The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
There’s no point in a new national park unless it puts nature first and foremost
If I were to be consulted by the Scottish Government on its new plan for at least one more national park by 2026 (an eventuality as likely as Dundee being unrelegated or discovering that the moon really is made of cheese), I would suggest a course of action that I imagine is far from anything under active consideration.
If there really is a widespread belief within government that, as Biodiversity Minister Lorna Slater said last week, Loch Lomond and the Trossachs and the Cairngorms National Parks really are “the jewels in Scotland’s crown”, then the Scottish cabinet needs to get out more.
In both national parks, landscape and wildlife are compromised by tourism, by development and by the “wildlife management” policies of some estates.
A thoughtful study of the best national parks in mainland Europe might have produced more appropriate outcomes, in which landscape and wildlife were the overwhelming priorities.
These are, after all, the only worthwhile reasons for establishing a national park in the first place.
And such a study would also have concluded that Scotland’s land ownership pattern and habits are at odds with most countries’ idea of a national park. It would have found that effective national parks need to be owned by the nation.
It is a fairly safe bet that a new national park owned by the nation is not on anyone’s agenda because it would be too difficult, too controversial and politically risky. But if a new national park does not safeguard its landscape and its natural habitats and ecosystems above everything else, what is the point?
Nevertheless, there is a moment of opportunity here. A public consultation is under way until June 3. The Scottish Government wants to hear from as many voices as possible.
Rest assured, the loudest voices will belong to landowners, gamekeepers, farmers and the tourist industry — and their priorities will be the status quo, the stuck–in–the–past Victorian shoot–it–if– it–gets–in–my–way prejudices. That’s the tourist industry that invented the loathsome North Coast 500, turned summer in Skye into a nightmare and equates success with cramming the land with visitors and small ports with cruise liners, whatever the cost.
That is what people who like nature are up against. But it is also what the land itself, its habitats and its wildlife are up against.
So, if you care about any of this (and the
chances are that if you don’t, you haven’t read this far), you might like to think about the following:
If you think one or more new national parks are a bad idea because the management standards will be as awful as they are in our existing national parks, and the added visitor pressures will wreck beloved lands, then go on to the Scottish Government’s new national parks website and say so.
If however, you like the idea, but you are fearful of eroding landscape quality, destroying vulnerable habitats and the level of disturbance to wildlife that drives them out or — worse — kills them, say so.
If you think that national parks should be owned by the nation, say so.
Having been writing about this for the better part of 40 years and in 40 books and thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, I know this: the model we have used at Loch Lomond and the Trossachs and the Cairngorms is a broken one and the government’s agency, NatureScot, is part of the problem.
A national park needs a vision, one shaped not by administrators and committee veterans, but by people who do get out more, people whose opinions and ideas are shaped by painstaking fieldwork and who are prepared to prioritise nature’s needs above all else when the occasion calls for it.
Scotland has ambitions to be an independent country. A coalition of Nationalists and Greens seems to me to be a good basis on which to build a modern democracy, but the land itself, which is at the very heart of any national park anywhere, needs a modern vision to tackle the climate crisis, withering ecosystems, eroding biodiversity and the number of wildlife species in a free-falling spiral towards extinction.
In Scotland of all places, land use practice is anything but modern.
We should wipe the word “vermin” from the language. We should toughen legislation to fight wildlife crime. We should reward good stewardship of the land and penalise bad.
And if we are to create at least one new national park, the implication is that there will be more to follow. It cannot be done without a national park service — and a national park service is worse than useless unless it is adequately staffed and adequately funded.
National parks are not cheap and it has to be assumed that they will be there for all time. So there needs to be a good reason to create a new one.
I still wonder if the Scottish Government knows what that reason is.
In Scotland, land use practice is anything but modern