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Climate | Action | Scotland | Writing

Paperboats Zine

The urge to explore and celebrate all the kinds of lives of Planet Earth is stronger than ever, but the environmental and ecological crisis demands we also lift our eyes, and our voices, to species extinction and habitat loss, to what is happening to the forests and hills, the rivers and seas, our streets and gardens. The writer’s instinct to pay attention has never been more vital. Literature can help us to see the natural world – and our place in it – differently.

ISSUE FIVE: OUR POWER – OUR PLANET

To mark Earth Day 2025, the writers in this issue of the Paper Boats zine bring us prose and poetry on the theme, ‘Our Power – Our Planet’. Their words resonate with ecological, human, technological and earthy questions. Power is addressed in the repercussions of our energy choices, but also in humans working together for common good and in sometimes relinquishing control so other species and habitats can flourish. We’re introduced to the quiet authority of a watching bird-man; how winter or true dark humbles us to literal proportion on the planet; our entanglement with trees and the triumph of resilient natural growth. Above all every piece foregrounds its own emotional viewpoint, helping reveal what we stand to lose if we don’t put the needs of our astonishing planet before all else.

Resistance

is those who flower in poor soil:
groundsel, self-heal, bittercress, speedwell;
is celandines forcing their way
through cracks

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Margaret Elphinstone

Blades

It’s my favourite field, this one above the village, hare-run, rutted with frost and, on the top of the rise, the gean tree

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Charlie Gracie

The Butterfly Effect

It started with a tree. Or if I look back further, maybe it was the magic tadpoles on the classroom windowsill, suspended in honey-coloured water

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Anthony McCluskey

December, Skagaströnd

The bay at Skagaströnd is around two miles from end to end and tilted slightly south. This is a busy deep-water harbour

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Lesley Harrison

Tastes of peat

From satellite or pilot height you’ll see
a continent of smoke, a mountain range
of Himalayan scale over Siberia,
concealing its own shadow

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Aidan Semmens

Raon-cluiche pacaidean

(A playground of packets)

Bidh meuran ciùin a’ cagarsaich gu feòirnean
gu socrach, a’ sireadh muinntir gun chuireadh

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Victoria NicIomhair

elm is me and I am elm

During the Covid pandemic, one of the places I liked to take a local walk was a small patch of ancient woodland called Den Wood:

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Ian Grosz

Metamorphosis

My life as a heather-stalk
granted me the opportunity to hear
the sounds of people as they walked
across moorland

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Donald S Murray

The Bird

He’s gone, is John. Like the fulmars that used to line the cliffs of the Isle of Eigg’s south-facing bays off Scotland’s west coast.

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Iona Macduff

Elephant

for some it is hiding
in plain sight, in the living room, the 92 inch
Sony TV screen looking puny beside

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Jeff Skinner

Excavations

Massive, broken-masted, mysterious,
their whitened trident blades fallen,
fractured, wrapped in the roots of trees,
they are unearthed and displayed:

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Craig Dobson

Powerlines

We watched the wind thread needles through the hills,
its whispers bending the blades to its will,
turning air into light, a soft revolution—

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Joshua Adam Walker

Waiting for Noah

When the TV presenter said countries were drowning
and lives were being washed away,
all due to climate change and it was our fault

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Owen Gallagher

Pantoum for the Planet

After school I find Mum frying meaty quarter-pounders, like I’ve never told her it’s ozone-irresponsible to fill the world with methane-making cows.

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Chris Cottom