Park failures

Roy Turnbull's concerns (Letters, 5 May), however pertinent they are at a specific level, are merely a symptom of a systemic malaise at the core of our national park structure.

Nearly 20 years ago, environmental journalist and author Jim Crumley wrote a feature for the Scotsman, predicting that the then proposed national park system for Scotland would not work.

Just about every point of warning that he made in the article has come true, hence the kind of problem Roy Turnbull has experienced.

Essentially, we just imported the failed English model and ignored all the other possible European, North American and Scandinavian management paradigms pertinent to Scotland.

Even erstwhile radical land reformers, such as the current Environment Minister, Roseanna Cunningham, have bought into this rather than face up to the fact that in all the countries so often quoted by her party as examples for Scotland to follow, national parks, unlike Scottish ones, are exactly that: an area of land owned by the nation state and managed by a national parks service to meet a national agenda.

What we have now are "oxymoron parks" with a built-in dichotomy of expectation in conservation versus development that cannot be resolved within the fatuous remit given and a multifaceted management paradigm that is based in sectional vested interests and bedevilled by bureaucratic inertia.

We either need to scrap national parks altogether or make them do "what it says on the tin".

RON GREER

Blair Atholl

Perthshire