Analysis reveals cultural importance of native oysters in community relationships in Scotland, suggesting effective restoration strategies rely on biocultural diversity.
Similar to many other shellfish populations that occur in coastal waters across the globe, European flat oyster Ostrea edulis populations are at extremely low levels across Europe despite once being extremely widespread. Previous work has evaluated historical written records from across Europe to understand the historical extent of the species, the timeframes of its declines and the consequences on coastal ecosystems, including a highly detailed account of the major oyster fisheries based along Scotland’s east coast. However clear differences between the east and west coasts of Scotland, both in terms of physical landscape and cultural heritage, suggest highly different environmental histories and cultural values for this species. This study aims to conduct an initial investigation into the historical relationship between native oyster and human communities in western Scotland, focusing on coastal Argyll and the Inner Hebrides in the period circa 1600 to 1900. Aiming to place the environmental declines in the complex social and cultural situation of that region during that time period, it will focus on oyster in the context of the Gàidhealtachd and evidence how the language declines present in today’s Scotland can risk loss of ecological knowledge about the environment. As cultural dimensions are one of four types of benefits that people derive from nature, known as ecosystem services and generated by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) project, recognition and analysis of different cultures and their relationships with nature is inherent in such environmental analysis. This work draws on historical written records (roughly 1750 onwards of the typically English-speaking landowning classes) obtained from archives alongside records in cultural artefacts (songs and place-names, prior to written records in typically Gaelic-speaking communities) to understand how people viewed and used shellfish in these communities. Mentions of shellfish in cultural artefacts suggest they played an important role in connecting Gaelic-speaking people with place, suggesting high cultural value in this geographic region prior to the eighteenth century. Mentions of shellfish presence and extraction began to appear more regularly in written records from landowners after this period and after approximately 1830, diversification of estate productivity meant that communities that would have farmed preferentially were forced to switch to depending on natural resources from the sea, with limited examples of fishing, oyster cultivation or subsistence collection prior to this period and many more afterwards. More importantly, this analysis demonstrates the importance of recognising the values and identities present in the Gàidhealtachd as distinct from those in mainstream British culture. The connections between language, culture and environmental changes are highly relevant in enacting effective restoration, management and policy initiatives that align with community needs and values, particularly in Gaelic culture. Maintaining and prioritising sealladh a’ Ghàidheil (the Gaelic worldview) is essential in establishing a mutual dialogue around the co-creation of community-based evidence-informed approaches to management of land and sea.
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McGregor et al. (2025) studied this question.