Several historians of British Imperial rule have examined the role of Scottish-trained experts and administrators in framing anxieties about ‘unhealthy’ colonial environments, expressed as the need to manage and control natural resources (Grove 1995; MacKenzie 1997; Beattie 2011). Grove has argued that Scottish medical students, whose training included field study of natural sciences, developed in their colonial careers an environmental consciousness that linked together disease, drought and deforestation as interconnected factors. While this notion of the environment as a complex dynamic system was developed in unfamiliar climates such as those of India or South Africa, these ideas later returned to Britain through popularising publications such as Forests and moisture (Brown 1877) or events such as the Great International Fisheries Exhibition (1883) and Edinburgh International Forestry Exhibition (1884). These colonial influences on environmental thinking in Britain form a contrast with accounts, centred in the British mainland experience, of the development of environmental organisations such as the Lake District Defence Society that were more concerned with preservation of culturally significant sites of historic interest or natural beauty against the ravages of development. But although colonial and ‘local’ approaches to the development of ideas of conservation are conceptually separate in many ways, nevertheless they both often privilege the ideas and the deliberations of educated individuals such as landowners or civil servants taking on the role of guardians of beleaguered nature, opposing modern industrial environments. This paper will consider instead a more urbanised view from industrial Glasgow of the value of the woods, mountains, and waters of the Scottish Highlands, from Loch Katrine through to the Firth of Clyde, and with particular reference to the development of discourses of sustainable natural processes with aesthetic, scientific, and municipal elements, aimed at the construction of an engineered and dynamic landscape of amenity.