This Dear Green Place

Oh, would some Power the gift give usTo see ourselves as others see us! — Robert Burns

When you walk out of the Scottish Event Campus and travel west down the Clyde toward the Atlantic Ocean, passing the sleek menagerie of Glasgow’s revitalized waterfront and the fading remnants of the industry and empire and desolation that followed in their wake, you will eventually come upon the mouth of Gare Loch, on which sits a naval base known as Faslane, the home of Trident, Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Stretching before you, in the sublime beauty of the Scottish Highlands, will be some of Europe’s most pristine wilderness, while behind you sits a storied city that lives in the constant shadow of humanity’s capacity for self-destruction, a silent but ever-present reminder that human progress has reached a point at which it is able to undo all that it has achieved in an instant.

It seems unlikely that...