In the baking summer of 2003, I had a job on a boat taking tourists through the third strongest whirlpool in the world. Rushing between Scarba and Jura on Scotland’s Atlantic Coast, Corryvreckan produces towering standing waves and a foaming swirl of water which the Admiralty describes as “very violent and dangerous”.
“No vessel should,” it says, “attempt this passage without local knowledge.”
In the mornings, before taking daytrippers round the north end of Luing where, usually, we’d be greeted by a playful dolphin I named “Bill the Bottlenose”, on out through the perilous straits and into the ocean beyond, we’d often stand on the pontoon as the skipper, Duncan, gave careful advice to a queue of sailors. He was the local knowledge.
My job mostly consisted of making tea and pointing at things: diving gannets and guillemots, ancient metamorphic rocks, the house where George Orwell wrote ‘1984’. Once, as we passed through the raging Corryvreckan, we watched a mighty battle for the skies above us between a pair of golden eagles, a family of buzzards, and a rave of ravens.
Duncan had the hard task of navigating us safely through the maelstrom. And watching him do it taught me something about politics too. Sometimes, keeping a boat steady doesn’t mean chugging along slowly. Sometimes, to stay safe, you need to accelerate hard, to fight against the current lest it sweeps you to peril, or to turn and face the storm, before it envelopes you.
For more than a decade now, the SNP government has attempted to steer Scotland calmly in a straight line, towards its ultimate goal, balancing the various competing interests which make up the nation. Where it does good work, it does it slowly, carefully. But as life on Earth drowns in a whirlpool of destruction, pointing the boat away from it and gently puttering isn’t nearly enough.
The hills are bare now
A fifth of Scotland is grouse moor: intensively farmed patchworks of heather, burned back again and again by landowners desperate to stop any life from flourishing but that which they can persuade millionaire holidayers to shoot.
For centuries, Scotland’s Highlands region was seen by Britain’s elites as a scary and wild place, home of the Jacobite uprisings, Gaelic speakers, and snow. But the Victorians tamed the image, with propagandistic art of empty hills and lumbering stags, Prince Albert’s purchase of Balmoral, and the invention of the breech-loading shotgun for slaying grouse. Soon, the stunning landscape became a theme park for first British, and then global elites.
This process has always been subject to protest, perhaps most elegantly in Robert Burns’s ‘Song Composed in August’: “Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns Bring Autumn’s pleasant weather.”
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Adam Ramsay | Radio Free (2021-02-19T23:00:00+00:00) This should be Scotland’s rewilding election. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2021/02/19/this-should-be-scotlands-rewilding-election/
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