"The combination of mountain and loch still has a huge resonance with the Scottish public"
Luckily, one or two of the older generation of speakers felt unconstrained by modern pressure to spout such gobbledegook and delivered some great presentations in fluent, immaculate English. Bob Aitken of the Scottish Countryside Activities Council delivered a splendidly lyrical and humorous homily on the spiritual importance of wilderness, and the identification of many Scots with the Highland landscape. Quoting everyone from Walter Scott to John Ruskin he argued that it was subconsciously part of most Scots' perception of their identity.
"The combination of mountain and loch still has a huge resonance with the Scottish public," he said, backing up his assertion with statistics such as the fact that an estimated 4-5% of the entire Scottish population go walking or climbing every month. However, he also admitted this could simply be romantic displacement activity, noting that half the men advertising in Scottish newspapers' 'Lonely Hearts' columns also mentioned hillwalking as an interest - something none of the women did. All the more reason to be wary of entering bothies if you don't have a beard.
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Looking ahead
The scientists among the speakers thankfully also brought mostly clear thinking and clear language to the debate. Indeed, David Fowler (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) and Rick Batterbee's (University College London) presentation concerning the effects of climate change and pollution in Scotland's mountains literally cut through the crap, and illustrated what the conference was really about - namely the desperate need to take decisive action to protect our desperately fragile mountain environment.
Battarbee showed a slide of an idyllic Lochnagar, one of his study sites, and then revealed how, despite its pristine appearance, it was in fact filthy. "I wouldn’t recommend eating brown trout from Lochnagar," he mused, after giving us the low-down on how many PCBs, heavy metals and gawd knows what else the poor fish have accumulated in their finny bodies. The problem exists because, far from rising above the industrial pollution besetting the industrial lowlands, mountains actually concentrate inputs from atmospheric pollutants such as acid deposition, toxic metals and nutrient nitrogen.
"For the first time in living memory, SNH was being praised from all sides of the rural community"
The simple fact that it rains a lot more in mountains means there's a greater throughput of atmosphere-borne pollutants, while at the same time colder temperatures ensure a much slower breakdown time for persistent organic pollutants and hence an accumulation in the upland food chain. Even more gloomily he predicted that because of the high concentration inputs and extreme sensitively of fragile mountain ecosystems, "these areas will be the last places to be protected by the steadily declining emissions of acidic compounds from industry, while climate change is set to cause additional impacts through interaction with pollution."
Don’t mention the Cairngorms
A more optimistic note was struck by Per Wallsten from Sweden who explained the concept of 'Conflict Management in National Parks', a rather timely presentation in view of the brewing brouhaha over the soon-to-be-instituted Cairngorm Park and Pitlochry's currently uncertain in-out status. Wallsten explained how Sweden's first mountain national park for 40 years, Mount Fulufjället, had been established by dint of both prolonged lobbying of government and painstaking campaigns to win the hearts and minds of local inhabitants.
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Managing the mountains
The whole process had taken 12 years to establish, partly because tactics had involved sitting down for a cup of coffee with every single person who lived within the proposed park to explain the benefits of designation. Given you were dealing with just a few hundred Sami reindeer herders this was perhaps not as tall an order as it first sounds. The same tactics might be a little trickier to apply to the proposed Cairngorm Park's estimated 22,500 inhabitants. Park officials would need bladders the size of space hoppers for a start. Nevertheless, judging by Murray Ferguson (SNH) and John Forster's (Cairngorm Community Council's Group) contribution, it seems that SNH has already achieved something of the sort by using local community councils to drive the consultation process with local people.
People Power
Adopting an arms-length policy and delegating the organisation of consultative meetings to community leaders appears to have been incredibly popular with Cairngormers. This 'bottom-up' consultation rather than the traditional 'top-down' approach appears to have produced a startling result. For the first time in living memory, SNH was being praised from all sides of the rural community. There was scarcely a dissenting voice amongst the 'locals' in the audience for the way SNH had handled the National Park consultative process.
Indeed, so successful have they been that all the criticism was being heaped on the Scottish Executive for suggesting that the new park should be half the size proposed by SNH. Local community councils felt their hard work in organising consultation with local people had been wasted and were demanding that they be included. (By this stage most Scottish Executive delegates had wisely left the building, leaving just one poor representative to mumble that "the process is not yet complete" and that the bill to create the national park would definitely be tabled this week.)
It was a rousing and entertaining finale to two days' worth of mountain blether, raising hopes that People Power may yet force the hand of the Scottish Exec to give Scotland a proper national park, rather than the filleted version they are currently proposing. And if nothing else comes from this conference, it will have been more than worthwhile.
