My friend Jill Robbie steps off a busy train at Lenzie station on an overcast Saturday afternoon. Jill is Professor of Property Law and the Natural Environment in the School of Law at the University of Glasgow. She is leading an ambitious research project that works with landowners, managers and farmers to build new tools and methods for large-scale peatland restoration. Jill is not (yet) an expert on peat, but she has a deep investment in the natural world and a conviction that we need to work together across disciplinary boundaries to understand how to manage conflicting land use and work towards net zero climate targets. I am learning a lot from her.
We set off from the station carpark and join the Moss in the southern birchwood. Jill has very recently returned from the Isle of Lewis, where she was attending a conference on sustainable island communities. She tells me about the practice of peat cutting there and shows me photographs of the extraction process, which is mainly carried out by local people who maintain a connection to the cultures and histories of the island. I had never considered that the extractive use of peatlands (which, after all, irreplaceably removes peat that has formed over thousands of years) might be the very relationship with the land that allows a level of respect, care and understanding to endure. Lenzie Moss is tiny compared to mòinteach Leòdhais, which is one of the largest peatlands in Europe. The resumption of extraction here would be highly unlikely and profoundly destructive. Nevertheless, the Lewis example highlights the comparative disconnection that many in Lenzie seem to have from the peatlands.
As we walk up the east pathway (Bea’s Path, named after Bea Rae, one of the founders of the Friends of Lenzie Moss), we pick the first raspberries of the season. I point out the birch barriers that line this section of the Moss, discouraging access to a place where water voles are living. I tell Jill what I know about the tensions between conservation and recreation – the ongoing tussle over the use of pathways across the bog. Jill is instinctively troubled by the idea of conservation at the expense of human access. I offer to show her some of the areas where walkers and their dogs have damaged the peat layer.
We step off the main path to the north of the site. After walking with Jackie from East Dunbartonshire Council the previous week, this immediately feels transgressive. We are greeted by a roe deer, standing very close to us, and we hold each other’s gaze for a minute, before it turns and disappears into the heather. Jill needs to get this close to the bog to understand it. She remarks that this is an unusual impulse for lawyers, who usually work in offices and engage with landscapes through regulations, legal proceedings and protections. Law is not usually practised in the field, but Jill is concerned with lived experience and an embodied understanding of the environment.
It is significant that Jill is currently reading the new materialists – Donna Haraway and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing – who advocate a situated knowledge that doesn’t seek quick fixes, learning from feminist and Indigenous ways of understanding and being in the world. The title of Haraway’s 2016 book is Staying with the Trouble. This poses a challenge to a legal mind accustomed to solving problems and overcoming complexity. What would it look like to stay with the trouble of peatlands in different, plural and entangled ways? For Jill, the answer lies in engaging with multiple perspectives and ways of being in a place. Her concern about conservation policies that keep people out is that however well-intentioned and ecologically justified, any dominant narrative or single use of the site can counter the collaborative, co-creative approaches that are necessary for humans to live with and within an already compromised and degraded ecosystem.
What non-extractive practices and processes might strengthen the relationship between people and the earth? Jill is asking that question in her work as a researcher in sustainability law and through her role on the board of NatureScot, Scotland’s national nature agency. She has been inspired by global examples of largescale legal paradigm shifts, such as that in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, where legal rights have been granted to the natural ecosystem, preventing large scale mining operations and protecting the Los Cedros region (a place visited by Robert Macfarlane for his latest book, Is a River Alive?). In these cases, there have been significant constitutional amendments that have afforded real legal powers to protect the environment. Could this level of change happen in Scotland?
We take an exploratory, meandering route across the site as I ask Jill about her research. When she began her peatlands project, Jill wondered whether a framework could be developed for ‘Rapid Engagement with Stressed Peatland Environments and Communities in Transformation’ (forming the acronymic call to RESPECT shifting ecosystems). The rapidity of this project is now being reassessed. Peatlands pose a challenge to the timeframes, rhythms and pace of human legal processes. Jill is discovering that rapid change and quick results may not be possible – or indeed desirable – in these slow changing, transitional landscapes. As we plot our course through the bog, carefully placing one foot after the other to reach more solid ground, the speed of our progress becomes a lesson in engagement. We need to proceed cautiously and sensitively, attentive to the dynamic and often contested entanglements of people and landscape, nature and culture.
I had been moved by the strength of Jackie’s conviction about how to manage Lenzie Moss, and the strong moral imperative that drives her on in her work. But Jill’s critical questioning of some of the assumed benefits of conservation practices prompts me to reflect on whether there might be alternative models that could be worth trying here. We talk about ways to bring the community and the landowners and managers into a more productive dialogue. I have heard of effective initiatives to build trust and find common ground in ostensibly polarised ecological contexts. Perhaps something similar could be developed here? But there would have to be a willingness to engage in such a process, and a commitment to respectful communication and undetermined outcomes. From what Jackie has told me, it does not sound like this would always come easily.
At the far side of the Moss, near where I pushed Ruairidh on the tree swing, we reach a simple wooden fence, part of a small exclosure that I had recently learnt was constructed to protect the rare bog rosemary. In the last couple of weeks, the fence has been pulled down and laid across the boggy ground as an effective pathway across a marshy area. Attached to the fence is a ripped sign, stamped into the mud:
Give the bog a chance to recover: This raised bog is 8000 years in making. Please stay on the main paths to limit erosion from trampling and help give this sensitive habitat time and space to grow back. Thank you.
