In the Year 2023

King Charles has championed environmental causes all of his adult life and it was important to hear him do so once again in this year’s Christmas address to the nation. I’m a great believer in the power of working from the ‘bottom upwards’ (as mentioned in previous blogs) rather than relying on civil servants to do the right thing, directed from the ‘top down’. I suspect King Charles believes this too, talking directly to all of us instead – trying to harness the power of the people as a force for good without any political agenda. A fundamental part of ‘bottom-upwards’ strategies is the power of communities. While we can all individually do our bit for the environment – in our gardens or on our balconies and window cills or even through a bit of ‘guerilla’ planting – by working in local community groups we can hugely expand the effectiveness of our efforts. The whole really can be greater than the sum of the parts. A bonus is meeting other like-minded people. Helping to keep our beaches clean is one such job (ref. my blog Landscape to Seascape) and I’m looking forward to joining the first beach-cleaning party of 2024 in early January, on one of our local beaches in Macduff.

View of the beach to be cleaned in January and the Art Deco Tarlair Pavilion and sea pools in the background, currently being refurbished

Talking about beaches, we are lucky in North Aberdeenshire to have access to beautiful sandy bays as well as some extremely rugged cliff-side walks, where having a head-for-heights is important. These rugged walks are a chance to see a fantastic array of wildflowers that make their homes amongst the tufty grasses and rocky outcrops. They seem inhospitable places, especially when there is a strong northerly wind blowing straight off the sea and yet so many plants seem to thrive there, nestling in the hollows and crevices. Sadly, I don’t yet know the names of many of them, but I have included a few photos below never-the-less.

Clumps of beautiful and delicate Harebell flowers dot the grassy slopes amongst the rocky outcrops

The more difficult these places are to reach, the more opportunity there is for nature to survive. But although I’m a glass-half-full person (SeeHow is about planning colourful garden futures after all) there are times when I do despair. You see, I’m actually old enough to remember being surrounded by a much healthier natural world … and it wasn’t so long ago. That is the frightening aspect. The decline in the diversity and sheer abundance of the natural world has been massive and it’s been within my lifetime. This presents me with a difficulty, as I do like to be positive when I write. I’m confronted by my own real memories, which no amount of spin can change.  

Less common on our cliffs, the deep red Thrift creates an explosion of colour

In 1963 I was a carefree boy growing up in Fife, with a superb beach at the end of my road and wonderful countryside all around. I was unaware of my good fortune. These things were simply there. That they were fragile did not enter my ‘ken’. I’m not looking back with rose-tinted spectacles, as our garden really did hum with the drone of bees and other insects. The small burns (rivers) really did team with fish. There were many river-loving birds and small mammals too. The sky really was full of songbirds that would fill the world with their chirping choruses all day long. They would flock to feed if bread was thrown out on the garden grass – all shapes, sizes and many colours. This abundance and diversity has now all-but disappeared and it seems the people responsible for monitoring the environment these days are too young to have memories of how things should be. The environmental ‘bar’ is being set too low. The natural world has become stretched, a bit like butter being spread far too thinly over a slice of bread.

Pink Thrift wild flowers growing from cracks in the rock outcrops where soil and moisture collect. Lichens also add to the bright colourful display

I soaked myself in this world, learning the ways of the wild animals and the best places to catch fish. As I grew older, using my trusty guide, ‘Food for Free’, I learned to recognise many of the wild forageable plants that grew in the hedgerows, woodlands and along the river banks, but we did not have mobile phones with cameras, so I have no record of this abundance. I did not think that this paradise would imperceptibly fade away – eroded by our own anthropogenic demands. But there it is. In my old stomping ground, woodlands have vanished; fields have become residential developments; burns have been straightened and no longer have fish, wild birds or water voles; heathlands have become golf courses; the farmers plough to the water’s edges, so the margins full of wild plants and flowers that I remember, are gone; the great line of mature beech trees that I climbed as a boy are also all dead and gone – killed I assume by the over-use of farm chemicals in adjacent fields – both fertilisers and pesticides. In the last 60 years of my life, our countryside and its biodiversity have been decimated and I’m a witness to this fact. The natural world is not as it once was, even if at a casual glance all looks well-and-good. It is not as it should or could be and our help really is needed if it is to be restored. The damage is so deep, it cannot be repaired by the superficial world of government edicts and vested interests. Only ‘we, the people,’ on the ground – in the communities – can reverse the trend.

Surface water run-off from above the cliffs has created areas of wet ground at the base of the cliffs where marsh marigolds are thriving

The paradox of this situation is that it is actually the sheer numbers of ‘we, the people’ that is causing the damage. Despite this being the root-cause of our environmental problems, this issue is never raised at any of the COP events. However, the ominous statistics have been available for decades. If everyone in the world were to live as US citizens live, then we would apparently need the resources of almost 5 Earths. This would reduce to about 3 Earths if everyone achieved UK citizens levels of consumption. So no matter what politicians say about solving the environmental crisis, the Earth’s resources are simply not there for everyone to have an equal share of the pie … unless everyone’s shares become much smaller!

Colts Foot now growing in only one nearby location, on a roadside verge behind a security fence

Regarding food production, each year we consume the planet’s annual productive capacity by a specific day, which is currently somewhere in the month of August – called the ‘Overshoot Day’.  This means there are always those who have and those who have not. In our understandable drive for increased food productivity we are displacing the natural world with one that benefits only us. Wild flowers and their insect friends are a casualty, left hanging on in the least accessible locations – all that there is for them. It is sobering to look at Google Earth images of the cliffs near my home, to see fields that have been bravely ploughed to the very edge of the sea cliffs because the farmers wanted to optimise their financial subsidies, which were based on the area of productive arable land. For the same reason, some years ago, the ancient hedgerows were uprooted over a huge area. Nature was simply squeezed out, pushed to the edge of existence with hardly a thought about the consequences.

Camomile growing amongst the scree fallen from the cliff-face above

I hope one day to create a, SeeHow – Wild Flowers edition. Seeing the steep slopes near Macduff covered in colourful flowers is a fantastic sight and worth the effort of getting there. As I write, in late December at the end of 2023, the gorse bushes are in full flower – bright yellow splashes of colour across areas of unusable land and along roadside verges. In the low winter sunshine they create a warm feeling of welcome optimism despite the gloomy threat to their existence. They keep going. Spring is just around the corner. Soon the delicate blue harebells will be back, sharing the slopes with clumps of pink and red thrift, yellow primroses, pink campion, marsh marigolds, wild sedum, rosa rugosa, camomile, daises and dandelions and many, many more. Can’t wait!

Gorse in full flower growing on a very steep embankment by the sea cliffs

The above Text and all Photographs are copyright of Wincenty (Wicek) Sosna. Please contact SeeHow for permission to reproduce in any way, in part or as the complete text.