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Making best use of land
George Clark had an honours degree in Zoology by the time he was twenty two. That early experience made him deeply green. Since then he has roamed the surface of planet earth dealing with people whose claims, concerns and issues were other than his own. Fearing that his enthusiasm for 'green' concerns might cause him to behave undemocratically he has drawn up a simple conceptual map to help remind himself that there is more than one way to skin a community cat.
Introduction
Mapping CommunitiesWe the Scottish people have a stake in what the Russians do with their land especially if they build nuclear power stations which explode and soak us in radioactive rain. We the Scottish people, being citizens of planet earth, should be able to control the vandals ripping out our lungs in the tropical rain forests, and control citizens everywhere who, in their ignorance, by using spray cans, make holes in the ozone layer.
And non Scottish people have a stake in how many herring we rip from the North Sea and in the extent to which we are harnessing nuclear power – are the machines at Dounreay and in the Polaris submarines really safe.
| There is the idea of stakeholders in
how land (and the water and the air) is used. Obviously the people who live on a
particular piece of land should have some say in how it is used but equally obviously, for
reasons as stated above, they should not be given a totally free hand. Unique individuals are rare. Most individuals think as they do because they belong to ‘communities’ of different shapes and sizes and with many different claims, concerns and issues. When a decision is made about how land is to be used it will be because some community or other, or some group of communities, has been able to cut a deal. Where the overarching political ethos is democratic there is the need to heed the voices of all stakeholding communities in deciding how a particular piece of land might be used. It helps to be able to map the possibilities. |
Communities of Place
Communities of Interest
Communities of Attachment
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These categories are not mutually exclusive and their patterns of interaction in real situations can be very complex but it is useful for analytical purposes to map them on a checklist:
Community of Place |
Community of Interest |
Community of Attachment |
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Environmental |
Economic |
Social |
Spiritual |
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Local |
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Regional |
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National |
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International |
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Transnational |
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Global |
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So what is the ‘best’ use of land?
This is a value judgement and different communities will have different ideas about what is ‘valuable’. In a democracy there has to be a forum for debate amongst all relevant and interested communities. In the past in Scotland the process has not been as systemically democratic as it might have been – hopefully it will be more so in the future!
Thoughts, comments and abuse will be grist to the mill of ggclark@srds.ndirect.co.uk