Overseas Briefing

Author: Edward Pickering

The words "wilderness" and "wasteland" are used interchangeably to describe any barren, imposing landscape. To say that the Western Highlands of Scotland are barren would be an understatement - a failure of description. The West Highland Way stretches from Glasgow north to Fort William, 95 miles of moorland and mountain bisected by a single highway. The Bridge of Orchy, a collection of mostly white buildings grouped around a hotel, sits astride the road and in the shadow of the 3,000-plus foot peaks Beinn Dorain and Beinn an Dothaidh. From their summits one can see clear to the horizon, bare mountains and sheer valleys extending on all sides. Not a single unplanted tree adorns the denuded slopes of this range; aside from rock, sheep are the only projections. Man has left his foot trails and cairns, but nothing more. Even Nature, elsewhere so liberal, seems to have begrudged the place its tiny stock of plants and animals.

To return to my original question: are the Highlands a wilderness or wasteland? Or, what is the distinction? And why, on the summit of Beinn Dorain, was I reminded of Greece, and then Vermont? I'm told that the Highlands were blanketed by forest a mere few thousand years ago. Moose, bear and lynx inhabited these wilds. But these species and many more vanished from Scotland, the victims of deforestation largely caused by agriculturally and pastoral-ly minded humans. The same goes for the Peloponnese, the birthplace of ancient Greek civilization, home to Corinth, Sparta, Pylos and Argos. Since time immemorial the Peloponnese has borne the rustic face with which we, in the modern age, instinctively associate all things Greek, past and present. Burnished hillsides with low growing shrubbery, the odd cluster of attenuated trees, a prevailing midday sun - that is our conception of Greece. Yet, bears and lions used to roam the Peloponnese and forests were once abundant and extensive, at least, until man did away with them sometime in the B.C.'s. The landscape we think of as uniquely Greek - as "natural" - is in fact an environmentally degraded one. So, too, are the West Highlands. All of which makes me think of Vermont and a startling statistic I was told by a professor. In 1900 farmland covered 80 percent of Vermont, forest 20 percent. By 2003 the numbers had reversed: forest 80 percent, farmland 20 percent. To think that Vermont's woods, so characteristic of the state, were reclaimed from pastureland. Vermont has always seemed so "natural" to me, so "untouched."

The next time you cross a stonewall crumbling in the middle of the woods, stop and consider why it is there; consider how different New England must once have looked. Of the Peloponnese, West Highlands and New England, I cannot say which is most pristine, least touched. It all makes me wonder if I have ever seen a true "wilderness," or if all the locales of my life are, in some respect, semi-"wastelands."