Three years in the making, this feature-length documentary shines a light on the perilous state of Scotland’s salmon, | dG1fWk5SVnh4bF9UdUE
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Nature in Scotland is in a bad way.
00:09One of our biggest problems is that people think what they see in Scotland is normal
00:13and natural when it is anything but.
00:17The last few years, you know, we've really noticed a big decline in them.
00:22They're hugely down and there's no denying that.
00:24They've reduced at least by 70%.
00:27Salmon are in crisis.
00:28I think it would be lazy to say that all the problems for Atlantic salmon are at sea.
00:36It's becoming more apparent that survival of salmon at sea is also linked to the conditions
00:42in fresh water.
00:45The surrounding land use has a huge effect on what happens in the river.
00:52We don't look at the upland river catchments and think they should be trees, but they actually
00:57should be trees.
01:00What we've done essentially is turn the hills from a thatched roof into a slate roof.
01:06If we don't get trees in them in the next few decades, we're going to lose salmon from
01:10over 300 kilometres of river potentially.
01:15What salmon do is they take marine nutrients and bring them back into the river systems.
01:21That nutrient that they've taken from the sea gets taken up by all the animals, the
01:25vegetation and even the trees.
01:29No one animal exists in isolation.
01:33It's a deeply interconnected web.
01:36I don't think anyone wants to be known for abusing the land anymore.
01:42We've all been guilty of it.
01:45Scotland without salmon is definitely a possibility and it would be a tragedy.