The West Highland Survey – research overview

The West Highland Survey (WHS) was a government-funded project conducted between 1943 and 1949 and, after much delay, published in 1955. My research shows that the WHS is an example of an attempt to link ecological science to social development, planning and policy, perhaps the first example of this in Great Britain, although colonial science provides other examples. The research demonstrates that, although concomitant with the planning ethos which emerged in the interwar period, and which met its fullest expression in the post-war years, the WHS was something of a gamble for the British state. In the 1940s the then relatively new science of ecology was untested as a source of state knowledge, let alone an ecologist, Frank Fraser Darling (Director of WHS), being given free reign to identify and to analyse the issues and then to evaluate lessons and propose solutions for such a large region. The wider community of British ecologists, then in the process of establishing the utility of their science, appreciated this opportunity being given to one of their own. Nevertheless they were also ambivalent about the approach of Darling who was viewed by those strategising towards the creation of a state ecological institution (which was founded in 1949), as prone to going beyond the bounds of science and partial to giving over-zealous explanation.

The WHS produced novel approaches to the perennial ’Highland problems’, problems of low land productivity, small populations widely dispersed, widespread social poverty, and a history of outward migration, some of it under duress (the Highland Clearances). The WHS defined these problems as, at least in part, being fundamentally caused by the historic ‘misuse’ of the land: as denuded by loss of forest cover , exploitation of soils and vegetation by capitalist farming (particularly the introduction of sheep replacing cattle farming over the Highlands and Islands), and the concentration of crofters onto the poor land, particularly by the large Highland estates. The argument also proposed that crofting was a viable and suitable form of development if properly supported and crofters advised about correct husbandry and use of nature. In particular it advocates the conservation and regeneration of the land and its forests, the proper use of the soil, and of the breeding of suitable types of livestock. The WHS was simultaneously both visionary and patronising. It was visionary in the sense that it prefigured later state legislation guaranteeing crofters’ rights, and it also defined the Highlands as a social space, thereby challenging views of the region as a ‘wilderness’, for example. It was patronising to Highland communities in its god-like view and in its suggestion that crofting, land use planning, and wildlife conservation, for example, should be controlled through technocratic state management.

This sort of analysis in WHS is part of a trans-disiplinary and quite encyclopaedic argument for a different approach to the region. My research suggests that because of this breadth of analysis and the implications it might have, the Scottish Office stalled its publication by absorbing considerable amounts of time going over detail about population change or the amount of stock in a particular area, for example. This, to Darling at least, was nit-picking and the records reveal his frustration. Nevertheless the delay allowed Darling opportunity to spread his wings and during the period he undertook extensive travel in the USA, meeting ecologists and land managers and absorbing ideas about human ecology which, when writing the work up for publication, he applied to WHS. It is because of this expedition and research that the subtitle of the 1955 book became ‘An Essay in Human Ecology’.

The impact of WHS on post-war science and planning is significant: as a concept for sustainable development; as recognising the rights of marginalised rural communities; in demonstrating that land use change can have negative long-term consequences. In the 21st century there is a central political focus on Highland land reform and simultaneously practical measures are underway to ‘rewild’ the Highlands: species such as white-tailed eagle and beaver have been reintroduced, and restoration of Caledonian pine forest is regarded as an important aim. However, as Ewen Cameron suggests,  the significance of WHS today is arguably in terms of the important shift it engendered in what Highland geography has come to be understood as, rather than for its specificities.