Against all the odds we gave ourselves, some sense of the heart of the oppositional situation on Easdale Island is emerging.
It’s disguised, even from its protagonists, by a welter of distractions that would seem to drive much of the anger in the situation. However, powerful as they are and woven, as they are, into the fabric of the divisions, they are in many cases by-products rather than causes; and in other cases, are separate issues of a different nature.
The truth of what is happening – and has been for for a very long time, is that this is a collision of two philosophies, each essentially but differently romantic and each largely unachievable.
In working to describe this scenario – which identifies the heart of the matter, what might be achievable and what could never be – we have had to generalise because that’s what patterns do. We are aware that there are exceptions to all generalities and have no wish to offend by ignoring those exceptions. As always, they prove the rule.
The two philosophies
One of these is laissez faire, of the ‘let it be’ persuasion’, essentially independent minded taking life as it comes. It is reactive, and is physically and psychically disturbed by – and perhaps resentful of – proactive intervention, however well meaning.
The other is the myth of the golden-age-that-might-be, the notion of a community in harmony with itself and with its place, mutually supportive, creative, joyful, working to secure a worthwhile future and striding purposefully forwards – together. A good-hearted myth, it is every bit as improbable as being left alone - because much of life is driven by tension even where that tension is ‘creative’.
Interestingly, when you look at them, these philosophies have a lot in common as well as their different but genuine attractions.
Both are centred on withdrawal, in a place – an island, itself physically withdrawn – where the first can let it be, behind the drawbridge that is the ferry; and the second can work to create newly a distinctive community.
With painful irony, given the actual situation on Easdale Island, both mythmaking micro-cultures arise from a felt need for peace, for oneness. The first is, by its nature, more passive and reactive; the second more active and proactive. One group wants to leave things alone; and the other to make them what it thinks they should be.
Apart from their mutual incompatibility, neither can succeed in its own terms.
In the everyday sense, you can neither reverse nor arrest time; and you cannot neuter the diversity and cussedness of humanity.
The myths in action
In a small community, these two myths cannot but collide – and angrily, because the very nature of each threatens the other.
One wants to stand still where the other keeps pushing forwards. One is self-contained; the other expansive, invasive even. One sees the other as a runaway train; and the train sees trees across the line. One eats the lotus and the other harvests the pollen. One is content where it is, independent, chilled, resistant to organisation. The other is organising, necessarily schematised, martialling forces for the onslaught on the future.
Neither world view can harmoniously predominate within one small community because what they want is diametrically opposed. But by their nature, one group will inevitably become dominant because they are the ‘doers’; and doing is, by nature, interventionist. It takes space and displaces, where laissez faire demands little.
The ‘doers’, busily creating the myth of the golden-age-that-might-be, drive onwards. They have a destination and an ETA.
Those just out for a scenic drive feel hooted at, tail-gated and sometimes rear-ended by the speed merchants. And the driven can hardly contain themselves at what they see as the obstruction to their progress offered by the dawdlers.
One side reacts to harrassment by deliberately driving even more slowly, doing the odd dodgy swerve to annoy the boy racers and throwing tacks into the fast lane to slow them up; while the other suffers rising blood pressure that can erupt into road rage.
The result is the genuine aggravation, disturbance and distress – as has happened – from the collision of largely incompatible life forces.
Consequences
On Easdale, the Residents and Property Owners Association represent, to a degree, the myth of the golden-age-that-might-have-been. From what they say in their comments, it is clear that a majority of them are most comfortable in trying to keep things as they were; and, in that context, are at peace in the ‘now’. They may be fairly undemanding, left to themselves. But they haven’t been left to themselves. Life and society leave few of us alone.
Eilean Eisdeal are driven by the myth of the golden-age-that-might-be. They are working – hard – to create a fantasy community and an island idyll. They are fuelled by the work ethic and the awareness that life on an island like Easdale will not survive if it cannot become sustainable. This push for sustainability leads them to look to the ‘now’, creating circumstances intended to build and promote the island; and to look to the future, which is the reason for their focus on the ‘now’.
The first group is essentially self-centred and the second generous spirited, wanting to create on behalf of others as well as themselves. The problem arises when the additional beneficiaries do not want what is on offer. But the Eilean Eisdeal schema requires them to want it.
This problem is not specific to Eilean Eisdeal. It is generic to all reformers. It is a reminder of the need to avoid adopting a monolithic vision.
The Residents and Property Owners Group are not largely engaged with future-building. That’s not their myth. They do, however, welcome what the future-builders’ efforts achieve, when it suits them; and, feeling bullied and abused, resist it fiercely when it undermines their own myth.
The reality, the insurmountable and the possibly surmountable
In a community as tiny as Easdale’s – and on a tiny island – no one can constructively do anything that affects the entire community unless it is almost universally consensual.
Not to accept that is to impose the brutality of force majeure – and that is a powerful recruiting sergeant for subversion.
Force majeure, at best, will get ‘consent’ by default, through abstention but there will be a price to pay for that. Consent may be won by persuasion but where it cannot be, reason suggests the exploration of potential alternatives.
The projects currently on the Eilean Eisdeal agenda are the wind turbine, the 6-bunk hostel with kitchen facilities and a modest amount of social housing. The charity wants to progress all three. The Residents and Property Owners are angrily opposed to the wind turbine, against the social housing and perhaps more neutral on the hostel.
When we said in our founding article that we saw these Eilean Eisdeal proposals as ‘to scale’ with the community, we were not referring to the height of the turbine but to its singularity and its modest utility; and to the equally modest scale of the social housing and the capacity of the hostel.
Of course the turbine would dominate the little island and would be an invader from another planet. So much is in the eye of the beholder and none of us can see as others see. We think it would be fun, a sort of steel tatterdemalion prayer flag planted on little Easdale and joyfully shouting sustainability. But it simply must not be imposed without consent. If that consent is not forthcoming, there will be other less contentious projects that might bring the sustainability of renewable energy to Easdale and perhaps to all the inhabited Slate Isles.
Given the waters around these islands – with the Dorus Mhor and the Sound of Luing, a marine turbine farm is an obvious, if more distant but more reliable alternative.
If the hostel might be a consensual project as it is now conceived, why not agree to build it? The people who would use it would be likely to be harmonious to the laissez faire group but their presence would bring both a positive contribution to the local economy and, through word of mouth, a broadening future impact.
Of course there is a cost benefit in building the social housing at the same time as the hostel but, if agreement were to be reached on the general acceptability of the hostel, the extra cost would be worth paying . Such an agreement would start to build a context of negotiation, compromise, mutual respect and consensus.
Then there are local tensions embedded in existing events.
Take the World Stone Skimming Championships – a genuinely delightful, left field invention – making creative use ‘the pile of waste slate’ – one affectionately witty way of describing Easdale. This event brings folk from all over the world to the island – for fun – and makes it a focus of international attention (and envy), as with the recent Lonely Planet accolade.
For those who live on Easdale to be left in peace, this is a genuine invasion – but a short lived one. It is certain that any community tensions around this event would dissipate if the context of trench warfare scaled down – as from time to time, it does already.
More troubling here is the quite serious vandalism and the anti-social behaviour which has – last year for example – been inflicted by event visitors on the picture-postcard little mainland township of Ellenabeich, minutes across the sound on the neighbouring Isle of Seil.
The event organisers have to do everything it takes to make it clear to participants that the event may be free-wheeling but social responsibility to others and to their places and properties is an imperative.
The future
Eilean Eisdeal is right that sustainability is the key to Easdale’s continuing ability to delight and support its residents and visitors. The Slate Islands, like Campbeltown in Kintyre, are literally out on a limb, at the end of the line, at the world’s end. They, above all, are terminally vulnerable to the failure to build for sustainability. But there is more than one way of achieving that.
Those who don’t want to be involved in any of this do not have to be. It is perfectly legitimate for the ‘doers’ to do, with the absolute proviso that it is by general consent.
The enabling key is the acceptance by one group that dropping automatic obstruction is an active contribution to a better collective future; and by the other, that that their admirable willingness to do the heavy lifting cannot be thought to earn them the right to do what they like.
There is – perhaps oddly – an essential gentleness and idealism at the heart of the differing philosophies of each of these opposing groups of people. That has its own compatibility – if a social archaeologist could dig and brush away the accumulations of hostility which have grown to mask it.
The challenge is to find a way to peaceful coexistence, discovering ways to neutralise whatever obstructs that; and then – sometime – to see if constructive coexistence is possible and attractive.
Lynda Henderson
