Tag Archive for: Scotland

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A Sky Full of Kites: A Rewilding Story | Tom Bowser

 

An inspirational account of one family’s journey from farming to rewilding and how they brought Red Kites back into Scotland’s skies.

Once Britain’s most common bird of prey, Red Kites had been wiped out by the early 1900s in Scotland and England following centuries of persecution. When some reintroduced kites began roosting on their 1,400-acre farm at Argaty in Perthshire, Tom Bowser’s parents, Lynn and Niall, decided to turn their estate into a safe haven. They began feeding the birds and invited the world to come and see them, learn about them and fall in love with them.

A Sky Full of Kites is the story of the Argaty Red Kite project, and the re-establishing of these magnificent raptors to Scotland, but it is also much more than that. Ill at ease with the traditional rural values of livestock farming, Lynn and Niall’s son Tom, who returned to work on the farm after a career in journalism, reveals his passion for nature and his desire to dedicate his family’s land to conservation.

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Antlers of Water: Writing on the Nature and Environment of Scotland | Edited by Kathleen Jamie

 

This vivid collection of prose, poetry and photography centres on the intersection of modernity and nature in a rapidly changing Scotland, taking us from walking to wild swimming, from red deer to pigeons and wasps, from remote islands to back gardens. Featuring writers and artists that all call Scotland home, the anthology takes a diverse and radical look at nature and landscape within the context of the evolving ecological crisis. ‘There is eco-anxiety, ‘solastalgia’, feminism; there are the ruins of capitalist endeavour.’

It is not all doom and gloom though. The noticing and caring, Jamie argues, ‘amounts to an act of resistance to the forces of destruction.’

With contributions from Amy Liptrot, Malachy Tallack, Chitra Ramaswamy, Jim Crumley, Amanda Thomson, Karine Polwart and many more, Antlers of Water urges us to renegotiate our relationship with the more-than-human world, in writing which is by turns celebratory, radical and political.

Ring of Bright Water | Gavin Maxwell

YA readers looking for real-life examples of humans living alongside nature can turn to Gavin Maxwell’s memoir. Originally published in 1960, Maxwell’s story about living with a trio of otters on the remote west coast of Scotland is a beautiful and poignant reminder about the power of connecting with animals.

Read our Librarian’s top climate choices for Young Adults here

The Treeline | Ben Rawlence

The Arctic treeline is the frontline of climate change, where the trees have been creeping towards the pole for fifty years. These vast swathes of forests, which encircle the north of the globe in an almost unbroken green ring, comprise the world’s second largest biome.

Scientists are only just beginning to understand the astonishing significance of these northern forests for all life on Earth. Six tree species – Scots pine, birch, larch, spruce, poplar and rowan – form the central protagonists of Ben Rawlence’s story. In Scotland, northern Scandinavia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland, he discovers what these trees and the people who live and work alongside them have to tell us about the past, present and future of our planet.

At the treeline, Rawlence witnesses the accelerating impact of climate change and the devastating legacies of colonialism and capitalism. But he also finds reasons for hope. Humans are creatures of the forest; we have always evolved with trees. The Treeline asks us where our co-evolution might take us next. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Treeline is a blend of nature, travel and science writing, underpinned by an urgent environmental message.

The Threadbare Coat | Thomas A Clark

This Selected Poems celebrates Scotland’s most distinctive contemporary writer – a vivid minimalist, ruralist and experimentalist.

“The Threadbare Coat is a beautiful production, and an interesting selection” ~ Rupert Loydell

Stride Magazine Praise for Thomas A. Clark: “In short, one-breath clusters of lines, Clark meditates on the details one might observe during a contemplative and solitary walk through remote countryside. His diction is perfectly pitched and his grammar exact…this is about a man’s spiritual need for the humblest manifestations of nature.”

Shortlisted for the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2021. Longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2021. A Telegraph Book of the Year 2020.

The Stone Age | Jen Hadfield

Jen Hadfield’s new collection is an astonished beholding of the wild landscape of her Shetland home, a tale of hard-won speech, and the balm of the silence it rides upon. The Stone Age builds steadily to a powerful and visionary panpsychism: in Hadfield’s telling, everything – gate and wall, flower and rain, shore and sea, the standing stones whose presences charge the land – has a living consciousness, one which can be engaged with as a personal encounter.

The Stone Age is a timely reminder that our neurodiversity is a gift: we do not all see the world the world in the same way, and Hadfield’s lyric line and unashamedly high-stakes wordplay provide nothing less than a portal into a different kind of being. The Stone Age is the work of a singular artist at the height of her powers – one which dramatically extends and enriches the range of our shared experience.