BEC’s own Marianne Brown has just published her debut book, The Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on My Father’s Islands, which mixes memoir and journalism to tell the story of Britain’s most productive onshore windfarm. We asked her some questions about the writing process and the journey that led her from journalism to community energy.
What inspired you to write the book?
My father was from Shetland and he moved back there after retirement. I wasn’t very close to him, he and my mother split when I was young. He died in February 2020, and I went up there with my partner and young daughter to attend his funeral, only to stay there for another seven months held captive by lockdown. During that incredibly intense time, I got to know him through his house, and the land he grew up on, eventually feeling a connection to the place myself. Shortly before heading back to England, I read news about a vast onshore windfarm, the most productive in Britain, which was about to be built on mainland Shetland, just visible from Dad’s fields. The vast majority of the energy produced would be exported via undersea cable to mainland Scotland. Over the previous 20 years it had gone from being a community-owned project to one now belonging to energy giant SSE. I was editor of an environmental magazine at the time and I felt the journalistic urge to unpick the story behind it. So I spent the next few years conducting interviews to understand people’s connection to the landscape and how that translated into the way they felt about the wind farm.
Shetland is a fascinating place because despite having a population of only 23,000 people, located in the most northerly part of Britain, it has been central to the country’s exploitation of energy from whaling to oil and now wind. It’s also really important for biodiversity so I wanted to bring in all these perspectives, as well as historical and cultural layers to the landscape, to get a richer sense of the value of the land – beyond the purely economic. The book was life changing in many ways, not least because it inspired me to leave journalism and get a job in community energy!
Did working at BEC influence the story at all?
I started working at BEC while I was writing the last few chapters of the book and was inspired to include a section on the Future Energy Landscapes model. Giving an example of how communities can be included in energy development from the beginning felt really important, and I really liked the fact that central to this, people were asked to map how they feel about their local area. This was something that felt very sidelined in the Shetland wind farm debate.
I interviewed Daniel Stone from CSE to hear more about the theory behind the project and Marchelle Farrell, who took part in the workshops. We discussed her relationship to place and renewable energy. I found her perspective as a psychotherapist really fascinating. I hadn’t realised at first that years before I’d actually commissioned Marchelle to write for the magazine I worked for. Her book Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside – Finding Home in an English Garden was later shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize.
Now the book is out, what have been the highlights of the coverage so far?
There have been lots of good reviews in the national press, which has been amazing. The local Shetland press has covered it too, including one editor whose work I quote in the story. One particular part of his review really touched me as he mentioned the theme of listening, writing: this is “exactly what has been missing from the bitter dispute over whether Viking was the right move to secure the future of what we all call home.” It gave me hope that the book can contribute something positive to the debate.
The most recent highlight was appearing as a guest on Radio 4’s Start the Week. I managed to do an impression of a red-throated diver live on air – and give the last word to community energy.
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The Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on My Father’s Islands is published by Borough Press. You can order the book here.
