Once again the arrival of the The John Muir Trust's Journal prompts the thought that the £15 or so I spend on membership every year might be better put to use elsewhere in the economy.
The JMT is an environmental charity whose name honours the pioneer emigre Scot instrumental in persuading the US government to found the Yosemite National Park, and whose writings found the intellectual cornerstone of the wilderness movement. The JMT has bought up a number of estates in Scotland (Knoydart, Sandwood Bay, bits of Skye and Ben Nevis) and works to restore woodland to what is, for all its bareness, a landscape thoroughly ravaged by man. I am not one of the original few - the JMT was founded in 1983 - but since I joined membership has more than doubled, and I've seen the Trust develop from humble beginnings into a slick and professional charity.
It's partly this transformation that worries me, but I'll come back to that. According to its Journal, the JMT now considers that its role should include creating "new opportunities for enjoying outdoor learning". You may think - I do - that there are myriad charities and government funded groups better suited to doing that, but I guess you might also say that, amidst Scotlands millions of empty acres, what harm can it do? Except it's not in Scotland. The Trust is "now able to support groups in Carlisle, West Cumbria and Barrow" and the groups "will be supported to explore, connect with and care for" inter alia the Lake District National Park.
That's right: a Trust set up essentially to preserve wilderness areas, optimally by buying them, is now engaged in the business of encouraging people to go to a place whose landscape management problems are best characterised by relentlessly excessive footfall. That environmental point aside, what is wilderness when you are there on your own, ceases, paradoxically, do be so when I turn up as well. More people = less wilderness. Why is the JMT contributing to the process of reducing Britain's wilderness?
Elsewhere in the Journal there is news and a photograph of the new footpath on Schiehallion. Now the old path on Schiehallion was bad enough in winter; it must have been a quagmire in summer. But why did the Trust buy Schiehallion in the first place? It is a small conical mountain near the road, easily accessible from Scotland's Central Belt. As long as Britain's post-Industrial society continues in its current form, Schiehallion will never be a wilderness again. The Trust should have saved its money (sorry - our money) until some more suitable property turned up.
The feeling that the Trust has fallen into the hands of those who don't understand its mission is underscored on p.11 of the Journal, where one Chris Goodman, apparently overseer of the Trust's wider footpath management (because after all the Trust has now got to the point where it can afford an overseer of footpath management) is quoted as saying, "We want to bring every stretch of footpath on Trust property up to a wild land standard". This sentence is actually used as a headline.
There is no sign that Goodman or the writer have any sense of the ironies at work here. The Trust's role is not to question the idea of footpaths in wilderness per se, it is merely to make them better, thus encouraging more people to walk into that wilderness. Because it's obviously vital that in wilderness areas, the footpaths are up to standard!
I'd like to think that at this point anyone from the Trust reading this might go, "Oh, hang on . . . ". But then if they can print Goodman's comment unquestioningly, they really aren't going to get it, are they?
I said I would remark on the Trust's transformation from a few beardy blokes clubbing together to buy wild land to an organisation with a glossy journal, a "footpath project officer" and offices in Edinburgh and Pitlochry.
Aside from the bad decisions it seems to me the Trust sometimes makes, its staff seem blithely unaware that wilderness is a conceptual as much as a physical thing. John Muir, and his disciples who set up the Trust, were sick of industrial society's tendency to commodify and package everything. Wilderness was needed as an antidote to this.
But with its corporate sponsors, its merchandising, its compulsive tidying, with the bland management speak that characterises its official utterances, the JMT is in danger of contributing to the commodification and therefore destruction of wilderness's head space, at the same time as it often does useful work to safeguard wilderness's physical reality.
