MEG TAINTOR

This study addresses two important issues: the challenge of ensuring social and economic sustainability in remote rural communities of Scotland and the need to regenerate sustainable ecosystems to combat biodiversity loss. Through a mixture of desk-based research and semi-structured qualitative interviews, I examined the intersection between two alternative land use practices, rewilding (restoring degraded ecosystems) and re-peopling (restoring human populations). Often positioned in opposition to each other, these practices represent different visions for the use of Scotland’s remote rural places.

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To gain perspectives on potential points of common ground in this often contentious debate, I conducted series of 11 semi-structured qualitative interviews during June and July 2021 with research participants representing a cross-section of stakeholders in the discourse around land use in Scotland.

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Participants endorsed a place-based approach, in which local communities have power in the design and implementation of biodiversity projects, and receive the benefits that emerge from them. Embedded within this approach is a critique of current concentrated patterns of land ownership in Scotland, and a desire to de-centralised both land ownership (through the breaking up of large estates and the generation of more land-owners, both community and individuals) and decision-making (through the empowerment of this new cohort of landowners).

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In these proposed community rewilding initiatives, human communities exist alongside and within healthy ecosystems, entangled in both space and function. Seen through the lens of a multi-species landscape justice, this model offers a path forward that requires land use decisions to made with recognition of the health of both human and non-human systems.