See my immediate thought on this was to remember one time I went off for an 8-week field season and returning to my flat at the end found a half mug of tea, I’d clearly abandoned on my dash to the airport taxi, which had reached a similar level of chunkiness to a Boba…

You’ve reminded me my viva was also a year ago today! Funny thought.

Absolutely! I’d love to have that chat! I carried out some local community workshops (partnered with the local folk museum) as part of this research to explore those themes a little more - hoping to get them written up this year.

I don’t mean to present in the article a cure for all of our modern crises… however I argue we should be thinking critically about how we represent these landscapes and how this can shape popular perceptions and policy around their futures. As you say their is much naivety within rewilding debates!

That’s not to say we should tear up the Moor to churn out iron, but, we can perhaps imagine new ways (or old ways) of using these landscapes which support both increasing their biodiversity and their productivity for human communities. Be this through high-nature-value farming, sustainable forestry…

This I’d argue is an important step in truly tackling climate change - as much of Scotland’s carbon emissions result for transport and the import of materials, localising production (of food among other things) across the country has the potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprints.

What I argue (as an archaeologist) is that we can look to the past to consider how upland landscapes have been made productive and sustaining in past, to challenge the dominance of the ‘wild land’ in policy, and imagine alternative productive futures for our uplands.

Housing shortages (in our current largely uncontrolled market for short term lets/holiday homes) and often as I argue prevents genuine local development (in housing/industry) to preserve an aesthetic desired by the visitor (‘wildness’), while providing jobs which are either seasonal or specialist.

I think there’s a balance to be struck, but, some of the clear issues forcing depopulation in many of these regions are a lack of (non-seasonal) sustainable employment and a lack of housing, the promise of rewilding to provide tourism jobs then does nothing to alleviate this, in fact it worsens…

You can find the full article (open access) here, thanks to @edinburghup.bsky.social: www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/...