NATURE – RESTORING THE WILD, CONFRONTING THE CLIMATE AND BIODIVERSITY EMERGENCY
Nature has always been not even a secret passion of mine. As a child I spent much of my time on tiny islands in the Sound of Sleat – the tidal waters separating the Scottish mainland and Skye. I grew up with naturalists like Gavin Maxwell, the celebrated author of Ring of Bright Water, his protegé Terry Nutkins who went on to be a popular TV naturalist, and Maxwell’s last young protegé, (now Sir) John Lister-Kaye who pioneered a Highland rewilding enterprise with my late father, the climber and writer Richard Frere more than half a century ago; John went on to establish the Aigas Field Centre, near Beauly, and also his reputation as a leader in conservation and naturalist writer.
So my formative years counted otters and owls as my friends if not quite playmates, and perilous rowing boat crossings over the fickle seas surrounding the lighthouse island of Eilean Ban were better than funfair rides.
The island was insulted when it was co-opted to support the Skye Bridge, but the cottages, which my parents restored for Gavin Maxwell back in the sixties, are now the Bright Water Centre, a small museum to preserve his memory.
The centuries old family home where I have my studios still has a multitude of visitors, human and animal. Deer and pine marten often intrude from our burn, badgers root out ground bees and our own native Highland bees still gently hum in our roof, which also hosts its own microcosm of bio-diversity with insects galore, bats, birds, including our constant summer residents, the house martins who return faithfully from their sub-Saharan winter roosts.
My own peregrinations took me all over the world before returning to the nest, where I realised we have a major fight on our hands to halt unbridled development depleting nature, disrupting the climate and if we are not careful adding humans to the burgeoning numbers of species lost to extinction. Even close to the shores of Loch Ness, speculative builders and industrial developers are wilfully destroying nature and the ecology. This wanton destruction of nature’s biodiversity must be halted.
So now I volunteer to help save our native Highland forests, with Trees for Life at the amazing Dundreggan Rewilding Centre in Glen Moriston, and have refocused my art, in all its forms, to helping people recognise that we all must act to save our precious natural world that is rapidly being diminished, eroded and irreversibly destroyed in the delusion that we can go on forever exploiting the very limited resources of this planet.
Nature cannot be bought and sold – it is priceless.