These rocks are a reminder of our very recent past
This thing’s called a Shieling, and it’s
where, in the warmer months, communities fae the glen floor, mostly women, would bring
up all the grazing animals to enjoy the summer pasture
and thegither to drink in the summer sun
It would have been a great place to be
It’s a reminder that we can live in this environment cyclically and sustainably
And that we did so really recently
Fae seasonal cycles to the climate emergency
A journey we can trace in stone
Toons like this are testament to the first
industrial revolution. Initially that was water powered, with innovations in mill technology
so a’ the factories were hunkered right doon to burns like here
These places were lit, and all the machines
were lubricated, with whale oil and whale grease
So that meant to keep the factories running
you had to have constant whaling ships heading out of the port towns,
harrying the northern waters
That had all sorts of unintended consequences – on our relationship wi’ nature, and
impacts on ecosystems themselves
The products here? Sailcloth for all the ships of empire, really rough, uncomfortable clothes
for the enslaved peoples in America and in the Caribbean, sacking
Just one day rural Angus was at the epicentre
of this huge, globalised network
Soon, innovations left these buildings behind
Every generation saw change, acceleration
And we’ve given the planet a batterin’ on the way
We’ve toomed the seas wi’ loads of fishing fleets,
we’ve taken coal power around the world, digging up and burning half of the
Central Belt and Fife in the process
These vast docks are kind of testament to that time, they remind us of the big steel
hulls and steam power, all that industry of this pell-mell, frantic industrialisation
And at every step of our development,
we’ve left a legacy in the sea, in the sky, and in the city
Scottish folk havnae always been that self-aware
when talkin’ aboot oor environmental impact
As with coal, so with gas. And Scotland has a special reason to be proud of our gas products.
For it was a Scot, William Murdoch, who first applied coal gas for the purposes of lighting,
just over 150 years ago.
At his own fireside, Murdoch noticed pieces of coal hissing as they burned,
and producing little bright flames.
So he experimented with a clay pipe and some coal dust.
It was that simple little test which started a new and much brighter chapter in history]
This was Dundee’s storage centre for Murdoch’s miracle
This gaswork fed the city’s lights for a century
The buildings, the shells we’ve left behind, reiterate our role in climate change
These layers of buildings, built up over generations,
can be sort of read backwards, like an archive, telling us aboot oor impact on the planet
The coal gas was our recent history,
and our present is behind me at the natural gas refinery
The hail place still carries that high, thin smell ae a leaky gas fire
We are still haein’ an impact, right in the here and noo
Being patient zero for the global industrialisation that swept across the world has its downsides,
but it gives us plenty of chance to experiment with strategies for recovery
Scotland absolutely has committed a lot of carbon to the air,
and it’s impacted negatively on all sorts of ecosystems,
and even set extinctions on track
And there is a message of doom and gloom about some of the stuff we’ve been looking at
But our built heritage also carries the message that things can be radically different
in just a single generation
Our industrial heritage is being repurposed in really interesting ways
The old coal gas plant that spent a century spewing fumes in to the atmosphere will soon
be a biodiversity education centre right in the heart of the city
Part of those abandoned docks are a waterpark
One mill is a popular visitor centre exploring industrial heritage
Others are bars, cool new hotels
We have done loads of stuff in Scotland that has reached out and impacted the world
– sometimes positively, accidentally at times extremely negatively
But let’s take a wee bit of hope fae that, a wee bit inspiration
We can reach oot in to the world and make changes. So let’s do that
– let’s just make the changes mair positive this time, eh?