I am not a hair shirt environmentalist but, sitting at home with three layers on observing the Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park Authority (LLTNPA) meeting last Monday, I could not help but notice how many members of the Board and senior staff sat through the proceedings in their shirt sleeves.
It is possible of course that one or two may live in passivhaus homes and had their heating turned off. But the exhortations from the green movement to help the planet and turn down your heating a notch sadly don’t appear to apply to the leadership of the National Park. (The rich, of course, consume far more carbon per head than the poor and have little idea of what fuel poverty – what it feels like to be cold – actually means). This points to some of the hyprocrisy at the heart of the LLTNPA’s approach to the climate emergency.
The LLTNPA’s plan (see here) to reach net zero excludes any consideration of carbon emissions outside of their own buildings and travel while at work, including all the carbon consumed by staff and Board Members working at home or travelling to work. But tackling that might force the leadership of the LLTNPA to change their lifestyle.
Increasingly the LLTNPA leadership is exhorting members of the public to cut our emissions, for example by thinking twice before travelling to the National Park. There was a good example of this in the meeting Gordon Watson, the Chief Executive asked: “How much do we accommodate demand in terms of our climate and nature obligations”? The implication being that one thing the LLTNPA could do to combat climate change would to be stop people visiting. He said this while sitting in his shirtsleeves (top left) in his nice house in Gartocharn.
The question of course the LLTNPA should be asking is how do they make the case for a public transport network across the National Park which enables visitors and residents to stop/reduce travelling by car? A major obstacle to that is the LLTNPA leadership are the sort of people who will be able to afford electric cars. They don’t have to be concerned about what they will do as petrol and diesel engines are phased out apart from ensuring that there are convenient electric car charging points across the National Park (which has been the main focus for the LLTNPA’s work on sustainable travel).
What the screenshot and the meeting demonstrated is that most of the LLTNPA leadership have no insight into their own privilege and as a result are extremely unlikely to tackle the issues that really matter.
What struck me was not the lack of jumpers, but the make-up of the Board and senior staff – only 23% female and 0% from minorities, with a similar profile for some years. The large majority are middle-aged white men. Hardly representative of the community, despite the Authority claiming “Our vision is to embed a culture of equality and diversity”. In fact if you study their latest “Equalities Mainstreaming Report & Equality Outcomes 2021 – 2025” report published in April, across all employees ethnicity appears to be 100% white and whilst there is gender equality in certain age groups, people identifying as female are much more likely to be employed part time across all age groups. Of course these facts are glossed over in the main body of the report, and associated action plan.
You cannot see all the Board on the screenshot but you are right, only four out of seventeen are women, none of the directly elected member, 3 out of 6 of the Scottish Government appointees and now just one councillor. Argyll and Bute used to nominate two women councillors but they have been replaced by two men. At the Board Meeting Board Members heard two short videos from young people which were mainly thanking the Board for allowing them to be involved in COP-26. It will have been a great experience for them but there is no sign young people have any influence over LLTNPA policy as yet and as for involving other groups in the Board, which might help balance the lack of diversity, there have been no attempts to do that.
None of them should be minorities. Why should less than 1% of the population have the right to representation ahead of normal people?
They shouldn’t be chosen for their membership of any particular category any more than they should be chosen for whatever it is they are currently chosen for. They should be chosen for their ability to do the job. The main qualification currently seems to be the ability to generate meaningless verbiage in quantity on demand.
I’m sure they are quite aware of their own “privilege”, restrictions in the name of “green” are for us not for them as COP26 clearly demonstrated – roads closed to the proles so they couldn’t impede the chauffeured cars carrying the elite to and from their luxury hotels in walking distance of the venue.
Probably sitting in the buff or some ill fitting underwear if it wasn’t for the cameras, log burners blazing 24/7 thermostat wired to a lever that opens the windows rubbing their hands in glee at the recent storms wondering where to stack their share of the bounty