What is your backstory?
My father was Scottish, his people from the Highlands and the Borders, and he studied medicine at Edinburgh. After the Second World War he got his first job in England and married my mother, a nursing sister from Birmingham.
My first four years were therefore spent in Doncaster in a small mining village called Armthorpe.
My father wished to return to Scotland, and in 1960 got a job as a doctor on the Isle of Lewis. However we used to go on holiday every summer to Doncaster, which was great and at the time seemed more interesting than the Isle of Lewis! There was lots of ice cream and lots of toy shops and it was so exciting!
Perhaps you don’t always appreciate where you grow up! But I had the good fortune to be raised in a medical family within an indigenous crofting (or fishing and farming) community in the Outer Hebrides.
After studying Geography at Aberdeen University, I went to Papua New Guinea with Voluntary Service Overseas and that was an incredible experience.
When I was in Papua New Guinea people asked me about land ownership in Scotland. They couldn’t believe that our communities didn’t own their own land. This prompted me to get involved in my work on land reform and helped me to realise that in Scotland and England we are, in that sense, a colonised people.
Back to the geography days, and I remember being influenced when on a field trip from Aberdeen University to Newcastle in 1975.It was heartbreaking, listening to the stories of increasingly redundant miners in villages outside the city and how the 1960s Beeching Cuts to the railways had cut many of them off. We also had to ask people in a high rise block of flats over a motorway what life was like for them. It was clear that while the slums had been removed, the sense of community had also been dislocated as well.
What is it that you write and campaign about?
My most famous book is Soil and Soul where I write about being born in Doncaster and then, from the age of 4, life in the Isle of Lewis. We were always out hunting, fishing and working on the land in an indigenous community that was very close knit.
After going to Papua New Guinea with VSO,I got involved in Scottish land reform with the Isle of Eigg Trust. This was a six-year campaign, during which we raised £1.6 million from 10,000 donors worldwide, and we were able to buy out the owner of Eigg and set in course an example of what land reform looks like. There are now some 500 land trusts in Scotland, covering about 3% of our land area.
I also write about the spiritual underpinning of this kind of work. Having been brought up a Presbyterian (but later becoming a Quaker), I ended up in Papua New Guinea working with bishops and Catholic nuns. This was soon after Vatican II and it cemented my passion for liberation theology: that is, the understanding that God is always on the side of the poor and those who suffer, liberating people from poverty and all other forms of material and spiritual oppression.
I like to weave that spiritual dimension and what it means to be a human being into my writing. If our consciousness is more than just brain activity but rests in the soul, it starts to beg wider questions: questions about what it means to be me, to be us, and so on. Why do all the great world religions have a sense that we are all interconnected? As Pink Floyd sang in Echoes:
“Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand?
And lead you through the land?
And help me understand the best I can?”
What do you hope your work achieves?
Fundamentally, I hope to help people to wake up to the deeper meanings of life as love made manifest, which is my definition of spirituality. Whether writing on climate change, land reform, nonviolence or life in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Govan I weave spirituality into the whole shebang. It’s a worldview that’s fundamentally different from a shallow reality where we’re all just competing with one another like dog eat dog.
Can you tell me about successes?
I have been fortunate with the outcomes of much of my activism on land reform on Eigg, and in helping to stop a superquarry in a National Scenic Area in the Isle of Harris.
With much of my work, and this is the same for most activists really, what we do today will come to fruition possibly after our lives are over. I’ve also been involved in much that hasn’t had much obvious success, but really, success and failure in the big issues of life can rarely be measured in a lifetime.
As the saying goes “don’t be misled by success or failure”. Or as Kipling put it: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
It is most important to be spiritually true to your calling with the faithfulness of service, not the expectation of success. That’s what the Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism teaches, or Christianity’s call to walk the way, the truth, and the life, and to do so cheerfully in spite of all the setbacks.
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Can you tell me about your plans for the future?
I turned 70 last year and I am writing about spirituality. I’m currently raising money to republish and hold a community festival on Eigg to mark the centenary next year of a book of Celtic spirituality, called The Road to the Isles.
What other initiatives are you involved in?
I am a founding trustee of the Galgael trust in Glasgow, addressing issues around urban poverty, and I work with the Iona community on issues around spirituality, as well as on land reform with groups like the Isle of Eigg.
Why is your work important?
My work is only important in as much as our humanity is important along the paths that each of us might choose to walk. I believe the same applies to every one of us. It’s not the size of what we do that matters. It’s love. Remember the story Jesus told of the widow’s mite; that her humble gift counted for more than the billionaire’s millions.
What would be your vision of a better future for people in the Northeast and the UK/Scotland as a whole?
We need to construct a wider vision of what a human being is, opening up each person’s human potential so that we hold each person as a human soul. Let us live a life that gives expression to the possibilities of the soul. Let us develop that alongside understanding the science of how the world works, but crucially, in ways that uphold the integrity and beauty of the world.
In the GalGael workshop we have some pretty broken people, but these are people whose experiences have often crafted them deep in soul. I walk through our workshop looking at our community, and ask myself: what might be this or that soul’s calling? What might be their meaning in this place, at this moment, and what part can I and each of us play in that opportunity? And also, how can they help me to unfold meaning in my life?
We need a just society that recognises what liberation theology calls “God’s preferential option for the poor.” There are two sayings: “Blessed are the poor” and “Blessed are the poor in spirit”. Human wholeness requires tackling both material and spiritual poverty. It’s for everybody, poor and even, for the rich!
I know that your work, Peter, has involved “development” in the North-East. You’ll therefore be well aware that that begs the question, “What kind of development?” The word development comes from the same root as “envelope”.
To develop, is to unfold the envelope, to open out human potential. This is what social teaching for which I have great respect in the Catholic church calls “integral human development”. That is what we have to aim for in our personal lives, and together, in public policy. The unfolding of each person in their wholeness, in a framework that is political, social, economic, psychological and spiritual. That is when we start to see the vision of what it means, or could mean, to be and to become a human being.
You can read more about Alastair’s life and work here.
Alastair’s books include Soil and Soul and Riders on the Storm.
You can read a review of Riders on the Storm here.
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