Watch this space for news of my forthcoming book, The Lost Elms, due for publication by Wildfire/Hachette in summer 2025. It is a love-letter to elm trees of all species, in all countries. I am lucky enough to live in a place where the native wych elms have not yet succumbed to Dutch elm disease, but my life has been affected by the loss of elm trees in many ways. Despite this, I find hope in their rich cultural stories, their many practical uses, their fascinating ecology and their resilience in the face of disease - when climate change feels like a crisis, elm trees offer a different way of looking at time and a deeply-rooted kind of comfort. 

 

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In 2008, Virgin Books/Random House published Paper Trails: From Trees to Trash - The True Cost of Paper, a non-fiction book about where all the paper we use comes from. Paper Trails was written after Bill and I did a huge journey, overland from Scotland, through Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, USA and Canada, to see where all the paper we use is made, its history and future, and what impact it is having on forests and their people.

It is now out of print, though second hand copies may still be available. Hopefully one day I will get a new edition back out into the world. It is based on twenty years of my life as a forest activist, particularly focused on trying to stop the paper industry from destroying the world's forests, including working as the international co-ordinator for the Environmental Paper Network from 2005 to 2018.

 

 

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Several hand-crafted booklets of nature writing, called Earth Wondering are available in the shop. These are the result of a daily practice of going out into nature, finding something that stops me in my tracks with wonder, then letting my mind explore around until I find a question or something worth wondering about. The results are brief, questioning, hopefully thought-provoking, sometimes poetic. They're accompanied by beautiful images by Bill Ritchie.

 

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Reviews

I just love writing book reviews. Here are some of them.

• Evergreen Ash by Christopher Abram.
• Black Cart by Jim Carruth and The Nature of Winter by Jim Crumley
• A interesting mixture of poetry books.

I have written lots of feature-length profiles of north Scottish creative people. A recent one was about Helen Denerley, sculpter, in the wonderful new Art North Magazine. Many of these were in Northings magazine, the ezine of Hi-Arts, which is sadly defunct, including pieces about about Fergus Stewart, potter; Helen Lockhart, wool dyer; Barbara Macleod, jewellery maker; James Graham, singer and James Hawkins, painter. I wrote this feature about Fergus Stewart in the January 2011 issue of Ceramic Review.

I have written for Resurgence Magazine, The Ecologist,  Pulp and Paper International and the magazines and newsletters for lots of organisations including the RSPB, Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Woodland Trust, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, Greenpeace, WWF, Reforesting Scotland etc. These are mostly about forestry, woodland, tree or paper issues.

I have written and helped to co-ordinate teams to write visions, plans, funding applications, leaflets and reports for various organisations including the Environmental Paper Network, The Woodland Trust, Assynt Foundation and Culag Community Woodland Trust. For several years I was part of a team at the Centre for International Forestry Research, working on Adaptive Collaborative Management of forests. I helped to design software, visioning and planning methods and wrote models, research papers and user guides, some of which are here.