67: Carbon Offsetting For Communities 1 - Rekindling Community with Alastair McIntosh

In March, Matt hosted the Community Carbon Offsetting conference at the Unversity of Strathclyde, which formed a fascinating gathering of people to discuss how land use and ownership is changing across rural Scotland in response to the booming carbon offset market.

This mini series will showcase highlights from the conference - the first of which is this passionate talk about community with reknowned writer, academic and activist Alastair McIntosh.

Essential Reading:

Alastair’s slide presentation - https://www.scottishinsight.ac.uk/Portals/80/SUIIProgrammes/Community%20Carbon%20Offsetting/Community%20Carbon%20Offsetting%20March%202023%20workshop.pdf

Episode Transcript:

[Music flourish]

Matt: Hello and welcome to Local Zero. This episode forms the first in a mini-series all about community carbon offsetting. In March, I hosted a high-profile event at the University of Strathclyde which, if I say so myself, formed a fascinating gathering of people to discuss how land use and land ownership is changing across rural Scotland in response to the booming carbon-offset market.

We focused particularly on voluntary, nature-based carbon offsetting. Here, landowners invest in natural forms of carbon sequestration or carbon capture such as afforestation or peatland restoration. This is to generate carbon credits for sale on the open market. These carbon credits are bought up by organisations wanting to offset their own carbon emissions by funding reductions or carbon avoidance elsewhere instead of cutting their own carbon emissions.

Now the main voice you’ll be hearing today will not be Becky, Fraser or myself. It will be the renowned writer, academic and activist, Alastair McIntosh.

[Music flourish]

Matt: Alastair was brought up in Leurbost on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. He has been very heavily involved with Scottish land reform, most notably the community buy-out of the Hebridean Isle of Eigg and a successful campaign against the proposed super quarry on the Isle of Harris. In Glasgow, he has also helped to set up the Govan-based GalGael Trust of which he is treasurer and a non-executive director. He also holds various academic positions, including Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology which examines the relationship between humans and their natural, social and built environments. Finally, Alaistair is a very well-renowned author and his works include Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power, Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being and finally, Rekindling Community: Connecting People, Environment and Spirituality.

Alastair was our opening speaker for day two of our conference and he has generously allowed us to share the recording of his talk and in it, he talks about the importance of community in its broadest sense but also his thoughts on land ownership in Scotland through the ages. Keep in mind that Alastair mentions several times throughout his talk about hyperlinks and references contained in his PowerPoint slides. To access these, please visit our web page at www.LocalZeroPod.com where you can navigate to his talk on the episodes page. There you will find a link to his talk contained in our episode notes where you can access all the bonus material. So enjoy this passionate talk from Alastair.

Alastair: Who is the community? Why does it matter for offsetting? Community of interest versus community of place. So something like a fishing club, a tennis club or a landowners’

finance group is a community of interest. They are like the fingers of community but the hand that holds it all in a geographical community is community of place. I want to suggest that communities are vertical as well as horizontal; that in advanced modernity, it has become disembedded. When we’re talking about these kinds of advanced capitalist structures that we have today, we’re talking about a consequence of advanced modernity. A community is rekindled by land reform. This is how we can restore control and agency and community desire is a key to authentic, sustainable development. I use that term without hesitation in its proper Brundtland sense; meaning relationships of soil, i.e. as a natural environment, with soul as the inner life, psychological and spiritual and society with one another held in democratic agency as communities of place. These are things that I unpack especially in these three books that you see here. Rekindling Community is out of print but on the PowerPoint, there’s a live link to a PDF download. Because of the nature of this group and the importance of these points, in being heard and understood by this group, I’ve brought along a box of Riders in the Storm. I know that academics never buy books and that nobody carries money anymore, so I’m just going to make those available. Help yourself to one but that is what I will be drawing on there and especially at the end where I quote David Cameron of Community Land Scotland saying that what’s needed is supportive government structures and community desire within those to build the competence to make it work. David really emphasises the desire and he says if the desire is there, then we can do it.

So why does it matter for offsetting? It matters to avoid local violation and I always reflect with a French wife that in French, le viol (the root of violence) means rape. It is there to avoid the rape of communities and, therefore, damage to the greatest social fabric of the nation. That is something I want to emphasise. This is not just about wee communities up in the Highlands or down in the Borders. This is about how we build from the grassroots up organically the social fabric of what it means to be Scotland. So let’s start with that.

There’s me on the right and my sister about 60 years ago and notice my friend, Alec George Morrison there. There we were about 20 years ago. There’s our house and the trees behind. My father planted trees to show it could be done. That’s a surgery and he was the local doctor. That’s our village, Leurbost. Notice also my friend, Rusty, President of the Local Historical Society now. All of us together. This is not a Facebook community that you like and forget somebody. This is a community that lasts for a long time. There we were last year out in the Pentland moor looking at the old shieling structures, looking at what is embedded there, looking at who had their peats where and how memory is encoded in the landscape. Another friend, Alice Starmore who is the same age as me and who grew up in Back but had her grazings out near where our house was. The moors bound up as my very first memories and that must be the reason why I associate them with my mother. The springtime smell when everything is just starting to grow particularly reminds me of her and I cannot help but think of her whenever I leave the road and take the first step onto the moss and heather. The softness beneath my feet is somehow maternal and life-affirming. If we are talking about changing land use by rewilding, this is the depths we have to understand. Alice Starmore, family name Mattison, is famous for her designs of yarn. So there we are through these years. Listen to John Lorne Campbell of Canna; ‘the consciousness of the Gaelic mind may be described as possessing historical continuity and religious sense. It may be said to exist in a vertical plane and the consciousness of the modern world, on the other hand, may be said to exist in a horizontal plane possessing breadth and extent and dominated by

scientific materialism and the concern with purely contemporary happenings. There is a profound difference between the two mental attitudes which represent the different spirit of different ages and are very much in conflict.’ So with that verticality of community, you’re not just talking about geographical entities. You’re also talking about the psychological history and deepening from that, I would suggest, depending upon one’s belief system, deepening into matters of soul and deepening into matters of spirituality. Not for nothing is religion such a presenting issue in the current SNP leadership election. Dr John MacInnes of the School of Scottish Studies was born in Lewis and grew up in Raasay: ‘a native Gael carries in her or his imagination not so much a landscape, not a sense of geography alone, nor of history alone but a formal order of experience in which these are all merged.’ That sense of how we order our experience is central to John’s understanding of community. The native sensibility responds not to landscape but to Dùthaich which cannot be translated into English without robbing the term of its emotional energy. As ancestral or family land, it is also family tradition and equally, it is hereditary qualities of an individual. In other words, who we are is coming from the land and the importance of land reform in reconstituting communities of place and the importance of how or whether offsetting can play a role in deepening those communities of place is hinging on factors like this and it is nothing less than emotional energy that is at stake.

Now I didn’t grow up in Lewis as a middle-class doctor’s son with another foot in the crofting community naturally understanding these things. I actually only understood when, in 1977, after doing a very helpful geography degree at Aberdeen University and thankfully failing chemistry, so I had to do research which meant I ended up doing both moral philosophy and psychology to advanced levels in the way you could do in Aberdeen University in those days. I don’t know if you still can. Thanks to that backdrop, I went out to Papua New Guinea with the Voluntary Services Overseas in 1977 teaching and setting up small-scale hydroelectricity units in the mountains because of what a crofting background can give to you in practicality and learning about the imperative of land from people like Margaret Ogomeni here, the extension worker at the South Pacific Appropriate Technology Foundation for which I later worked as a financial advisor after having come back to Scotland and done an MBA at Edinburgh in 1980 in order to make myself a bit more useful. So what did I learn? Well, what do we learn because we have all been coming to the system in modern times? So here I am with a group from New Guinea and actually, from West Papua and Papua provinces in Papua, Indonesia of which you may know something of the political constellation. I won’t go into that here. There’s my wife in the background there, Vérène, right at the back. Rusty, the village blacksmith shipwright, now the President of the Historical Society, is going to be taking us across the end of Loch Leurbost to that green area. Why is it green? Why is nobody living on that side of Loch Leurbost? Why, when you go there, do you see these ruins scattered all around that southern area of Lewis? Notice as we go the feannagan or the old, lazy beds of cultivation not used for a long time but look at how sea level rise and increased storminess is eating away at them and eating away our heritage. Indigenous peoples around the world are extremely aware of this, especially if they are coastal.

So we sat with the older and the younger members of our community. That’s Evelyn Coull MacLeod and Catherine Mary MacLean there. Notice the anchor stuck in the ground there from one of the old boats. We talked about the anchor points and we talked about the

meaning of community across the world in societies of communities of place. We told them about the Clearances and they matched that to their colonial experience, initially under the Dutch. We talked about what it does to people’s psyches and to their minds and the intergenerational trauma of being pushed off the land. We talked about my own twice great-grandfather here, a precentor in the Free Church. There is Murdo MacLennan of Strathconan whose father’s people were evicted by the Balfour family. We talked about how they used their proceeds from mainly English industry and Scottish landowning to build places like… I’m inclined to pronounce it Dunrobin Castle but you have to ask if the robbing is fully done yet. We talked about where that leaves people because the people I’ve just shown you here, some of them, are distantly related to a certain American president because Donald Trump’s mother’s people had been evicted in the 1820s. In 1830, when she was 17, she emigrated to America. The whole constellation of poverty led many people, when they could, to leave the island. So the Stornoway Gazette’s headline… when you’re sworn in… notice the constellation. They put much more emphasis on bags not being searched at the airport than they have on the fact that a man sprung from the loins of a woman from Lewis has taken official control of the most powerful political office in the world because, of course, the community were ashamed (or most of them) of his values. Why? What happened?

I put it to you that when something piles in on Scottish communities like this and when all of a sudden, we’re being told the bankers are coming to town and there’s one of our Green MSPs surrounded by bankers and the memorandum of understanding that Andy Wightman got from NatureScot mentioned ‘communities’ only three times and ‘confidentiality’ 38 times in an eight-page document. What sort of transparency is that? I put to you that if we want to be academic about it, a Chi Lambda position or in common parlance, let’s call it X and an inverted Y. It’s like at one time back in the days, you had what folk, where I come from, would think of as a green-welly, Oxbridge set of conservational ecologists who’d come in with a relatively right-wing mindset. I’m generalising here. They would get into bed with landowners and look at setting up SSSIs, etcetera, in a way that was necessary because simply to save some of these places, it needed a scientific framing in the mid-20th century like that. On the other hand, you’ve got the community development people who you might say are more politically left-wing and so they’re nature people and concerned with rewilding and repeopling. What happened progressively, culminating in 1987, was they came together with the Brundtland Commission and Our Common Future with that famous definition of sustainable development as ‘not satisfying the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future.’ The question I think we are facing now and in this conference is whether the future will be a Lambda Chi, an inverted Y or a double helix where the two are integrated together and the task of people like us here is to keep them together or where both sides will look at each other and say, ‘Uh oh, we’re not having that,’ and they’ll overshoot and go back into a Chi or X shape. So I talk about this as the X and Y axis of sustainable development.

So what are we looking at here? We’re looking at what Giddons talks of as the ‘consequences of modernity.’ He’s a sociologist who advised Tony Blair in the early days and who says ‘community has become disembedded as a consequence. The dynamism of modernity divides into the separation of time and space and their recombination in forms which permit the disembedding of social systems. The emptying of time is, in large part, the

precondition of the emptying of space – the Clearances – and may be understood in terms of the separation of space from place by fostering relations between absent others, like bankers from god knows where, and locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction. The phenomenon serves to open up manifold possibilities of change by breaking free from the restraints of local habits and practices. That is to say locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them.’ This change is what we must avoid with carbon offsetting.

You’ll be saying, ‘Well, that’s all very well up in the Highlands and Islands, Alastair, but what about here in Glasgow?’ Well, I lived in Govan for 20 years for a reason; being a founding trustee of the GalGael Trust - the Gal, the stranger and the Gael, the heartland people. In Sinéad O’Connor’s words, ‘if there’s ever gonna to be healing, there has to be remembering.’ Remembering and putting back what has been dismembered. So that there can be forgiving, there has to be knowledge and understanding. Paulo Freire of Brazil calls it conscientisation: the raising to consciousness and conscience. So in GalGael, grassroots urban folk are also needing to reconnect with community of place and also needing that historical connection that has so often been denied of them. So in our workshops, we’re building boats and making all kinds of things of beauty, very viscerally so sometimes when we cook up a stew if somebody is good enough to give us a deer. A batch of pheasants was handed in to us the other day. We get out into our boats. Notice it says ‘Established 9th century’ when the term GalGael first started to be used. We get out onto the river and we might raise a sail, reclaiming heritage and reconnecting coastal communities.

But what is it that we find when we start reconnecting with coastal communities? Well, perhaps we go up as far as Assynt, north of Ullapool, to [s.l. Trya – 20:21] here. Lisa MacDonald says, ‘From my window, I see the fence from the next house, a scrap of sky where the buzzard hangs low over fields at Polglass. We, who are here, we’re lucky. These houses are warm and the rents are secure. In the distance are sunshine and freedom. The beaches, the poised sure hills and space… not ours. There’s plenty. We may touch it and reach it but live on it and know. My sister would bring home her family but homes can’t be found. I miss them. The falling school role misses three, bright, young minds. Though I know I am lucky, I long for a place of my own with blue, and light and black, brown soil where my children can grow on the land, where my children can grow on the land.’

The imperative of land reform, why it matters so much, is not just in rural Scotland but in the work the Land Commission and Community Land Scotland have been doing and increasingly also for urban Scotland. This is why, in 1991, we launched the original Isle of Eigg Trust: a challenge to landed power and an island owned by one man, Keith Schellenberg. It was put on the market as a consequence of needing to separate business arrangements following one of his divorces. We launched a manifesto because, at that time, people didn’t feel free to talk. Quoting McDermott, ‘We have sanctuaries for birds but not for people.’ The question that we faced was legitimacy. How do you establish legitimacy? What we did is we had a public meeting and we said, ‘Look, we understand why the community couldn’t do this itself but key gatekeepers (note that term) in the community have said we’re heading in the right direction. We’ve got that legitimacy but now you must express your voice.’ So the residents’ association, a locally legitimate, democratic group, held a secret ballot with 73% in favour of a 100% turnout but with the proviso that we gave

the residents power of veto over anything we might do. That was crucial. That was what was built first. My message to investors in Highland Rewilding or any other such scheme is that unless you are prepared to trust communities to that extent of veto, then do not expect communities to trust you with your investment plans. Jeremy said to me, ‘I can’t do that. It’s not what investors want.’ Earlier, he had indicated to me it was too much like hard work. He said, ‘I’m 68 and I’ve not got the time to do that.’ Fair enough. I can understand that but it does raise the question as to whether this is an appropriate way forward or whether public resources instead ought to be put into things like this: the first community-elected board of the Isle of Eigg Trust. Look what happened. You then get people like Angus Mackinnon, the tradition bearer, teaching incomers like Davey Robertson from Easterhouse or Karen Helliwell from the South of England. He was teaching them with the ordinance survey maps the meaning of the places and passing on to them that verticality of history. Schellenberg didn’t like it. He issued eviction letters to some of the key island people who were involved in the trust.

I’m going to have to cut through this very quickly. In short, a Scottish land rights revolution got going. We launched an appeal. We ended up raising £1.6 million from 30,000 donations around the world. We bought it. Market spoiling. Camille Dressler is there with me and Maggie Fyffe there on the day of the buy-out on 12th June 1997. Market spoiling meant that instead of getting the £3 million he’d hoped for, Schellenberg got £1.5 million for it or rather his creditors did. It was actually Maruma by that time but that’s complicating the story.

So now we go back to a healthy community; a community where wellness is at the heart of what’s happening. We’ve aged a wee bit. There’s Camille five years ago at the 20th anniversary with a bottle of very nice Talisker that the brewery gave a crate of. You go to Eigg now and it’s a green island. It’s got its own businesses. People who were on the dole and taking money from the state are now paying taxes to the state. You’ll all have heard about Eigg’s energy system. That united a divided community. There was still some division but when it comes to ‘do you want to be joined up to the electricity system?’ that shifts minds. As George MacLeod of the Iona Community, for which I was a business advisor for five years in the 1980s, put it, ‘Only a demanding common task builds community.’ It’s a huge joy to me now that the current island directors in the trust were all children at the time of the buy-out. We’re seeing the intergenerational transmission. It’s a huge joy to me that the Chair of Community Land Scotland here, also on the board of Highland and Islands Enterprise, also on the board of the Crown Commission, is also the Chair of Isle of Eigg Trust just now succeeding Jim Hunter.

What did the Papuans have to say? The Papuans’ conclusion on visiting places like Eigg, Skye and then Lewis and Harris was, ‘We have seen that people here have two things that make their communities work: love and a sense of ownership.’ The land in Papua is more productive but because these people love so much, it holds it all together. They’re happy to live for other people and just for themselves. They understand that land is God’s creation. Friends, that’s the central driver. We’ve got to ask of anything we do, ‘Is it going to serve love because without love, there is no desire?’ There can be none of the community desire that David Cameron so emphasises. The scholars here will know of Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities who says, ‘In an anthropological spirit, then I propose the following definition of the nation. It is an imagined political community and imagined as

both inherently limited and [27:50] in the minds of each [27:54] image of their communion.’ Regretfully, in my view, this doesn’t go deep enough. It doesn’t go deep enough into an understanding of the imagination such as Ibn Arabi, the Islamic scholar, had of imagination being something that we don’t just have but we move in but is of a divine origin ultimately. We don’t just reimagine our communities. We dig very deep into what it means to be a human. Ernest Renan put it well in 1882 and said, ‘A nation is a soul; a spiritual principle.’ You may think that’s off the wall but read my paper that’s free online on my website, The Political Theology of Modern Scottish Land Reform where Rutger Henneman, one of my students, and I interviewed a dozen key leaders as to the role that spirituality played in bringing about the passing of the Land Reform Scotland Act 2003 20 years ago. You will see these deeper things but you have to let your eyes adjust to the twilight or you won’t see in the blazing glare of the likes of Jeremy Leggett saying, ‘The Highlands is my new frontier,’ as in the recent piece that he put out. I’m not quoting exactly but basically, he’s seeing it as his latest frontier. He put solar panels on roofs and now he’s going to rewild the Highlands. I sent him a reply tweet to which he didn’t respond but I said, ‘Jeremy, it’s one thing to put panels on roofs. It’s another thing to parachute into communities of this kind of depth.’ So not everybody is going to be happy but we have our land reform bill and now act which was passed on 25th February 2003. This is what the rewilding agenda and carbon offsetting must not cut across. Unless it’s supportive of this framework, it violates community. Frank Rennie of the University of Highlands and Islands said, ‘The adherence to social, environmental as well as economic objectives means that local land trusts managed by local people have different and longer-term perceptions of what sustainable development might actually mean.’

The reason why I’m going to some slight expense to offer you copies of this is that it ends up on that. Climate change is so huge and we can all see none of the answers add up even very much. In this book, I unpack the last three special reports of the IPCC. I only deal with that kind of mainstream, consensus, expert science. I unpack that. I move to the conclusions it draws and then I say, ‘Well, where does that leave us?’ The best answer I can give to ordinary people on the street or in the countryside is to rekindle community. Come what may in the come to pass, it is community that we need and that is why both rural and urban land reform is important. So Jeremy Leggett, in this recording here (you’ve got live links here), is saying, ‘Institutional investors are only going to invest if they have a structure that they’re used to dealing with like a small board of very business-experienced people,’ but as the Scottish Land Commission has said to me, ‘It is much more part of the solution than it is part of the problem.’ Well, as you probably know, the Land Commission has felt that there have been some misunderstandings in Highland Rewilding’s comprehension of its position. Andrew Simms, certainly in his communications with me, has been anxious to correct that misunderstanding because it was ‘undermining the social legitimacy of our Scottish Land Commission.’ I’m very happy to report… in fact, I believe there is also something on the website dealing with certain aspects of this. It’s probably not for me to say any more about that but I’m glad to hear that things are shifting on that front.

I’ve deliberately closed with this slide. So I took you all the way up to heaven and I’ve brought you back down to the realities of climate finance because when Matt invited me to do this, I wanted to leave enough time for us to have a good discussion. So thank you so much.

[Round of applause]

[Music flourish]

Matt: So we’ve just heard from Alastair. Fascinating talk covering tremendous ground with many thought-provoking reflections on his time working both as a member of a community but also supporting others. So what did we learn? Well, first and foremost, it’s about how we frame community. There’s no point in us trying to engage, support and collaborate with communities unless we know who they are and what they capture. So, on the one hand, we may have a community of interest but we also may have a community of place. The two are not necessarily the same thing. So the first point of call is really to frame that community and understand who exactly it is that we are engaging with. The second, I think, is reflecting on the state of the carbon-offsetting market and the real danger of running into many of the same issues that we’ve encountered historically: most notably, this feeling of a community, not just in rural environments but this was the focus of the talk, of being colonised by outside powers potentially with ulterior motives. Now, carbon offsetting presents a potential threat in this regard as new investors and landowners begin to mobilise to take advantage of these new land-based market opportunities around the generation of carbon offsets. Crucially, we’re still dealing with the intergenerational trauma of non-democratic land-use change and the displacement of communities as encapsulated by the Clearances. Now, this is because who we are comes from the land. The land is bound in our historical and religious sense of self and cannot be disentangled. Our memory is encoded in the landscape that we inhabit. This is important – really important – when undertaking processes of land reform to reconstitute communities of place. But importantly, as demonstrated by cases such as the community buy-out of the Isle of Eigg, threats present opportunities to galvanise community action as they self-organise in response to fast-moving events. More broadly too, community or that sense of community can be rekindled through land reform and carbon offsetting must reinforce the democratisation of land rather than further concentrate power in the hands of those who already possess it. Finally, for landowners keen to work with communities rather than against them, the power of a community veto was considered critical by Alastair. If you don’t trust communities, they won’t trust you.

[Music flourish]

So I hope you enjoyed the talk. Please keep your eyes peeled for the next in this mini-series which will feature the panel discussion and the Q&A that followed Alastair’s talk. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and colleagues and stay tuned for more episodes taken from this conference. Until then, bye for now.

[Music flourish]

Transcribed by

PODTRANSCRIBE