Written evidence submitted by Alastair McIntosh BSc MBA PhD, Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology, Govan, on psychological and spiritual benefits of land reform

I was a founder and leader of the original Isle of Eigg Trust that raised £1.6 million and bought Eigg into Community ownership in 1997, setting a template for subsequent community buyouts. I am also currently, or have been until recently, the Visiting Professor of Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde, an Honorary Fellow at Edinburgh University’s School of Divinity, and a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow. My work on land, community and environment is best expressed in my book Soil and Soul (Aurum, London, 2001), described by George Monbiot as “world-changing” and by Bishop James Jones as “life-changing”.

I am confining my testimony to one simple observation that ties in with points 1, 2 and 4 of the Committee’s remit. In this I simply want to state what may be so obvious that it slips through unsaid in the more specialised testimonies that the committee will receive. In my experience, the greatest benefit, and the prime driver of land reform in modern Scotland, is the psychological and spiritual empowerment that precedes the wider socio-economic and environmental benefits. In a nutshell:

Community land tenure empowers the people because it re-grounds their capacity, dignity and confidence, opening up access to life’s most basic resource and drawing them from disempowerment to empowerment; towards lives more richly abundant.

My supporting basis for maintaining this is laid out in the paper which was published in a leading international journal jointly with my former student, Rutger Henneman, who carried out the field work under my partial supervision with the Law and Governance Group at Wageningen University.[1]

That italicised statement, above, is all that I need to say. It drives what I have elsewhere[2] called the Cycle of Belonging, by which, a) a Sense of Place engenders, b) a Sense of Identity, informing, c) a Sense of Values and from that, motivating d) the Sense of Responsibility that drives change and reconstitutes a damaged Sense of Place.

September 2013