A mere commodity

Recently Viking Energy provided written evidence to the UK Parliament’s Scottish Affairs Committee’s inquiry into the renewable energy sector in Scotland.

A considerable part of this evidence was given over to a refutation of Sustainable Shetland’s submission to the same inquiry.

Sustainable Shetland had asserted that the project had been (and would be) “injurious to the health of the Shetland community”.

Viking Energy claimed that: “There is no evidence to support this claim and we dispute it.”

As further evidence http://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/scottish-affairs-committee/renewable-energy-sector-in-scotland/written/34863.html Sustainable Shetland provided the following link to an article in the Shetland News http://www.shetnews.co.uk/news/4730-viking-energy-the-human-impact 

The American author Barry Lopez, in his seminal book Arctic Dreams, had this to say about people’s relationship to the land that surrounds them:

“It is easy to underestimate the power of a long-term association with the land, not just with a specific spot but with the span of it in memory and imagination, how it fills, for example, one’s dreams.

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For some people, what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land. If the land is summarily disfigured or reorganised, it causes them psychological pain. (my italics).

Again, such people are attached to the land as if by luminous fibers; and they live in a kind of time that is not of the moment but, in concert with memory, extensive, measured by a lifetime. To cut these fibers causes not only pain but a sense of dislocation.”

This is something that proponents – including the Scottish Government – of the Viking Energy, and other industrial-scale wind farms in Shetland completely fail to understand. To them the land has become a mere commodity, just as the land (and sea) of the Eskimos did, to satisfy our greed.

James Mackenzie
Vice Chair
Sustainable Shetland
Tresta