The way in which society values the rural environment in Scotland has moved from a production to a consumer agenda, argues Dr Richard Birnieof the Macaulay Institute

Considerable controversy and conflict surrounds land management in rural Scotland – the current debates surrounding wind farms, new power lines and the provision of affordable housing exemplify this. While such land management debates are nothing new, they appear to have taken on an increased complexity.

It can be argued that the way in which our society values the rural environment has fundamentally changed over the past 50 years. This has moved us away from a production agenda concerned with food, towards a consumer agenda concerned with conservation, amenity and recreation. These changes were perfectly highlighted by the arguments about the access and compensation arrangements put in place during the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in 2001. Why should the interests of the agricultural industry be protected while the interests of the tourism industry are not?

We appear to be replacing ‘landscapes for food’ with ‘landscapes for fun’. Is this really the case? And how does it stack up with a sustainable rural development agenda?

If you have been involved in rural development issues for any length of time you will be well aware of the nexus between the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches. The first is generally associated with a strategic planning paradigm and powerful institutions. The second is founded on notions of community-led development with a more devolved institutional framework. Both approaches assume that there is control of the development process at some level or an other.

However, there may be another way of looking at this which suggests that rural change simply reflects the beliefs, values and preferences of contemporary society – the so-called ‘dominant social paradigm’. While policies and institutions may mediate our needs, in general the landscape we get is the product of our demands rather than the product of our desires.

Two things flow from this: firstly that it is primarily social processes that drive rural change and secondly, cultural landscapes are not just about history: we are continuously creating new cultural landscapes. So what are the typical cultural landscapes of contemporary rural Scotland and who are the main actors?

Contemporary landscapes

To answer this it is helpful to look back in time. In 1947, there was little doubt about the main agenda for rural Britain: food and fibre production. Food shortages during and after WWII meant that food security was the dominant issue. This was reflected in a commitment to maximising food production across the arable and livestock sectors, protecting the UK market for agricultural products and continuing the drive to increase our timber resources.

These changes were enabled by technological advances in all aspects of the production cycle, but they also came at a cost – what the economists call externalities. While many people would immediately point to the environmental costs associated with loss of habitats like hedgerows and moors, and issues like acidification and diffuse water pollution, some of the other social externalities like loss of employment and related rural de- population are also important.

In very general terms, most of the landscape changes in rural Scotland from 1945 to around 1980 were associated with changing agricultural practices and the drive to expand the national forest estate.

By the early 1980s, the socio-cultural and politico-economic climates had changed radically in the UK, as elsewhere in the western world. A growing awareness of environmental changes, coupled with increasing disposable income and mobility meant that our views on the roles of rural Britain were also undergoing a radical change – from it being seen as a place of production to a place of consumption.

Even more so than in the past, rural Britain, and in particular rural Scotland, became a ‘lifestyle choice’. This was both directly through people choosing to live there, and indirectly through membership of organisations like the RSPB, which intervened in both the political process and directly in the land market to enable the interests of their membership to be pursued. Between 1980 and 1995, the amount of land owned by conservation, amenity or recreational trusts (CARTs) in Scotland rose by 146 per cent.

The turning point for the landscape of Scotland came in 1988 when the culmination of the Birds, Bogs and Forestrydebate over the Flow Country (NCC, 1987) resulted in radical changes in the tax regime which had previously supported private investment in large-scale afforestation. Almost overnight, the planting of extensive areas of softwoods in Scotland stopped.

Recently, there has emerged a new form of cultural landscape. This is a landscape where the public goods of environment, amenity and recreation are either directly supported through ownership by a CART or local community group, or indirectly supported through agri-environmental or rural stewardship payments to the land-owner. The results are seen on the ground in terms of the re- planting of hedgerows and small woodlands in agricultural settings, efforts at woodland regeneration, environmental management and developing access in open landscapes.

Put crudely, in terms of our relative priorities for rural Scotland, we do appear to be replacing production with amenity – replacing food with fun. But that would be too simple a view. The reality is that like most of rural Britain, there is a range of social and economic processes operating. Firstly, the old agenda of food and fibre production has not gone away. Agriculture is still the major land use in terms of area, and the farming community and its associated institutions, like the National Farmers Union, are still very important parts of the rural scene. However, a new set of actors and institutions is demanding new goods and services from rural areas. The combined effect is that we are demanding that our rural landscapes deliver many more goods and services –that they are multifunctional. In this sense, food has not been replaced by fun. Rather we are expecting the countryside to deliver both food and fun.

Sustainable solutions

While many of the things that we desire from our rural landscapes are complementary, it is inevitable that some are conflicting. In the post-war period, our landscapes became highly specialised: with forest production geographically separate from agriculture, and even within agriculture, livestock and arable production increasingly separated. Against this background of specialisation in landscape functions, we now seem to be creating a new type of specialised landscape: the public good landscape. So, although we expect our rural areas to be multifunctional, the trend appears still for the functions to be geographically separated. If you believe that sustainable development is all about the delivery of social, economic and environmental benefits together and in the same place, then this trend towards the geographic separation of environmental and economic benefits would appear to be moving us away from sustainable solutions rather than towards them.

The now rapidly growing rural population, its changing demographics, and the emergence of so-called ‘lifestyle tribes’, all mean that both the number and types of voices wanting to be heard over rural issues is continuing to increase and change. Understanding these changes allows us to better understand the polarised views that are emerging over developments like wind farms. These are a manifestation of our changing values. In the past, many of the debates would have been about jobs or environment. Now, many of them are exclusively environmental, or green on green debates –and yet the old economic development arguments still persist in relation to the more remote rural areas. These are being bypassed by lifestyle in-migration, and remain dependent on employment in the primary industries of farming, forestry and fishing. This situation has been described as the ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ type of rural development.

A fundamental question is: what will possible major global changes in demographics, food supplies, energy security or environment mean for land use in rural Scotland over the next 25 years? Will it become the new engine room for a sustainable UK energy economy based around renewables (wind, wave, tidal and biomass), a key element in a future food security policy, or will it further develop as a rural playground?

While it is hard to forecast exactly how this will work out, two things are certain: firstly, the future of rural Scotland is intimately bound up with the wider social trends in our society and secondly, whatever happens, it is likely that the expectations of rural dwellers (in terms of access to amenities and services) will continue to converge on those of urban dwellers. Given their economic dependence on the tourism and service sectors, this still begs the question of how to make these feral suburbs sustainable in the long term.

This feature is based on a seminar given by Dr Birnie on 30 March 2007, in a series: ‘Towards a successful and sustainable Highlands and Islands 2025’. His full presentation is available at: www.policyweb.uhi.ac.uk