Michael Russell, Minister for Environment
Friday, November 30, 2007
One of the best places to view Scotland - literally and metaphorically - is at the top of a hill.
Recently I was in the Lammermuirs, learning from members of the Moorland Forum about heather, game birds, biodiversity, and a host of other things whilst all around there were the sounds and sights of natural Scotland, including the glimpse of a white mountain hare, running away from this large group of booted men and women, tramping over its habitat.
Heather is, according to those who know, not only iconically Scottish, but botanically well suited to us too.
That is hardly a surprise, except that it might not be so in a couple of generations unless we take the actions needed. Some 25 per cent of heather cover has been lost since the second world war - as a result of afforestation, the decline in traditional patterns of agriculture and also because of changes in land management and land use.
Other things have changed too. Rivers are running higher and longer, seasons for muirburn are out of step with the legislation , and the need for carbon capture - in peatlands as much as anywhere else - is greater than every before.
All these things point to a need for appropriate policies for our particular landscape and our special type of land use but developing these appropriate policies for an era of unprecedented natural change - with all that means in terms of human change too - is a massive task.
We will need to focus on our own priorities, on the levers which we alone can pull and the resources we alone can command. Yet it is clear that our nation also needs to undertake those tasks in the full knowledge of best practice elsewhere and in full and equal partnership with other countries.
Much of the power to make a difference is devolved but not that final and crucial element - the element of working with, learning from and plugging into the wider world. After six months as Scotland's Environment Minister it seems to me that one of the strongest current arguments for independence is just that - gaining the vital ability for Scotland to seek its answers, not second hand and at arms length via DEFRA in London, but directly within the EU in Brussels and at the UN in New York as well as in consort with a range of other nations in a wide variety of other settings.
Working in that way would not be cutting ourselves off - it is in fact the ultimate in joining in. The prospect of sending Richard Lochhead to negotiate for our fishing industry at the top table, rather than making him haggle with English ministers before being allowed to sit somewhere behind them, is one that should be an obvious argument for constitutional change. Similarly choosing to let our excellent land mangers and natural heritage organisations participate effectively at every level in every forum should be a no brainer.
I am often astonished at the perverse energy and imagination used by those who argue against independence. They seem capable of almost any mental gymnastics in their slavish defence of the status quo.
Yet in the end their arguments are sterile because they always leave us outside the conference room and distant from where decisions are made - decisions that are of central importance in terms of who we are and what we may become.
The fresh air of the lowland hills blows unionist sophistry away. Scotland's landscape and all within it would be better off with independence.
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