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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.

Writing

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

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

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

Storm Bebet

Hid’s blowin a hoolee, bit I geed oot a luk efter dinner wae the camera.  A job tae stand apace long enough tae tak photos.

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Sheila Garson

Maerl Time

What are we searching for, really, when we search for cowries? Out on the skerries, the four of us are bent double.

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Laura Anne Brown

Cairn by Kathleen Jamie

Jamie’s latest collection, Cairn, refuses to be about any one thing. Hillsides, are graced with tormentil and turbines. A tanker carries oil through Glen Esk.

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Christina Riley
Paperboat floating on on the Scottish Parliament ponds among leaf-litter.

Ghost Boats

The Splendid Poison Frog,
Spix’s Macaw,
the Bramble Cay Melomy,
the Moorean Tree Snail,

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Hugh McMillan