Saxons and Normans each had a hand in chopping down Caledonian forests — all centuries before the Industrial Revolution. It’s an unfortunate truth, but even pre-fast-fashion homo sapiens were a destructive creature. There is no primordial state to which Scotland’s hills and dales can return, at least since the last Ice Age. Even attempting to turn back the clock to before the eighteenth century (when the last British wolf was killed) would mean conceding to a landscape without lynx, beaver, or capercaillie.

Many of the animals these rewilding programs seek to return to Britain went extinct because of habitat fragmentation, often through logging, and it’s not apparent that Scotland has undivided tracts of forest large enough to return to pre-industrial wilderness. Reintroduced wolves or lynx, like students in the winter months, may be tempted to stray beyond their usual habitat for mates or a lamb dinner. Even the largest of recent rewilding projects, such as the Affric Highlands near Loch Ness, are fractured by farming plots and other human activity. 

Fragmented habitats may do more than make farmers uneasy, however. Such hodge-podge nature reserves prevent herbivores, and the carnivores that prey on them, from finding better food during periods of harsh weather. In Oostvaardersplassen, a nature reserve in the Netherlands criss-crossed with fencing and private lands, reintroduced wild cattle and horses starved in large numbers during the winter of 2008 (a bad year for everyone, it seems). 

Rewilding initiatives, of which there are now over 150 active projects in Scotland, owe their popularity in part to their highly visible nature. Images of otters, capercaillie, and red-tailed kites cover the websites of rewilding organisations. Since the Romantic poets and philosophers of the nineteenth century, we imagine wilderness as something pure before the coming of steam engines, and part of this image are the animals that once inhabited it. It makes sense, then, that we should seek to restore these animals, if only as proof that mankind isn’t as evil as our behaviour over the last few centuries has suggested. It’s a paltry apology to Nature, however, to introduce a few foreign beasts to an environment they are poorly equipped to deal with. 

Instead, Scotland should prioritise environmental policy that recognises human and animal coexistence and not just aesthetics. Currently, the Scottish Government offers grants of up to £250,000 for rewilding initiatives. This money could be spent on improving the quality of Scottish farmland, promoting sustainable agricultural methods, or in acquiring tracts of contiguous land that might one day be returned to wilderness. Nature exists on its own terms; it’s not our job as environmentally conscious humans to promote an image of wilderness but to instead ensure its preservation.

Image from Wikimedia Commons