Abstract

This article is an investigation into contestations about the landscape of Loch Gruinart, a nature reserve managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) on the Scottish island of Islay. Farmers argued that the low-lying areas of the reserve should have been farmed more intensively to support higher numbers of geese, which farmers disliked because they caused damage to their own grass crops. Instead, the RSPB managed the land to support wetland species through less intensive agricultural practices and by flooding fields. The article takes a symbolic approach that focuses on the ambiguity of Loch Gruinart as both a farm and nature reserve. It is argued that this enables the reserve to be used as a metaphor of relations between conservation and farming. The article demonstrates how farmers used the reserve both to situate themselves and to claim that the reserve was not a real farm. In response, RSPB staff argued for the logic of their management and advocated education and community involvement as a means to help farmers understand their aims. Such controversies, it is argued, are a consequence of conservationists' attempts to bring non-humans into the political arena and can thus be seen as essential to the integration of conservation into Islay rather than inimical to it.

Highlights

  • Conservationists have sometimes found themselves in dispute with local communities, and the principle of consensual rather than coercive conservation has emerged as a central concern of contemporary conservation (Campbell 2005: 302303).1 But what is happening when conservation organisations are in dispute or disagreement with local people? Whilst each debate is distinctive, there is a need to explore how such contestations can be examined and how a more general understanding of the politics of conservation can emerge from an analysis of the particular

  • It was only of concern to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and its members. Even though both they and others might have perceived the reserve as bad farming this did not represent anything more than the RSPB having a different agenda that they were at liberty to pursue, just as any farmer should be allowed to do as they wished with their land

  • Farmers suggested that the RSPB were ignorant of how to farm and of the history of the site

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Summary

Introduction

Conservationists have sometimes found themselves in dispute with local communities, and the principle of consensual rather than coercive conservation has emerged as a central concern of contemporary conservation (Campbell 2005: 302303).1 But what is happening when conservation organisations are in dispute or disagreement with local people? Whilst each debate is distinctive, there is a need to explore how such contestations can be examined and how a more general understanding of the politics of conservation can emerge from an analysis of the particular. In this article I describe the ways in which farmers and the RSPB draw on this ambiguity to situate themselves and others and to debate the ongoing relations between the activities of farming and conservation in Islay.

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Conclusion
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