alladale project presentation at the mcofs agm

Tue, Sep 9, 2008

We were across at Glenmore Lodge for the MCofS AGM at the weekend, although we were primarily there for the birding seminar (which was a complete washout unfortunately), the hog roast (which was superb) and the ceildih (which we just watched as we were caught up in animated blethering with new friends we’d made!). We popped along to the lecture by Hugh Fullerton-Smith, Paul Lister’s project manager for the Alladale “re-wilding experiment” and I was interested how both Hugh and the assembled mountaineering audience would react to each other. I’ve blogged about this before, in Wild animals and fences and To wolf or not to wolf and I was hoping some of the confusion might be cleared up about the fence.

Chris Townsend, being president of the MCofS has a summary on his blog and Paul of WalkHighlands was sitting in front of us and took a lot of notes, with a comprehensive article on his site. It was great to meet Paul as we shared some mutual acquaintances from Skye and the Gaelic on his site is excellent as it’s all done by Alec Valtos.

My stance on the issue is one of opposition to any endeavour that contains the word “managed” and this is about “managed reintroduction” or “re-wilding” as Hugh put it. Now Hugh has an impressive track record of working with indigenous peoples around the world and also has an equal track record of mass movement of animals from one country to another, which seemed to end in disease ridden disaster in some cases and by his own words, the Alladale project is possibly the last one he’ll undertake before retiring and I got the impression he has a completely different view of the project than does his boss, Paul Lister. Whereas Lister wants to recreate a romantic wilderness populated with moon-howling critters, Hugh sees a more practical use for other creatures such as boar, as “reforesting tools” but again, by his own words, cattle can do the same job, working over land that has gone to pot and arguably doing less damage to existing trees in the process.

To this end, the project has created a substantially enclosed area using fencing less than two metres high, which doesn’t require planning permission, as an experiment, run in partnership with Oxford University’s WildCRU conservation group. Now, interestingly, although there are some stiles over the fence in places, as would be expected in these times of liberal access legislation, WildCRU have asked the public to keep out of the enclosure as they don’t want humans to influence the outcome of the experiment. This immediately got my goat up as I have a background in physics and I’ve done a lot of theoretical stuff and experimentation and this just didn’t square with Lister’s plans of a natural wilderness, where reintroduced animals would wander freely on the estate, side by side with walkers. The Oxford team were clearly working with incorrect initial conditions. They wanted to remove the most influential factor in the equation, man. Any “experiment” that relies on sharing habitat with the planet’s most aggressive and invasive species is bound to draw incorrect conclusions. So to me, that would seem the fence is there to stay and this was confirmed by Hugh when he stated that you can’t just dump a box of hogs on the land and expect them to get on with it. I drew the conclusion that the fence wasn’t there to keep people out, it was there to stop the animals within from starving to death. The fence is their life support machine. It keeps them in an area where they can be fed.

The current enclosure is part of a very impressive vision of planting millions of trees on the estate, mainly along corridors on the main rivers and burns as well as reintroducing red squirrel and Lister is intending to spend almost one million pounds upgrading Deanich Lodge for use as accommodation. Now that’s an admirable aim, spending that amount of money on such a remote building. That’s the project Hugh is dealing with. Making the estate “wash its face” in financial terms, making it sustainable if only just breaking even. Lister, on the other hand, reminds me a lot of Sir Iain Noble, who gifted the land on which Sabhal Mor Ostaig stands, who built up Eilean Iarmain Hotel and who has a real passion for the Gaelic language on the Isle of Skye. Those are real things that he’s done but he also has a less practical side, calling for the expulsion of non Gaelic speakers from the island and pressuring his staff to speak gaelic or face the consequences. Lister lives in the same cloud bank as Noble. While these money magnets dream up schemes in front of the fire and stock market reports, more level-headed people get on with the job of implementing those plans but within the remit of current laws. Such is the position of Hugh Fullerton-Smith I believe.

And that leads me on to why he was there. He could easily have declined and who would have blamed him? and his presentation wasn’t helped by the choice of hardware and software on offer. Some of his slides, his best ones he said, failed to display. However, I noticed he turned up with an Apple laptop and the lodge only had a PC laptop connected to the digital projector. I do a lot of presentations in academia and I felt for him. What displayed fine on his Apple was destroyed by the PC and although he didn’t say it, it was down to the lack of a proper Apple/PC connector for the projector. So I was willing to forgive the blank screens! No doubt it added to his apprehension but he dealt with it professionally. In fact, that was the opinion I formed of this man. Professional, with a job to do and one he is intending to complete.

One thing that did get me annoyed however, was his constant referring to the audience as “the experts”. I felt like standing up and asking why, if he considers us the experts, he didn’t consult us? And that to me is the nub of the matter. Did Fullerton-Smith come here intending the project to be his swansong? Surely someone who appears to display professionalism such as I saw, could not be ignorant of this country’s most cherished access laws. Then again, he seemed genuinely surprised at the level of hostility when access was curtailed. In his own words, he thought the project could be a real success, if people “could just get over the access issues”. It just didn’t occur to him that the audience, who were representative of the entire outdoor fraternity in Scotland and indeed the UK, could not see past the access issues as it was that fraternity that fought so hard to get them in the first place. And here was someone from abroad, with a history of enclosing land and shipping foreign wildlife into it on a biblical scale, standing in front of them saying “access rights? get over them!”.

The alternative conclusion I could draw would be one of subterfuge and politcal skullduggery whereby the project does what it needs to within the law, fences under 2 metres high and experimental enclosures with the onus on the public to stay clear, the work emboldened with messages from Oxford academics. Down the line the work could be used to justify a greater enclosure. Who would oppose such good work? the management might think. Surely no-one would object to fencing off a munro-less and corbett-less tract of land? Perhaps if compromise could be reached. Landowners sometimes come to a compromise on access, rerouting or creating anew, curtailed access routes, to the benefit of all parties but the project has gone too far for that now. Lister has drawn the line in the sand and he’s preparing to cross it. It would set a precedent whereby any moneyed landowner could enclose land and exclude people.

Excluding people in preference to animals has a precendence in this country. It’s called the Highland Clearances.