From MIT Press via Literary Hub:
Deep Time and an Uncertain Future on the Orkney Islands
Considering Energy Solutions in Remote Communities
The following is from Energy at the End of the World, by Laura Watts, and is best understood in the context of that work. Copyright © 2018. Reproduced with the permission of The MIT Press....MUCH MORE
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I. Three Energy Futures
The sun has burned its way down the side of the Hoy hills, and the distant horizon is aglow with red and orange embers. The prehistoric stone circle is all dark shadows leaning down the heather slope. I touch the silica and lichen edge of the nearest standing stone, its stratigraphy thin, like a layered stone skin. My hand gleams like metal under the molten light. Walking slowly, I follow the muddy path inside the ring of stones, leading around and down toward the mirror of a freshwater loch. There are 27 stones still standing in the fragmented circle, out of what may have been 60 when it was assembled around four or five thousand years ago.
The Ring of Brodgar stone circle is considered by many prehistoric archaeologists to be one of the earliest of its kind, a model for subsequent stone circles built elsewhere, potentially the blueprint for Stonehenge. The monument forms part of the UNESCO Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site and is an essential experience for every visitor, even when that visit is just a few hours on a coach, to and from a cruise liner. It is a striking place that generates cliché. It is hard to take a bad photograph at the monument. And hard to take an interesting one, not already repeated a hundred times before.
But the stone circle is also part of contemporary life in the islands. The Ring of Brodgar lies on a sliver of land, an isthmus, between two shining lochs in the heart of mainland Orkney. It is visible from the main road between the two towns, Kirkwall and Stromness, and is seen by everyone who drives through the area. From the road, the stone circle appears as distant dark teeth set in a heather jaw, with mirrored cheeks of water on either side. The monument is both a familiar and extraordinary part of the enduring Orkney landscape.
The standing stones are not the only enduring technology in the landscape. Around the monument are enduring infrastructures, such as roads, electricity cables, telephone poles, and wind turbines. Stone, silicon, and metal technologies coexist in a working landscape. The monument’s future is entangled with the Energy Islands’ renewable energy future, with its turbines, grid cables, and increasing Orkney electrons.
Walking around the curve of stones, I have returned to the top of the slope. I look out over the field, past the Bronze Age round barrows (grass-covered burial mounds), beyond the brackish loch, and toward the Hoy hills. The two hills appear like pulses in the sky, whose line continues to meet the low, analogue hills above Stromness, upon which a red sun rests. This is the view that another Energy Islands’ saga is focused on, one that happened around the beginning of my fieldwork, a decade ago, but has left its scars. This saga shows how hard it is to make energy futures cohere, and despite local struggles, there are good things to learn about how to go on together, into a long future.
From the road, the stone circle appears as distant dark teeth set in a heather jaw, with mirrored cheeks of water on either side.
The saga begins when the local islands council gave planning permission for three wind turbines to be installed on a hill just north of Stromness, on a rise of moorland called Merranblo, a project proposed by two local business people. The hill is just there, visible from the Ring of Brodgar stone circle, where the sun is setting as I write. Due to the visibility of the wind turbines from this important monument, there were objections raised. A public inquiry was held to decide whether the planning permission should be upheld or rescinded. Local tensions ran high. National tensions ran high. The situation became so serious that UNESCO became involved and, in particular, the organization who advises them on World Heritage Sites, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). Representatives from this council, along with many other national organizations, came to Orkney to give evidence at the public inquiry.
What follows are fragments from three energy futures that cannot coexist. These fragments come from statements made at the public inquiry, held one dark winter month in 2008 in a Stromness function room—the one with the faded red velvet chairs and sparkling chandelier overhead....
Previously:
Feb. 18
The Orkney Energy Miracle
