Landscape in Pain: Extractivism, Solastalgia and Geotrauma in Shetland

This contribution explores the project Landscape in Pain as a critique of extractivism in the Shetland Islands and as a case study with relevance to the wider northern and Arctic region. The contribution looks at this multi-faceted project as a means to ask how we achieve balance between sustainable development and care for communities rich in resources who are being mined by multi-national corporations. It considers how Landscape in Pain addresses the complexity of issues linked to renewable energy, climate justice, geopolitical consequences, human and environmental impact. In Shetland, the disproportionate scale of the Viking Energy Wind Farm and the daily violation and physical destruction of our environment is a cause for collective concern and despair in relation to the impact on people, wildlife and the environment for future generations.

Landscape in Pain comprises a web site and on-going series of digital drawings and films initiated in early 2021 in response to the construction of the Viking Energy Wind Farm in Shetland after many years of public debate and local dissent. Additionally it incorporates community engagement and public talks. The ongoing, and evolving, project strives to document the exploitative practices linked to the development, construction and operation of renewable energy developments. Since the project was initiated it has functioned variously to raise awareness, facilitate dialogue, provoke questions and encourage critical thinking in relation to the complexity of issues generated by renewable energy developments. The project questions the green credentials of the massive developments undertaken across rural and island Scotland that have shifted our relationship with land and sea, highlighting consequences of human impact within the wider dynamics of environmental change and sustainability.

Ideas drawn from the field of geography, such as solastalgia (Albrecht, 2005) and geotrauma (Pain, 2020), provide ways to consider the complexity of trauma, crisis, or pain created by the widespread destruction of the environment through extractivist practices, particularly in relation to the concept of reciprocity linked to the more than human in our social and environmental ecosystems. Some Shetlanders, and others across Scotland, think of the industrialisation of our land and sea as the 21st century Clearances, a cause for trauma through the forced eviction of Scottish crofters and their families in the 18th and 19th centuries. The idea of geotrauma takes cultural and social contexts into account as well as the notion of place in relation to different kinds of trauma, reflecting interplay between interior and exterior worlds at multiple scales, located trauma not only within people’s minds and bodies, but in the social, environmental and structural contexts around us.