Rewilding is gaining strong momentum in Europe as a means to achieve biodiversity conservation, with growing prominence in both scientific and popular debates. Its influence is increasingly translating into activities and programmes on the ground, which are underlined by their ambition and scale. In the UK the Scottish Highlands are consistently mentioned as a viable location for rewilding initiatives, owing to their low-population density and already established ‘wild’ character. This PhD research project has two objectives. Firstly, it seeks to illustrate how rewilding initiatives are shaped, in terms of spatial configuration, management and operations, by wider politics, history and socio-cultural values around land-use and conservation. Secondly, it seeks to provide an account of how these same factors can determine both varying local social support for rewilding, and the distribution of benefits and burdens around rewilding projects.
Rewilding in the Highlands has been integrated within and bolstered by an already existing movement to reforest Scotland, which maintains high national social and political support. It has also been associated with growing support for and increasing prevalence of species reintroduction initiatives. Changes in subsidy regimes have increased declines in livestock farming, accelerating the processes of agricultural land abandonment associated with rewilding. This is part of a wider move to a post-productivist countryside based around tourism and conservation. However, ideas of a new Scottish ‘wild’ can undermine and conflict with still enduring cultural landscapes which privilege traditional and customary land-uses, most significantly crofting, a form of traditional small-scale farming practised in the Highlands. Crofting communities are at the heart of the movement for Highlands renewal and land reform, which seeks to revitalise local communities and economies through greater control of land and natural resources. Visions of a wild, unpeopled and un-worked land can sit uncomfortably with these alternative ideas of future landscapes.
This project explores the above socio-political dimensions of rewilding in the Scottish Highlands through research in two sites where crofting and rewilding initiatives are taking place. In Assynt in the North-West of Scotland landscape-scale woodland regeneration and restoration across different forms of land-ownership and land-use is taking place in an area with a large crofting community. In the South of the Isle of Skye reintroduced white-tailed eagles are now strongly established. With local crofters facing increasing predation of lambs significant human-wildlife conflict is occurring, but at the same time the eagles are being attributed to rising income from tourism. The research utilises social methods, primarily semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, focus groups and participant observation. Preliminary findings demonstrate that social conflict around and support for rewilding at these sites is significantly determined by differing values and norms associated with what constitutes ‘wild’, contestations over which forms of nature are appropriate in the social context of the Highlands, and the ways in which different social groups use land, for example recreational or production. These same cleavages also shape the distribution of benefits and burdens resulting from rewilding projects.
Topics: Management of Human-Wildlife Conflicts: Large Carnivores in Europe , Topics: Management of Human-Wildlife Conflicts: “Other” Species in Europe , Topics: Natural Resource and Conservation Stakeholders: Managing Expectations and Engageme
