However natural we might feel that our landscape looks here in Scotland, it is a 'managed' landscape – impacted for centuries by the decisions we have made and the priorities we have imposed. Beautiful though it may be, the landscape we have inherited is one born of conflict. Not necessarily battles and human wars, but of the day-to-day conflicts of land use and the very human battle of survival – finding the space to build homes, growing the food to feed ourselves or the trees and energy to fuel our lives and industry. Everywhere there is land and people, there is conflict – between the short term and the long term, between the selfish and the communal, and between local and national and, increasingly, global demands.

And wild though it may seem, it is one largely denuded of wildlife. Our natural world has been pushed to the margins, only free to continue in the areas we don't value – cliff tops and gullies, pockets of woodland – replaced instead in the main with concrete, or with one-dimensional land use, monocultural crops and non-native species. The modern world's 'anti-climax vegetation'. This is our Anthropocene, but is it a conscious choice or an accident of narrow perspectives and short-term thinking?

We have enacted this change so absolutely that we have come to associate many native species with these remaining spaces and not their original preferred habitats. Golden eagles do not nest on cliffs purely by choice, but because it is the only safe place left for them to breed. And strips of birch and willow woodland literally cling for survival onto steep-sided burns, protected from humans and livestock only by the precarious slope.