Reflecting on: Connected at the root
8 July 2025: Grassroots campaigners, artists and cultural practitioners gathered at The Anatomy Rooms in Aberdeen for a film screening and conversation to explore climate justice and international solidarity, and to reflect on entanglements between people and land.
Just futures
The evening started with two short talks about local climate justice struggles.
Michelle Marshall, North East Community Engagement Officer for Friends of the Earth Scotland, spoke about weaving together social and environmental justice in Boddam, Aberdeenshire.
In 2022, SSE and Norwegian company Equinor submitted a planning application for a new gas burning power station with a carbon capture plant in Boddam. The application is for an additional plant alongside the existing Peterhead gas burning power station, which Scottish Environment Protection Agency figures have shown is repeatedly amongst Scotland’s biggest polluters. Research by independent think tank Carbon Tracker (PDF) revealed that climate pollution from the proposed power station and carbon capture plant could be three to five times higher than SSE and Equinor disclosed to the Scottish Government.
Michelle, a resident of Boddam, shared how small and powerless people can feel in the face of the government-backed oil and gas corporations on her doorstep. Despite this, she asserted that community resistance and resilience give the village the power to fight for just futures: ‘If you can learn helplessness, you can learn hope; if you can learn hope, you can learn strength; and if you can learn strength, you can create change’.
Energy transition
Rachel Grant, a freelance curator based in Aberdeen, presented ‘Living with Energy Transition’ (PDF), a collaborative project with artist Maja Zećo, anthropologist Dr Gisa Weszkalnys, urban planner Dr William Otchere-Darko and community partner Friends of St Fittick’s Park. The focus of the project was to ask what it meant to live with the energy transition in Aberdeen.
At the centre of the project was a series of four soundwalks that took place at St Fittick’s Park, a site earmarked for development as an ‘Energy Transition Zone’ (ETZ). The park sits between the neighbourhood of Torry, the city’s semi-industrial southern periphery, and the newly expanded Aberdeen South Harbour. It is the only green space accessible without public transport or a car in Torry. The ETZ plans to transform the park – a sanctuary for humans and non-humans, including many bird species, deer and other wildlife – into an industrial complex designed to attract renewable energy businesses to the area. In the context of the ETZ land grab, soundwalking was a political intervention, documenting the rich acoustic ecology of St. Fittick’s Park and the web of human and non-human relations.
‘Soundwalking became a means of witnessing seasonal alterations, rain and shine, changing wind direction, building sites being worked and completed, new industrial developments becoming, and the migratory movements of some of the many bird species that inhabit St. Fittick’s Park.’
Rachel Grant, curator
Film Screenings
Following the talks we watched two short films selected by Take One Action Film Festivals, our event collaborator.
Seaweed (2022) by Julia Parks explores the folk songs, ecology and history of seaweed in northern Scotland. It highlights the meandering links between seaweed and the people whose lives it touches, from seaweed harvesters and alginate factory workers to environmental activists. Archival footage and oral histories situate the decline of seaweed farming and the violent displacement of kelpers and crofters within the context of the Highland Clearances.
The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (2024) by Theo Panagopoulos is a film essay that reclaims a Scottish missionary’s footage of Palestinian wildflowers in the 1930s and 1940s, during the British Mandate of Palestine from 1922 to 1947. The film questions the role of the archive – and image making more broadly – as a tool of both testimony and violence when connected to entanglements between people and land.
The attendees had the opportunity to discuss the films over dinner, which was provided by Friends of the Earth Scotland.
Weaving our connections to non-human beings
We closed the evening with a workshop facilitated collaboratively by Culture for Climate Scotland and Take One Action Film Festivals. The activity wove the connections between the right to access green spaces and radical relationships between people and non-human beings.
Chris Aldred, a member of Friends of St Fittick’s Park, read a poem originally written for a public hearing on the proposed ETZ. The poem describes the thriving biodiversity of St Fittick’s Park and the non-human beings at risk of displacement:
‘The ETZ spokesperson they asked of me
Oh where is the profit in your patch of green?
I answered them back with a tear in my eye
Oh where is the hope in your profit?
There have always been flowers since the start of the year
Marsh marigold sparkling through grey winter showers
Gold in March sunshine, white blossom in May
Will anything flower under concrete?
The blue tit, the robin, the heron’s weird cry
The chaffinches, greenfinch and bullfinch fly by
Pigeons and magpies, moorhens and ducks
Will anything fly past your concrete?
Fruit from wild cherries and red rowan trees
Brambles and berries, hazelnuts green
The fruits of investment are nothing to these
Your profits sour fruit of the concrete
Generations from Torry have looked out to sea
From the graves in the kirkyard no waves can be seen
Heritage lost and the money moves on
Will our ghosts have to walk on the concrete?’
After listening to the poem, participants were invited to consider their relationships with non-human beings through the following exercises:
1. Write about a non-human being that you have a connection to. This might be a body of water, a boulder, a tree, a bird etc.
2. Draw this non-human being. This does not have to be literal. Instead, you might think about drawing how the non-human being moves, the shape of any sounds it makes or how the nonhuman being feels to touch.
3. Share your drawing with the person sat next to you.
The group then wove a physical web of relation. One by one, participants described the non-human beings they had a connection to. Each person joined the web if they could imagine their non-human kin was connected to someone else’s being. Participant Carrie Fertig reflected that she could have entered the web at almost any point because ‘all non-human and human beings are interconnected in some way’.
We reflected on the feelings of grief that emerged when describing non-human beings that were threatened, or now only existed in individuals’ imaginations. One participant felt reminded that we are not alone in our grief. In coming together to organise against social and environmental injustice, we can share our grief in ways that mitigate feelings of helplessness and resignation to recognise the strength that lies in the collective.
Further resources
- Join the Reel Change film club, a collaboration between Friends of the Earth Scotland and Take One Action, at Peterhead Community Theatre. If you’re not in the area, why not start your own community film club?
- Listen to Landed, a four-part podcast series by Farmerama Radio. Landed is a personal exploration of land ownership and colonial legacy, told by Col Gordon, a Scottish farmer’s son.
- Read about the 2022 exhibition, In the Eddy of the Stream, by Cooking Sections and Sakiya, which explored the history of land struggles in Scotland and Palestine.
About Green Tease
This event took place as part of the Green Tease events series and network, a project organised by Culture for Climate Scotland, bringing together people from arts and environmental backgrounds to discuss, share expertise and collaborate. Green Tease forms part of our culture/SHIFT programme.
Film still credit: ‘The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing’ by Theo Panagopoulos.