The Project

“Scotland is uniquely placed among industrialised nations to lead on the carbon issue: low population, access to land, clean air, water and forests for intense carbon sequestration, substantial scientific research and supportive communities of interest prepared to undertake action”

The Deep Wealth of This Nation, Scotland is an original vision to see how one small country can mobilize as a nation to be the first industrialised country to move past the carbon cycle and become the first nation to give more to the global environment, which the Harrisons call the Life Web, than it consumes. This vision, informed by an interdisciplinary network of contributors hosted in ongoing discussions, takes form as a poem. This poem transcends political and social boundaries and encourages the possibility of collective action at all levels in society.

The Conversation

Deep Wealth began, true to the conversational form developed over many years by the Harrisons, as a call and response. The Barn invited Newton Harrison to consider a work that would address the Dee and Don catchment area in the wake of recent floods. The response was to look to the Dee and Don watersheds, observing how they join on either side of the city, and ‘let them tell us what to do’. So the twin watersheds became a model through which to sketch a larger vision described above and pictured as a set of beautifully realized maps that grow from the initial guiding metaphor of the poem that accompanies them.

Newton perceived wealth in the form of commons: the commons of topsoil, water, forests, atmosphere and importantly ‘commons of mind’, that is a shared understanding of how each commons, and the entire life web, comprise an interdependent ecological system. The image that emerged in Newton’s imagination cast an ironic glance at the work of Adam Smith in eighteenth century Scotland. Smith’s vision had had a strong ethical underpinning in shared access to wealth in exchange for labour and the need for forms of governance that would offer protections to citizens. It had also unwittingly founded a form of modern economics reliant on industrialised systems that have escalated environmental problems.

In a playful flipping of ‘wealth’ as it is commonly understood, Newton’s vision positions human well-being as dependent upon the well-being of the web of life. Humans can live from the abundance that nature can produce with careful husbandry and a sense of responsibility rather than competition, but not the other way round.

In this way the work suggests a dialogue between place, poem and future possibilities. It invites us to consider the future through a revaluing process of shared discussion with amongst others, artists, scientists, farmers, planners and foragers. These movements in between different perspectives gather together voices and an active citizens’ network.