Here’s the message:
My head isn’t very together today, so I may have misunderstood something.
Sounds like everyone with any commonsense is working/striking/manifesting to counter the threatened closure of the Maternity at Autun.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out… fingers crossed the idea will be shelved…
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I hope so. I pinged off an email today to our friend/ex-estate agent expressing what I hope is understood as sympathy and asking if it will make any other differences to her - she’s single AFAIK and didn’t look ready to have a family back in the autumn. I get a little worried about emails, because so much communication requires nuance and it’s hard to tell whether the words are right or wrong.
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Indeed. Got a message from our Maire this morning saying that there is a big consultation process starting this week about health provision in Aude and encouraging people to contribute. It includes an online questionnaire and meetings to discuss. The OH has just had her knee replaced and has used the health service here recently, so we will definitely be contributing.
You might want to sign the Petition which is mentioned in the Message Important on the Morvan site…
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It would be good to stand with them.
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I’ d love to know the details of your project, as it (presumably, very unfairly) sounds not dissimilar to the Highland Clearances that followed the failure of the '45 when the lairds evicted their suddenly uneconomically supportable clansmen warriors from their small holdings (for centuries mainly cattle theft and local pillaging had made the Highland clans sustainable - will that upset someone?). Dr Johnson, who visited the region in 1775 wrote ‘where formerly there was an insurrection, there is now a wilderness.’
My stats are now about twenty years old, but in the early years of this century, the Scottish Highlands were the only place in Europe where the rural population was substantially lower than it was a couple of centuries ago, yet there still isn’t sufficient area for a viable wolf population.
Islands are biologically different because they were often too small to support or attract larger species, or alternatively they’d been disconnected for so long that local evolution had take different turns (obviously Darwin in the Pacific, but also more dramatically in Oz and Madagascar)By contrast, wolves are still thriving in many places around the world, whereas a similarly amazing predator, the Southern African Wild Dog is an endangered species that only has one, ever shrinking territory.
Their small packs are matriarchal, but require surprisingly vast amounts of hunting territory. They’re further burdened by their name, which makes farmers feel they’re entitled to shoot them. Amazing animals in very many ways…
We’ve drifted a long way from current best places to live in France, but for me that’s one of the charms of SF thread drift
It was a policy research paper, so gone in the mists of time sadly. Have you read Feral, by George Monbiot?
Yes, but I’m increasingly ambivalent about Monbiot, why anyone who’s supposedly ultra well-informed, buys a wood burner when they’re asthmatic beggars belief. I also disagree with his views on the undesirability of upland sheep farming - no other food source can flourish up there and the soils are far too shallow for plant based agriculture.
I first encountered rewilding in S Africa when I became aware of indigenous species being ‘returned’, but not the former inhabitants and indeed the former fauna. There’s a complew post-colonial interchange between 'restoring ’ and continuing to exclude by other means. Many prestigious rewilded game reserves like my local Shamwari https://www.shamwari.com/(or think Ralph Lauren on safari) have replaced colonial cattle pasture with indigenous thornbush, but before it was cattle pasture, it was slow growing hardwood rainforest. That will never be replaced - a stretch of coastal rainforest equivalent to the distance from London to Edinburgh has gone for good.
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Went to sign, but can’t find the petition. Weird.
I do hope the petition gets to the necessary 10,000 to move it forward for discussion…
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Thank you. I wonder why it wouldn’t find the petition for me? I was careful with accents when entering the petition name.
I had troubles too… so you’re not alone… just one of those things… 
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The clans survived by cattle theft and pillaging!
Well i had many ancestors who were crofters in the Highlands and I can assure you none of them lived by theft and pillaging.
Greed was the reason for the clearances. Sheep were more profitable.
I suggest you read “The Last Clansman” if you want a true picture.
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Quite right, a lot of the Clan Chiefs were the ones who were the landlords and were part of the clearances, a lot of clansmen thought they had a right to farm the land but that was never recognised by Scottish Law and so they could be moved of the land legally.
The statutes of Iona law meant that a lot of the Clan Chiefs saw themselves more a landlords and land owners than protectors of their people.
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Maybe your ancestors didn’t, but I can’t see how you can assure me of that because the clan system was essentially feudal and tenants were expected to provide military service if required. Maybe you should do some serious research, rather than citing anecdotal evidence and fiction. I’m an academic and would never use historical fiction as the basis for serious research. 'All of James’s works are based on historical, geographical and physical reality and blended with imagination, fantasy and adventure. (Hunter’s Amazon bio.)
The pre-'45 Highlands were over-populated in terms of there being more people living on the land than it could support. After the mapping of the Highlands by the English army see Microsoft Word - Fleet-Kowal_OK.doc (e-perimetron.org) the lairds were unable to continue their traditional lifestyle of income from tenant crofters and casual brigandage. so they turned to other forms of livelihood, namely sheep, forestry and deer. The Clearances continued for over a century and right into the 1850s, they came to a halt when a Times reporter found the former tenants of Glen Calvie had been living under tarpaulins in a local churchyard for several months through the winter. They were too pious to squat in the church, but had scratched curses into its windows, which you can still read today.
I’ve done plenty of archival and on the ground research on the historical background to the Clearances in the context of researching the historical background to the depopulation and the ‘rewilding’ of the Highlands, particularly Alladale , It’s a terrible history and as in South Africa rewilding is a futile attempt to erase or sanitise colonial history.
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Yes I’ve visited the Church where they waited before they emigrated. The clans had to move to the coast in many instances to try and scrape a living off unsuitable land and still work for their lairds collecting seaweed for processing and earning a pittance.
I’ve read a lot of factual books about the history of the Highlands and the behaviour of many of the landowners was appalling. One of the worst was the Duke of Sutherland closely followed by his wife.
John Prebble will give another description of the clearances if you’re not happy with the Last Clansman. By the way, you can visit the spot where the "last clansman"was hung, it’s not all fiction, close by the Ballachulish bridge following a joke show trial.
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My original interest in the Clearances and rewilding was sparked by my SA PA being the daughter-in-law of Shamwari’s founder " she was married to a ranger and lived on the reserve. Paul Lister, who owns Alladale was inspired by his stay at Shamwari, hence the interesting link between the two and their respective histories