Bog Myrtle & Peat

I was invited to be on television.

Researchers found my blog and came to me with a proposal last month. They were making a program for BBC Scotland about young people in the countryside, and despite my increasing antiquity, I seemed to be a good fit.

But then there was talk about grouse moor management, land reform and community land ownership; things started to feel controversial. And I began to feel like a bad choice for a program like that, because my opinions are pretty boring. I support grouse moor management, but I can understand why people don’t like it. I’m unsure about the principle of land reform, but I have seen at first hand why people need it. I don’t know much about community ownership, but I also see that anybody who aspires to own and manage land should be careful what they wish for.

I’m not deliberately obscure or evasive on these subjects; I’ve just spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about them from every angle. And so I felt like there was little I could add to a television program which seemed to have an increasing focus on conflicts in land use. It would be far better to include people who see these issues with more polarity – that would make for much better TV.

I chewed over the many “worst case scenarios” of being involved with the program, and I finally decided to go ahead with it. A team of people came out to film me feeding cattle and lifting turnips; I’m told I was very “natural” in front of the camera. But I’m also aware that in passing comment on issues of controversy around land use in Scotland, I’ve opened myself up to criticism and abuse. It would be easy to take things I said out of context, and while I don’t think the production team will do this deliberately, it would not be hard for people to get the wrong end of the stick. So I begin to wonder if I should have kept my head down after all.

But then I balance my instinct to withdraw with a sense of general frustration around how many of these discussions unfold in public. Despite working first hand with grouse moors and upland agriculture for a decade, I’m often reluctant to comment on these issues when they emerge in the news. This is mainly because the quality of the debate is so staggeringly poor and is often based upon heaped mounds of untruth and misinformation. I used to think that I could make a valuable contribution to conversations around land use; I felt like I had built up some worthwhile experience. But when I tried to get involved, I found that these exchanges were often dominated by people (on both sides) who had no idea what they were talking about – it was a weaponised competition where people battered into one another with half-truths and their frustration steamed like a kettle.

So I withdrew and now have very little to do with it. I also know several people who are far better qualified to “have a say” in the debate than I am – they’ve all withdrawn too. It feels pointless – trying to battle against a lunatic rollercoaster which seems to derive its momentum from little more than sound and fury. The “grouse moor debate” will come to a conclusion one day. No matter how it pans out, I think it will be remembered as a sad, embarrassing mess for everyone involved.

I’ll be on television in the spring, and it will be interesting to see how the discussion unfolds around this program. Perhaps I’m being naively optimistic, but I hope that there is still space for the middle ground.