Green Lairds and the Just Transition: Can rewilding save us from climate change?
Across vast swathes of rural Scotland, conservationists look at an empty and ecologically degraded landscape and see a source of hope. In the fight against climate change the land itself can be put to...
View ArticleFoilles (or, The Free State of Eddrachillis)
Gemma Smith continues her midge-bitten and cleg-infested journey through history and landscape, taking in Coco Channel and Ivan Illich, in a search for the forgotten and the mislaid of the highlands....
View ArticleSuilven
Gemma Smith continues her journey through history and landscape, placenames and bothy culture, in a tribute to the wonder of Suilven. Suilven is the frustratingly prosaic name of a giant, oddly-shaped...
View ArticleSandwood
Sandwood is one of a cluster of rather curiously mangled place-names in the far north-west of Scotland, along with nearby Oldshoremore and Oldshore Beg. Oldshore has come into Gaelic as Aisir, meaning...
View ArticleSt Kilda
St Kilda is the rather fanciful name that has been accidentally acquired by a small volcanic archipelago in the North Atlantic, forty miles west of the Outer Hebrides. As anyone with a passing interest...
View ArticleCreag Ghuanach
This is the final part of Gemma’s epic six-part series on land, language, wilderness and belonging … read the full series here. Creag Ghuanach is the name of the sylvan one: green, leafy, wooded, the...
View ArticleThe Question of Community and “Rewilding”
An invited response to Jeremy Leggett by Alastair McIntosh on re-wilding in Scotland. Last week the solar energy entrepreneur, Jeremy Leggett, published a blog titled Highlands Rewilding: governance...
View ArticleRewild or Re-wilderness: The dangers of colonial masculinities
Shortly after presenting my research on colonial masculinities in rewilding at a recent conference, I scrolled across this – now deleted – tweet by a prominent rewilder: “The UK nature movement is...
View ArticleTime to reassert land reform’s radical edge
In ‘Land Reform for the Common Good’, a new discussion paper for The Jimmy Reid Foundation, Dr Calum MacLeod calls for a more radical approach to land reform policy in Scotland. This is an edited...
View ArticleClimate Solutions Scotland, Community Land or Big Finance
The public discourse between Community Land Scotland and Nature Scotland came to a head recently with the publication of a paper by Jon Hollingdale on Scotland’s interaction with private Green Finance...
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