The River Avon flows through the “rust belt” of West Lothian, the old industrial heartland of Scotland.
But on a walk along its banks last week I saw few signs of the old civilisation. Yes, there were the occasional remains of weirs and water mills and railway lines and viaducts, but they were hidden in the undergrowth as nature reclaimed the landscape. It set me thinking about how we are handling our age of transition.
Will we, for instance, move out of oil and gas as quickly as we left the age of coal and heavy engineering? And will the transition be as cruel as it was to the mining, shipbuilding and car manufacturing communities of Central Scotland? Such questions are immediately real to the 400 workers at the Grangemouth oil refinery not far from the River Avon and the 65,000 people working in the North Sea oil and gas industries in Aberdeen and the North East.
This week, the first redundancy notices were handed out to the 400 workers at Grangemouth by the owners Petroineos who last year announced they intended to close the refinery in the summer. So far the Scottish and UK governments’ Project Willow has done little to organise a transition to renewable industries. The £100 million of aid promised is simply to help the town cope with the effect of the job losses, not create new industries.
The same is happening in Aberdeen where the new Great British Energy agency is based. The SNP this week has been highlighting the fact that this “British” agency will take 20 years to effect the promised transition to renewables. What are oil workers supposed to do in the meantime, as the oil industry winds down?
The issue has exposed a rift inside both the Labour Party and the SNP over the dash for “growth”. There are those who want to continue pumping oil and gas out of the North Sea for short-term economic growth – giving permission for the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields to go ahead. And there are those who want to stick to the existing policy of no new oil and gas developments.
Other transitions comes to mind. The Scottish Government’s budget, approved by parliament this week, has £21 billion allocated to health and social care, half the entire budget. It means there is a squeeze on everything else – especially local government, environmental projects and higher education. But within the health service itself, there is supposed to be a transition from hospital care to GP surgeries and specialised clinics. But again it is slow and uncertain, with only 6.5 per cent of the NHS budget being spent on GP services and only four of the promised nine treatment centres opened. Meanwhile, three new hospital projects have been given the go-ahead.
There is a slow transition too in the countryside. Farmers are being subsidised to care more for the environment rather than maximise food production. Land is being seen not as a source of income but a resource to absorb carbon and allow city folk to improve their wellbeing by enjoying the wilds of nature. To this end the government is planning a third national park, this time in Galloway. But the local council looks distinctly uncertain about it. This week only 15 councillors voted in favour of the idea, 25 were undecided.
The biggest transition of all is climate change. And while we humans are not adjusting to it, indeed trying to ignore it, the bird population are already adapting. Figures out last month from Nature Scot show that of the 66 species of land birds studied, 32 increased in numbers over the last 20 years 30 declined and 4 remained stable.
But within these numbers, there are big changes, due largely to the warmer climate. Among woodland birds, chiffchaffs have increased 14 times, woodpeckers 7 times, blackcaps 5 times. But others, like the famous capercaillie, are in danger of extinction. Some farmland species have increased, like the goldfinch, the great tit and the magpie. But others are in decline: kestrel, greenfinch, lapwing, oystercatcher, rook, and skylark. Seabirds were in serious decline even before the bird flu epidemic, largely because of changes in fish and ell stocks due to climate change. Scotland has lost half its seabird population since the 1980s.
Changes in nature, industry, and indeed in our general civilisation, happen slowly. And that’s the trouble, because we don’t notice until the change becomes a crisis. Then it’s too late to do anything about it and we abandon those most cruelly affected.
