I've been thinking a lot about Jack McConnell's announcement yesterday that he wants to see Scotland become the number one wildlife tourism destination in Europe. My first reaction was "there's hardly enough wildlife to go around as it is. How are we going to share it with anyone else?" To the lay person, much of Scotland appears wild and ideal for supporting wildlife, but the reality is quite different. Sure there are small pockets where wildlife is concentrated, but vast areas are virtually empty, save for a few Meadow Pipits. The problem with Scotland is that it is not wild at all. Man's influence is everywhere,whether its the pollution of the Moray Firth which is reducing the Dolphin population, or the speedboats on Loch Lomond which have decimated wildfowl numbers. Enormous areas of upland have been destroyed, perhaps forever, either nibbled away by millions of sheep and deer, or covered over by blanket afforestation. Only in tiny oases such as nature reserves can any semblance of wildness live on.
What Jack McConnell and his advisors have to realize is that if he wants Scotland to be a wildlife tourism destination, he has to invest in wildlife. That means creating wilderness. Not little pockets here and there, but huge areas which man's influence can't penetrate. Richard Mabey wrote about this a few months ago in his column in BBC Wildlife. He described modern thinking on conservation in the US which advocates turning vast tracts of land into wildlife reserves. The existing reserves are the starting point, but then compulsory land purchase is used to join them up. The resulting wildlife corridors allow isolated populations to meet up, and exploit the territories in between. Such schemes require roads to be re-routed, land use to be changed, and even human populations to be moved. But if we are serious about having a product worth "selling", then tough decisions will have to be made.
In Scotland, the "Trees for Life" charity have already produced a plan to turn 2,238 square kilometers (that's over 30 times the size of Loch Lomond or 3 times the size of East Lothian) north of the Great Glen into wilderness. All the costings and impact studies have been done. Jack McConnell could set the whole scheme in motion with the flick of a pen. What an epitath that would be.