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#5 Alastair McIntosh on Donald Trump's psychohistory, Calvinism in the Western soul, and Scotland reborn
66 Plays5 months ago
Alastair McIntosh is a human ecologist, theologian, activist, and writer known for his work on the interplay between community, ecology, and spirituality. Alastair is best known for his 2001, but still very timely book, Soil and Soul—part autobiography, part theology, part history.
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We talk about…
- The concepts of psychohistory & cultural psychotherapy, and how our deep past, going back many generations, makes us who we are.
- Alastair’s travel/philosophy/theology book, Poacher’s Pilgrimage
- How the Scottish Clearances in the 1820s on the Isle of Lewis may be half-responsible for forming Donald Trump into who he is today. For more, read Alastair’s compelling article on the subject.
- Should Donald Trump pay an extended non-entrepreneurial (and non-golfing?) visit to the Hebrides?
- Read Alastair’s poem calling Trump to “come home.”
- The concept of “indigenousness” and if the term can apply to white folks.
- Ken tries out a big word: “ethnomasochism.”
- Are we all Calvinists without knowing it? Alastair defines Calvinism with “TULIP.”
- The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
- A free PDF of Alastair’s Island Spirituality
Alastair recommends:
- Alice Walker’s poetry—Horses Make A Landscape Look More Beautiful
- And Carmina Gadelica by Alexander Carmichael (get the volume that condenses the six volumes into one)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:05
Speaker
This is the Out of the Wild podcast with Ken Ilgunis.
00:00:18
Speaker
Alistair Mikintosh is a human ecologist, theologian, activist, and writer known for his work on the interplay between community, ecology, and spirituality. Among his many books is one I recently read, Soil and Soul, part autobiography, part theology, part history. Even though it was written way back in 2001, I felt like it was a book for our times. Alistair, it's an honor to have you on. Welcome.
00:00:48
Speaker
Well, nice to be with you out of the world, Ken. um Thank you.
Exploring Disconnection and Ancestral Ties
00:00:53
Speaker
Let's start with soil and soul. When I read that book, I felt like you put your finger on one of the biggest problems in the world, one that few others are talking about. And I'm talking about our disconnection, disconnection from our ancestral lands, our ways of being, traditions, myths, religions.
00:01:17
Speaker
This rootlessness can manifest in spiritual emptiness, disconnection, depression. In the US, it feels like this disconnection is everywhere. But let's begin with with your story. Where are you from and how did you become interested in these things? Well, I suppose when you speak about something like disconnection and reconnection,
00:01:46
Speaker
It always helps to have a bit of experience of that. And so I grew up in a in a context of divided connection because I was born in Doncaster in England in a mining community. My father was a Scottish doctor with roots in Bosey, Scottish borders and especially the Scottish Highlands. My mother was an English nurse with family roots in England and Wales.
00:02:15
Speaker
And they met when my father became a doctor in the Doncaster Royal Infirmary, and I was born in 1955. But in 1960, our family moved to the Isle of Lewis. My father was desperate to get back to Scotland. We had some very distant family connections. There was an island, but basically it was a matter of coming in, having spent the first four years of my life ah growing up in England.
00:02:43
Speaker
into an indigenous crofting of small-scale agriculture and fishing community in a Hebridean island and in a context where, you know, it was only just at that time that villages had been connected up to electricity supply. We had no mains water where we were. For the first few years, we got it from a well and ah drinking water off the roof.
00:03:09
Speaker
and it will so and it It was, you know in a very benign sense of the word, a peasant community.
Reconnecting with Community and Heritage
00:03:16
Speaker
I just took it as being the way things were, but I realised, as I've grown up, what a remarkable place it was to have grown up in, especially because it gave me one fruit in the mainstream world, being the son of a medical family,
00:03:31
Speaker
and the other foot in an ancient indigenous worldview and way of living. Growing up with that kind of holding, being held in what I call the basket of the community. You're not just on your own, but you're in community with others. And then experiencing so many people in today's world suffering disconnect.
00:03:56
Speaker
makes me think that there are things about being human that we've lost touch with that we can recover and that's what my work was land reform and the kind of issues the urban poverty work etc also mentioned in Soil and Soul are all a about.
00:04:14
Speaker
These issues are are close to me because I'm American and naturally I'm somewhat disconnected from my ah European roots, but I also grew up in the American suburbs where sometimes you don't know the name of your neighbor, just two houses down. So I think I've always had this kind of inner craving for connection in the way you described on the the Isle of Lewis.
00:04:37
Speaker
One of the most interesting terms I came across in your books is the ah study of psycho history. Could you describe why it's important to know about your and your culture's psycho history? I did an event this Sunday just um two days ago from the time we were coding this with a couple of historians here in Glasgow, and it was about what it means to be a state, what it means to be a nation, what kind of political structures we want to see develop in Scotland. These were two um very well-respected historians, and I was one of the three speakers. And at one point I said to them, I think it's important to map out a difference from where with where we're coming from, because you are academic historians.
00:05:33
Speaker
for which everything must necessarily be evidence based and that normally means working from written records to be sure or as sure as you can be as to what you are saying and you're very much trying to establish the facts of a matter. Whereas I'm working at a different level, I'm working at how history has affected us psychologically and that takes us into the realm that is more akin to folklore to mythology, to spirituality, to theology, into those kinds of things. And the historians ah completely he understood and accepted that point. It wasn't the point of contention between us, but I think it is an important difference to notice.
00:06:19
Speaker
And that in the past, we have had very little history presented to us in ways that helps us to understand how history has affected us psychologically. And yet it's hugely important. I have a a case study for us, Alistair. He's going to be the next president of of the United States. And I know you've written about Donald Trump a few times. You've written that um You call him a son of the Isle of Lewis through his maternal side, of course. And you argue that in some ways we owe the Donald to the Highland clearances. um You've been critical of Trump, but you've also called for him to come home. There's a lot to unpack there, but let's start with this. Why should Donald Trump come home? What what might he learn if he were to spend some time in the Hebrides?
00:07:17
Speaker
Well, I'd like to be very clear that in calling for Donald Trump to come home, I'm not doing so in the sense that one of our politicians did the other day, where he wants Trump to come home and bring material prosperity to the island. I'm looking at it very differently. I'm looking at the psychological constellation that I think I can see in Trump. I'm talking about the way in which a person's family history has arguably cut off parts of their full humanity. And I think that applies personally to Trump for reasons I can go into, if you wish. But I also think, and this is what's really important, that it applies to a lot of his base constituency.
Cultural Psychotherapy and Healing
00:08:06
Speaker
When I've travelled in Appalachia, I'm struck by how many Appalachians
00:08:13
Speaker
identify themselves as Scots-Irish. Even though, I'm told by the scholars, that is usually on a very tenuous basis, and many of them just aren't. But nevertheless, psychologically, they identify with that motif. Why so? Because they're coming out of a context, whether in Scotland or Ireland, of having to seek what they saw as being a better way of life, because the way of life they were leaving behind had become so insufferable. Few people willingly leave their native land unless it is insufferable.
00:08:59
Speaker
They were coming out of hard times. And then, of course, they create a narrative myth around that, which often denies the reasons why they were coming out of it.
00:09:11
Speaker
But then, because they don't understand their own psycho-history, that which has been oppressed in them so readily it becomes the oppressor of others. But then, because they don't understand their own psycho-history, that which has been oppressed in them so readily it becomes the oppressor of others.
00:09:41
Speaker
Now with the poor white, do you want me to expand on that, Ken? Well, I guess what one of my questions here is, what is the fix here? What is psycho historical therapy? You know, how do we, is it just a simple acknowledgement of the history and understanding of oneself and where you're from? Well, I think that's part of it. ah I use the term cultural psychotherapy. You see, individual psychotherapy or most forms thereof,
00:10:11
Speaker
The aim is to help a person to understand the causes of their psychological suffering. and As Freud himself said, he said that that may not resolve the suffering, but at least it helps people to understand it.
00:10:27
Speaker
If you can understand why you are the way you are, it can make it easier to live with and even to grow beyond. Freud's initially student, and then he went his own way, Carl Jung, likens it to saying, he says, we never really get rid of our fundamental new roses.
00:10:48
Speaker
but it's a bit like being an alpine mountaineer. You might set off with a storm down in the valley, but then you rise up above the clouds and you reach a point high up the mountain where you're in the blazing sunshine, but you can still look down on that storm that is raging in the valley. It's just that you have it in a wider perspective. So that's kind of how one way in which you get out of it.
00:11:17
Speaker
But I think more widely than that, we also get structurally locked in. If we have an oppressed people, if we are Native Americans or African Americans, for example, then structurally we can be locked in to that which stops us from being able to express our full humanity because of racism, because of the way the land has been taken.
00:11:46
Speaker
because of the way that our cultures are not respected. That's basically what I look for, for understanding what has happened to us, but then saying, well, how do we how do we go beyond that? How do we come back into the relationship that has been broken?
00:12:05
Speaker
Let's take it back to Trump for a second because I think your argument that um we might have Trump as he is today because of the Highland clearances, I don't think that's known enough in the US. I think the average person in the US has no idea what the Highland or the clearances in general are. Maybe you could give just a very quick um definition of the clearances and how it came into Donald Trump's family history.
00:12:35
Speaker
Well, this is the kind of thing I write about, especially in my book poachers pilgrimage which came out in 2016 poachers pilgrimage, an island journey. So what happened in Donald Trump's family background is that in the 1820s, the Isle of Lewis was owned by Colonel Francis Humberston Mackenzie, the whole of the island of Lewis, about 800 square miles. And he was by that time the governor general of the Barbados.
00:13:05
Speaker
ah slave come ran a He ran up huge gambling decks and so he leased large areas of the island's land to sheep farmers who then evicted the people. The Donald Trump's ancestors were evicted from their land on the two sides of his family. These evictions were very brutal.
00:13:29
Speaker
ah It is still told in our village how the people came from that area, from a village called Burnish, where Donald Trump's Smith and sisters were from. And they had to live underneath upturned boats for their first winter. And then they moved to where Trump's mother grew up, the village of town, where their conditions were described as being worse than anything that a traveler had seen in Donegal in Ireland.
00:13:57
Speaker
Now, when she was 17, Donald Trump's mother, Mary Anne McLeod, emigrated to America. At that time, the Isle of Lewis was suffering multiple traumas. First of all, you had poverty brought on partly by the way the land had been taken off people. You had huge loss of life of young men in the First World War.
00:14:21
Speaker
the war was followed by tuberculos and the Spanish flu. I mean, you could say, who was she going to marry? So she took a chance. She moved to America. She met Frederick Christ Trump and Donald was one of the outputs. But Donald Trump, unlike us, was not raised in the basket of the community. He was not held in that communal holding that would have rubbed off his rough corners. He didn't have the kind of opportunity like I had
00:14:53
Speaker
put out as a teenager in a small boat, a rowing boat, to catch fish and share it in the community and have to take, you know, calculated risks and made sure that I didn't get blown out to sea or whatever and had to learn from the elders in
The Role of Ancestral Roots in Identity
00:15:11
Speaker
so doing. He didn't have that kind of opportunity. Instead, he he was raised as a rich young boy who kind of got his own way to seem and got sent off to military college and became the kind of arrogant man that he is now because he didn't have a community rounding him off. But then he's able to speak, he's got traction with others who also have come from similar types of background and other parts of youth.
00:15:43
Speaker
others who also like you know so many of well J.D. Vance says it himself and Hillbilly Elegy. J.D. Vance says you know I identify as a Hillbilly. We are the descendants of those who worked in the southern slave economy. So what you have is these poor white people evicted from our land working in the southern slave economy or joining the military or pressing Native Americans you name it.
00:16:14
Speaker
and gaining political power, which they now desperately hold onto at any moral cost to themselves. Because what they are basically hold on holding onto is a form of privilege that masks an inner emptiness. And it is that inner emptiness that I think you can see in a figure like Trump. It's an inner emptiness that Europeans can see in a lot of North Americans who don't have roots, who don't know who they are, whose outlook is very transient, very post-modern, because they're not really belonging anywhere, and yet have a deep hunger for community. And we see that when Americans come to Scotland. They're desperate to look up their ancestors. You know, oh, you're a clan Macintosh. Are you related to so-and-so? And we kind of laugh at it. but but
00:17:14
Speaker
yeah It's kind of a bit sad in a way. They're so desperate for connection that we just take so much for granted that we don't need to um look it out like that because we have the connection, at least many of, some of us have, I should say. And a lot of them don't have a Nile of Lewis or a small community where they can kind of, well themselves. And what what can what can communities in America and across the world do to kind of recreate connection and and rootedness? Well, you see, that's why when I published Soil and Soul, I was getting people here in Glasgow saying to me, you know, what about us? We are living in urban native reservations in poor areas of Glasgow. And so I was asked by people in this community of Goven, which is the former shipbuilding community, and to get more closely involved. And we moved here
00:18:11
Speaker
ah nearly 21 years ago, we've been living here now, where my work has been involved with issues related to urban poverty and the making of urban community, especially through an organisation called the GAL Trust, G-A-L-G-A-E-L. Now, that's a term that came into use in Scotland in the 9th century.
00:18:36
Speaker
When the Norse were infusing with the native Gallic people, the Norse of the Strangers, which in Gallic is the Gal, the gale with the Heartland people, and the mixture of the two became known as the Gal-gal. So what we say today is we are all Gal-gal now.
00:18:57
Speaker
There is something of the stranger and something of the indigenous in all of us. But the task that faces us is all to become indigenous to this place once again. And when I say to Donald Trump, come home Donald, it is in that sense that I mean it, in that sense of reconnecting with what it means to be community, what it means to be in solidarity with the poor and the oppressed, not to be lording it over them with wealth.
00:19:28
Speaker
what it means to create a society in which people can connect to the land and simply live with dignified sufficiency, not with excess but with dignified sufficiency.
00:19:40
Speaker
when i read When I read your poem, which I think was written back, way back in 2012, if I have that right, um but when I read your poem, I took that Come Home Donald as a rhetorical flourish because I sensed that he wouldn't really get that much from the Hebrides. Is it rhetorical or do you do you believe that anybody can redeem themselves?
00:20:07
Speaker
Well, I believe ultimately that anybody can redeem themselves. But of course, that is a huge debate within the very Calvinist theology that Donald that is donald Trump's background and indeed the background of much of America. If I could just quote you ah from the end of that poem that ah the that that you mentioned. If I can just um read you the last part of it, just to give a sense of what I'm getting at here. Oh, Donald Trump, do not be mistaken.
00:20:46
Speaker
Come home, Donald. Come home in your mind. Come home to gentle, honest folks. Come home to nature's guileless way, without greed, without force, without tears. Renounce the ruthless sands of capital and pride.
00:21:08
Speaker
Renounce the decorated corpse of sup-ureting wealth. Renounce those vicious, violent, so-called winning ways. Come home, O Donald Trump. Come home to this new start and build a golden tower to be your greatest work of living art that rises from the fairway as the meteoric human heart transmuted Transfigured, transubstantiated. Come home, Donald. Just come on home.
00:21:49
Speaker
That's really nice, Alastair. And when he comes home, you guys can keep him. But no, I really appreciate that and the sentiment behind it. um You mentioned indigenous before, and that's something I wanted to touch on. um I remember i I was actually discussing your book on a train with a young lady and she was really bright and thoughtful and she spoke with a lot of scrutiny and disappointment about British history and and British empire.
00:22:26
Speaker
And when I brought up how the UK has its own indigenousness that has been you know inner colonized, she really um bristled when I used indigenous to describe like a Scottish indigenous or a ah British and indigenous. And I think sometimes in progressive progressive circles, I sense this tendency towards what feels like ethnomassicism, a kind of self-loathing tied towards one ah ethnicity or national identity. How do you think of the concept of Indigenous in places like Scotland? Is it a helpful way to frame it? Well, life yeah what do you mean by Indigenous? You mean a deep belonging to place. um I know people who can trace their ancestry
00:23:21
Speaker
back to the Battle of Culloden in 1746. you know That's pretty deep-rooted connection with place. I think you've got a right to call yourself indigenous to place when you've got those kind of connections. um I can trace my ancestry back to four times great-grandparents on my father's side and one line on my father's side.
00:23:51
Speaker
and to the time when they were cleared from the land by the Balfour family. They were cleared from stress, again in the 1820s. But what is, you know, ah my friend, Professor Ulrich Cookholt, and I, he's an ethnographer, and we make a distinction between being native and being indigenous. Being native, we see as being blood lineage.
00:24:19
Speaker
but being indigenous we see as belonging to place more in a spiritual sense. And that is important in the Celtic tradition because in the Celtic tradition, foster ship or adoption counts for even more than blood lineage.
Calvinism's Influence on Culture and Identity
00:24:36
Speaker
There's a proverb that says blood um ah blood for tenfold, foster ship a hundredfold. Another proverb says the bonds of ah The bonds of milk are stronger than the bonds of blood. The nurture is stronger than nature. And so in Scotland, a lot of us have been working with this idea, as I put it in one of my poems, that a person belongs in as much as they are willing to cherish and be cherished by this place and its peoples.
00:25:12
Speaker
Now what that does is that it opens the door to the outsider. It says if you're prepared to respect what is found here, if you come here not just to take but to give and take, then you can come to belong, then you can come to be held in the basket of the community and become part of that community.
00:25:37
Speaker
And a lot of people don't understand that because so often the term Indigenous is used in a highly ethnocentric and exclusive way. Whereas in Scotland, in scotland I mean there's a Scottish government caption, one Scotland, many cultures. That's the kind of identity we're talking about building.
00:25:58
Speaker
Let's talk about Calvinism for a moment. When I bought here your book, I bought a used copy of the book and whoever sold me the book online, he folded inside the book an email conversation he had with with you actually. don't worry there was nothing so salaccious i being spider um And it was a very short but interesting trade of dialogue on the topic of Calvinism because he was a psychotherapist and
00:26:31
Speaker
um He was just kind of observing and a lot of his clients that this Calvinism, it just runs deep in the saish Scottish soul so much that many Scots don't even recognize its influence. I think it needs to be.
00:26:48
Speaker
understood for what it is. And that's why when I was writing Poaches pilgrimage, I also wrote another book called Island Spirituality as a theological spinoff, published by the Island Spook Trust as a historical monograph. And Island Spirituality is now out of print, but they allowed me to put the PDF online. So if you Google Island Spirituality Macintosh, you will get it, in which I unpack Calvinism as I experienced it, and I do so in as neutral a way as I can, leaving others to make their judgment. But Calvinism, as it is often taught, not so much how the scholars would teach it, but how it is taught in many a Highland and Island pulpit, is based upon five principles known as the tulip as an acronym, T-U-L-I-P, total depravity, that
00:27:47
Speaker
Your sinfulness totally penetrates who you are. That can work into very deep senses of worthlessness.
00:27:59
Speaker
You, unconditional election. Now, the key word there is election, to be elect to be chosen by God. And in the Calvinist framework, because everything is predetermined or predestined by God,
00:28:17
Speaker
God decided which souls were going to be saved and which were going to be damned from, as the Westminster Confession puts it, before the foundations of the earth were laid. So basically, whether the you are saved and I am damned has already been decided from before the beginning of time. And that is unconditional. Supposing that you are saved, it's not because of anything you've done.
00:28:47
Speaker
Deporting that I am of the damned, nothing that I can do, no matter how much I pray or do good works, can redeem that situation. I'm screwed for all eternity to suffer in the flames of hell. T-U-L, limited atonement. If you are saved, how come you're saved? You're saved because of Christ's sacrifice and the curse.
00:29:14
Speaker
because God, as Calvin puts it, and I quote, was armed for vengeance, end quote, at human sin. But Christ gave himself to take the punishment on your behalf. However, that atonement of Christ is limited. It was for you because God had already predestined that you'd be saved. It is not for me.
00:29:42
Speaker
As Patti, oh, what's the name? That's Singer Patti, famous American singer. Patti Smith. Thank you. Puts it in one of her songs. Jesus died for someone's sins, but not mine. That Jesus died only for those who God had already decided would be saved. ah T-U-L-I, irresistible grace. So let's suppose that you're not a fundamentalist Christian.
00:30:09
Speaker
um But you are nevertheless one of the elect what you are going to be saved. Before you die, God is going to get you whether you like it or not. God's grace will be irresistible when it comes upon you. And finally, P perseverance of the saints. Deposing you are one of the saved and you might have signs of your election like blessings of this life. Deposing you are one of the saved, nothing you can do will cause you to fall off the wagon.
00:30:40
Speaker
And that's why James Hogg wrote his famous book, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, where the sinner committed various murders, but felt he could do so with impunity because he was convinced that he was justified, which is to say, saved in the eyes of God. Now, that's a pretty harrowing theology.
00:31:07
Speaker
It is pretty mainstream American theology, historically speaking. That's what the Pullman fathers took over. That's what George Bancroft, the Secretary of the Navy, said was the foundation of what made America. That's what John Winthrop described this framing of America being as as a shining city on the hill.
00:31:29
Speaker
a light unto the nations. It's amazing that it's so widespread and has had such an influence because there's not much about it that I find all that appealing and it's hard for me to imagine why people would. Well, people do. I mean, people consider these words. I mean, these are words that Americans will frequently sing it from the star-spangled banner. Then conquer we must when our cause is just And this be our motto, in God is our trust. And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, or the land of the free and the home of the brave. I mean, that's some exceptionalism going on there. And then similarly, you've you've got the rule of Britannia, which is sung every year at last nights of the firms. And and you've you've explicitly got a sense of manifest destiny.
00:32:28
Speaker
I, God, given destiny, a charter in the land here. When Britain first, at Heaven's command, arose from out thee as you are mean. This was a charter, the chart of the land.
00:32:46
Speaker
And god guardian angels sang this strain, Vule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never, never shall be slaves. And he goes on to say, the nation's not so blessed as he, those who are not so must in their turn to tyrants fall, must in their turn to tyrants fall, whilst thou shalt flourish, shalt flourish great and free, the dread and envy of them all. So the psychotherapist who is emailing you and saying Calvinism is in the Scottish ah character and soul, I think if you were to go go to every single Scottish person and ask them, you know, what is your religion or denomination of Christianity, almost none of them would say I'm
00:33:35
Speaker
Calvinistic. so So what is it? What what what makes them calvin is Calvinistic, even though they don't even know they are? Well, Max Weber, the German sociologist, wrote a whole book called the Protestant Work e Ethic about that. um The implicit idea that if you prosper in this life, it's because of God's blessing.
00:34:00
Speaker
Now, most people would not framework it like that, but they probably carry something like that within them historically. I do think it's a lot less strong now than it used to be. um This past year, the there's been a turning point. ah Only a minority of Scots would now identify as being Christian. What I find so sad is that it takes us away from the beauty of the gospels. It takes us away from the love of Christ. It takes us away for christ from Christ's insistence on solidarity with the poor, the oppressed, the prisoner, the broken-hearted, that kind of thing. it it It shifts us from what Christian teaching really ought to be about by focusing on some of the, I would say, the worst aspects of the Bible.
00:34:56
Speaker
where what we see in the Bible is actually a historical documentation, albeit one in which all along God is saying, stop behaving like this. Remember the quadrant of the vulnerable, the widow, which is to say the bereaved, the orphan, which is to say the bereft.
00:35:20
Speaker
the alien, which is to say the stranger in our midst, and the poor. Those four things, the quadrant of the vulnerable, that the Hebrew prophets were always banging on about. And God's anger being represented in the Bible so often, because these were being violated, that innocent blood was being shed.
00:35:46
Speaker
Now, these are depths of theology that you find in liberation theology that came out of Latin America, but you don't find in the mainstream evangelical theology, such as led to 83% or something of Trump's vote. You don't find it there. Their theology is all about personal salvation. Their theology is about me, me, me. Am I saved? Is there a fundamental question?
00:36:18
Speaker
And to me, I don't see Jesus being obsessed with whether we are saved or not. Jesus is, as I read Jesus, Jesus is saying to come to me all ye who thirst and hunger. And that I come to bring good news to the Quarterant of the oppressed, his mission statement in Luke 4.
00:36:45
Speaker
good news to the prisoner, good news to the poor, good news to the broken hearted in the King James translation, translation and so on. This is about love. As Bell Hooks, the American writer, puts it, it's all about love. And anything that falls short in the standards of love, to me, is not true spirituality. It might be a religion.
00:37:12
Speaker
but it's a religion of authoritarianism. um I'm just ah transitioning to a wildly different topic now that I know I only have you for a few more minutes, but I wanted to talk about um these links that have been illegally released into the wild.
Rewilding and Land Ownership in Scotland
00:37:30
Speaker
Any American listener probably has no idea what we're talking about, but it's been in the news that four links have been illegally rewilded into the Scottish Highlands. And I think all four have been um captured. But this just brings to to mind the the topic of rewilding. And i think I think a lot of environmental organizations, they spoke of these illegal releases with criticism, but also a little bit of sympathy because everyone just knows how ecological restoration and in Scotland is going so slowly. because And I think part of the issue is that Scotland
00:38:05
Speaker
has been kind of de-wilded for you know over thousands of years, but it's also been de-peopled over the past few centuries. So in a country like Scotland where cultural and ecological histories, they're so deeply intertwined, what do you think the best approach is to rewilding? Well, a lot of us in Scotland are very skeptical of the term rewilding.
00:38:32
Speaker
for the reason being that it has been parachuted in by wealthy people buying up large areas of land in order to rewild it and then perhaps sell off the carbon and maybe biodiversity credits to finance their acquisition. So many of us bristle when we hear that term because we associate it to the kind of neo-colonialism We, however, would use such terms as ecological regeneration. You know, I have on my desk over here, I will show you the evidence. I mean, there are several copies of the journal Reforesting Scotland, which has been going since the late 1980s and is all about ecological regeneration, including your times discussing things like reintroducing the links of beaver, the wolf,
00:39:22
Speaker
that kind of stuff. We've already got that going. We don't need wealthy people coming in from God knows where saying I'm going to buy up 50,000 acres and re-world you. We want re-peopling. And then what happens in re-peopling, Ken, and this is what my work with land reformers described in Soil and Soul has been so much about. When the people of a place get control of their place back and we now have nearly 3% of Scotland's 19 million acres in community land trust ownership, some 500 community land trust. When that happens, when people are able to take responsibility for their own place, they want to reconstitute the natural ecology.
00:40:14
Speaker
but let them do it in their own way. Don't let don't make it that they have to have it done to them by somebody wealthy coming in and dictating their way of doing it. They will do it in their own way. I was on the Isle of Harris recently, and much of which is now in community land ownership.
00:40:35
Speaker
And they are engaging in ecological restoration, planting out quite a large area with native woodland and doing it in patchwork so you can work alongside traditional grazing rights and so on.
00:40:53
Speaker
But they have engaged four local tree nurseries to raise the trees from local seed provenance. Many of the big rewilding things just buy in bulk from contracts from God knows where. But doing it locally, it feeds into the local economy. You get buy-in of local people into what is happening. It's a whole other business because then you restore people as well as nature.
00:41:20
Speaker
ah I think that we've got to have natural economic ecology running hand in hand with the human ecology. Anything less than that is doomed to failure, like we're starting to see happen with a particular set of the big re-wilding schemes at the moment, which are currently on the market up at Ben Luyt around in Venice.
00:41:42
Speaker
you You touch on community purchases there. That's one of my favorite topics. um My article in the New York Times about OVA should be coming out sometime soon. And I know you've written about the island of OVA as well. Just to remind any listeners that community purchases are usually so small rural communities buying land around them oftentimes from you know, a landowner who could have been ah benevolent or otherwise beforehand. And I see it as just one of the great ideas of the 21st century that can be, that ought to be replicated in other places, but do you see community purchases as as a model that can be kind of replicated globally because most of us are living in dense, urban environments? Can you see this being applied in um in an urban sort of way?
00:42:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question that because Community Land Scotland, note that name, are doing a lot of work on urban land reform also, but it's much more difficult. You see, in 1997, when we raised the money to buy out the Island of Egg, 7,000 acres, 2,400 hectares, ah we raised 1.6 million.
00:43:05
Speaker
no By market spoiling, we had knocked a big hole in the value of it. That's why we were able to get it at that price. But you wouldn't get very much urban territory for 1.6 million. um But then that raises the question of why we live where we do. Why should living in the countryside be the domain of the well-to-do?
00:43:32
Speaker
Why should ordinary people not be able to afford to live in the countryside? And the beautiful thing that's happening when communities get the land back is that they're able to gradually and at their own pace open up housing opportunities so that local people can afford to live in local places. So the school stays open, the post office stays open, the shop stays open.
00:43:58
Speaker
Visitors want to come because they get an authentic connection with real people in a real place, instead of an art artificially created tourist paradise. Let's go down that route. But that means empowering people. It means empowering people to be able to have that connection with their land.
00:44:17
Speaker
to be able to set up democratically accountable community land trusts governed by themselves with regular elections. So if somebody doesn't like the way it's being run, they can stand for election and see if they get the vote. That's how we're doing it in Scotland.
00:44:34
Speaker
is that there should be a land value tax applied to private landowners, community ones should be exempted, land used for the public good should be exempted, the private owners should be taxed and the proceeds of that used to buy them out where communities want to take control of their own place. That's my basic model. No politician has taken it up.
00:45:00
Speaker
that It sounds like a good idea. I pitched it to you, but you know, the politicians, I mean, I was in a discussion about this just today. The politicians are frightened of rocking the boat too much, because landowners are powerful people. They are the same people who are also big into business, who can prural a lot of political influence. So you're dealing with very real power when you're talking about landed power.
00:45:29
Speaker
Land is the ultimate security and as you say, God doesn't make it anymore. the People's relationship with land and Scotland, I find to be so unusual because on the one hand, um it's so and inspiring to see laws like the right of responsible access and community purchases and ecological restoration happening. But you're also seeing so much kind of land ownership inequality. You're seeing a lot of extremely depleted landscapes. um You're seeing just a lot of forgotten parts of Scotland. How do you make sense of of that? Well, it's about power playing itself out. I mean, yeah if you take fasten shooting vast numbers, hundreds of thousands of pheasants released just to be shot by rich people. Gross
00:46:26
Speaker
Moor burning. Fast areas of Scotland regularly burnt so that this bird, the grouse, will breed there. Now, there was some argument in favour of it because grouse moors are ecologically rich in their own way, but fast areas are given over to it. You're talking about re-wielding. Actually, you don't need to do anything.
00:46:51
Speaker
All you need to do in most places is put a fence round and keep the deer down, keep the deer out or shoot the deer so that you bring them down to a level where they're not going to be a threat to trees and nature will regenerate itself.
00:47:07
Speaker
You see examples of that in many places in Scotland where that's been done. It's no big deal. We just need to manage the land sensibly. But that's not going to happen when it's in the hands of wealthy people who primarily want to manage it for blood sports. Let's end on a a better note than Bloodsport, Malister. So i yeah I asked you to um bring just anything you're consuming culturally that you'd like to kind of recommend to the audience, a book, poetry, movie, whatever. well I mean, what's on my desk just now? I mean, here's Alice Walker's book of poetry. Horses make a landscape look more beautiful.
00:47:53
Speaker
um A poem here by her, which kind of says it all, we alone can devalue gold by not caring if it falls or rises in the marketplace. Wherever there is gold, there is a chain, you know, and if your chain is gold, so much the worse for you. Feathers, shells, and sea-shaped stones are all as rare. This could be our revolution to love what is plentiful as much as what's scarce.
00:48:25
Speaker
So that sounds like a black American poet. And from our own indigenous culture, where was it? The Karmina Gadelica. K-C-A-R-M-I-N-A-G-A-D-E-L-I-C-A. The single volume edition condensed from the six volumes of Alexander Carmichael's material of our indigenous Celtic spiritual tradition. I would recommend it to people.
00:48:55
Speaker
I'll link to it in the show notes. Alistair, I can't tell you just what an honor it was to talk with you. And I just wanted to thank you so much for your your scholarship, your activism, and all your your work. We're all better off because of you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Ken. It's been very good sharing with you and go well to your people. Thank you.