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Changing Ideas Award
This photograph of a peat bank on the Shetlandic island of Foula offers the familiar visual language of a remote and windswept Scottish landscape. There are no humans to be seen here. But look more closely and one will notice that this terrain has already been cut and inscribed by the labour of hands and bodies that remain absent from the frame.
At an industrial level, peat extraction poses detrimental ecological consequences to the natural environment by releasing stored carbon and damaging vulnerable ecosystems. On Foula, however, peat cutting remains a small-scale and traditional source of fuel for the island’s inhabitants, having been harvested sustainably for centuries by a community that has been forced by the vagaries of the North Atlantic Ocean to adapt to the pressures and demands of a precarious marine environment.
One of the most isolated island’s in the British Isles, Foula is no different from other remote communities in Scotland suffering from the effects of depopulation. As its young people are increasingly drawn to economic opportunities elsewhere, the generational knowledge required to sustain ancient land practices risks disappearing. With its loss would vanish a mode of being-with the land that any future environmental policy would find difficult to reinstitute.
This image not only bears witness to sustainable land practices that risk being forgotten within the span of a single generation, it honours the very bodies whose quiet presence has inscribed the landscape of Foula for centuries.