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INTRODUCING JAMIE WHITTLE

Foreword author Alastair McIntosh is professor of Human Ecology at the University of Strathclyde.  He author of Soil and Soul and two volumes of poetry.

Still a young man, Jamie Whittle has already quartered the globe and packed in the experience of two lifetimes.  In conversation he is relaxed, even laconic, and a centre of calm.  He gives the impression of a man who, having grown larger in his mind, sees further ahead as he grows, and indeed he is all of these things. 

His life’s origins are in the Highlands of Scotland.  Born in Inverness he spent his earliest years in the village of Findhorn on the Moray coast.  Stand on the shore there and, on a good day, you can see all the way across the wide body of water known as the Moray Firth to Caithness.  Over there is the village of Dunbeath where Neil Gunn was raised and where he located his seminal work, Highland River.  In essence it is the story of a returnee walking upriver to the source, musing on the world and his place in it in time of international crisis.  The Second World War was already casting its shadow and, for its hero, so were the challenges and questions that would arrive with nuclear power. 

Listen to the cry of the gulls and the sound of the tide as it draws across the shore and you have some idea of how powerful an impression the natural world must have made on the mind of the child.  Now the family renovated a cottage in the nearby Altyre woods and to his experiences of the shore were added the sounds and smells of river and forest, the brittleness of autumn leaves, the moistness of moss in spring and the rush of the river in spate. 

My own clan, Mackintosh, traditionally presided over the headwaters of this river.  A son of my own great-great-grandfather ran the Altyre Estate stables. His father, Murdo MacLennan, sang as precentor in the church in Contin.  Today on my wall I have a picture from 1896 of old Murdo and his children beside another of myself standing by Randolph’s Leap on the River Findhorn, the stream below heaving with winter ice. 

It was in his family’s tradition that children be educated away from home, so after attending the nearby Logie Primary School, Jamie went first to Aberdeenshire and from there to the Yorkshire Dales to complete his schooling.  There he excelled and earned a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

The Morehead is considered to be the most prestigious undergraduate scholarship in the world.  It demands its students ‘must do the things they love to do, and become enthusiastic leaders while doing them’.  More than that they must meet the lifelong challenge of perpetually seeking ways to give to whatever communities they become a part of – local, national, or global.  Along the way they are directed to discover new passions and strengths that will build enduring leadership skills. 

Only forty students are accepted in any one year and, of these, only two are from Great Britain.  At Chapel Hill Jamie graduated in Modern Languages with honours, taking the Jacques Hardré Prize for French along the way.  His subject was the Life of Paul Gauguin and to complete his thesis he extended his travelling experience to Polynesia. 

The travel habit by now had joined the natural world in his bloodstream.  After graduating he drove with a friend in a ‘beat up old jalopy’ the thousands of miles to Alaska where they hiked through the Yukon Territory.  Intent on time for himself, and space for his mind to expand into, he took almost two years out in 1997 and 98, travelling across southern Africa, through Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa itself.  In these areas another level of sensitivity was added to the awareness he had taken from the Yukon and Polynesia, and most foundationally from the River Findhorn. 

The Okavango Delta, he says, ‘was like Eden in the diversity and richness of its plant and animal life’.  In the Namib and Kalahari deserts he added sand, grit and dry heat to an already deep reading of Laurens Van Der Post – a close friend of both the depth psychologist Carl Jung and Prince Charles.  He also travelled to Costa Rica and, privately, in a cloud forest there, made the life commitment he had been searching for – that he would dedicate himself to the protection and preservation of wild places and threatened species.  Since then he has realised the vital connection of these places and species to the wellbeing, indeed the survival, of the human species.  In White River he writes of both things as one. 

In Nepal he chose his means and direction and, on returning, enrolled to study Law at the University of Edinburgh.  During his time at law school, in order to study further the substantive issues concerning the environment, Jamie also embarked upon a Masters degree in Human Ecology at the Centre for Human Ecology.  As the course director it was at this point that our paths crossed and we began our long exploration and friendship.  Like me, Jamie is inspired by the geopoetics of Kenneth White, that ‘higher unity of geography and poetry’ that White sees as the shamanic function in Scottish literature. 

Since then we have campaigned together, travelled together, talked together.  I will always remember visiting a bothan on the Isle of Harris, shortly after the mountain known as Roineabhal had been saved from the predations of a superquarry.  It was the old sort of blackhouse that had no chimney so we struck up a makeshift hearth on the middle of the floor and watched our smoke saunter out under the thatch into the summer gloaming.  There we slowed down to the outer and inner cosmos that fills the Hebridean night and it felt good to be alive.  So good – and that has always been my experience of time spent in Jamie Whittle’s company – whether in bothan or classroom, shooting white water on the River Spey or reading this, his first book. 

University summers were spent firstly working as an intern at the Centre for International Environmental Law in Geneva, and the following year in the mountains of Ladakh on the Tibetan Plateau.  There he joined the International Society for Ecology and Culture, a non-profit organisation, living for a summer with a Ladakhi family in the Himalayan village of Hemis Shupkachan.  This translates as ‘The Place of the Cedars’, a descriptive, functioning name that echoes the Gaelic place names in the land of his birth. 

Participating not only in this family’s group life but in the whole interconnected life of the village, he tended cattle and yaks, herded goats to the high pastures, planted and harvested barley and apricots, milked cows and churned butter and, through it all, was impressed by how a community working together in a hard environment could create abundance out of so few resources and manage to live so well.  It was while herding goats that he decided to write his Masters dissertation in Human Ecology on the River Findhorn. 

Returning to Scotland and to his final year of university studies, he completed law school and graduated in Human Ecology with distinction.  In 2001 he joined a prestigious corporate law firm based in Glasgow and there deepened his understanding of the legal mindset of which, in some ways, he was destined to trouble the peace.  As will be guessed after even a cursory examination of his life to this point, his time in the city was not easy for him.  Yet it was this immersion in corporate culture that propelled him to write seriously about the natural world for a wider reading public. 

By 2003, a life pattern of action, engagement and thought was emerging in which, until now, ‘action’ meant ‘study’ and ‘engagement’ meant ‘travel’.  With formal studies and legal training complete, however, a new kind of action was required.  It proved to be the balancing of development and wilderness as it is contested in law, but in determining his route within this field he needed more thinking time.  After joining a ski-mountaineering expedition to Patagonia, he qualified as a ski instructor and taught in the Alps for a winter, before heading to British Columbia where he trained as an outdoor instructor and deepened the interest in canoeing so evident in White River. 

Had he been fated to live as a carpenter or a compositor it could now be said, and he recognised, that he had ‘served his time’.  The apprenticeship was over.  He accepted a post as an environmental lawyer with a firm in Forres and Inverness and returned to Moray and the River Findhorn.  Back in the Highlands he followed in his family’s footsteps by renovating a cottage and making a new home – and here he completed his first, great, book.

White River is the story of a foot journey to the source of the Findhorn and a return by canoe to its delta and outlet to the sea.  As such it follows the example of Neil Gunn’s Highland River, although it is a book written for different times.  The threats that face us now undoubtedly include war, but to that are added global warming, nuclear waste, plastic detritus, chemical fertilisers, cultural degradation and the pollution by oil and other poisons of our single great, shared resource of water.  It is no longer enough to go to the source.  A careful return along the line of the river is also required, meaning a practical re-examination of the way we live and of our values. 

White River is one of those rare environmental books that, more than a local travelogue, takes us on a journey into the soul of modern times.  Holding the lawyer’s scales of balance as he goes, Jamie recognises that the river meanders between two banks.  One is economic and practical.  The other is aesthetic and idealistic.  Without both we are undone, but with them – with this constantly shifting equilibrium – we can glide through the potential paradise that is our Earth. 

‘I consider the River Findhorn a sacred place’, Jamie writes. Only one who loves very deeply is capable of speaking such truth of heart with such unquestionable authority.  Only someone closely in touch with the groundedness of place could get away with it.   Take this book with you to a quiet spot of your own. You may never have had the privilege of growing up somewhere like Jamie did but you can be touched by the beauty of his sharing, as I have been. You can be penetrated by the salmon’s wisdom and ravished by the stag’s roar. You can be laid open to that outer and inner cosmos that dreams forever on and on… like wisps of smoke from beneath an honest homestead’s eaves.