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I’ve just been in Scotland. The writer Aldo Leopold once said that even the smallest ecological education leaves you walking through ‘a world of wounds’ which nobody else seems to see. Scotland’s beautiful hills and glens have for the most part been stripped and scarred and left utterly desolate by generations of landowners, land managers and dreadful politicians. You can drive in any direction for hours and see nothing but sheep and more sheep on denuded hillsides, pockmarked with vast, artless blocks of monocultural conifer plantation deadzones. Even where there are few sheep, red deer numbers are artificially inflated for the canned shooting industry and the deer do just the same as the sheep, leaving nothing but cropped grass from the top of the hills to the bottom of the valleys, a gigantic bowling green with contours. Developing countries which have suffered a loss of trees and nature on anything like the same scale have the rest of the world rushing to offer assistance in restoring it. Think Madagascar, or Nepal, where things are fast now being turned around. Many of the pockets of natural woodland that remain in Scotland are totally infested with head-height invasive rhododendron. Some landowners are turning things around, to the fury of their neighbours, but they remain a small minority. Those places are fast becoming truly magical islands of what once was and what could be again. It’s even worse under the sea, out of sight, out of mind. Scotland says that marine protected areas represent 38% of its seas. It’s bollocks. Even the most destructive fishing practices such as bottom trawling are permitted with impunity in nearly all of it. Just 1% of Scotland’s seas are actually protected. This is what happens when you have a population that has lost touch with what nature is, and can’t see the ravages which surround it; governed by politicians who are in hock to a small minority of established vested interests who simply won’t have it any other way.