View from the Street: Scotland’s landscape is changing, and not in the way you might think
Published
Tom Gillingham
Last week I attended Prosper’s Aviemore Summit, where I heard about the investment, jobs and opportunity flooding into the Scottish Highlands.
This follows a pattern now familiar across Scotland – significant infrastructure projects being developed in some of our most remote places.
Each proposal and every project creates its own understandable tensions. One person’s opportunity is another’s threat.
But there is a reality that is often lost in critiques about industrialisation and energy policy blighting our landscape and it is this: slow, perceptible change – of a type we’ve never experienced before – is already reshaping our nation and not for the better.
There’s a beach I have visited several times each year since I was only months old. It’s just one of countless rocky bights carved out of the Solway coast but this particular one is special to me and my family. This lesser-visited estuary has big skies and, when the tide makes its twice-daily retreat to England, the sort of vast flat spaces that feel alien to much of Scotland’s population.
When you know a place like this so well, the smallest changes, observed over time, add up to something more unsettling. The absence of blue-grey mussel shells amongst the cockles. The way the tidelines inch higher each year. The sudden lifelessness of the rockpools.
When my toddler son uses one of my old childhood nets to sweep these pools today, he assumes the aim is – has always been – to pick out bits of seaweed or chuck around lumps of mud. Not, as it was when I was his age, to wonder at curious creatures.
People far more qualified than me observe these incremental changes in different ways. Back in the Highlands, for example, the Sphinx snow patch – or its increasingly common summer absence – annually receives a smattering of media attention. At the same time, Scotland’s wildest places are documenting evidence of record moorland fires, higher levels of drought and changing species.
Even if you don’t believe in man-made climate change, these alarming rural trends are not limited to environmental factors. There is a growing young and working-age population crisis. Between 2001 and 2021 the 0 to 15 age group in the Highlands dropped by 6.7%. In Dumfries and Galloway, between 2001 and 2024, the 25 to 44 age group decreased by 24.5%.
We need to make more obvious the link between these inexorable, tangible existing losses and the rationale for positive, current infrastructure decisions. Failing to do so gives the illusion that change can be avoided if we simply sit tight. It allows difficult questions – the ‘if not this, then what?’ – around energy security, jobs and reducing emissions to be swerved.
If we choose to ignore the fact we’re already in a world of least-worst choices, it also becomes easier to misrepresent community activism as blanket opposition.
Sarah Ade, writing for The Herald captures this point perfectly: “…the debate isn’t about whether Scotland should pursue renewable energy, as is so often perceived when communities raise their voices. It’s about how that transition is delivered”.
Few things happen quicker than the pouring of concrete. Few developments are more conspicuous than the appearance of new structures against skylines. Conversely, like the growth of a tree, children leaving home for brighter lights or our own ageing processes, some of the most fundamental changes to our nation have already crept up on us, slowly and stealthily.
This context must be communicated more effectively if ambitious project plans are to reconcile with communities who are on their frontline. That will also require better coordination to ensure local and lived perspectives to be heard, respected, and acted upon.
In an ideal world, we would have abundant energy, all rural communities would flourish and nothing would change. Sadly, we’re long past that tipping point.
It’s right to debate the policy detail and push for equitable delivery. But, in our imperfect world, it is possible that – by paying heed to the small changes happening around us – we can better contextualise the need for the big, difficult ones.