This is a very good read and I see it is long-listed for the Wainwright Conservation Prize. I wish it well, because it’s a good book, but it has about as much to do with conservation as it does with cricket.
This is a book about carbon in many different guises. The author travels across Scotland visiting old coalfields and their slag heaps, old nuclear research establishments, oil rigs, and a bunch of renewable energy projects. We visit the Flow Country, the Uists, Highland forests, Kintyre, Orkney, Shetland and some cities and some duller places too. But it is a fun series of trips because of the people we meet through the author and his thoughts on the journeys by rail, ferry and his decrepit car.
A bicycle journey opens the book as he cycles home to write after having drinks with friends in Munich and sustains a serious head injury which is a companion on these journeys. I couldn’t help wondering whether he was wearing a cycle helmet.
The book has plenty of examples of things from the past which were thought to be great and then didn’t turn out too well (e.g. burning coal and capitalism) and things from the present that look as though they will be great (renewable energy).
I’ve been to many of the places that crop up in this book, including some of the dull ones, and they are brought back to my mind in this book. But I hadn’t set up a lot of discussions with the locals and those, and the author’s memories and thoughts of the future, make this such a good read.
The cover? That’s how I remember the coast of Caithness feeling – thrifty. I’ll give it 8/10.
Drifting North: finding a sustainable future in Scotland’s past by Dominic Hinde is published by Manchester University Press.
You could buy this book from Bookshop.org and I have set up a booklist to make that easy through this link https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/MarkAvery I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
[registration_form]