Rewilding in the Scottish Highlands
Retrouver la nature sauvage de l’Écosse
Conserver la faune et la flore uniques de l'Écosse est au coeur des préoccupations écologiques du Royaume-Uni ; plus encore depuis la signature du « Green New Deal », le plan de relance écologique britannique, en novembre 2020. Certains souhaitent laisser la nature reprendre ses droits librement au sein du pays ; d'autres souhaitent lui donner un coup de pouce. Cap sur les Highlands, pour un débat au coeur de paysages à couper le souffle...
The purple of the Highlands in early autumn can drive the dourest of Scots to poetry, but Renwick Drysdale, who with his brothers will inherit an estate in Fife, can’t see the landscape as beautiful any more. “Rolling through all these valleys,” he says, should be the “rich, biodiverse woodlands” that were there 5,000 years ago.
2. To Jamie Williamson, the 73-year-old owner of Alvie and Dalraddy, an estate near Aviemore, it is as lovely as it ever was. “What is more natural,” he asks: “moorland, which we’ve had for the last thousand years, or dense woodland?” Scotland’s tree cover, he points out, had fallen to 4% by as early as 1350.
3. Behind this disagreement lies the idea of “rewilding”, which is gaining traction. Boris Johnson promised on September 27th to protect 30% of Britain’s land “to support the recovery of nature”, and the most extreme interpretation of this is returning the land to its pre-human state. That is happening in small ways in bits of England; but Scotland, with its vast uncultivated Highlands, has greater potential.
4. The main obstacles to the revival of woodland are deer, which browse on saplings and so stop trees from growing. The wolves, bears
and lynx that used to keep their numbers down are long gone, and although the idea of reintroducing them has been mooted, the prospect of wolves and bears roaming the Scottish suburbs appeals to few. In March Lynx UK applied to NatureScot, Scotland’s environmental agency, for permission to reintroduce those elegant cats, but the response was lukewarm; so for now, keeping deer numbers down means organised culling.
5. But deer-stalking is an important source of income for Highland estates. Landowners can charge up to £1,000 per stag shot and many times that for accommodation and catering. Asking them to cull their deer is like asking a farmer to burn corn. And these vast estates are not generally separated by fences, so when deer numbers drop on one estate, the neighbouring estate’s deer move in, and its income falls.
6. Sometimes the argument over deer-culling pits older people who like the familiar Highland landscape against younger people who have bought into a newer, green agenda. Wealth is another faultline. Among Scotland’s most enthusiastic rewilders are very rich people with unlimited funds, who sometimes find themselves in opposition to the less wealthy.
MY DEAR DEER...
7. Rewilders argue that restoring Scotland’s natural fauna and flora will encourage tourism, which will generate jobs that can replace traditional employment in hill-farming and deer stalking. Bear and lynx could be an attraction: Germany’s national parks have used their lynx populations as a marketing tool, even though the chances of seeing one are negligible.
8. Others argue that a burgeoning carbon market will make rewilding economic. “Ecosystems services” which were previously deemed worthless, such as habitat creation, “are now being given monetary values”, says Mr Drysdale, who as well as being a prospective landowner runs kf Forestry, a green consultancy. In future, he believes, carbon credits produced by planting native broadleaf trees will be more profitable than commercial timber or traditional farming. 9. In the long run, they may. In the short term, deer are a better bet, but making money from them is getting harder. Mr Williamson shares many of the rewilders’ green ambitions—he wants to build wind turbines at Alvie—but is bewildered by their desire to return to a prelapsarian idyll. “For what purpose?” he asks.