The bus driver in the Highlands clued us in on the secret of forecasting Scottish weather. We were passing alongside a Munro — a mountain higher than 3,000 feet — when he pointed to the peak, obscured in rain clouds.
“If you can see the mountain top, it’s about to rain,” he deadpanned. “If you can’t see it, it’s already raining.”
The self-effacing Scots regularly joke about the weather, as well as their proclivity for frugality. A dropped piece of food is fair game; plastic bags are reused for decades. Animal parts like offal aren’t wasted but cooked up in a dish called haggis.
For me, the emerald-hued countryside and Scottish culture provided some insight into two Scottish historical figures who have influenced me over the years.
Adam Smith (1723-90) and John Muir (1838-1913) both emigrated to North America and made their marks writing about economy and ecology.
Muir is known in the U.S. as the father of national parks. He was a self-taught botanist, zoologist and glaciologist. However, his legacy is as a naturalist and philosopher.
The image I have of Muir emerges from his 1894 “Mountains of California.” In the anecdote, he recalls climbing to the top of a tree during in a windstorm for the pleasure of feeling alive in nature.
“I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past,” he wrote.
How did Muir relate to trees? Scotland was nearly all forest following the Ice Age, but by 1900 there were few trees: the timber coverage was reduced to about 6%.
Climate cooling in the Neolithic Age was one cause, but timbering was recognized as early as the 16th century as the reason the woods had been “utterly destroyed.”
Afforestation efforts dated from the 1800s, but forest cover today is only 4% of the land. No big predators remain and only one endemic bird – the Scottish crossbill.
Given this history, I wonder if Muir’s love of our redwoods may have been mourning the deforestation of his homeland.
The stark differences between long-settled Scotland and relatively pristine 19th century California may have spurred his advocacy for the preservation of wilderness in his adopted country.
Like a good Scot, Muir’s legacy was ensuring that American forests were protected from similar wasting.
Smith has been called the father of economics. His conservation views are less widely recognized.
In his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations, Smith derided the waste present in the colonies’ agricultural practices.
He described how colonists would work a piece of land until it was infertile and then clear another piece. The practice then common in the Old World was cultivating with manure.
“A piece of land which … could not maintain one cow [in the American colonies] would in former times … have maintained four, each of which would have given four times the quantity of milk,” he lamented.
Interestingly, his view of good resource use extended to what we now call human capital. His “invisible hand of the marketplace” legacy is used to justify labor practices he likely would have abhorred.
Smith was against mercantilism (the system of granting merchants corporate monopolies, like the East India Company):
“It is the industry which is carried on for the benefit of the rich and powerful … That which is carried on for the benefit of the poor and indigent, is too often, either neglected, or oppressed.”
These two Scots left widely different legacies, but their connection to their Scottish heritage is clear: wise use of resources.
There is one resource abundant in California that Scots famously lack, then and now.
In our home exchange outside Cairngorms National Park, I exclaimed to our host one morning that the weather forecast showed sunshine in the afternoon.
“Well, you better watch out, then,” he warned us. “They’ll be throwing rocks at the sun — don’t know what it is.”
Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist
This article was published on August 5th, 2024 in Noozhawk – you can read it “in print” here.
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.
KTL at CanyonVoices dot com