By leaves we live

what does green mean?

Hello friends

I’ve been thinking about green this month. There’s a lot of it about just now, in the fullness of mid-July growth. So I’ve revisited and reworked a post from a couple of years ago, circling back to pick up an idea I’ve not quite done with yet:

The rainy summer means the loch is still brim full of water

Orkney is often mentioned as a place that’s at the forefront of the transition to ‘green’ energy, with marine renewables and wind power already generating 120% of our electricity and more big development projects already underway. A gigantic electricity substation is currently under construction. Cables that will send Orkney’s abundant renewable energy South will cross the islands under and over ground, and beneath the waters of the Pentland Firth towards mainland Scotland. Offshore, the enormous West of Orkney Windfarm also in development promises to deliver 2000MW of energy.

Good news. Perhaps.

But in all the talk of green technology and reaching net zero, all the plans for more wind turbines across moorlands and along the sea horizon, the arrays of solar panels, heat pumps, EV’s, carbon capture and storage, and (god help us) new nuclear power, something seems to have gone missing from the conversation.

Nature itself. The original green.

In his essay “Putting the land back in Climate” activist and writer Rob Lewis asks:

What if there’s another side to climate change, one less concerned with what we put in the atmosphere than what we do to the land?

He points out that our singular focus on atmospheric carbon emissions has led us to forget that there is another, equally powerful force at work in our climate that has, in recent decades, largely dropped out of the conversation: water.

Though we tend to think of climate in terms of carbon, water is in fact the primary medium of Earth’s heat dynamics, perhaps not surprising on this 71% water planet. Water not only has the highest heat capacity around, it’s also a shapeshifter, continuously phase-changing between water, vapor and ice, absorbing and releasing heat at each juncture, elegantly distributing heat along the way.

water on the move

Richard Heinberg has also argued eloquently that the green machines are not coming to save us. Restoring nature’s own cooling cycles is our only viable climate solution.

On the large scale, ocean currents move enormous amounts of water around the planet, shifting more water onto land via precipitation than evaporates from it. On the small scale, water falls as rain or other forms of precipitation, is absorbed by soil, is drawn up into plants, and transpires or evaporates back into the atmosphere. This dual water cycle has a net cooling effect.

To restore these complex water cycles we must:

Re-vegetate the planet. Restore soils so they hold more water. And get rid of pavement wherever possible.

Rain and grass, both plentiful in Orkney

More green.

In the green fullness of high summer in the northern hemisphere, everywhere around us we see the most powerful, efficient, miraculous, machines unfolding themselves spontaneously into the sunlight: leaves.

Each leaf is water-fountain, cloud-maker, carbon capture and storage mechanism, rain-bringer, flood-preventer, shade-bringer, soil-builder, air-cleanser, food source and habitat, all rolled into one perfect, tiny, life-saving buoyancy aid.

Orkney may not have leafy forests, but we’re pretty good at growing grass. Every blade of it is in constant exchange with the air, water, soil, insects, birds, animals wild and domestic, and, of course, people.

Summer fields in Orkney

The Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes, in 1919, famously remarked:

How many people think twice about a leaf? Yet the leaf is the chief product and phenomenon of Life: this is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live. Some people have strange ideas that they live by money. They think energy is generated by the circulation of coins. But the world is mainly a vast leaf-colony, growing on and forming a leafy soil, not a mere mineral mass: and we live not by the jingling of our coins, but by the fullness of our harvests.

It’s not by the whirr of turbines, but by the green of leaves we live.

‘The Quiet Hill,’ Samantha Clark, 2026, Acrylic on Aluminium panel, 50 cm x 60 cm (20 in x 24 in)

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until next week!

Sam