We could be a small country with the population of Iceland and, without that nation's shady banks, have a thriving economy.

Sorry Alex Salmond. That Pentland Firth is ours, not yours.

Once you start extracting more than a few hundred megawatts from the tidal stream, the whole of that wild stretch of sea between Caithness and Orkney will be changed for ever.

And it is us who will have to put up with fishing restrictions, blighted views, mangled whales and seals and birds, or whatever.

Actually I'm broadly in favour of tidal energy.

But I've had enough of seeing somebody coming in from the outside to exploit the Highlands for their own pocket or popularity.

Originally it was the Highland men who were taken away to fight and die in others' wars.

Then came the Clearances, most country people were driven off their land so that the landowners could make big profits from sheep.

Strathnaver still has an air of quiet sadness about it.

A plaque at Grumbeg, towards the eastern end of Loch Naver, tells how the people were evicted in brutal haste because Patrick Sellar already had his sheep waiting at Syre and it was costing him a fortune to keep them fed on corn while he was waiting for the people to get off the land.

We see the same today in those landowners wishing to forcibly inflict wind farms on local communities who are unanimously opposed and who will have to suffer all the detriments while a very few people take home lots of subsidy money.

We saw how, at the stroke of a chancellor's pen, it suddenly became possible for rich taxpayers to plant trees instead of paying tax.

Within a few years vast areas of pristine Flow Country, untouched for thousands of years, were blanketed with unprofitable and unextractable conifers.

Some gullible local people believed promises of jobs and prosperity. Now, the useless forests are slowly being removed – cut down and left to rot – at the taxpayers' expense.

It has been a history of exploitation. When those Highlanders who had fled the Clearances to New Zealand and Australia started farming sheep in large numbers and then exported their produce back to Britain, suddenly the local sheep estates were no longer profitable.

So the land was transformed into vast deer forests for the sport of the rich. Many such estates were run like private kingdoms.

Woe betide anyone who ventured in during the stalking season!

I remember a walker telling me, a number of years ago, how he had been warned on a certain estate in the west that if he came back again the next day, he would be thrown into the loch. (He did come back and stalked the stalkers, watching the panic in the deer herd when the shot was fired).

Exploitation, either by outsiders, by powerful landowners or by a few local people in cahoots with big money from outside, has been the history of the Highlands.

"Power from the glens" – again no local say and precious little local benefit from the flooding of many fertile valleys and the eviction of more communities for relatively small amounts of hydro-electricity.

We still hear of supposedly nice, small, green schemes.

"Run of the river" sounds good until you realise it means putting the river in a pipe for a couple or more miles, leaving the river bed mostly dry.

The old and the new. Wind turbines at the Causewaymire.

Then there was the attempt by a big mining consortium with the backing of a couple of local bigwigs to push through a super-quarry at Loch Eriboll, one of Earth's most special places.

And then we have wind farms, an almost precise parallel with the Flow-Country plantings, driven by subsidised profit but of very little use to anyone, a catastrophe for the local environment which even Orwell would have found hard to believe could be termed "green".

I guarantee that within 15 years many of them will lie derelict, deemed not worth the expense of servicing.

I gaze out over the Pentland Firth towards Stroma from St John's Point. A strong south-east wind is fighting the swell and easterly tide, the Merry Men of Mey are dancing, huge waves break against each other and the sea boils white.

Into this mayhem the gannets are diving for fish, the big white birds plummeting vertically, one after another, into the foaming sea.

Along at Scotland's Haven the curious seals swim, as ever, close to the shore and watch as I make my way down to the beach.

The Gills ferry is just rounding Stroma, the choppy waves no serious problem today. All will change if the really big tidal energy schemes go ahead.

If we can get the engineering right, tidal energy should work and, unlike wind, actually produce, reliably, decent amounts of electricity. The Pentland Firth might, of course, still win!

However, there is no doubt that exploitation on any scale will completely change the coastal strip from Scarfskerry to John O'Groats. And do we actually want to tame the firth, one of the few remaining truly wild places?

These decisions should be taken locally. We must not let yet another exploitation be imposed on us, from Holyrood or Westminster. It is for the people of Canisbay and Caithness and Orkney to decide how to proceed with tidal energy.

As for windmills... the desecration by profiteers of our landscapes on such a scale would never be permitted by an independent Highlands and Islands.

Local communities might decide to put up one or two turbines for their own use and benefit. Perhaps everyone might agree that a single remote uninhabited site be sacrificed and many large turbines put there.

But the present set-up, where the pain is spread far and wide purely at the whim of local landowners and farmers, would never be allowed.

The Beauly-Denny transmission line?

Another decision to be taken by the Highlands and Islands, not imposed on us by Central Government.

And then maybe we'll decide to bring back the wolves and bears and elk to the wild places of the Far North – but that would be our choice, not the decision of a certain billionaire estate owner near Bonar Bridge Our real resource, and one which is still not made nearly enough of, is our wild landscape.

There are increasingly few places in the world as beautiful and with so few obtrusive human intrusions.

Big engineering projects should go elsewhere, the big project should be to showcase the Highlands to the world as the place to come for rest and recuperation of spirit and body.

The best place in the world for getting out into the wild outdoors, for adventure sports, for walking,

cycling, diving, boating, climbing. The best place to see an incredibly rich diversity of wildlife and birdlife. The place to come for a great welcome and good food and a relaxed pace of life.

We've been bossed around and exploited for too long. Independence for the Highlands and Islands!

The Men of Mey with the white-tipped waves breaking against them.

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