Equal Rights for All

Working with Steve Connelly, Morag Paterson, and Culture for Climate Scotland, we undertook a collaborative workshop exploring the tensions and competitions between different users of place in the form of a GreenTease initiative.

Before the workshop, and I wanted to summarise my 3 years of research on land use and management around Scotland as clearly and concisely as possible, so I asked myself, “What Three Words Describe Land Use In Scotland Today?”. The following three words come closest to purveying what I felt

IMPOVERISHED – that many of Scotland’s land uses and management approaches, be they urban or rural, have become siloed, specialised, commoditised and simplified
DOMINIONED – that land use and management in Scotland are dominated by human needs over and above other users of any place
GLIMMERS – to reflect the hundreds of exemplars of amazing individuals and organisations (the quiet voices) delivering new thinking that deliver a positive future for all users of place.

Then, to better understand if my own summary reflected those of other people, I asked the same question of the workshop participants in advance of the event, without informing them of my own thoughts. I gathered their responses into the following word cloud.

Wordcloud formed in response to the provocation “what three words describe land use in Scotland Today?”

The workshop itself centred around the provocation “Equal Rights For All…” with respect to place. We posed three apparently simple questions, namely

Who Should Have Rights?
What Rights?
How Should They Be Delivered?

What followed, both in groups and together as 40 people around a ‘fireside’, were a series of unexpected and extraordinarily philosophical discussions.

As we gathered the combined thoughts together following the event it occurred to me (others may have differing opinions) that in essence, what we had unintentionally been formulating was a ‘Charter of Rights’ for all users of place. With this in mind I gathered them together in the visual form below.

Charter of Rights – by Ted Leeming. Based on, and with thanks to, the discussions and contributions of the GreenTease workshop participants of November 2024

Whilst I loved the outcome, I felt that unless you had been present on the day, it took a level of interpretation summarise the findings. So, with support from the GSA Biosphere, and collaborating with the wonderful illustrator Maia Thomas, we created the following infographic.

Please feel free to download, use, and share the Charter of Rights below (licence free for non-commercial purposes) far and wide, with anyone you feel will learn, appreciate, enjoy and engage with its content.

Charter of Rights For All Things, Now and Yet To Be – Maia Thomas & Ted Leeming