Filed for Evening News, 08 May 1991
As I cycled home from Prestonfield House Hotel by the side of Arthur’s Seat a few weeks ago, I met a friend at the traffic lights. I told her that, along with hundreds of others. I had just spent several hours in the sunshine witnessing the formal launch of the Nature Conservancy Council for Scotland.
“Oh yes”, she hazarded. “Is that the organisation run by Malcolm Muggeridge?”. Not quite, I replied, recalling that he was dead. But the idea of a media personality with a couple of initial ‘M’s was roughly right.
In fact the chairman of the government’s main environmental organisation is the Mastermind presenter Magnus Magnusson. He presided in avuncular pipe-smoking fashion over the love-in at Prestonfield House.
The cause of the celebrations was the devolution of power from England to Scotland. Instead of the NCC being run as a UK organisation from Peterborough, it has been split into three separate entities for England, Wales and Scotland. And in Scotland it has restructured itself so that decision-making is more regionally based.
It is difficult to disagree that decisions taken as close to the grassroots as possible ought to be better decisions than those taken by a few scientists sitting in an office hundreds of miles away. It is certainly preferable in principal to have decisions about Scottish nature conservation taken in Scotland.
The awkward fact is that in the past the scientists in England have sometimes seemed to offer better protection of Scotland’s environment than officials in Edinburgh. The Scottish Office and senior staff at the NCC’s Hope Terrace headquarters have historically been too willing to bow to the wishes of the powerful landowning and farming lobby. There are even some suggestions that they shifted a few NCC field officers who tried to do their jobs too enthusiastically.
Another problem which has not been mentioned is the severe short term damage that the trauma of reorganisation will inflict. The retiring deputy director, Jim McCarthy, told me that the inevitable result of being forced to restructure too quickly was that the NCC would not be able to do its job properly over the next six to nine months.
It is suffering acute staff shortages and is having to recruit 150 new staff in order to carry out the financial, administrative and educational work that was previously run by Peterborough. Despite this, though, Jim McCarthy is optimistic about the long term future.
I hope his optimism is justified, but I fear it may not be. At Prestonfield House Magnus Magnusson gave an eloquent explanation of the new organisation’s new logo - three concentric circles all broken in the same place. The circles, he said, as well as representing the three ‘C’s - countryside, community and conservation, also signified earth, sky and water - the three circles of life that have been interrupted by humankind.
He emphasised the point by quoting from American ecologist Barry Commoner’s inspiring 1971 book, ‘The Closing Circle’. To survive, we must close the circle, it says. “We must learn how to restore to nature the wealth that we borrow from it.”
I don’t know whether Magnusson has read the rest of Commoner’s book, but I have. It is a fine work whose conclusions will not be music to the ears of Magnusson’s boss, the Scottish Secretary, Ian Lang MP, who was also present to help the launch.
Commoner argues powerfully that environmental issues cannot be separated from national and global social and economic issues. “To resolve the environmental crisis, we shall need to forgo, at last, the luxury of tolerating poverty, racial discrimination and war”, he writes.
To reverse our unwitting march towards ecological suicide, he argues that our options have been reduced to two: socialism, or free-market profit-driven anarchy. Or, as he puts it, “the rational, social organisation of the use and distribution of the earth’s resources, or a new barbarism.”
The trouble with the current government’s prescriptions is that they are closer to barbarism than anything else.