Too often books that claim to provide a UK overview on rural environmental issues give a cursory and inaccurate account of the situation in Scotland, succeeding only in demonstrating the authors' lack of grasp of just how different things are "Up There". So it's gratifying that we now have a genuinely Scottish environmental treatise in this remarkably comprehensive review. Charles Warren has toiled mightily to cover a wide and often bitterly contested territory with a good deal of authority and a broadly balanced perspective. He doesn't hesitate to deal crisply with the politics of land ownership, nor to plunge into some of the most controversial land management and conservation issues of recent years.Perhaps inevitably, in taking such a wide sweep, the author sets out only some fairly straightforward arguments on either side of the issues; and working to a carefully measured degree of detail, his analysis sometimes lacks sharp penetration. In that sense the book shows the limitations of its core purpose, as a course text for students where none previously existed.
But 'Managing Scotland's Environment' also possesses the virtues of that primary purpose: it's a very useful compact reference source, packed with hard, up-to-date data and 40 pages of references. Chris Smout, in his Foreword, rightly calls it an "invaluable survey".
