Building Resilience and Sustainability in Lowland Scottish ‘Treescape’ Management Regimes: ‘Voices of the Future’/Re-imagining the Commons

Historic landscape study in the north of Scotland suggests a sustainable agricultural regime, extant over many centuries, was replaced with an unsustainable structure during the eighteenth century. Increasingly intensive landscape management approaches have reduced the rural population to a point where sustainable and
resilient modes of forestry production are untenable. Without an increase in rural labour, healthy, resilient ‘treescapes’ appear to be unachievable, rendering attempts to utilise that approach to biodiverse carbon sequestration impossible.