ABSTRACT
For the last 35 years, ecologists and conservationists working for government organizations in Scotland, and in the Highlands and Islands of the north and west of the country, in particular, have been publicly criticized by sectors of society as diverse as nationalists, the hunting lobby and crofters. These criticisms are broadly of two interrelated types. On the one hand, there is criticism of how state conservation ’ interferes’ with, and exercises control over, other land uses and ways of life in the Highlands and Islands, especially with small-scale land uses, such as crofting, and the large, dominant sporting estates. 1 , 2 On the other hand, and more significantly, is the criticism of state conservation’s own institutional culture, forms of scientific knowledge and assumptions about nature and society. The practices and ideology of this kind of conservation are widely regarded in Scotland as being at odds with widespread aspirations and advances towards rural development through land reform – a process that can be termed rural ‘reconstructionism’. 3
