Wild Land 1984 – James Hunter

Community Land Scotland is delighted to be able to publish a long lost (or forgotten!) paper from 1984 by James Hunter discussing tensions between environmentalism and wider rural development in the Highlands and Islands. Many of the themes and observations made in 1984 still resonate today. 

Below is an brief introduction by Jim and a link to the document containing the original paper and more recent reflections on how many of the same issues apply in 2026. 

The paper reproduced here was written 42 years ago. I was then an Aberdeenshire-based freelance journalist and broadcaster specialising in rural and environmental issues. And I’d been invited to become an early trustee of the just-founded John Muir Trust (JMT). There was much discussion among trustees as to what JMT should be about. Safeguarding ‘wilderness’ or, as it would be called today ‘wild land’, was a key priority. I shared that objective. But I thought it could be attained in ways that also helped people living around wild land areas. What I wanted, I guess, was a means of bridging the gulf that had opened up (and remains evident today) between environmentalist aims on one side and, on the other, the aspirations of rural communities in the Highlands and Islands. Hence my 1984 paper.

This paper was sent to me some two years ago by Denis Mollison, one of JMT’s founders, who (unlike me) had kept a copy. Until that point, I’d forgotten about it. This may seem strange. But if (as I’ve done) you’ve written many hundreds of articles and compiled lots of papers for a whole variety of purposes over several decades, you’re inclined (in my case anyway) to find some of them slipping from your memory. And so it was with my 1984 contribution to JMT debates. Many of the ideas I outlined in 1984 were elaborated subsequently – not least in light of the close contact I’d have, in various capacities, from the mid-1980s onwards, with people on the ground. Here everything’s left as first written – though I’ll afterwards touch on the extent to which the situation I described has, or hasn’t, changed for the better.

James Hunter