Scotland climate: Oil worker, farmer, fisherman and tales of hope

Mike Scotland

Oil industry worker behind a community litter pick movement

In 2019, oil industry worker Mike Scotland found himself in a very dark place standing over the River Don with a plan to jump off the handrail and into the water. What stopped him was that someone happened to call his phone right at that moment.

“People sometimes say,” he observes now. “You had a child at the time, a partner and a family, how could you do that? But when you’re in that mindset nothing else matters.”

That moment was the start of a process for him – one that would lead him to set up a mental health group, manUp speakUP, within the offshore oil industry, and also start a movement of community litter-picks.

Mike Scotland with vintage crisp packets from his river clean ups (Image: Mike Scotland)

“I was suffering,” he says, “from severe anxiety, and social anxiety. I gave myself an ultimatum of, either leave the industry I’m working in or do something about it."

"In the offshore oil industry it was as if no one ever spoke about those things. You’re macho, a North Sea Tiger. I felt that there’s no way I’m the only one that struggles with anxiety, so I set up an online group, specifically targeted towards people in the offshore oil industry.”

Then, in January of the following year, 2020, he went back to the strip of the Don carrying three black bin liners. “I decided to  clean it up, because it was used as a dumping ground for decades.”

“I remember starting to pick up the litter. I’d never done it before and it was outside my comfort zone. I was worried that people might judge me.”

It happened that a cyclist asked him if he wanted a hand.  “For me that was a big thing. I just met a stranger that I had never spoken to before and we started talking about things I hadn’t discussed with anyone before – and during that we also managed to clean up a bit of litter.”

He decided that day to set up a group, called Community cleanUP, to continue the litterpick of the area. The next weekend six people turned up and cleared 300kg; the following Saturday there were ten, and over the months the community cleared 13,000 kg of litter from a 200m stretch of riverside and transformed it into a nature trail.

Last year, Mr Scotland organised a huge litter pick at Aberdeen beach following Storm Babet. It was an idea, he says, that was prompted by his five-year-old son.  “I was due to have a boys' day out with him," he recalls. "We thought we would go to the beach and he said, ‘Dad that beach is a mess, go and clean it up.’”

When they saw how much waste there was on the beach, they realised they needed help - and he made a social media call-out. 150 people joined a CleanUP, removing 400 bags of waste, from personal clothing to bottles and fishing nets, from the beach.

Despite his social anxiety, Mr Scotland delivers regular speeches for companies and organisations on mental health and litterpicks.  "Instead of looking at litter as a negative, you can turn it into a positive, ” he says. 

READ MORE: What Storm Babet threw up - from a 1968 crisp bag to tyres

Ruth Ashton-Shaw

Graphic designer turned farmer 'for nature'

Ruth Ashton-Shaw's intention had never been to run a farm. Till around a decade ago, she and her husband were ‘living the dream” in Manchester, working as designers, renting a "fancy studio", and, whenever they could, escaping the city in their little Campervan to pursue outdoor sports.

A lightbulb moment arrived when they realised most of their work could be done by email, Skype and Zoom from anywhere – they could “escape permanently.”

Ruth Ashton-Shaw, farmer. Image: Richard Ashton-Shaw (Image: Asthton-Shaw)

They could also, if they pooled resources with Ms Ashton-Shaw’s parents, (a police officer and midwife, who happened to be coming up to early retirement) afford to buy a property in the countryside with a small amount of land. On this, they imagined, they would run a “very chill” campsite.

Eventually, they bought Low Auldgirth in Dumfries and Galloway, a smallholding which was, at thirty acres, larger than intended, and found themselves wondering what they were going to do with all that land.

“We had no experience whatsoever of farming,” Ms Ashton-Shaw recalls. “A local farmer stopped by one day. He said, 'What are you doing with the grazing? Did you know that the government will give you money if you put sheep on the land?'  We were thinking ‘The government will give us free money, just for having a couple of sheep?’

“We started with a few sheep and I just fell in love with agriculture, managing animals and the land – and it grew from there. When we got the farm it was very clean and quiet and the more animals we added, the more the place came alive.”

They tried for a while to run a conventional agriculture business, but found, not only was it failing but also incredibly difficult. She recalls, “We weren’t enjoying it. We were fighting everything. We were fighting the winter weather, trying to lamb in February. We were fighting the elements. We were fighting nature.  I remember just sitting in the middle of the shed one morning thinking I don’t want to do this anymore.”

After some soul-searching, Ms Ashton-Shaw concluded that she still wanted to farm and, inspired by a book on regenerative farming, decided to try a different more nature-friendly strategy.

“Everyone I spoke to was like, ‘It’s just a bunch of hippy madness.’ But I felt it was the solution. I started to play around with different things and the biggest was that we just stopped fighting with everything. We looked at what nature wanted to do and worked with it. That was a Eureka moment.”

They cut back on the number of sheep and brought in other animals – pigs, geese, horses, chickens – and also took an approach called mob-grazing, in which animals graze land intensively for a short period before being moved on.

People, she recalls, thought of her as a “crazy lady” when she first started. “But now I think there’s more of a general acceptance. We are running a successful business. We have to pay our mortgage and our bills. We are very much in the real world. Our farm has to make money and we are.  That’s why I’m so passionate about talking about it – because it does make financial sense, it makes business sense.” 

"We transformed from a struggling agricultural business to a profitable business that’s a pleasant place to live and work and be.”

READ MORE: SNP-Green farm funding reform fails nature with 'status quo'

Hans Unkles

Fisherman who built Scotland’s first solar-powered electric fishing boat

“I’ve always been concerned that we’re not doing enough around climate change. For me, it has been a red flag for years  – probably decades- and it never seems anything is constructively happening.”

Unkles is talking about what drove him to convert the Lorna-Jane, the first fishing vessel in Scotland to run on electricity and solar power, which arrived on the water in June this year after a long battle not just to fit her out, but also to manage all the red tape that would allow her to be registered as a UK fishing boat.

Hans Unkles aboard the Lorna Jane (Image: Hans Unkles)

The idea, he says, evolved over the years, only properly becoming realisable when batteries and other technology became more affordable. 

A new documentary, titled It'll Never Work and made by Joe Osborn of Carsaig Films, follows the story of  Mr Unkles over the boat's construction, in his garden workshop, including the toll the work had on his health, the stress of the process and the magic of the community of family, friends and fishermen who help out.

As yet, no one has followed in Mr Unkles' footsteps, but he hopes others in the fishing industry will. Part of the problem, he observes, is the cost. 

“As an adopter you’re disadvantaged, and as a non-adopter you’re advantaged. So until that balance sways then there’s not going to be any dramatic change. I think the best way is to advantage the adopters. If you encourage the people that are doing it, heavily, then suddenly people are going to be interested.”

Fiona Lindsay

Ditched her job to make outdoor furniture - out of wind turbines

“I didn’t know what circular economy meant when I first heard the phrase in 2018,” says Fiona Lindsay, director of ReBlade, a company that is taking wind turbine components and fashioning them into boldly-designed outdoor furniture and shelters.

“I remember sitting in a team meeting at Scottish Power Renewables where a colleague talked about it. Afterwards, I Googled it. But I felt I knew what it was all along, instinctively. It was about being sustainable and closing the loop."

Fiona Lindsay of ReBlade with table made from decommissioned wind turbine (Image: Colin Hattersley)

Those principles of circular economy are now at the heart of ReBlade, the company which she left her job to found in partnership with her husband.

She has, she says, never thought of herself as a businesswoman. A degree in Earth Sciences and a career first in construction and later as a project manager for Scottish Power Renewables  - as well as the climate crisis - led her to a point where she was project managing, but thinking  of ways she could do more.

Whilst at Scottish Power Renewables, she met her husband, Steven, then a colleague, and the two began to discuss a key problem in the life of wind turbines - what to do with them once they reach the end of their lives - and whether it would be possible to create a business around this.

Ms Lindsay recalls that in her early years working in renewables decommissioning felt like a long way off. It was all about getting up and operational to generate clean electricity.  

Her husband worked on the first trial to convert the components into energy from waste rather than dumping in landfill – but both felt this was not enough.

They began talking about making outdoor furniture and Zero Waste Scotland gave them a small amount of start-up funding. “From day one,” she recalls, “we were getting orders from clients to take blade material and to manage it in a more sustainable way, and do testing, and start creating pieces of outdoor furniture”

Innovate UK gave ReBLade funding that enabled the company to, she says, “bring on specialists with 3D scanners, a structural engineer, people whose expertise could help develop how we could take these structures and transform them into public realm pieces of infrastructure".

Ms Lindsay drew some of the initial designs herself.  Among them a sketch used as basis for two shelters that were installed this year above an electrical charging hub at Kingsway in Dundee.

“With these blade shelters, we've proven the concept that you can put them into public realm safely and they look amazing. And the processes to do it didn’t have more of an environmental impact than buying virgin ones in."

This, for her, is about impact and about doing something for “future generations”. 

"I do feel worried. I’ve seen my kids' anxiety watching television programmes about climate change. I see other people’s anxieties. That’s what motivates me.”