I never imagined in 2001 that the manuscript which I had laboured so hard to make as 'cutting edge' as possible would so rapidly be left high and dry by the pace of change. The rate at which environmental thinking and policies have developed over the last seven years has been remarkable. The extent of this transformation not only made a second edition urgently necessary, but it meant that the revision turned out to involve a great deal more work than the minor tweaks and updates that I had naively thought would be sufficient. In the end, hardly a paragraph remained untouched. New questions have emerged, old questions have returned with novel twists, and the sense of urgency and importance attached to environmental issues in today's world has reached unprecedented levels. The questions of how we should aim to live as global citizens, and the kind of future which we in Scotland should seek to create for this special part of our shared planetary home, are no longer obscure issues for environmental philosophers but very active and public debates. It has even been suggested by Bishop and Phillips (2004: xvii) that the countryside has not been such a focus of political and public attention since the Corn Law debates of the nineteenth century, and that 'at no time in recent history has the future of the countryside been the subject of such profound uncertainty and anguished debate'. The vigour with which the many debates are being pursued and the rate at which they are evolving is enormously stimulating, but making sense of such a fast-moving and multifaceted field has proved far from straightforward. Regularly I found myself wishing that everything would (please) just stop for a moment and let me write about it! Instead, I have had to try to provide a mid-gallop snapshot.