A letter to the Guardian responds to NatureScot's decision to prohibit the annual guga hunt, where islanders collect gannet chicks on the Hebridean island of Sula Sgeir. The author, Sjúrður Hammer, argues that the ban is a significant step in the wrong direction for our relationship with the natural world.
Against the spirit of global biodiversity goals
Hammer contends that the decision runs counter to the spirit of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which recognises that safeguarding biodiversity will not be achieved by scientists and city dwellers alone. Instead, it affirms that indigenous and local communities hold a legitimate and essential role as stewards and caretakers of their own environments.
He notes that people in his part of the world often assume that “indigenous and local communities” refers only to distant, exotic cultures or to the shameful legacies of colonialism. But the Kunming-Montreal accord makes clear that this category also includes small, place-rooted communities in countries such as Scotland, the Faroe Islands and Iceland – communities with ancient traditions, distinct languages and ways of relating to nature that have endured for centuries.
Living cultures under pressure
These cultures are not museum pieces; they are living, fragile social ecologies that are continuously pressured by the modern lifestyles and ethics of capitals and cities. As a seabird biologist committed to the sustainable use of seabirds for food, Hammer does not dispute the population modelling behind the decision, nor does he believe NatureScot has acted carelessly. But as a Faroe Islander, he has been on the receiving end of many conservation campaigns imposed from the outside, and he has seen how easily well-intentioned policy can become a tyranny of the majority when local voices are sidelined.
A call for fair hearing
Hammer asks the Scottish government to consider whether the local community has been sufficiently and fairly heard in this matter, and if the decision has been taken in the spirit of the Kunming-Montreal accord. He describes the guga hunt as a regulated, small-scale practice embedded in local ecological knowledge. Ending it risks alienating the very communities that global biodiversity policy says must be empowered. Conservation that excludes local actors is not progress.
