Newspaper article: Living Heritage for Living Landscapes: ICH and Nature Restoration
This was an article for the West Highland Free Press, first published on Thursday 25 September 2025.
This September, I’ll be teaching again on the ‘Creative Connections’ online course for Tobar an Dualchais - Kist O Riches. It’s always fun to meet the participants – a mix of artists, musicians, educators, writers, makers, budding folklorists – all keen to explore the collections and possibilities for their own creative work.
One of my sessions reflects on the role and value of local archive material in the context of the global climate and ecological crisis. Here in the Highlands, that crisis is close to home: a region vulnerable to climate change and ranked among the most nature-depleted in the world – sitting in the lowest 12% globally for biodiversity, a reality far removed from the untouched wilderness of the imagination.
Local forms of culture and creativity offer ways to connect with place and with the natural world. This was a theme so beautifully articulated by Eilidh MacKenzie in last month’s column, with a focus on Skye’s gruagach traditions – how songs, stories and cultural practices can encode deep relationships with land, animals and the natural world.
I’ve been thinking recently about so-called Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) – music, song, story, cultural practices, traditional knowledge – and its relevance to nature recovery. In 2024, the UK government finally ratified the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH (2003). While this distinction between tangible and intangible heritage may sound abstract, or the jargon a bit academic, this is nevertheless a pivotal step forward in terms of a national framework that commits to the recognition, support and renewal of living traditions.
When it comes to nature recovery, the UNESCO Convention recognises that cultural heritage is vital for sustainability and biodiversity; however, in Scotland, the emerging ICH Partnership – led by the museums, heritage and cultural sectors – has so far not engaged with environmental and nature policy frameworks. At the same time, Scotland’s Biodiversity Strategy to 2045, led by NatureScot, while it highlights the importance of involving communities, makes no mention of cultural heritage, local traditions or cultural practices.
Perhaps this is because nature restoration is often understood in practical terms: planting trees, restoring peatlands, improving water retention, reintroducing species. While these interventions are vital, their long-term success depends as much on human relationships with the land as on ecological processes themselves. Sustainable environmental stewardship relies on emotional, ethical and cultural connections between people and place – relationships that foster a sense of belonging, responsibility, and care. That is to say, nature restoration is as much a cultural task as it is an ecological one.
“What if every nature restoration initiative included a policy for engaging with Intangible Cultural Heritage? What if every woodland, wetland, river, coast, or landscape-scale project recognised that cultural practice and traditional ecological knowledge are a vital part of restoration?”
Across the world, research has shown a causal link between the loss of biodiversity and the loss of cultural diversity. When languages and traditions disappear, so too does the knowledge of how to live with and care for the ecosystems that sustain life. The destruction of culture often comes first – disrupting memory, dislocating communities and severing the bonds between people and place. It is no coincidence that the world’s 370 million Indigenous peoples, who make up less than 5% of the global population, steward around 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity.
Global examples show how integrating cultural heritage into nature recovery can lead to more sustainable, community-supported outcomes, particularly in Indigenous contexts. In Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia, for example, established protocols ensure that traditional knowledge and practices actively guide restoration and stewardship. In Scotland, no such legal protocols exist. NatureScot has a Gaelic plan, but this focuses mainly on language use and cultural visibility rather than embedding cultural heritage within nature recovery frameworks.
This is partly because Gaelic culture is not officially recognised as Indigenous. Claims to Indigeneity are hotly contested: some argue that Gaelic culture absolutely should assert this status, in solidarity with Indigenous peoples across the world; others caution that doing so conflates the historical experiences of the Gaels with those peoples colonised by external modern imperial powers today, undermining Indigenous struggle. Others worry the term risks being essentialist or exclusive, sidelining people outside Gaelic-speaking communities or excluding those already under-represented.
Whether Gaelic culture is considered legally Indigenous or not, it carries a rich tradition of place-based knowledge that resonates with indigenous perspectives worldwide, rooted in a worldview that reflects a deep, reciprocal relationship between people and nature.
Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) provides a constructive framework to recognise and safeguard Gaelic cultural practices on their own terms, without conflating them with Indigenous rights. In Scotland, emerging ICH policy has adopted an inclusive approach, celebrating the value of such deep-rooted traditions while also embracing contemporary cultural expressions from migrant and marginalised communities, supporting evolving, plural understandings of community, place and belonging.
ICH is also defined as living heritage, meaning that it is actively practiced and transmitted from generation to generation. Framed this way, ICH isn’t viewed as a romanticised or static relic of the past, but part of a living flow of culture: traditions can be revived by the communities that sustain them, adapted to contemporary contexts while remaining rooted in their original meaning.
One of the main ways ICH is safeguarded is through documenting and inventorying practices guided by communities themselves. This preserves knowledge that might otherwise vanish, providing a resource for education and creative practice. In the context of the climate and ecological crisis, safeguarding ‘knowledge about nature and the universe’ – including understanding of land, sea, and ecosystems – is a vital and urgent task.
Of course, many local projects have long understood the link between culture and the environment, drawing on songs, stories and traditions in community initiatives. What’s missing is a way to translate this practice into national frameworks. The land reform and parts of the rewilding movement increasingly emphasise the importance of connecting people and communities to the land through cultural engagement, but this remains piecemeal.
This matters now more than ever. Land across Scotland is changing hands rapidly, often through large-scale rewilding or carbon offset schemes, freezing ownership patterns and locking out local voices. This diminishes not only community agency but also the ecological resilience that comes from local knowledge and place-based stewardship.
One approach that begins to address the missing cultural dimension is bioregioning, which looks to organise human life in alignment with the living systems that sustain us. It defines regions by natural characteristics – rivers, mountains, watersheds – rather than political boundaries. Bioregioning understands that humans are a fundamental part of the ecology of a place, and therefore recognises the importance of including both cultural and scientific knowledge in nature restoration projects.
I have been fortunate recently to work as a researcher-in-residence on a bioregioning and ecosystem restoration project, the Findhorn Watershed Initiative (FWI), led by Elle Adams at the Findhorn, Nairn and Lossie Rivers Trust (FNLRT). Together with Raghnaid Sandilands, we have been exploring in part how cultural heritage can begin to help nurture and restore connection to the river, guide restoration efforts and foster relationships of care for lasting stewardship.
Our work recognises that cultural and ecological loss are deeply intertwined, and therefore both are necessary for restoration. This connection is vividly illustrated in Gaelic placenames, which hold valuable knowledge about the land and its former richness. Names encode details about flora and fauna, landforms, traditional land uses, settlement patterns, local stories and beliefs. In Gaelic, even the smallest features of the landscape were named in detail, reflecting a depth of local knowledge and care.
In music, song and story there exists a cultural memory of a human story – cultural expressions of a relationship with the landscape, unique to this part of the planet. Unearthing the songs and stories of a place is not simply about preservation. Our work is future-oriented, an act of repair and creative renewal. Local tunes, songs and stories can be given new life, performed in convivial spaces, returned to the community to be carried forward with care into the future.
What if every nature restoration initiative included a policy for engaging with Intangible Cultural Heritage? What if every woodland, wetland, river, coast, or landscape-scale project recognised that cultural practice and traditional ecological knowledge are a vital part of restoration? Implementing this vision at scale would require collaboration, capacity building and dedicated resourcing – but doing so could turn ICH into a powerful source for nature recovery, fostering lasting stewardship grounded in local knowledge, culture and connection.
Archives are a vital part of this picture. The thousands of recordings on Tobar an Dualchais - Kist O Riches capture songs, stories, folklore and the wisdom of those who lived in intimate relationship with the land, sea and rhythms of the seasons. There are so many recordings I could choose to illustrate this, but I really like this one – a conversation with John Brown from Tiree about the various uses of plants. The fieldworker is Margaret Mackay, alongside Eric. R. Cregeen (Track ID 88452).
Tobar an Dualchais is a wellspring for rekindling cultural memory and inspiring creative practice. It is not a resource to be mined, commodified, or extracted; its potential comes alive when people engage with care, respect, and reciprocity – sparked into action through creative connections, bringing the recordings back into living use, renewing and remaking traditions for our time. This is what our course is all about. In an age of profound ecological loss, this work is not nostalgia; it is quietly radical, and necessary.
Mairi has co-written a policy paper on this topic for the British Academy, which will be available on https://www.ichfornature.co.uk/ when it is published this autumn.