Respect for nature and our place within it
When attempting to rebuild a healthy and resilient natural landscape, no man – or woman – is an island. Affric Highlands Field Officer, Nicola Williamson, explains more.
Looking out across the Highlands, the landscape has filled many a poet with romantic notions of wild beauty. I have walked through these glens, worked in them, altered them, and found the solitude and comfort that many seek within them. But all is not as it seems.
Affric Highlands is working with landowners and managers who are facing the challenges of biodiversity loss and a changing climate, as well as changing expectations from society on what we need to do about it.
Our ancestors have shaped these landscapes for thousands of years. Throughout this journey, the land has been traversed, grazed, burned, cultivated, forested, and lived in. We have taken what we have needed to support and sustain our lives, but often we have taken too much.
By managing land under high grazing pressure, clear felling non-native plantations, burning moorland and carrying out intensive farming, we are doing a great injustice to the land that lies degraded under hoof and foot. It keeps the remains of our woodlands in isolated and confined ravines. It allows our peatlands to crack and disintegrate, losing soil and carbon. It shrinks the available healthy habitat for Scotland’s native wildlife. And for people, it reduces our ability to take from nature the goods and services that have sustained us these last 300,000 years.
Our aspiration for Affric Highlands is to find space where nature can be restored, re-connected and respected. To work with partners so that woodlands can re-colonise lost landscapes, so that man-made drains can be blocked and the land re-wetted, and so that grasslands can be managed as species-rich hay meadows. Together, we can rewild, encouraging the return of fully functioning ecosystems, restored to not only support wildlife – but the communities that will only become more dependent on them as resources.
Whether land is managed for different objectives, depending on if you are a forester, stalker, farmer, a conservationist, or a rewilder, we all have a shared love of nature and depend upon it for our future. It is within this common ground where we need to work collectively. We need a landscape filled with healthy soils, woodlands and peatlands that can support regenerative food production, carbon storage, firewood and timber products, bursting with biodiversity, clean air and water, and a thriving community ready to tackle the future.
Nothing in nature happens quickly or in isolation, it takes time to restore what has been lost, and this is our time to do so.
Affric Highlands is a Trees for Life initiative, delivered in partnership with Rewilding Europe. It is generously funded by the British Science Association, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Halleria Trust, Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, National Restoration Fund, Rewilding Europe, FedEx and Support in Mind Scotland.
