We’ve taken the fight for Scotland’s Countryside to Space.
Join us!
We are excited to announce the launch of our latest campaign …. into ORBIT!
In the year of our centenary we are merging our longest-running campaign, against litter, with our newest on hyperscale data centres to take our expertise protecting Scotland’s countryside to the final frontier.
There’s a race for space – to fill it with data centres….
Elon Musk and others want to put a million data centres into orbit. Well that is simply space junk and we haven’t been campaigning on littering for nigh on 100 years to let that happen. Litter is a menace whether it’s in the Outer Hebrides or Outer Space.
Tech giants think they can exploit space for minerals and energy, and fill it with waste. Something the countryside is more than familiar with.
It is vital that APRS deploy our long experience, and tenacious campaigning to defeat this free-for-all.
An artist’s impression of the planned APRS litter picking expedition to space:
(Background image by Comstock Images on FreeImages)
Help us get into orbit
We have been told that, just to launch a cluster of campaign placards and a team of litter picking volunteers into low earth orbit would cost several hundred million pounds, but we are confident that, with your help, we can do it.*
*Please note that if we do not raise the funds required for the space mission we will spend it on our campaign against hyperscale data centres and other APRS work.
P.S. If we get desperate we might auction off our domain name serversinspace.com which we hope will lead to a billionaire tech bro bidding battle.
Endorsements
“APRS’s track record working on Green Belts and planning policy on earth provides foundational experience in establishing a proper framework of protection for orbits around planets and moons.
There is clear potential for National Parks, and National Scenic Areas in space, and their litter campaigning and data centre campaign has direct relevance beyond the earth’s atmosphere, given the race to fire data centres into space. From the Green Belts to the Asteroid Belt, APRS’s experience puts them in pole position to be a pioneer in the field of environmental space campaigning.”
Dr Deborah Long, Chief Executive at Scottish Environment Link, and chair of the Centenary Review Commission
“APRS’s founders were an imaginative bunch, who rightly foresaw that safeguarding the quality of Scotland’s countryside would matter even more to future generations than to their own. But even they could hardly have foreseen that we would have to take the fight for our precious environment from the green belt to the final frontier”
APRS chair John Thomson
Selling serversinspace.com
An APRS supporter acquired serverinspace.com twenty years ago, when not even the most audacious tech entrepreneur had thought of putting a server into space.
If we get desperate for money we might sell off the web domain to some tech bros for their space-based exploits (or preferably to someone who doesn’t want tech bros to put servers in space). The irony is not lost on us but needs must ….
Celebrating our Centenary
APRS has been working to protect, enhance and promote Scotland’s landscapes and countryside for a hundred years. As Scotland’s oldest environmental charity, we established the National Trust for Scotland. And we had early successful campaigns on river pollution, woodland protection, hydro electricity, and town and country planning, leading to many of the policies, we see still in force today.
We are still small (only three part time staff) and still proud to be campaigning on issues of great importance to Scotland. Our most recent campaign is on hyperscale data centres which will have a huge impact on our countryside, our climate goals and our communities.
Find out more about our history
We are scanning in our archive as a body of work for our Centenary – here are some of our documents so far
We are looking into APRS history in preparation for our centenery with help from two of our volunteers. Here are highlights taken from our annual reports up to 1954
To celebrate our centenary, we are taking time to look at what we can learn from APRS’s history and the relevance for today. Here we look back at the hydro-electric schemes of the 1930s-50s, to see what this can bring to debates about energy in the landscape today.