Paper short abstract:

In Scotland, rethinking conservation after the COVID-19 pandemic must include conceptualisations of landscapes as spaces of danger, beauty, disease, and health. This paper discusses the role of the Scottish Highlands in Lyme disease, COVID-19, and the relationship between conservation and infection.

Paper long abstract:

Scotland's nature and the national past-time of hillwalking are seeped in topophilia inspiring literature, films, and passionate discussions on nature's wilderness, domesticity, and stewardship. But, Scotland, in particular the Scottish Highlands, also has the highest incidence of Lyme disease in Europe, a complex multi-organ illness caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi. However, little to nothing is published about Lyme disease on tourist websites dedicated to Scotland's great outdoors and the illness remains poorly understood.

This paper, based on 12 months ethnographic research, asks how conservation can take illness into account by exploring multispecies relationships in Lyme disease during the COVID-19 pandemic. I first introduce which landscapes my interlocutors became infected in, and how patients conceptualise these landscapes post infection. I then introduce the ecologists and entomologists constructing the understanding of Scotland’s landscape epidemiology by researching ticks infected with B. burgdorferi. The main section of this paper then discusses Scottish nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. During lockdown, ecologists couldn't access fieldsites to survey tick infections and forester landscape maintenance (trimming tick habitat, Lyme disease signage) halted; during easing restrictions, access campaigners, political narratives, and tourism constructed Scotland's charismatic landscapes away from the possibility of danger and disease.

This paper discusses zoonosis in the more-than-human commoning of conservation, to ask: how can the more-than-human endeavour of taking care together include patients, disease, and how conservation conceptualises landscapes as spaces of danger, beauty, disease, and health?