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 threat to their culture, which dates back thousands of years.

In this acclaimed and thought-provoking book, James Hunter examines the dispute between Highlanders, who developed a strong environmental awareness countless generations 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 which has worldwide implications.