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In order to increase the active involvement of local people with our local natural environment, it is necessary that we recognise a proprietary interest:
It
is our common heritage, and we ignore, damage or destroy it at our
peril.
Our interest, being local and potentially intimate, is
not identical to that of absentee proprietors, whether individuals or
agencies of 'public' ownership.
A community is the local
manifestation of "the public", and as such, has a vital
interest in the sustainable management of its local environment,
including both public and private land.
With rare exceptions,
local benefit (social, economic, amenity, environmental health...)
must become the prime consideration in environmental management
policy, including land use, and particularly in the case of publicly
owned assets.
In the case of private land, resident owners
offer the best assurance of good management practice.
The
land is a source of great social & economic value, THE source,
Our home! Above all, we must not allow ourselves to feel intimidated
or excluded from full and active participation through lack of
'expertise.'
The management of environmental assets, including
forest, is likely to be best done through the direct involvement of
persons and/or communities resident in the immediate locality.
Where work is to be carried out, it is most likely to be well
done by suitably qualified local workers.
The provision of
local employment is a valid goal of environmental management, even
when this may not be the quickest or least expensive in money terms.
Good management decisions are more important than quick or
easy ones. Forests are rarely in a hurry, especially when managed
under principles of sustainability.
The prime source of
fertility and health in soil is forest cover. For this reason and
others, it is important to restore more of Scotland's depleted native
forests to renew soils depleted by millennia of overgrazing and
decades of monoculture.
A Localist Manifesto
Many
of our cultural problems are similar, whether urban or rural, but the
resources are different in the rural areas. the rural populations
contain the last remnant of people with a direct ancestral relation
to the land as users of it, and the native sense of 'community',
including the land, as the most obvious and powerful manifestation of
"the environment". The rural populations are, by
definition, surrounded by relatively un-populated
(un-developed?)land.
In our particular rural area, and I speak
now of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, latterly partially described
as Stewartry District and Stewartry Area of 'Dumfries &
Galloway', "they", the government, are the largest
landholder in the watershed, by an order of magnitude (tenfold). If
there were a way for "them" to become, in a real sense,
'us' and 'we', then we would be some way towards developing
and sustaining an
active, caring population of empowered
stakeholders. It is unlikely that the rurality of the area would
suffer.
What I am suggesting is that, for the Stewartry, and
possibly also for many other localities, two essential policies be
adopted, co-equal with the 'overarching policy on sustainable
development', in fact as the best policy for creating the conditions
for and empowering
sustainable development:
1.
For any publicly owned asset, the prime consideration of
development policy shall be
local benefit.
2. For
any publicly owned asset, development policy shall be
decided
and implemented by bodies on which
local residents
constitute a clear majority.
I
have chosen the above words carefully, for if the policies are stated
as ought,
must, should,
or in any other subjunctive form, or even will,
then the effort is doomed.
Obviously, there are other local
resources than those in public ownership, but in the absence of the
policies above, there is very little moral high ground.
It is
unwise to allow 'economics' too much or too early consideration in
matters of cultural reinforcement or development, as it is too easy
to get diverted from deeper truths. Nevertheless, I can see the above
policies leading to relatively cheap developments in support of
sustainable local economies. A major
capital asset, the land, is in hand. It need not be withdrawn from
agriculture, and it need not be purchased.
Nevertheless, there
is need for continued long-term investment in the development of
local economies involving the care and
eventual utilisation of the asset. Committing the land in question to
forest can be seen as starting repayments on an overdraft - the
fertility which has fed us throughout our development as a species
was created largely in forest soils. Sustainable
forest will repay the overdraft in time, but must be established,
and it will not be done by looking for short-term cash flow.
Much
money, many working lives and much time will be needed. Money well
spent, lives well spent, and time well spent!
Ed Iglehart
15/01/99)