ABSTRACT
The Highlands and Islands of Scotland have suffered for some hundreds of years by being a second-class neighbourhood of little importance to a dominant South. Impartial inquiry in the Highlands could scarcely support such a view and we find numerous examples of erosion directly attributable to wrong land use. Fire used by man has been one of the most potent ecological factors in world history and prehistory in changing the vegetational face of the earth. If economics deals with income and expenditure symbolised in money, ecology deals with income and expenditure in terms of energy flux in communities of animals and plants. Overgrazing is a common cause of setting the conditions for erosion by wind and water, and even frost in the terraces of glacial drift in the Central Highlands. To return to wild-life conservation in the Highlands: sporting owners, being men the same as the proletarian demagogues, could be just as silly.
