by Daniel Mittler

This book needed to be written. After ´devolution´, Scotland´s environment is (mostly) under the control of the Scottish parliament. Scotland´s politics, meanwhile, has started to receive more academic attention. An informed debate on environmental issues, however, is still more an aspiration than a reality, as Auslan Cramb, the former environment correspondent of the Scotsman newspaper, knows only too well. Serious books on Scotland´s environment and the mechanisms by which it is managed are still a rarity (one notable exception is McDowell and McCormick, 1998). This book thus plugs a big hole. It is a mini-encyclopedia of ´facts´ about the Scottish environment and admirably introduces the societal mechanisms through which the environment is currently controlled. As a journalist, Cramb writes well. Most chapters start with engaging anecdotes. Before you know it, you are engrossed in the new topic that these tales introduce. However, Cramb is not an academic. A lot of the book is thus excessively sketchy. Many a times the book seems like a string of newspaper articles; it lacks continuity and coherence as a book.
Fragile Land is most convincing when it debunks existing myths about the innate ´naturalness´ of the Scottish environment. Cramb shows how the Scottish Highlands are everything but wilderness. He rightly describes the bare Scottish hills which tourists adore, as degraded ´biological deserts´ suffering from bad land management. This book should thus be compulsory reading for any tourist.

The author is less convincing when he tries to analyse environmental politics more generally. He lacks any framework with which to do so. He thus often simply reports on the views of different actors (mainly government agencies and NGOs). Contradictory views are simply presented side by side. While the author, who now writes for the Daily Telegraph, is surprisingly critical of the market and its tendency to undervalue nature and to fragment public policy making, he fails to provide an alternative. Instead, he praises New Labour uncritically from time to time and stakes his hopes on "environmental education". His hope is that "eventually, all environmental issues will become apolitical" (p. 220), as everyone will have been taught from childhood on to take good care of their environment. This is, of course, utterly naive. It devalues a lot of the rest of the book. For: this book shows how the environment is inextricably political. Environmental politics cannot be separated from wider political issues such as the distribution of power or income. Cramb, for example, describes the plight of 750 000 households in Scotland whose dwellings are so badly insulated that the inhabitants cannot afford to heat them. What these people need is hardly "environmental education". They need a house insulation programme and higher incomes to meet their fuel bills. Cramb also shows how bad land management in the Highlands is linked with the interests of big landowners. Sporting estates, for example, have an interest in having too many deer on their land in order to make shooting them easier for wealthy tourists. Again, education alone is unlikely to change this situation. What are needed are stricter (and more local) controls on land management. There is a case for linking the right to own land to the owner's ability to prove that s/he can manage the land sensibly. However, implementing such a scheme, which Cramb would - I believe - approve of, is highly political. It requires government to impose limits on the rights of the wealthy.

This book is thus a readable introduction to Scotland´s environment. It should gain a wide readership among the general public in Scotland as well as among tourists. As a book of environmental politics, however, Fragile Land leaves much to be desired. The author often describes the mechanisms of environmental politics well, but shies away from the resulting conclusions. While this book shows just how political the environment is, in Scotland as elsewhere, the author fails to explore this topic fully. The content of this book suggests that saving Scotland´s environment will require radical changes in the distribution of power. The author, however, is too afraid to say so. Instead, he seeks rescue in the little convincing liberal hope, that ´education, education, education´ will somehow, miraculously fix it.

Note

Environment Scotland: Prospects for Sustainability edited by Eleanor McDowell and James McCormick, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.

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