Tag Archive for: Shetland

, ,

The Shetland Way: Community and climate crisis on my father’s islands | Marianne Brown

 

How do we balance our needs with the needs of the natural world around us? How can we have nuanced conversations and debate in a time of extreme activism or extreme denial? How can we begin to understand the complexities of a subject as enormous as climate change? And how can we change the way we live to save our lives?

This is one woman’s story of how her quest to make peace with her father’s death brought her straight to the heart of a challenging debate about how we save the planet.

Shetland is a place bound together by community, history and culture. But when a huge windfarm is greenlit to export energy to mainland Scotland, it creates rifts between neighbours, friends and even families. One side supports the benefit to a planet spiralling into climate disaster; the other challenges the impact on an environment with an already struggling wildlife population.

As an environmental journalist, Marianne is drawn to investigate this story of sustainable energy that is irrevocably tied to her grief. But nothing is ever straightforward, and she soon finds herself on a transformative journey into the heart of a debate that mirrors global concerns about how we save the planet.

,

Sea Bean | Sally Huband

 

Sea Beans are seed pods that fall from vines in the tropics and are carried around the globe on ocean currents. Wherever they are found washed up on shores, local folklore has turned them to talismans and charms for anyone that finds them. When Sally Huband moves to the windswept Shetland Islands and pregnancy triggers a chronic illness, she is forced to slow down. She takes to the beaches and her search for a sea bean begins.

On Shetland’s stormy shores, Huband finds the world washed up at her feet, discovering a wealth of treasures and curiosities. There are orcas too and the shriek of sea birds overhead. Huband’s beachcombing path takes her further afield too, from the Faroese archipelago to the Orkney islands, and the Dutch island of Texel. It opens a world of ancient myths, fragile ecology, and deep human history. It brings her to herself again.

Winner of the Highland Book Prize, 2023 Sea Bean is a message in a bottle of the interconnection of our oceans, communities and ourselves, and an invitation to feel belonging when we are adrift.

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.