In defence of the calculated risks inherent in our entrepreneurial model
In the three years of our work in the Highlands, we have benefited from many interactions with the Scottish Land Commission. We have read their reports, and endeavoured to incorporate their wisdom into our work with local communities on and around the land where we work. Highlands Rewilding empathises with the land-ownership inequalities that drive the commission's work, and we hope that our mass-ownership model of land-ownership will make a contribution in trying to defuse it in the years ahead.
We came away from our most recent interaction, with the entire board of the Commission and its senior executives, encouraged by the breadth and tenor of the discussions, determined to action as many of the Commission’s recommendations to us as we can, whilst staying true to our model for trying the help attract private capital to the pursuit of the Scottish Government's nature-recovery targets on the scale that the ambition of the targets requires.
We then received a follow-up e-mail from the Chair of the Commission, which seemed discordant with the general tenor and content of the meeting. It contained two criticisms of Highlands Rewilding. Now that they have been made public, we need to air our response, because we dispute the criticisms strongly. We also have a criticism of the Commission in return, which we are interested to hear their response to.
We emphasise that all this is against a backdrop where we agree with them on many things of mutual concern.
The first criticism is that we are in some way imperilling communities by taking on what the Chair of the Commission terms significant financial risk. We are in fact taking on no more risk than many a front-running entrepreneurial organisation. We have many very experienced business leaders investing in us as individuals, including Scottish business leaders, and some companies too. We know they are all pleased with our progress, and comfortable with the risks we are taking with their money. Scotland will not hit its vital nature-recovery targets unless entrepreneurs and investors are willing to take risks. This is calculated risk taking, not irresponsible risk taking, as the Commission Chair’s note infers.
Does this risk-taking imperil communities? If it works out, it leads only to benefits, for the communities where we work, and our mass-ownership company (including shareholders in the communities). And if it doesn’t work out? Highlands Rewilding will have tried, and honourably failed. And we will have bought time for communities to buy all or parts of Highlands Rewilding land themselves, and/or work with us to find a mission-congruent buyer or buyers. And that selling will limit any loss for our investors.
The second criticism is that we are imperilling our own staff with our risk taking. How so? If the risk taking works, they are rising stars in a company that Scotland can be proud of. If it doesn’t, they will have been stars in an already widely-acclaimed track record of natural capital accomplishment, and will surely find new employment accordingly. We refer here in particular to the reviews of our two natural capital reports, including from the top level of government (see Lorna Slater’s foreword to our second natural capital report, for example).
Our criticism of the SLC is that they need to factor holistic Scottish Government target-setting into their analysis. In a time of existential threat from climate meltdown and biodiversity collapse, we believe it is dangerous to delay meaningful action until the concentration of power in land ownership has been defused (as we accept it must be). That is why, working within the existing system, we are seeking to diversify power and ownership of land while simultaneously positioning to attract capital to the reversal of climate meltdown and biodiversity collapse. Our aim is to achieve outcomes that address all three problems. But if capital has not been attracted into nature-recovery in the £ tens of billions required to hit national targets, we will all have failed. Communities will be finally owning the land around them, but its forests and bogs will be ablaze, and its pollinators long gone, and hope with them. In that future - which the great majority of our scientists tell us we are on course for, absent deep policy change and diversion of investment billions - then social cohesion will be collapsing, and functional communities will be impossible.
We look forward to ongoing discussions with our confederates in the Scottish Land Commission, and all the many other stakeholders in the frontier efforts to defeat the existential threats we are all facing. As we begin to succeed, the vision of prosperous communities that increasingly emerges will be a candle for hope for all.
In the meantime, as we near closure in our acquisition of the Tayvallich estate, we are far advanced with the drafting of a Memorandum of Understanding with the Tayvallich Initiative on how Highlands Rewilding and the community will work in strategic harness, consistent with Highlands Rewilding’s purpose (nature recovery and community prosperity through rewilding taken to scale). We are hoping that when that document is completed it will give all but the most diehard among our critics pause for thought.