On the Other Side of Sorrow

Nature and People in the Scottish Highlands

James Hunter

• Publisher: Birlinn
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857908346
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Écosse

"An extraordinary intellectual voyage" through Gaelic environmental awareness, centuries ahead of its time, and its value today ( The Herald).
Caring for the environment, developing rural communities, and ensuring the survival of minority cultures are all laudable objectives, but they can conflict, and nowhere more so than the Scottish Highlands. As environmentalists strive to preserve the scenery and wildlife of the Highlands, the people who belong there, and who have their own claims on the landscape, question this new threat to their culture, which dates back thousands of years.
In this sensitive, thought-provoking book, James Hunter probes deep into this culture to examine the dispute between Highlanders, who developed a strong environmental awareness a thousand years before other Europeans, and conservationists, whose thinking owes much to the romantic ideals of the nineteenth century. More than that, he also suggests a new way of dealing with the problem, advocating drastic land-use changes and the repopulation of empty glens—an approach that has worldwide implications.
"A very thoughtful piece of advocacy." — The Scotsman

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Preface to the 2014 Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Alistair McIntosh
• Introduction: Your Blooms in Agreement Like Elegant Music
• Chapter 1: Everyone Who Ever Mattered is Dead and Gone
• Chapter 2: The Glory of Great Hills is Unspoiled
• Chapter 3: The Hind is in the Forest as She Ought to Be
• Chapter 4: Oh for the Crags that are Wild and Majestic!
• Chapter 5: Without the Heartbreak of the Tale
• Chapter 6: The Highlands are a Devastated Countryside
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index