Please NOT another talking shop ending with another feasibility study ......& another "cart before the horse"...... E.F.Schumacher “SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL ~ ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED” 33 years ago wrote... “…reconciliation of man with the natural world is no longer merely desirable, it has become a necessity. And this cannot be achieved by tourism, sightseeing, or other leisure-time activities, but only by changing the structure of agriCULTURE in a direction exactly opposite to that proposed by…..the experts in their crude materialistic view of agriCULTURE as “essentially directed towards the "FOOD INDUSTRY“. Instead of searching for means to accelerate the drift out of agriculture, we should be searching for policies and POLICIES backed up through FUNDING to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or part-time basis, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of 1) health…to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he remains a highly vulnerable part. 2) beauty…to humanise and ennoble man‘s wider habitat, and 3) to provide foodstuffs & other materials needed for a becoming life. He believed that a civilisation that only recognised a third of these tasks ie as the "FOOD INDUSTRY", and which pursued it with such a vengeance that the other two tasks were not merely neglected but systematically counteracted has no chance of long-term survival.”

33 years on, statements from respective Scottish Ministers, underlining wholly the dearth of wisdom of those in power, stresses little hope of maintaining in upland Galloway nor Scotland as a whole, the natural, social or cultural environment in good heart. "
from the heart of the matter....
Galloway Hill shepherd

Mary V Armstrong
PS please refer to my letter(s) in this weeks Scottish Farmer 31 August 2007.