AN INHABITED SOLITUDE: SCOTLAND, LAND AND PEOPLE

by James McCarthy

Luath Press, #6.99

JAMES McCarthy's latest book serves two purposes.

It acts first as a useful guidebook for the visitor to Scotland, answering those questions to which the host never quite knows the correct answer: Which are Scotland's native tree species? (Oak, ash, birch, elm, lime, bird cherry, aspen, alder, willow, holly, hazel, rowan, and juniper.) What is the translation of Badnancuileac forest? (Answer - the thicket infested with midges.)

In guiding the reader through the landscape and heritage of Scotland, the author also explains the background to many of the issues that dominate the country's environmental and land use agenda.

McCarthy is well-placed to document Scotland's natural heritage. His background is in the Government's conservation agencies, forestry, and environmental education. And for most of the book he devotes his writing to a factual account of how human activities have impacted on Scotland's natural factors to produce the country's environment of today. Then, in the very last chapter, he changes tack to comment on what he believes the Scottish Parliament must do to manage and protect Scotland for the 21st century.

He writes: ''A casual observer today might be forgiven, from the preoccupations of the media, for thinking that we are much more concerned about the state of the countryside, rather than the towns, more dedicated to 'green' rather than 'brown' issues, despite our demography; by far the greatest proportion of the population lives in urban and industrial environments.''

He then delivers a social critique of the voluntary organisations' middle-class love affair of the wilderness, the antipathy between the superior ''green wellie'' brigade and the industrial proletariat, and the environmental problems of industrial blight, vandalism, and social exclusion that afflict Scotland's urban areas.

''There is little point in exhorting the unemployed, trapped in a sub-standard inner-city home to support campaigns for sustainable forestry or the protection of the Green Belt from industrial encroachment. The plain fact of the matter is that in Scotland, as elsewhere, the means of subsistence will always be a first priority where this is under threat, and so-called environmentalists have too often been guilty of adopting an indifference to this,'' concludes McCarthy.

Indifferent McCarthy is not - perhaps it is a pity, however, that his final chapter in this book of two unequal halves had not been expanded further. Nevertheless, it acts as a sorbet at the end of a sating meal might - sharpening the appetite for yet more.