The French philosopher Voltaire is quoted as saying in the 1760s that “We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation”. What did that mean then, and what might it mean today and in the future? What makes up a civilised nation and is Scotland one? And, looking forward, what words or descriptions might we…
By Eleanore Widger, University of Dundee and @Nell Widger Earlier this year the Scottish Gamekeepers Association (SGA) and Mountaineering Scotland made an unlikely alliance in opposition to government plans to plant thousands of new trees. According to the Guardian, the Scottish Government intends to increase woodland cover from 17% to 25% by 2050 as part of its Draft…
By Nicola Martin, @NicolaMartin14 “We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.” This summary of a quotation from French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire is commonly used by commentators who wish to present Scotland as a beacon of civilisation and enlightenment in both the past and the present. [1] However, such a phrase and interpretation…
By Eleanore Widger, University of Dundee and @NellWidger A curious thing happened in Scotland during the Romantic period: vast numbers of tourists from Britain, Europe and elsewhere used new road networks and steam packet routes to access the landscapes they valued as wild and remote. According to John and Margaret Gold, those tourists had two main objectives when…
The first line of an article I read this morning proclaimed that: “Technology has driven human civilisation for thousands of years.” [1] Businessman Mukesh Ambani was discussing the opportunities for India to become a world leader in technology as humanity sits on the cusp of a fourth Industrial Revolution that looks set to blur the…
By Nicola Martin, University of Stirling and @NicolaMartin14 5 April 2017 Before we consider what various stakeholders understand by the notion of a civilised nation or civilisation in the present, and even before we consider the various past perspectives of these notions, it is useful to understand the definitions of the words themselves, where the…
By Eleanore Widger, University of Dundee and @NellWidger 13 April 2017 Something has troubled me as I’ve progressed through my internship thinking about Scotland’s relationship to landscape. My research background in the Environmental Humanities has taught me to be sceptical of the term ‘nature’ – what can it really mean, and does it really exist, in the context of millennia…
By Eleanore Widger, University of Dundee and @NellWidger I began my last post by describing the view from my Futures Forum desk. Looking past my computer towards Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags, I received what Neal Ascherson describes in his beautiful and illuminating book, Stone Voices, as ‘a lesson in the unimaginable forces and lapses of time which…
By Nicola Martin, University of Stirling and @NicolaMartin14 Whilst the current view from my window is not as symbolic as Eleanore’s (I’m currently working from home rather than the Parliament), I too found my thinking for this opening post directed by one of Scotland’s many evocative landscapes. I started my day as I often do: an…
By Eleanore Widger, University of Dundee and @NellWidger As I write this I can see, to the right of my computer screen, the gorse-covered north-west side of an extinct volcano, a huge slab of rock which juts diagonally out of a 640 acre landscaped royal park in a city centre. Where else could I be…