15/05/2026
Last Friday was the wonderful Conserve our Coasts event at the Bute Community Winter Garden. Here, writer Andrea Dow, pens her own reflections on the event, of ocean disaster and hope, and the call to action for the watery world all around us....
Last week I walked in a bluebell wood where the massed colour of the flowers made me reach, as they always do, for metaphors of water: the sea at dusk, a flood-tide, eddies and pools of light-soaked drenching blue. At the wood’s margins too, wild garlic foamed like breaking surf, trunks rose like stipes of giant kelp and the newly opened fish-shaped leaves of beech trees shoaled and flickered over-head. To walk in a wood in spring is to walk on the ocean floor.
And there are forests under the sea. A few days after that walk we took a trip beneath the waves with David Attenborough’s film, Ocean. There, in an eerie inverse mirror-world, corals unfurled like bronze-green bracken fronds in a Scottish wood and a white manta ray soared above them with the ghost-winged grace of a herring gull.
Ocean shows a world that’s all around us but that most of us have never visited, never really seen. Lavish, stunningly shot documentaries like this bring the natural world up close in all its glittering detail but they can also distance. It’s easy to look at the lush, tropical underwater Mardi-Gras off the coast of Hawaii, or Australia’s great barrier reef and think, exotic, elsewhere, other, but Ocean also features no less spectacular waters much closer to home. Off the coast of Arran local divers witnessing firsthand the devastating effects of scallop dredgers on the seabed began a long, impassioned campaign to bring the issue to the public’s attention. Attenborough’s emotive portrayal of this fragile Eden and its subsequent brutal (yet entirely legal) destruction left some audience members close to tears.
The film went on to offer hope with reports of increased public and government awareness of dredging and over-fishing around the world, but (probably due to time constraints) it left Arran’s story on a bleak note. It’s worth pointing out then that thanks to the sustained efforts of the community group, COAST (Community of Arran Seabed Trust) Arran’s Lamlash bay was designated Scotland’s first No-Take zone and that life is steadily returning there too.
Seeing somewhere this close to home featured in a documentary of such global significance was powerful, especially for the children and young people in the audience. It shows that however small and set-aside the place you live might feel, it’s part of something bigger. It shows that the ocean doesn’t divide so much as it connects- places, people, and creatures of all kinds.
It’s often hard enough to protect what you can see, let alone what you can’t. The sea surrounds us here but for most of us it’s a beautiful backdrop, and for this island nation the ocean has also traditionally been a blank sheet on which to project our dreams, map our fantasies of empire, colonialism, extraction. And our fears of invasion.
You could read the ocean the way our culture has tended to read all nature; see it in our own dark looking-glass: a place of violence and relentless, existential struggle for dominance. But we now know that life beneath the sea is also symbiotic, complicatedly and profoundly entangled.
As a year-round swimmer I regularly dip below the surface to immerse myself in this shifting liminal zone and I find it hard to say anything definitive about a place so full of inversions and reversals, where near is far and up is down, where water distorts and magnifies, and things are even stranger than they look. You can fly over kelp forests, star-fields and pulsing bio-luminescent moons. Seen from below a mackerel’s belly shimmies seamless against a low-lit sky; from above, its back maps the inky crests of the waves. The sea is a place of correspondences and contradictions, an intricately woven net filled with glittering paradox and beautiful subterfuge: an invisible strand brushes your skin and tenderly lets loose a million stinging cells, a mottled stone splits its shellacked sides and sidles off. Nothing is as it seems and the darkest places scintillate with light. Death or life? Plant or animal? Everything’s on the verge of becoming something else. Binaries do not exist. The ocean is a q***r place in all senses of the word.
It felt significant to me that the day before this film was screened here, people were casting their votes in the local and regional elections and that while we watched Ocean those votes were being gathered in. Some voted for the natural world and for each other while others voted for division and to keep ‘the other’ out. The world is a strange and frightening place just now and people are angry and afraid.
But Ocean dissolves the very notion of other. You can’t think in terms of borders in the sea. As the film makes clear, the beneficial effects of protected areas ripple out, extending far beyond the areas themselves. As does the damage we do. Circulating currents bring exotic drift-seeds to our familiar beaches. They also bring radioactive material, not just from Hunterston across the bay but from Faslane and Sellafield. When I swim, I swim with beautiful mysterious organisms and I swim with caesium and s**t.
Poison doesn’t stop at borders and neither does life. Step into the sea and you’ll find the very notion of human/not human dissolves. It shifts your perspective to what wild-swimming laureate’s Roger Deakin called the ‘frog’s eye view.’ The water holds you up but it also brings you low, putting you on a level with other life-forms. Once, as I swam past a skerry of rocks a grey wagtail tried to land on my head. In that instant before I flinched reflexively and shut my eyes, I could see each lemon-coloured feather on its breast and feel the breathy whirr of wings on my face. For one light-struck moment I was nothing more than a rock or a rotting stump of wood. I felt blessed.
At the end of Ocean there was a call to action where people shared their ideas on how best to protect the environment. There are various ways we can do this, none of them easy. Campaigners in Arran have stressed the importance of getting local fishermen on board with their cause, which meant persuading those who might perceive them as ‘the enemy,’ that what benefits nature benefits everyone. David Attenborough cites the importance of the Save the Whale campaign in turning the tide of public opinion against whaling in the 80’s. I was a child then and I remember the passion of their efforts. I also remember the derision with which many people referred to them and other ‘eco-nuts.’ Everyone loves David Attenborough but environmental activists still face public contempt, and worse. Quite a lot of them are currently in jail.
Perhaps the one thing we can all do is to extend our own boundaries by exercising our imagination, our empathy for others, for the other. There are creatures in the ocean that we only know exist from their washed-up bones. No one has ever seen them and maybe no one ever will but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they’re there. As writer Helen McDonald, says, (encapsulating in three pithy sentences the entire heart of this piece) “We are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has done.”
Not all of us are willing to risk prison for a better world. Not all of us are able or willing to plunge into the ocean to get a glimpse of it. But we can all imagine. And we can watch this film. If you haven’t already done so, please do. Dive in. You’ll surface from Ocean shocked and shivering but exhilarated and fully awake.
