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Climate | Writing | Action | Scotland

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.

Edens

When we came: a Glenkens story

As they coast upriver with the flooding tide the smell of salt recedes. The river meanders over oyster beds, between bullrushes and water lilies.

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Margaret Elphinstone

Northerners

It dawned on us at last,
the madness of our coming here:
how we’d deceived ourselves

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Donald Adamson

In the Beginning

Aoife pushes past pine needles
To the wind-chilled flesh of her baby boy.
Calum, or Canaan, or Canine.

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Cate Bone

Paradise Explained

The weatherman wears a ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ expression while outside the animals are pairing up to board the SS President Erdogan

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Al McClimens

Garden

All morning long,
soft white feathers floated down,
a pillow shaken from the trees.

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Alex Nye

The Holy Land

A lot of us were raised with the tradition that the holy land is somewhere else. Or in our searching have created our own version

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Peter Cashorali

Losing Eden

A walking guide in one of these National Parks will tell his group more than 200 million trees were planted

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Dave Wynne-Jones

Solargraph

The pinhole pupil of a lensless eye
stares south, where our star
clambers through branches

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Gillian Dawson

THE WORD WAS FLESH

It cleaves itself along the edges, chorusing and phosphorescent. It comes from the dark. Piles of bladderwrack seaweed lines the road

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Emily Alice Spivey

Phoenix Tree

you are fallen not finished
unrooted not rootless
you lie in recovery position

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Genevieve Carver

Eavesdropping

‘Eden’ as a slice of the Cairngorms National Park with words taken from eavesdropping on a crazy media deluge delivered by smartphone.

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Gill Russell

Greenheart

This is an urban beach, a string of beige sand that’s bounded by tarmac and a firth-sea. Groynes, large wooden breakers, run at right angles

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Susan Elsley

Ready Them

Even big gardens start
as small fragilities.
Ready them, Mandy wrote

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Robin Fulton Macpherson

Dunbeath Water

Taking breath in the hazel wood, we listen
as one of the many forms of silence approaches.
This particular flavour spreads dark peace

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Ian McDonough

Private Landfill

Between our fence and our neighbours fence…
twelve hidden inches of untamed no man’s land
a shady earthen paradise

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Deborah Leslie

Dripped in jam 

Shreds of cyan rock on optic nerves, and
Particles of sleep acted in my head.
Here was a new planet. A new Eden.

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Stephen Paul Wren