Let local communities be the stewards of their own wildlife | Letter

Letter: Sjúrður Hammer responds to NatureScot’s decision to prohibit the annual Guga Hunt, where islanders collect gannet chicks on the Hebridean island of Sula Sgeir

What many celebrate as a win for nature conservation is, in my view, a significant step in the wrong direction for our relationship with the natural world (Scottish gannet chick hunt blocked for first time in 400 years, 3 August). The decision to prohibit the community on Lewis from collecting gannets runs counter to the spirit of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which recognises that safeguarding biodiversity will not be achieved by scientists and city dwellers alone. Instead, it affirms that indigenous and local communities hold a legitimate and essential role as stewards and caretakers of their own environments.

Too often, people in our part of the world assume that “indigenous and local communities” refers only to distant, exotic cultures or to the shameful legacies of colonialism. But the Kunming-Montreal accord makes clear that this category also includes small, place‑rooted communities in countries such as Scotland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland – communities with ancient traditions, distinct languages and ways of relating to nature that have endured for centuries.

These cultures are not museum pieces; they are living, fragile social ecologies that are continuously pressured by the modern lifestyles and ethics of capitals and cities.

As a seabird biologist who is also committed to the sustainable use of seabirds for food, I do not dispute the population modelling behind this decision, nor do I believe NatureScot has acted carelessly. But as a Faroe Islander, I have been on the receiving end of many conservation campaigns imposed from the outside, and I have seen how easily well‑intentioned policy can become a tyranny of the majority when local voices are sidelined.

I would ask the Scottish government to ask themselves if they genuinely feel that the local community has been sufficiently and fairly heard in this matter, and if this decision has been taken in the spirit of the Kunming-Montreal accord.

The guga hunt is a regulated, small‑scale practice embedded in local ecological knowledge. Ending it risks alienating the very communities that global biodiversity policy says must be empowered. Conservation that excludes local actors is not progress.
Sjúrður Hammer
Tórshavn, Faroe Islands

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