Great Glen House and Town House, Inverness, 29-30 November 2007

Installing Dalziel + Scullion's images at Great Glen House

A PAIR of mallard feeding contentedly in a pool by the entrance to the headquarters of Scottish Natural Heritage high on a hill above Inverness. That was the auspicious start to the More Than Us event which promised conversations between humanity, the arts and ecology.

At the opening reception in the cavernous Great Glen House I came across another pair of old friends, Larry Butler and Ratnadevi of the bodhi eco-project and much else, and met Liz Douglas, visual artist and long-standing member like me of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics.

The huge atrium with its long glass walls and wood finishing was impressive, although we pondered the large tan coloured parasols that hung over the balconies of the open plan office floors above. Some trendy artist’s visual statement or was the roof leaking already?

In his welcome speech SNH Chairman Andrew Thin didn’t answer that question but, having with conviction set out the case for Scotland’s natural heritage being its greatest asset, as well as having intrinsic value, he told us that the vast concourse was crucial to the building’s sustainable design and it had long been his ambition to fill it with people. With 180 participants signed up for the event, he pretty well achieved that goal.

Listening to him our eyes were drawn to the huge photographic panels on the walls above with their familiar view of west coast rocks looking out to sea, a ship and islands in the distance, and superimposed close-ups of a dead branch, a swift and a moth.

Louise Scullion explained that this new commission by her and her partner Matthew Dalziel represented, together with the symposium and the temporary exhibition of multiples by students from Moray and Duncan of Jordanstone Colleges of Art, their artistic response to the work of SNH.

The photographs were taken off the west coast of Mull where they learnt that the fragile biodiversity of these rocks supported the endangered species of Scotch burnett moth which they had depicted on a stalk of grass.

The view of the Dutchman’s Cap in the photograph struck me as not unlike the view of Belnahua from the Isle of Luing where I live and where the rare marsh fritillary butterfly depends for its survival on the right kind of cattle grazing for its larval food plant, the devil’s-bit scabious. When Louise told us that they had met the band Lau, who were to play a set for us that night, at An Tobar on Mull, I suddenly began to feel that these Argyll connections could be central to my take on the event’s proceedings.

Lau’s music was exuberant, poignant and uplifting (literally), but it was the virtuoso fiddle playing of Aidan O’Rourke which stole the show and had some of the audience up on their feet at the front in some kind of ecstatic dance. When Aidan said that his new composition ‘The Sea’ had been written on the ferry between Oban and Craignure and that another beautiful tune was called ‘Hinba’, the ancient name for the Isles of the Sea which I can see from my window, I felt right at home.

Over a splendid buffet of west coast seafood, Highland meat and Scottish cheeses Liz and I met another geopoetics friend Tess Darwin, who works for SNH and wrote The Scots Herbal: Plant Lore of Scotland, who promptly explained the mystery of the indoor umbrellas as being there to shade staff and their computer screens from the sun’s blistering rays that came through the glass walls opposite. On the way out Liz drew my attention to beautiful diamond light patterns on a footbridge and we headed off, our spirits and our expectations high after the evening’s events.

Crossing the Ness Bridge next morning, I heard behind and above me many strange honk-honking sounds. Five chevrons of geese, maybe five hundred strong, flew high above the river and formed a single V formation as they passed over the Town House where the symposium was to take place. Another good omen.

The walls of the big hall in the Town House were festooned with portraits and memorabilia of old fogies, local politicians and military men, in sharp contrast to the packed audience, the majority of them women, and the politician of a somewhat different type who kicked things off. Mike Russell, Minister for Environment in the new SNP Government, spoke as someone with a long-standing interest in culture and the environment who has written extensively about their interconnections.

When did you last hear a politician, let alone a Minister, quote Alastair McIntosh, land reform campaigner and author of Soil and Soul, People versus Corporate Power, Seneca (‘all art is but imitation of nature’), Hegel, Robin Jenkins, Sorley MacLean and Norman MacCaig?

He said that closing the gap which had opened up between humanity and the natural world required an intellectual and emotional response in which creative artists had a key role to play and announced that next year he and Linda Fabiani, Minister for Culture, would be organising a conference to celebrate people and landscape and would be supporting artists engaged in environmental projects. He argued that artists could help to inform and inspire people about the importance of not just preserving our natural heritage but renewing and refreshing it.

The warm reception he received prompted the thought on this St Andrews Day that maybe a sea change had indeed occurred in Scottish politics at the May elections.

Next up Mark Lynas spoke persuasively without notes about how humanity was responsible for the mass extinction of other species and how our annual use of fossil energy was the equivalent of burning 100 million years of stored solar energy. He told us that at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago 95% of life was extinguished, and by 2015 our current destruction of the planet’s species would be irreversible unless serious action was taken.

A very scary message, but one in which he detected signs of hope in local movements like the one in his own community to make it a low carbon area and the recent result of the Australian general election which changed that country’s position on implementing the Kyoto agreement . He said that it was crucial to mobilise the citizenry internationally to build a critical mass to force Governments and companies to take action. ‘A tour de force’, chairperson Ruth Wishart called it.

After the break Jay Griffith came from a completely different angle. She spoke passionately about the wildness of the human spirit and how indigenous people are still being wiped out by Western ‘discoverers’ and missionaries bringing diseases. She told us of intelligence within animals and plants, how the land tells us how to behave ethically, and advocated letting the mind wander and being a nomad in one’s life.

In this and in the poetic language she expressed she was coming close to the nomadic intellect of geopoetics, and it struck me that with her and Robert McFarlane a new generation of writers is emerging in the high line of Henry Thoreau, John Muir and Kenneth White. At the bookstall her Wild: an Elemental Journey disappeared fast.

In the question session to her and Mark Lynas that followed, issues of global travel, journeys of the mind and nomads being rooted in their territory were explored, and the need for new ways to express the world that went against the Western tradition of seeing nature as bestial and would re-inspire a sense of connectedness with everything.

In the lunch queue I connected with Caroline Dear who lives and works as an artist in Skye and we found a mutual connection between the Staffin fishermen she knows and those in the Oscar Marzaroli photographs in my book. As the day went on and more connections were made, it became clear to me that building on the network of individuals and groups who were there needs to be one of the key outcomes of the event.

John Lister-Kaye mainly gave us a list of his current concerns, i.e. the constant demand to justify nature in economic terms and the obsession with managing it, what he called cheque book conservation and the suburbanisation of nature, and the lack of environmental education in schools.

More interesting by far would have been if he had developed his brief reference to an instinct for nature being latent in every child and had examined how that could be nurtured and reawakened. Despite some funny stories, he came across to me as something of the grumpy old man of nature conservation whose decision to take his daughter to the Arctic to try to see a polar bear in the wild flew in the face of real concerns about the planet.

David Abram, on the other hand, beguiled us as only a magician can do with his Alaskan close encounter from a kayak with sea lions and a humpback whale. He demonstrated the value of storytelling in gesture and sound and made a powerful case for a return to the oral tradition so central to the lives of the Inuit, the Navajo and all who live close to the land.

He talked of the waves, the trees and the floorboards speaking to us and how we have lost a sense of a speaking cosmos, substituting for it instead the written word which is separated from its origins in the landscape and divides us from the world. He saw air as the element which unifies us through our breath with all things and insisted that a rejuvenation of oral culture was an ecological imperative. It was a spellbinding and inspiring performance akin to the ethnopoetics of Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder.

In the final panel session the need to slow down our lifestyles and listen deeply, to hear natural sounds, to rediscover and green our cities were explored and there was a call for this to be the first of a series of such events, only bigger and longer. No doubt others were discussing on the way home how that could come about and the energies generated could be set free.

I went out into the chill night air, my mind buzzing with thoughts of how invigorating it was that so many people were keenly into this field and how we might try to take all of it forward next year in the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics. By good fortune I took a wrong turning and finished up on the bouncy suspension bridge where I again came across Larry and Ratnadevi and we bounced some clear, fresh air into our heads as the lustrous black river swirled on below us.

Norman Bissell’s poetry collection Slate, Sea and Sky A Journey from Glasgow to the Isle of Luing with photographs by Oscar Marzaroli is just out from Luath Press.

© Norman Bissell, 2007

Links

• More Than Us
• Dalziel + Scullion’s
• Scottish Centre for Geopoetics

Associated Article

• SNH Multiply review
• Michael Russell on Cultural Tourism