Flame shells, nesting eagles and pots from waste. New hope stories for 2021.

When we get demoralised, we need to remind ourselves of these things. It is not over yet. Nature is already restoring itself and surviving in some places. There are humans that are already changing things for the better. There is light in the darkness.

Diver making plant pots from marine waste

It was what professional diver, Ally Mitchell, saw through his work that led him to create Ocean Plastic Pots, a start-up turning waste from the ocean into plant pots. Earlier this year he got a job working on the salvage of a vessel, the Kaami, which had run aground, hitting a reef north of Skye.

“The ship was,” he recalls, “carrying 1937 tonnes of pelletised refuse-derived fuel, which is basically shredded waste material that they incinerate as part of the concrete making business to make ash. The plastic floating in there was quite a shocking scene. If any of this pellet waste had escaped into the environment it would have been quite a large amount of pollution but fortunately none of it did. In amongst the debris was milk bottles and shampoo bottles."

As it happened, also on his mind at the time was the 26 tonne sperm whale that had, four months earlier, famously washed up on Luskentyre beach with 100 kilos of rope and fishing net in its bely. It was the start of lockdown, and each night he went home and read about recycling and ocean plastic pollution, learning how there is 10,000 tonnes of plastic dumped in the North Sea every year – and that 11 percent of that is rope.

“I’ve got two young children,” he says, “a three-year-old and a five-year-old, who are quite involved in planting in the garden and growing things, and I had this idea that we could use polypropylene to make plant pots. I was aware that in my job we used to throw away a phenomenal amount of polypropylene rope in my job – a one tonne bag every four weeks.”

Mitchell started to play with the idea of using the rope and net, as well as plastic gleaned on beach clean-ups, to make such plant pots at home, using compression moulding. His first attempt, he recalls, looked like a rice cracker, but soon he had made an actual pot. “From there we continued to play and we got better and better. We wanted to utilise the colour from the raw material. ”

Now he has worked with a product design company and a manufacturer, both Scotland-based, to create his own production line of such pots. "We’ve embraced this concept of a circular economy – where our pots come from a waste material. We don’t adulterate it in any way and at the end of its life it’s really easy to recycle because it’s single poly propylene We even changed our stickers and started using a polypropylene sticker which means it doesn’t have to removed and just recycled."

But Mitchell’s business also provides hope because it is not alone – rather he is just one part of the growing circular economy. He shows what we can do when we try to reuse our resources rather than throw them away.

Flame-shells discovered near Arran

When, in December, a rare living reef of flame shells, was found by divers in the Clyde, south of Arran, it seemed like a small flaming beacon of hope. Such beds had almost disappeared from the Clyde region, having been destroyed by bottom trawling, and the only known remaining bed was in Loch Fyne. But here was another, a huge carpet of 10,000 square metres.

The beds are our very own Great Barrier Reefs, living ecosystems that support huge diversity, and which as Jenny Stark of Community of Arran Seabed Trust (COAST), the community organisation that discovered it, describes as “biodiversity powerhouses” and important “blue carbon stores”. When so-called blue carbon habitats like flame shell beds help sequester carbon from the atmosphere, they are helping combat climate change.

“They’re called living reefs,” says Jenny Stark, “and without that key species at the bottom, that habitat wouldn’t exist. It’s like a coral reef which depends on the coral to support all the other life. The flame shell bed forms a complex matrix which affords an opportunity for loads of species to live there.”

Lucy Kay, the diver who made the initial find, recalls the moment of discovery: “Trying to control my excitement I carefully lifted up the edge of the consolidated seabed material and there it was, a beautiful flame shell. I quickly took some photographs in case people might think I had been hallucinating underwater. In many years diving in the UK I had only seen flame shells on a very few dives, and those had been at sites of known flame shell beds.”

Flame shells are beautiful, bright orange molluscs, with flame-like tentacles, but their value is not in their aesthetics – it’s in the fact that the nests that they build combine to create a dense bed which is home to many other species. n 2017 a flame shell reef in Loch Carron, an area without protection, was damaged when it was dredged.

The bed that was discovered is only a flame of hope if we protect it, and others like it – and if our MPAs are effective in stopping dredgers and trawlers coming in and destroying such habitats. In November last year, a leaked government report revealed that in spite of protections, the last ten years have seen significant decline in our underwater habitats. The declines were most severe in Argyll, which has lost at least 53 percent of its flame shell beds and 35% of its serpulid reefs since 2010 – but the Clyde region had also lost at least 9% of its flame shell beds.

Such a discovery is only hope if we push for more protection of our waters and their proper management.

“We’re really thankful it was in an MPA,” says Jenny Stark, “because otherwise it would be at risk. It could have been another Loch Carron. What is called for is proper spatial limits on bottom-towed fishing in our inshore waters. The Our Seas coalition, of which we are a member, are calling for this exact thing. Proper protection and management of these protected areas but also spatial limits, a modern inshore limit.”

Homes heated by the Clyde

The first large-scale water source heat pump scheme of its kind in Scotland, was switched on recently and is already making Dalmuir one of the greenest areas in the country. The system, which extracts water from the Clyde to generate heat for buildings at Queens Quay, works using a system which generates heat from the difference in two temperatures. In this case, the source of the heat – which can be the ground or the air – is the River Clyde.

The attention of the world will be on Scotland when we host COP26, the world's biggest global climate conference, this autumn. Neil Kitching, energy specialist and author of Carbon Choices, observes that such projects are among those we should show off. “COP26 is a massive opportunity to showcase Scotland’s world leading ambition on tackling climate change and the actions that we are already taking – the UK’s largest onshore windfarm at Whitelees can be seen from Glasgow, the first ‘smart canal’ in Europe in Glasgow designed to prevent flooding, and the Scottish built heat pump at Clydebank is the largest high temperature water sourced district heating system in the UK – extracting energy from the River Clyde.”

Eagles returning to Dundreggan

Though there are many eagles in the west of Scotland and islands, across large swathes of central and eastern Highlands their potential territories and breeding sites have remained unoccupied for decades. Such was the case at Dundreggan – the flagship rewilding estate run by Trees for Life – until last spring. No eagle had bred there for forty years.

But on a bright, sunny day, this year, Doug Gilbert went up “to a part of the estate, where in 2015, the ornithologist Roy Dennis had supervised the construction of an artificial eyrie, designed to attract eagles and saw what at first he thought could be a rock in the corner of the nest or just a shadow. “Then,” he recalls, “it moved and stuck its head up and I thought ah, it’s a large bird and that was it. The magic moment. I was whooping and hollering once I got a little bit away from the nest.”

A couple of months later a young eagle fledged. The arrival of the eagles is seen as of benefit to the entire ecosystem. As Gilbert puts it, “Our feeling is that having an intact ecosystem which has develop for millennia is bound to be more resilient and better functioning than one that doesn’t have, for instance, top predators. And because we’ve wiped out every single top predator, golden eagles have only just hung on by the tips of their talons and if it had been up to the Victorians we would probably have eradicated them as well. We’re pretty sure it will have a positive impact.”

Dundee turns electric

When, in 2019, the Mayor of London announced that they were going to move to 10 percent of the taxi fleet being electric vehicles, they were chasing Dundee’s tail. The city had already achieved that goal and has the largest percentage of electric minicabs anywhere in the UK with 165 fully-electric taxis. As John Alexander, councillor and the youngest council leader in Scotland, puts it, “This is just another example of Dundee leading from the front.”

Dundee, he points out, has been viewed as a pioneer, in terms of the electrification of transport, for some years. In 2018, it was even awarded, by The World Electric Vehicle Association an E-visionary award for its pioneering initiatives to encourage the use of electric vehicles.

Since then it has gone further, showing the way for other cities. It has the highest number of rapid chargers of any Scottish city, a council-owned network of three solar-powered charging hubs capable of taking 78 cars at a time, free parking for pure electric vehicles (not hybrids) in the city’s multistorey car parks, free use of public charging points for those resident within the city and a former petrol station which has now become an electrical charging hub with solar canopy that actually generates electricity.

Alexander who has championed such changes also believes in practising what he preaches. “I turned in two petrol cars,” he says. “My wife and I used to have separate cars and we now have one pure electric vehicle."

A chorus declaring “enough is enough” ahead of COP26

A song can make a difference. A song can make us believe there is hope and galvanise us around a movement. Such was the impact of Karine Polwart, Oi Musica and the Soundhouse Choir’s Enough Is Enough when it went viral last autumn. The video, an invitation to join a huge collective “musical response” to COP26, begins with the words, “If our planet could talk to us now, what would she say?” The song that follows is urgent, child-like, sad and rousing. Its lyrics, at one point, repeat over and over the line, “Enough is enough. But it’s never enough.”

This song is just one element in a wider movement of people coming together to put pressure on COP26 in Glasgow and demand that this summit does produce the necessary change. Many groups have already joined in a COP26 Coalition. Its founder, Asad Rehman, said last month, “This is an opportunity for bold action - a green recovery that fixes our broken economy and that can turn the corner on a COVID pandemic that has left the poorest suffering the most; one that can end energy poverty and hunger and ensure everyone can live a dignified life.”

Hope lies in the belief that we can change things – that our individual actions we can turn things around, create a song of change. If you are in need of any encouragement just watch the video for this song, and feel the urgency. It’s a rallying cry, calling us all join the song for the planet and the movement for change.

Levenmouth, a hydrogen community

The small town in Fife where 300 homes, over the next two years will have their old gas heating ripped out and replaced, is the site of an important experiment announced last year. There, households will become the first in the world to use pure hydrogen for cooking and heating. Hydrogen might not be the answer for every home, as we attempt to decarbonise our heating system – the more frequent answer is likely to be heat pumps – but it is, undoubtedly, part of the formula.

The Survivor Tree

Twenty years ago, a lone rowan, clinging to a stream bank in an otherwise treeless valley, stripped by centuries of sheep and goat-grazing, inspired the Borders Forest Trust project to plant 600,000 trees and the slogan, “Where one tree survives, millions will grow.” That tree is now surrounded by young, native woodland, the Carrifran Wildwood. It's no longer lone, but soon due to be obscured from view by others its size. Recently named Scottish Tree of The Year, it has been declared a “symbol of hope”.

Philip Ashmole, the zoologist and ecologist who was one of the driving forces behind Carrifran, has described how they were doing this work long before the term rewilding was used in Britain. Places like this, and others like the Cairngorms Connect project, have shown us what is possible when we give nature a kick-start. They show what can happen when we remove our sheep, deer and other grazing herbivores and give trees a chance.