Marianne Brown’s The Shetland Way tells how an unjust energy transition has left lasting division on the Shetland isles. Originally published in the Scottish Left Review.

When Marianne Brown travelled to the Shetland Islands to attend her father’s funeral in February 2020, she was perhaps more unprepared than most for the six months of lockdown that followed. Having grown up in Edinburgh, and by then living in Bristol, Shetland was both physically and culturally remote. But those lockdown months living and grieving in her father’s croft, along with her then partner and their three-year-old daughter, became an entry point into island life, its precarious past and entangled present. And almost by chance, she found herself in the middle of a fierce debate about its future. A debate that was tearing apart the community she was coming to know.

Shetland is at the sharp edge of the energy transition. When the Shetland Islands Council cut a deal with the oil industry in the ‘70s, the islands grew rich; the large, well-built community centres, sports facilities and arts venues stand as monuments to this boom time. But the tide is now out on oil, and the urgency of the climate crisis means the world is scrambling to transition to something more sustainable. Shetland, like the highlands and islands of Scotland, is turning to a natural resource it has in abundance: wind. But as elsewhere, big renewable energy projects are being met with on-the-ground resistance. The book focuses on a key site of controversy: the Viking Energy Wind Farm mega project on the Shetland mainland, owned by private energy company SSE. With 103 turbines, each 150 metres tall, the wind farm was being built right next to Brown’s father’s croft.

Inspired by a conversation with her father a decade earlier about his own worries around the coming wind farm (the planning complexities meant the project took years to get off the ground), Brown sets out to understand the depth of emotion – anger, despair, resignation, hope – that the project has stirred up within the tight-knit island community. She interviews key players on all sides: members of Sustainable Shetland, who bitterly fought the windfarm on the grounds that it would destroy deep peat and bird habitats, and eventually lost; the local councillor who pushed for the windfarm alongside a vision for community ownership that was later thwarted; an artist appalled at the noise of the turning blades and the intrusion of the human onto a natural and living landscape; a principled conservationist who, despite serious concerns, saw the development as chance to restore peatland habitat as part of the fight against climate breakdown.

The Shetland Way is a kaleidoscope of ecological anxieties, turning over on themselves, rippling out and connecting back: nature, climate, capitalism, modernity, community. A chance encounter with a raingoose, Shetland’s cherished rare wetland bird, on a dreich spring evening forces an urgent exploration of the global plastic pollution crisis via a childhood memory of birdwatching with her dad. Lists of Shaetlan bird names – peerie whaap, skeer devil, blood linnet – weave island folklore into the tragedy of modern biodiversity loss: “Every year more and more face extinction: Now one in four in this sad, dried up, dying country.” Listening back to recordings of her father chatting about his kale patch spark meditations on grief – her own loss of him, but also the collective loss of humanity’s connection with the soil amidst its endless death march of economic growth. 

Two questions chase each other across the pages. Was the wind farm development right to go ahead, given the depth of community opposition and the projected impacts on nature? And isn’t the switch to renewables a global and urgent imperative given the climate crisis? Brown refuses to come to a definitive answer, letting her interviewees speak for themselves. You can feel her quiet hesitation to probe deeper and pose a clear opposing view in some of her interviews, a tendency I sometimes found frustrating. I wanted her to be more fearless, to ask tough questions of the activists opposing the windfarm on ecological grounds. Would you rather stay wedded to fossil fuels, I wanted her to ask them, and watch the planet slowly burn the peatlands and birds you want to protect? Similarly, I longed for the proponents of the windfarm to squirm under interrogation on their lack of sensitivity to the wildlife that shared their island home.

But Brown’s refusal to argue and polarise ends up as her strength. In part, she hesitates because she is both “an insider and an outsider”, unable to stake a claim on land she feels “wasn’t really mine.” With a father born and bred in Shetland, locals she met ‘placed’ her on the Shetland family tree as one of them. This act of generosity clearly touches her. But she isn’t from Shetland, and doesn’t claim to be. She thus foregoes the right to judge any decision by a community about their own place. She seeks only to understand, “to give people an equal ownership and platform for their words,” and they open up as a result.

Which makes the tragedy of what happened in Shetland even more galling. Brown discovers that the initial plan for the Viking wind farm was 50% owned by the community, 50% by SSE. The vision was similar to the 70s oil boom when the community cut a deal with the industry for the benefit of generations to come. It could have been – should have been – a just transition landmark: a former oil and gas community growing collectively rich while saving the planet. Instead, the various delays and setbacks (both from local opposition and opaque government subsidy regimes) created untenable levels of financial risk, resulting in the community having to pull out. SSE gained full ownership, and so too all the profits. The £20 million community benefit was eroded to a measly £2 million. The windfarm is now operating, a wound on the landscape to many, and the community remains bitterly divided.

Perhaps a more useful question to ask is not whether Viking should have happened, but how similar projects can move us away from oil and gas in a way that unites and nurtures, not divides and destroys. Clearly, the current transition to renewables, pushed by private energy companies unaccountable to the public, is falling glaringly short of what we need. Communities should be at the front and centre of decisions about the places they call home, and should be the first and foremost to benefit. Ecological impacts must be taken seriously and remedied properly. And the wider context is crucial, too. Brown is haunted by an image she once saw of a man in Vietnam sitting next to the bodies of his wife and children, his whole village having been swept away by a landslide made worse by extreme typhoon rain. This is the climate crisis, she insists; we must act. Our collective challenge, then, is to act together for the benefit of all – “native, incomer, artist, farmer, peasant, landowner, raingoose, great northern diver, peat, mangrove, kale, whale, wind.”

The Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on my Father’s Islands by Marianne Brown is published by Borough Press (£16.99).