With one of my other hats on I am an events organiser for The Scottish Ecological Design Association (SEDA). Since SEDA members are predominantly architects most of our events are building related. More recently I decided to put more emphasis on non-architectural events.
Next week A New Vision for Land Use in Scotland: 6 Conversations starts with the first in a series of six “Conversations”, triggered by COP26 and the Covid-19 pandemic, to look at alternative and more sustainable ways of managing the land in Scotland. One of our goals is to break down the barriers between all the many and varied users of the land and instigate some out-of-the-box ecological thinking. We hope that the event will act as a catalyst for new ways of managing land in Scotland, both at national level in terms of policy, and at the micro-level to help inform decision-making for all sizes of landowners and land managers.
The James Hutton Institute are collaborating with SEDA for this event and we have the backing of the Pebble Trust and Wildland Ltd. We have been lucky enough to have attracted an impressive array of speakers, details of whom can be found on the website.
We are reaching a crisis point for our biodiversity and the quality of our soils. Urgent action is needed and this is the opportune time to address a new approach to managing the land with Cop 26 taking place in Glasgow this autumn and the launch of the Scottish Government’s programme of creating Regional Land Use Frameworks by 2023 – a programme of land reform to maximise the potential of Scotland’s land in tackling climate change.
We are delighted that several artists are contributing music, videos and live poetry readings throughout the conference enlivening the debate and telling the story from the human perspective.
New frameworks need to be set up to give value to environmentally friendly measures but who should pay for the degradation caused by centuries of mismanagement? There are many urgent questions that need to be addressed concerning employment, health and well-being and energy as well as biodiversity and food production. We will be addressing all of these over the series.