In this online chat, author, poet and community activist Mandy Haggith talks from her Assynt croft in the north-west of Scotland. She is using poetry to create a sense of agency when so much seems bleak. We hear of community development in Scotland, how policy has enabled local people to but estates, islands and urban plots. It’s hard, though, to create the income streams for local people. Mandy talks of the use of poetry in local projects on nature recovery and reducing fossil fuel dependence. She says, “At least, verse can’t make it worse.”

She says, “Little changes can snowball into vast change. We don’t all need to be heroes.”

Mandy’s books include The Lost Elms, five collections of poetry, and five novels, including The Last Bear; Bear Witness, The Walrus Mutterer. See her website: https://www.mandyhaggith.net/

Mandy recommends Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer.

Her action: go and plant a tree (if you have the resource). Do imaginative time travel: go into the past, find things that are wonderful, beautiful, uplifting. However far you went back, now go forward the same amount of time into the future, and take that good thing with you. Imagine how that feels.

People feel better. It seems to generate hope about the future.

My new book will be supporting this podcast, and will be published in March 2027 by Unbreaking/5m. It’s called "Bamboo and Butterfly: Transformation and Story for Climate and Nature Recovery."