coe195_watts-2.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome back, everybody, to the Cultures of Energy podcast Berlin Edition.

Speaker2: [00:00:29] It's going to be a lot of Berlin editions

Speaker1: [00:00:31] Berlin Edition Part one. Number one how? How are you doing?

Speaker2: [00:00:33] Number one Good. It's a little lagging of jet over here.

Speaker1: [00:00:38] I'm going to get to you,

Speaker2: [00:00:39] Jet lag Gridley.

Speaker1: [00:00:40] I'm going to get you pumped up then. Yeah, you should get you pumped up with a couple of things we're going to do on this podcast for the next several weeks while we're in Berlin. We're going to do special Berlin stories, special Berlin stories, moments. We don't really have a name for this feature yet, but they're going to be special special Berlin stories for sure that people are going to enjoy very much and we have one to share today. But the other thing we might want to tell people about is the family revelation you had to, which is also kind of cool. So I don't know. Do you want to do family revelation or is that too complicated to get into?

Speaker2: [00:01:14] Oh my gosh, I don't know. Yeah, that might be kind of complicated. Maybe we wait until we hear more news in case we get some more news, because I think there's some yet some details to come in. Plus, I don't know that anyone would be interested in it other than me. And maybe you.

Speaker1: [00:01:28] I mean, honestly, we stayed up late last

Speaker2: [00:01:32] Night debating, yeah,

Speaker1: [00:01:33] This whole thing and creating various theories. I think it would be a great podcast.

Speaker2: [00:01:38] Well, OK. All right. We did. Yeah, we could do. Yeah, we can be the unfolding mystery that can be a good that's good practice for scriptwriting.

Speaker1: [00:01:45] But here's the tagline. Here's the tagline What will you do if you thought your great grandfather had stayed in Switzerland with a group of relatives who would've never known? Because this is already so boring? You were thinking of going here and thinking of taking a trip to Switzerland to find your own relatives. When you discover that he actually emigrated to the U.S. and had been living in Melrose Park, Illinois, and working as a night policeman for years. And all of those Swiss relatives are actually just Chicagoans. It's just Tal Afar, but you never met him anyway. It did. It was more interesting than that. There are a lot of twists and turns,

Speaker2: [00:02:26] But most people haven't met their great great grandparents, actually.

Speaker1: [00:02:29] Well, that's the thing. It's like,

Speaker2: [00:02:31] I don't even know if it's possible.

Speaker1: [00:02:33] What if your father who you thought was Swiss right and abandoned you actually was living a secret life in Melbourne in Melbourne's park, where he ran a failed movie theatre in a place called Cold Town or city? Or was

Speaker2: [00:02:47] It cruel? Yeah, cold

Speaker1: [00:02:49] In a place that was obviously starved for entertainment because it's called coal, city couldn't even keep a theater's doors open. Anyway, let's see if we get a resolution to this story. We may check back in. I know that was a little cryptic, but in terms of our Berlin Stories First Edition, we went today to something called the DDR Museum, which is a museum devoted to recreating life and extending public understanding of the former East Germany. Now, as somebody who spent a good chunk of his life studying the former East Germany, I pretty much have PTSD right now.

Speaker2: [00:03:25] Oh, do you really?

Speaker1: [00:03:27] I was triggered. I was triggered by two things in there, but so many.

Speaker2: [00:03:31] How did you tell us your impressions first? I was going to try to find the little thing, but how it's described here in the book, but it may take me a while to get there

Speaker1: [00:03:39] Rollicking, laugh filled romp through late

Speaker2: [00:03:43] Socialism. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I guess you described it as like kind of colonial, I guess this sort of colonial, but there was a better way of describing it. I think that's all the disorder. Yeah, it's just all the all the kind of stereotypes that ever existed around socialist states or aspiring communist states gets crystallized into a kind of bad plastic form in this in this museum. But I will say it's just it's pretty interesting to see all these objects. It's a whole, oh yeah, it's like, you know, they have these rooms set up like they have a little kindergarten classroom that I guess is more or less authentic and with the little coats hanging on the wall and the abacus and the lesson plan for the day. But the whole narrative of the museum is that it was a space of a place of total unfreedom where individuality was squashed

Speaker1: [00:04:42] And practices and collective body training

Speaker2: [00:04:45] And create and create and creativity was was verboten. I mean, that was the other funny thing is like the creativity was disallowed and there's a couple of different plaques that said that creativity was was was sort of disallowed.

Speaker1: [00:04:59] So I would say squash, there's a part of it that if you know the caricatures through which the unified German, I will just call it West German state has has sought to portray the East German history and legacies. I think if you know that history, there's nothing surprising there. And as you say, it's just a gallery of stereotypes and caricatures, some of which are presented so like boldly and without. Context that they're almost kind of funny. There was one of them where they were like because of the collective toilet training practices that the GDR used in its kindergartens. Some scientists believe that this has created a greater tendency for right wing extremism. Right. And in, you know, post unified East Germany. Right, right.

Speaker2: [00:05:42] This is something like one day one political theory.

Speaker1: [00:05:45] Yeah. And it was. I remember when that article was published and it was a huge uproar in Germany about it because it was was such a kind of shit science, literally no pun intended. But then it's every I mean, it's like it's every single exhibit is in some ways saying, you know, East Germany is a totalitarian police state that tried to destroy everything that's good and right about humanity. And you know, amazingly, East Germans were able to rise up in the form of like nude bathing.

Speaker2: [00:06:15] That was that was to

Speaker1: [00:06:16] Show you some

Speaker2: [00:06:17] Butts. Yeah, there were some. But, you know, people were pretty fit, I would say, you know, they were enjoying themselves at the beach. There were a lot of there's like there's definitely some breasts and derrieres and even an interesting like lots of penises, too. But you know, what's funny is that that was the one thing that somehow the state couldn't control the nude bathing because they didn't they didn't approve of it. It came out of the sort of nudist the naturist movement of the 1920s, and people just kind of glommed onto it as a wonderful way to enjoy the beach and be out in the sun. And it's like 90 percent of people who go to the beach went so in a nudist fashion. But it sat on a little placard that that the government didn't like it and they couldn't stop people. It's the one. It was the one domain of freedom allowed and saying

Speaker1: [00:07:03] That just to give you a sense of what it was like to be in this museum, you walk in. And the first thing you see, of course, is a diagram of the wall. Yeah. And you know where the guards sat and shot people who tried to cross the border. But then, you know, your titillation moment is a diorama of a new bathing beach.

Speaker2: [00:07:22] Right? Yeah. Well, it was a lot more nudity than you see the average kind of history museum.

Speaker1: [00:07:28] I mean, I walked over and just gave me this look over my shoulder like, what is this again like? Why am I looking at this now?

Speaker2: [00:07:33] But the hilarious because it was they had some photos, but then it was like an actual diorama with little figures. They were like little one inch, like little one inch,

Speaker1: [00:07:43] Like little naked people naked,

Speaker2: [00:07:45] Little naked people by the Plexiglas.

Speaker1: [00:07:48] Oh Jesus. It was bad. It was really, really bad.

Speaker2: [00:07:51] So but they had a fault. They had a full sized Trabant in there where you could, and they had a simulation of driving on in East Berlin streets. That was fun.

Speaker1: [00:07:59] Yeah, you got to sit in bond. I mean,

Speaker2: [00:08:01] You got to drive it. Actually, the steering wheel worked at everything.

Speaker1: [00:08:03] Yeah, the interactive

Speaker2: [00:08:05] You could push the you can put it down on the gas. You got to. Apparently, they had no gas gauges like you just had to guess as to when you were going to run out of gas.

Speaker1: [00:08:12] Well, because the cars were made of plastic, you didn't really use like, say, keep them, keep them going for a year on one tank.

Speaker2: [00:08:18] And it said, I mean, again, it's hard to know what was propaganda and what was truth. But it said that sometimes people had to wait up to 16 years to get there to get a car. Oh, they get their trouble.

Speaker1: [00:08:28] That's true enough. Yeah. But when Bridget was asking us, so is socialism or capitalism better? Or we were like, Oh my God, this is such a much larger conversation we have to have and don't believe anything you're listening to. You're seeing in this museum, please, because it is not the way we want to start that conversation about what socialism could be and what it should be as opposed to this particular. It's a caricatured Westermann reading of an East German caricature of socialism, so it's like a double into caricature,

Speaker2: [00:08:55] You think, or it could have been an American production even it was almost too extreme to even be a West German.

Speaker1: [00:09:01] No nation. It had to be West Germans doing it because they wouldn't have. The language is so of a piece with, like all the West German coverage, plus the Americans don't even know enough to really know that level of detail. But yes, they like the old East German gadgets and the kitsch of East German.

Speaker2: [00:09:19] Or it was or maybe it was. Maybe they had some advisers from East Germany, but those who are really, really despised the state in every way,

Speaker1: [00:09:29] The super haters. The thing that got me is all the school groups in there. I mean, thank God the kids weren't paying any attention to it. They were just on their phones. I was like, Thank God for once the kids are not looking at animals around them because they're not going to get anything good out of this experience. So, you know, scale of one to 10, I'm giving that a solid zero for that in terms of an education. Oh, really? Oh, I don't think it was that bad. As a matter of entertainment, yes, maybe a two, two and a half somewhere in there. We are going to do better next time. We are going to find some really interesting things in Berlin to tell you about, but I'm going to pass on the DDR museum. But again, this is coming from a place of somebody who has spent a good part of his career criticizing how West Germans depict East Germany.

Speaker2: [00:10:14] Right. So yes, it is kind of a touchy subject for you. But I will say again that as a form, the way that. A museum was curated, was well done, yeah, very interactive, authentic materials, you could touch things, you could pull out these drawers and find things inside there, and there is sort of common housewares and women's curlers for their hair, and you got to see the packages of stockings and they had this cool thing where you could go into the bedroom. Yeah, that was set up in in real scale and form. And they had clothes hanging in the closet. And if you moved the clothes on the hangers across the pole, it would then there would be a video projection that would then show you in that outfit so you could see yourself in the mirror wearing this kind of goofy, like early 80s like East German sweat suit or tracksuit or house dress. It was pretty cool. So you had to kind of see it, but it was. It was very well done. And then I don't know if you noticed that in the in the same bedroom, they had a projection onto the bed itself where it told you this is another like, this is another like monkeys in the zoo. But it was like, you know, how often were people having sex in the east versus the West and in this town or that town men versus women?

Speaker1: [00:11:31] I mean, if you if you wondered whether white people could exotic size and sexualized other dominated groups of white people, it happened. It happened. And there's there is this obsession with like our East Germans, like, sexier than West Germans. Did they have more sex or are they having better orgasms? Like there was all of this science that came out in the nineties that was obsessed with like sexual difference among Germans? And anyway, so

Speaker2: [00:11:55] All of that has what was the answer to that, by

Speaker1: [00:11:57] The way. East Germans are so much sexier, but of course, they're also, you know, all right wing authoritarians at heart. So right. It's hard. I mean, it's sexy, but you're a Nazi, kind of. So how do you what do you do with that?

Speaker2: [00:12:10] Yeah. Where do you go from there?

Speaker1: [00:12:11] Well, we're going to go from here is away from that bad museum and towards our amazing guests this week who is back again. She was in our first 10 episodes. We had the amazing Laura wants with us. We talked to her in a in a small and very cozy lounge area of a bed and breakfast in St Andrews. Yeah, I remember that this time we did not get up close and personal. We had to do it by Zoom.

Speaker2: [00:12:37] But so her new book is just out brand new brand new from Am I to press. I'm trying to stay, in so many words, coming out of the mouth here, German energy at the end of the world and Orkney Islands saga. That's it. We also learn in the podcast that it's not that Orkney is. It's Orkney

Speaker1: [00:12:56] Island. Yeah, I got I got a little.

Speaker2: [00:12:59] It's OK. Got a little slap on that one. No, it's OK. I got I screwed up Papua New Guinea somehow. So a few episodes back, you

Speaker1: [00:13:06] Could pop in New Guinea.

Speaker2: [00:13:09] You know,

Speaker1: [00:13:09] I am apostrophe

Speaker2: [00:13:11] And we have a declaration to go to the to Orkney Islands. We need to go to Orkney Islands anyway. It's a wonderful book. It's beautifully written and it's beautifully created in the sense of having lots of images and evocative prose and representations. And there's even a playlist we didn't talk about the play modified playlist. Yeah, yeah, Laura did a really cool playlist to listen to while you're reading the book or just whenever. Yeah, whenever you want to get all organised,

Speaker1: [00:13:41] So you can, you can say Orkney, you can say the Orkney Islands, you can say the islands of Orkney. What you can't say is the Orkney is yeah, right? Because that's it's not. The Shetlands, I think, was the example she gave. I don't make that mistake. It is Orkney or Orkney Islands.

Speaker2: [00:14:01] So speaking of Shetland, you forgot to ask whether they have any proper ponies there on in the Orkney Islands. I don't know. I've never heard of. I've never heard of an Orkney pony. But would that be a really cute thing to have?

Speaker1: [00:14:13] I think she talked about the problem of energy poverty being a fuel poverty being a problem, their energy abundance, but fuel poverty, they have poverty.

Speaker2: [00:14:21] Also, that could be. Yes. Well, it's an incredible working island. Is this incredible inspiration in terms of how they're producing renewable energy? They're having some trouble getting it off the island. In some ways, they can't sort of get it off fast enough, but it is or enough enough. But it's it's an amazing story, and they're

Speaker1: [00:14:41] So far ahead of where the rest of the world is that they're literally blowing up the current system, right? Which is great. It just shows you that energy revolution is not.

Speaker2: [00:14:48] We didn't talk about this, but erm, I made quite a bit of some shit, some. So I think she brought. She brought up the islands of some soul, which is also not just energy independent, but energy prolific, and is sort of sending its energy back to the mainland and selling it. So there it's highly advanced energy island.

Speaker1: [00:15:07] What is the poni situation in Samsa like, though?

Speaker2: [00:15:11] I don't know. I mean, if we ever have someone who does that, the only reason I brought up ponies is because of the Shetland reference. Yes, because they have their own brand of pony there.

Speaker1: [00:15:20] Yeah, I've never had a Shetland pony.

Speaker2: [00:15:23] I've never heard of an

Speaker1: [00:15:24] Opponent either ignorant about many pony related topics. I am not the go to pony expert on this podcast by

Speaker2: [00:15:30] Any means, but anyway, did it did make me want to go to Orkney Island or the Orkney Islands?

Speaker1: [00:15:35] Well, that's for sure. One last thing before we get there, folks. Be sure to strike for climate this Friday. That's right. Friday is the climate strike. There are climate strikes all over the world.

Speaker2: [00:15:45] Yeah, you just go online and you can find it in just like 20 of us. I'm going to meet the one in Philadelphia.

Speaker1: [00:15:51] I will be at the one in Berlin. There is one in your hometown or near your hometown. I will put the link in the OK.

Speaker2: [00:15:58] Yeah. So you can do that if you if you are in a place where you can do that and you have some energy and some people to bring it on, you should just do it.

Speaker1: [00:16:04] I think it will be the biggest climate strike of human history. So that's exciting.

Speaker2: [00:16:09] Oh, that's I mean, take to realize that, but that's good.

Speaker1: [00:16:11] I'm pretty sure it will be. So anyway, let's all get together and take a day off from whatever else we're doing to demand political action, right?

Speaker2: [00:16:20] Yes. Ok. I think it's worth it.

Speaker1: [00:16:22] And you know who I bet will be striking on Friday, Greta? Yeah, yeah. I was thinking of another person. A person who.

Speaker2: [00:16:29] Oh, Laura. Yeah, oh, she'll definitely be striking.

Speaker1: [00:16:31] I can assure you she'll be in her big black boots out there. Are they silver boots? She had some cool silver boots. She'll be out there kicking some button herself.

Speaker2: [00:16:39] Yeah, totally. All right. And in order to do that, we need to say, Go Laura. Welcome everybody, we

Speaker3: [00:17:05] Have on the phone with us today, the fabulous and wonderful Laura Watts.

Speaker4: [00:17:09] Hi, Laura. Hi, Simone. Hi, Tony. It is fantastic to be with you. Thank you for such a warm introduction.

Speaker5: [00:17:15] Laura, you were last with us. We last spoke on this podcast, March 20 16. It was a totally different world back then. No Brexit, no Trump. Well, that's right. They were they were in their protoplasm phase, I

Speaker4: [00:17:27] Suppose, was a halcyon days. Little did we know.

Speaker5: [00:17:31] I know. But this is just to say it's been a million years since we've had you on the podcast, and so we're so thrilled to have you back.

Speaker4: [00:17:37] That's right. Thank you. It is an absolute pleasure to be here. It's a fantastic podcast. I'm always recommending that people listen to you.

Speaker3: [00:17:42] Thank you, Laura. That's so excellent. And anyone else who wants to follow that path, please do. So do it. Yeah, but I just have to interrupt our podcast for one second, because before we turned on our recording here, Laura was asking about our little dog shadow. And I think this is very intuitive, Laura, because just last night, our dog became a criminal subject criminal dog.

Speaker2: [00:18:03] No one, no one

Speaker3: [00:18:04] In our household has ever gotten busted by the Houston Police Department until last night. That's right, when SHADO got busted by the Poco's.

Speaker4: [00:18:11] Ok. This isn't your dog isn't called Shadow Moon. It's just shadow, right?

Speaker3: [00:18:15] Shadow is a small. She's a small chihuahua and someone her

Speaker5: [00:18:19] Gang name when she goes to prison

Speaker1: [00:18:21] May be shadow minnow.

Speaker4: [00:18:23] Ok, that's that's a Neil Gaiman reference, but for some listeners.

Speaker2: [00:18:26] Oh, good point. Good point. Yeah, so shadow is in the the big house now.

Speaker5: [00:18:34] Well, her accomplice humans left all

Speaker3: [00:18:36] The the fault of a ten year old child who thought that the dog was in her little box bed thing. But in fact, the dog was out on the back porch and so the dog barked for three hours while we were out and one of our friendly neighbors decided to call the police on the dog and Australian.

Speaker5: [00:18:50] I'm not going to like name names, I'm not even going to disparage the

Speaker1: [00:18:53] Australians, and

Speaker4: [00:18:54] I'm not going to be expecting an update.

Speaker3: [00:18:58] Ok. So anyhow, that's that's our story of criminal canines from last night. Very important. But more important is talking about your amazing new book, Laura, which is such a vivid and spectacular read. It's so engaging and you get to wander through all these miraculous places and you write so beautifully. The book is called Energy at the End of the World and Orkney Islands Saga, and it's just out very recently with MIT Press. And so we wanted to begin with, I guess, a big question, which is how did you get interested and go into the Orkney Islands to explore marine energy and other forms of energy? I should say to, but tell us the origin story. How did it all begin?

Speaker4: [00:19:41] So a long time ago, a very long time ago, perhaps about 12 or 13 years ago, I went up to Orkney, originally with a friend of mine who was an archaeologist. Because, as you well know from reading the book and others may know who've had the opportunity to go to Orkney, it has an extraordinary richness of Neolithic prehistoric archaeology, about 5000 years old material culture so that stone circles lots of strange things called carve stone balls and an entire Neolithic city. In fact, the nest of Braga, which is an ongoing archaeological dig. So I was up there for the archaeology, originally encountered the place and thought, This is extraordinary, but obviously I'm interested in and have been all my life with how the future gets imagined and made. And so although it might seem like a strange place to look at the future, I and obviously I was up there for the archaeology. Whilst I was there, I realised that I was walking through an archaeology of energy and an archaeology of the future, and that was in the form of these extraordinary marine energy devices that have been prototypes that have been installed at the European Marine Energy Centre. And we just kind of lying around on the dockside, these extraordinary, monumental metal beasts. And I realised there was something happening in Orkney and that what might seem a, you know, the idea that these places at the edge are remote actually needed to be turned around. It got turned around in my head and I realised that Orkney, although it's often considered to be at the edge, particularly of the UK, is not at all.

Speaker4: [00:21:13] And in fact, it was at the centre of an entire global industry the wave and tidal energy industry. And then I started digging. I realised I had to go back. I want to find more, and I was incredibly lucky because like many ethnographers, I met a wonderful set of people in Orkney, particularly at a company called Aqua Terra, which is a small, small, medium enterprise company in the islands. And from there on, I just met more and more people, and there was such enthusiasm in the islands for what I wanted to do. I mean, I, you know, as as many listeners are ethnographers, you know, you often come to a place and you don't have a pre worked out clear idea necessarily what your research questions might be, but you you're kind of following an instinct, and that's very much what I did. I came to Orkney. I met a lot of wonderful people really interested in going on that journey with me in collaboration with me in the different. Companies and communities, and so I just started, you know, hot desking at these organizations, getting funding to spend a lot of time there. And I began to realize that the European Marine Energy Centre wave and tidal energy was actually the end of the story in some ways or in the middle of the story, because actually that had innovation around renewable energy for perhaps the last 20 years, if not the last 50 years. It was extraordinary.

Speaker5: [00:22:29] You know, before we get too much into what I imagine we're going to be talking about, mostly on this podcast, which is energy. I did want to just underscore something you just said about Orkney as a site of kind of Neolithic cultural revolution that seemed to have, you know, brokered a whole set of cultural forms, archaeological forms that then spread south. So as I understand it and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, the ring of Broad Ga, for example, which you which you mentioned is a forerunner of something like Stonehenge, right? So the the Salisbury ites can just be jealous about that, this kind of massive cultural influence. And now, as you say, again, perhaps standing on the cusp of an energy revolution.

Speaker4: [00:23:10] Absolutely. I mean, dead, right, Dominic, you're right on the money. I mean, in fact, that's something which archaeologists such as Colin Richards and other press historians in the UK talk about a lot that the ring of Roger Stone Circle and and in fact, the stones of CNS, which is the oldest stone circle in Orkney. These are the precursors for what came later in the area and the region known as Wessex, which is where Stonehenge is a stone circle. And so they've actually tracked the relationship between these. And it's it's an interesting thing because for me, when I think about archaeology, I look at the stone circles and I see silicon stones are silicon. So in a way you could. There is a kind of story which I like to play with and think through that. We have technological innovation ongoing in Orkney for potentially 5000 years, starting from the Ring of Rock or in the stone circles, and that Neolithic technology and that kind of silicon technology all the way through to the present day and on going into the future.

Speaker5: [00:24:07] It's fabulous. And partly that question was to lead me to something else I really wanted to ask you about, which was what you're doing here with using the form of the saga, you know, and I know that places like the Faroe Islands, which aren't so far away from Orkney, have a deep connection to Scandinavia. Perhaps Orkney does as well, but the fact that you're using the saga form, I think, is fascinating. So I was hoping you could talk us a little bit through that decision. And then what the Orkney Islands saga looks like in terms of your kind of contemporary reinvention, of that of that form?

Speaker4: [00:24:38] Absolutely. The saga was a gift because there is the Orkney saga, which is one of the Icelandic sagas written down in the 13th century. And it is a very, very important saga to Orkney because Orkney was part of the of the North well as part of the North Viking Empire. And that's really crucial because it's still the Acadian dialect spoken is still got its Norse heritage blogger, for example. It has, you know, Nordic Scandinavian roots. So the language of the place, the culture, the place, the I talk in the book about different forms of ownership, Norse forms of ownership, which go back and predate the feudal form of ownership, which comes much later when the islands are porn to the Scottish Crown. So Orkney and Shetland, the two Northern Ireland and Scotland off the North East Coast, are very much connected to the Nordic countries. And in fact, the wonderful thing for me is I'm now at University of Edinburgh. Before that, I was at the IT University of Copenhagen, and when I was talking to my colleagues across Scandinavia, they would always know exactly where Orkney was because it's part of the the whole kind of understanding the mythology of the whole region. And at the same is true in Iceland. So I've spent time in Iceland visiting and the Orkney yards are very much connected to Iceland because they were sailing there. So the whole the, you know, the sagas were something that were intrinsic to the place. And the book is all about Orkney as a place I'm trying in the book not to necessarily describe in abstract an argument, but to create an experience of the place and the landscape because it's done things to me.

Speaker4: [00:26:28] It's changed me and I'm trying to find ways to evoke that change through the writing and the book. So drawing upon the saga as as a structure and also something that underpins the mythology of the place was incredibly important to me as I was writing the book. So just to kind of outline, because I'm I'm sure there are listeners that have actually read the book. The book itself is structured in three sagas, and these are like three sections and the Icelandic sagas. At least the opening saga is written in inshore. Sections is like short moments, and of course, that seems to me to resonate with our thoughts on as ethnographers, as we're writing kind of ethnographic anecdotes or writing down kind of short kind of arguments. So the collection of sagas in the book that focus on different aspects of the energy future in Orkney, including marine energy, including thinking through issues of community and also the Orkney Electron. As I talk about it, these three sagas are structured in a similar way to the Icelandic saga because they're essentially using this sense of short pieces of writing that are that then weave together into an overall saga. And that's a different structure, I think, to how people often have books in sort of eight or nine chapters.

Speaker3: [00:27:44] So Laura, one of the things that you write in the book is that the Orkney Electron, which you just mentioned, gives me hope that the future can be otherwise. Shout out Donna Garraway, and there is another way of being and living that is not apocalyptic. You say the Orkney Electron tells me the end is not nigh. There are some people who are just getting on with making a low carbon and renewable energy. Future centralisation be damned. The rules of capitalism be damned even while they are within and reliant on both. And then you say that hope is and maybe another property of the Orkney Electron, but you pose that as a question. Can you tell us about how you see potentially hope as a property of the Orkney Electron? And maybe we need to know what the Orkney Electron is to?

Speaker4: [00:28:28] Yes, you don't ask questions with short answers. Do know,

Speaker1: [00:28:32] But take your time. You have as much

Speaker4: [00:28:34] Time as you want. Yeah. So the the Orkney Electron was a way that I best found to think about electricity and energy and Orkney the islands themselves. Aside from, I've talked about the wave and tidal energy. They also are generating hydrogen fuel in the islands. They've had community owned wind turbines for a very long time. They have about over seven hundred micro wind turbines that's individually owned. Turbines have got electric cars and they've got a smart grid. They've actually had a smart grid for about a decade in different forms. So because the islands essentially operate as a kind of it's not. They are on grid, so they are on the national grid, but they operate as a smart grid and a semi-autonomous way. And what this means is that people know where their energy comes from. The infrastructure of electricity and energy is not an invisible thing. It doesn't stop at the wall with the socket. In Orkney, there is a sense of the energy that you use in Orkney, the electricity they use, whether you're powering your electric car or the community, wind turbines that power the islands and generate revenue and money for the islands in which they're on. These are all things that are part of the landscape and part of the place, and the energy that they use on Orkney is different to the energy and the electrons and electricity that are people might use. There is a relationship to it and that I felt was really important because we don't often feel like we have a relationship to this stuff called electricity and all the electrons they might use. But yet in Orkney, that's what I encountered. People had a very strong relationship to the sense of, well, that, you know, that wind turbine there, that's our community wind turbine and that's generating electricity and energy for us.

Speaker4: [00:30:16] That's our electrons. These are Orkney electrons. So that's where I began to realise that these Orkney electrons are real things. Now I have a background, originally way back in physics. So those of your listeners are also listening going. Don't be foolish, Laura. You can't possibly tell the difference between Orkney electrons and who stone electrons. Yes, this is very true, but relationally there is a different set of relationships. There's a different understanding. So the relationship. So when I talk about an electron, I'm talking about the relationally. And also it's true in terms of policy because in the UK, there is an extraordinarily complicated, privatised energy system. And what happens is that if you generate electricity in Orkney, you have to pay a certain fee to basically pay the national grid to put that electricity on the national grid. And that cost is different depending on where you are in the UK and in Orkney. It's extremely high. It's one of the highest places in the country to generate electricity and put it on the grid. So Orkney electrons are actually defined by the whole kind of market mechanisms of the grid, and it's something that is a very serious problem for all sorts of reasons. I talk about the book and therefore it was something which I felt I wanted to talk about in depth. You know, Orkney electrons are something which people feel are present, and it changes the nature of the relationship that people have with electricity in Orkney. So that's what the Orkney Electron is about.

Speaker3: [00:31:44] Mm-hmm. Do you want? I kind of ask that a compound question. Do you want to talk about how the Orkney Electron gives you hope or it might or might give us hope?

Speaker4: [00:31:53] You see, I knew there was a second question follow up and I was thinking, I've got I've got sidetracked talking about the Orkney Electron because it's just so incredibly fascinating to have a. Such strong relationship with energy and with electricity, per say, so the hope, the hope, I feel sort of somewhat ambiguous. It's a sort of ambiguous thing for me because I think that and I talk about this in the book on the first place, I wanted to talk about the ways in which places like Orkney. Aukey is my case as an ethnographer, but there are many places around the world, particularly at the edge, where they are quietly getting on with the business of making a low carbon future. And you know, there is no end of the world and all this discussion that happens in other places, you know, particularly around discourse of the Anthropocene. This very apocalyptic sense that the world is coming to an end that is not happening in Orkney. It's not a it's not even possible to talk about that. I often feel the ability to say that the end of the world is coming is often sent by those who haven't experienced what it's like to live at the edge to kind of live in places of precarity, as Anna might talk about. And Orkney is a site of precarity and in that in those kinds of places and certainly in Orkney, you don't talk about the way the world is going to end because of the archaeology.

Speaker4: [00:33:10] There's a sense of the past is 5000 years we've been here with, you know, for 5000 years we've been farming for whatever it is, it's three or four thousand years. We have archaeology, which we can see on the other side of the road. You know, stone circles over here that are four or five thousand years. We've been here for that long. It therefore is part of the way of thinking that we're going to be around for another 5000 years. How do we do that? It's just taken as read that there's a future in Orkney, and it's not going to be an easy future because there is a precarity around the infrastructure. The lights go off on, you know, off and on. You know, broadband is is a whole different story, as it is in many edge locations. Getting good broadband is very difficult. So the awareness of how precarious infrastructures are means that they know you can't just sit around and have an armchair debate about climate change. Climate change is right here right now in Orkney. So I wanted to tell this story of how people in Orkney and it's not. It's twenty two thousand people. It's on the edge of Scotland. These are not it's not a wealthy place.

Speaker4: [00:34:10] Fuel poverty is a big issue. And yet they're quietly getting on with what other people are, maybe just kind of complaining about and armchair quarterbacking. So I felt for me, that's where the sense of hope came from, not in a sitting back and hoping that somebody else is going to get on and solve these problems, but hope in a much more practical sense of how do we take ownership of this? How do we collaborate together? How do we go on together? And that was the version of hope that I wanted to work with and that I talk through in the book is a sense of the possibilities of collaborating together, of working with those who are around us. So I talk a lot about that, that much more collaborative form of hope in the book, and that's the one I want to focus on. And the electron gives me hope because it's increasing in terms of there are more Orkney electrons. And this is, as I say in the book, this is actually goes against what is actually trying to be worked out by a lot of kind of policy because it's so difficult to get electricity off Orkney through one single underwater cable that goes to Mainland UK that the UK National Grid has made it very expensive, as I said, to generate electricity. And they haven't been improving the grid in Orkney.

Speaker4: [00:35:26] But despite the constraints they have on their grid in Orkney, which essentially is trying to through market forces and also technologically through the infrastructure constrain and make it more difficult to generate Orkney electrons destroy. Despite the fact that capitalism and market forces are all kind of like standing against them, the Orkney Electron is actually increasing. They're making more local electrons right now. I believe the last figures were that the islands are generating 120 percent of their energy from renewables, from their renewables. That's averaged out over a year, and that's extraordinary and it's going up all the time. So that's why it gives me hope because it means that although all many of us are in places where we have things that are that are systemic and issues standing in the way, whether there are policy issues or whether there infrastructural issues. But for me, my slightly, I feel like I'm becoming slightly evangelical. But the the sense that, you know, I think there's an important story to tell that for for many places, is this because they're just getting on and making more electrons, making not just any old electrons, but electrons that are low carbon, that are renewable electrons, and this is a bottom up set of projects that are happening. These are projects that are community led there locally, organizationally led, and that's what gives me hope.

Speaker3: [00:36:42] I mean, it really is quite an inspirational story that you tell in the book and that you just narrated. And I love this idea of quietly getting on with to a renewable future in a place that that very clearly sees the representations of its past, as you say, with the stone circles and. I love this kind of confluence of the deep past and awareness among people as a community, as a population that has survived in this precarious place in harsh conditions, let's add. And yet this kind of self-sufficiency and overabundance, in fact of renewable energy, it's just it's a really inspirational story.

Speaker5: [00:37:19] I just wanted to to add to that and to circle back to something you said before about this relationship with Scotland and the rest of Europe. I mean, on the one hand, Orkney is exploring, you know, prototyping this potential future, especially the electric features of Europe. On the other hand, it seems to be have done it so quickly and frankly, in such a revolutionary way that Europe isn't ready to meet it. And that's part of the problem is that it's like, Wait, this is happening too fast, but it's actually happening at the speed that the world needs to move if we're going to address, you know, the worst scenarios of climate change. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, that Europe Orkney relationship and how it gets mediated through Scotland in the UK. Are there people elsewhere in Europe who are kind of encouraging the Orkney or sort of siding with the acadians against some of the restrictions that Scotland is, is putting on them? And or is Scotland itself as it explores its own potential, you know, not to get ahead of ourselves national future post-Brexit. You know, as an energy powerhouse itself, I mean, do you see that as Scotland moves more in that direction that that perhaps Orkney will become more incorporated, at least into that, I mean, less marginal to the Scottish imaginary,

Speaker4: [00:38:32] I would say. It's interesting because I don't think that Orkney is peripheral marginal to the Scottish imaginary. I think it might be to to to Westminster and to more of the British imaginary. So and that's an interesting distinction given where we are at the moment, as you say. So let's kind of take these those two pieces to what you are. So I think the first bit is the relationship between Orkney and other parts of Europe. And in fact, there's very strong relationships like many, many islands and island and archipelago communities have fantastic connections over the sea. As as we well know islands are connected over the sea. Right. So and Orkney is no different in that respect. So not only is it about connections to the other Northern Ireland, which is the other Northern Ireland of Scotland, as they're called. But you know, it's in regular contact with the Faroe Islands, but it also has excellent connections and is part of a large number of EU projects with places in Denmark like SAMHSA, which is well known as an energy island. Great connections to Madeira in Portugal, which is another site where where they're thinking through energy issues and in fact, a lot of the the funding for a number of the projects that Orkney has has come from the European Union because the EU is has been pushing very hard for renewable energy targets and Orkney is very much able to stand up and say, Hey, we're on it, we got this. We can make this happen and they are.

Speaker4: [00:39:53] So Orkney has become not only a test site for the UK, but it's very much a test site for for Europe, if not other parts of the world. And those connections with islands are not just within Europe. There's also a lot of a lot of collaborative projects happening with Indonesia, with Japan. So it kind of reaches right around the world, Chile. So when I think about Orkney and occasionally people say to me, How Laura, are you working in this place? It seems like it's really remote. And I'm kind of like when you were in Orkney, you feel like you're in the centre of the world because it's got these incredible transatlantic transpacific connections that reach out across the North Sea and very much in collaboration. I mean, the there's a sort of bit of a standing joke in Orkney that we were always got, you know, film crews coming to visit from around the world all the time. So it feels it feels very, very connected for that reason. So I think going back to this issue about the connection with with Europe, that's always been really strong. And there's a very, you know, not only the histories of cost to Norway. Know there's a lot of connections with with Norway back to back to Orkney and Shetland because of the Norse heritage. But it is right across right across Europe where those connections lie for funding reasons, if nothing else. And I think that the other thing you know, thinking about Scotland's place in relationship between Orkney and Scotland now Scotland has has the energy bluntly in the UK.

Speaker4: [00:41:12] It's all it's got. It's got the renewable resources. So Scotland has an energy and extensive energy history. Its coasts has the world's largest, I believe, one of the world's largest resources for tidal wave energy. That's where the energy is. You know, there's the history of the hydro. So the dam building in Orkney, which is a very long history in Scotland. And then you've also got the energy histories of the North Sea oil, which are really important to Scotland as well. So it's it's interesting, you know, think about who's doing, whether it's whether it's energy, oil, oil histories as well. You know, there's a lot of connections between Houston and Aberdeen, for example, in Scotland, you know, across those are where the links really are. So that that as we move forward, I think that Orkney is becoming more and more central. Its important part of this of the Scottish story enables Scotland to. Not just to Europe, but a lot of the movement we're getting into political discussions where we are at the moment. But you know, Scotland is very much looking to the Arctic region, you know, it's in conversations with Iceland and thinking through what the Arctic relationships are looking northwards. So there was a lot of discussions about Relationship Scotland has with the Nordic Council, for example, and North is very much a springboard to that because of its Norse heritage.

Speaker3: [00:42:24] Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's super interesting. So Laura, one of the places where you spend quite a bit of ethnographic energy, if you will, and time is the European Marine Energy Centre, the Yemisi Emek, which we learn as the largest test site for marine energy in the world. And it's also the oldest. So it's a kind of pioneering centre. And yet they get by with fairly few resources and not a lot of staff. So how do they do this? Like maybe spell out for us how this, how this organisation, how this entity operates and functions, and how they're able to do the research and development that they're doing?

Speaker4: [00:43:02] Yeah, it's a really, really great question because marine energy worldwide, that's wave and tidal power. There's lots of different definitions of marine energy. But when I talk about it on this podcast, in the book, I'm talking about wave and Tide. So that's not including offshore wind, which is a completely different industry, although it's in the sea. So the European Marine Energy Centre up in Orkney opened its doors in two thousand three. It isn't funded by the EU, despite its name. That's an important thing to say. It's not like set up by, you know, it's not like set up by the by the European Union. So it's essentially it's a not for not for profit organisation. And it's it's really interesting, as you say, because of its very limited resources, because there has been so little money put in by governments into this energy, into wave and tidal energy, despite the fact that it's a proven technology. So the reason it was really interesting is because, as I say in the book, you know, at one point I think they had almost 10 people, I think was the quote. I think so. Neil Kermode, who is up there at one point, said to me, and this was quite a number of years ago, so they are a bit bigger now. But he said, you know, he's in conversation with a guy from Canadian fisheries who had said, Oh, this Canadian fisheries guy said, Oh, we only have 10000 people and they'll come out gone. Yeah, we only have 10. And almost almost

Speaker2: [00:44:21] Almost almost

Speaker4: [00:44:22] Almost. Yes, exactly. So it's just to put it in perspective. So there are now I mean, you make everything moves very quickly. So now a little bit larger, I think they have about sort of like twenty or twenty five members of staff, but they're able to be they are the World Center and it's not a it's it's a genuine claim. Everybody in that industry looks to Orkney. It's the beacon of where everybody looks to where it's actually happening. It is the one of the only places, I think, in the world where the industry gets to be an industry because they have, I think it's about 13 different sockets for devices to plug in. It's a plug and play test site. So many developers can come in at one time and plug in and test their devices in the water on the grid, so it's on good test sites. And what's really important about that is it's not just the test site. There are many, many test sites around the world that can test wave and tidal energy devices. But Orkney is different because not only can you just plug and play system, but it has entire end to end supply chain. So Inoki, because it's been there because the test site's been there for such a long period of time for ten years, if not more. Now they've got a whole series of companies.

Speaker4: [00:45:28] There's, you know, people, organizations like Green Marine, and that's a company that has a whole specialist series of vessels which can install and maintain marine energy devices in the water. It's no mean feat for the nautical listeners. Tidal energy test site in Orkney operates in waters about seven knots of tide. It's really difficult to stay still in seven knots of tidal, let alone anchor anything, and the season opening are really, really demanding any device. So just having the right kind of vessels and having a supply chain, who knows how to do that? It's really important the Mariners who install these devices and who maintain them have the knowledge of how to do that. And this is very practical knowledge. This isn't stuff that you can't read a book and find out how you're going to install a wave and tidal energy device. Neither can you just build a hydrodynamic model and go that we've proven how this is going to work, figuring out the complexities of the sea, which is an ecosystem. It's not water. You don't put a marine energy device in water, you put it in an ecosystem. You have barnacles that like to grow on things that are anchored to the seabed. And that makes a huge difference to these devices and the understanding of how you actually get this stuff to work at that practical that embodied knowledge is is crucial and that supply chain, the companies who do the side scan sonar and all the Scala testing that is all there in Orkney.

Speaker4: [00:46:50] You don't just build a device, you're building entire infrastructure. You have to build the supply chain, you've got to know you need standards, you know, all that stuff, which we know. I work in the field of science and technology studies, and it's something we think about a lot around standards and infrastructures, so that's that's what Emek has. It's not just those nine, it's now I think that's 20 people and they've got others who are working on on projects. They're working on hydrogen as well as marine energy. It's a it's a growing endeavor, but it's the the hundreds. I mean, I think in the numbers I hear, we have about three hundred people involved in various ways around marine energy in Orkney. And that's extraordinary. And that's an industry and that's just not one or two people to testing a device on the beach, which might be in other locations. And it's the fact that those organizations work together. So one thing I talk about in the book is how Orkney kind of operates as what I talk about as Orkney Limited, so limited as in a company so everybody works for, and those of you are listening carefully will notice that I'm sliding in between sort of saying things like We do this and we do that because many because there is an essence that, you know, as I'm talking to you, there's part of me which is essentially working for Orkney Limited.

Speaker4: [00:48:02] And that's a really for me. It's really important to to be be counted among among the members and to do that work. But that's how Orkney works. You can get things done really, really quickly because everybody has a clear sense and we're working towards this goal of developing wave and tidal energy and working towards the goal of how do we as islands still get to be here, still get to live on these islands for the next hundred years, a thousand years. And that's not straightforward because as I said, it's an archipelago of islands. We've got islands in Orkney with 60 people living on them. Wow. All right. You know, depopulation is right there in front of people's noses and it's you've got it. You've got to work really hard to make sure that doesn't happen. And the understanding in IMEC and the other organisations is all about, we're doing this for the future. We are committed to the future and that commitment to the future and that entanglement and the in the long story of the future in Orkney is what also gets entangled in the long story of the future that gets made for marine energy.

Speaker3: [00:49:00] Laura, I realise it would be useful if you gave us just a really quick tech overview of how tidal and wave energy works, like how the mechanics, the physically, how it works

Speaker4: [00:49:11] In many different ways. Yeah. So there's not one answer to that. Let's give you some just some quick examples, and I'm trying not to wave my hands here because that's not going to be very helpful or the podcast.

Speaker3: [00:49:23] Well, but we can teach it. Please, listeners, please picture Laura waving her hands. I like

Speaker4: [00:49:28] This. Those who know me well know I do a lot of hand-waving, but you kind of the my account. Yes. So let's start with a tidal energy device. One of the ways in which you want to capture tide energy is tide energy, essentially as the movement of the water over the seabed. So you've got a walk, you've got the tide is a force, and it's in a way you would understand how we capture wind energy. You have a set of blades which capture the force of the wind on those blades and in the same way, with tidal energy below the surface of the water, you install it, particularly with tide energy. It's often some kind of bladed device. It looks like a bit like an underwater wind turbine, and the tide basically will turn those blades. Those blades turn and then drive a generator. And in the device, what usually happens is you have something that floats on the surface of the water, and then beneath that is carried the blades of, say, a tide energy device. I'm thinking in particular of something like the Scott Renewables or orbital device. They've got a two megawatt device at the moment that's just been doing really well. And those those blades under the water then turn as the tides move backwards and forwards. Now the tricky thing is how you then get the power off the device, so you need to then transmit the power. And usually what happens is you then have a cable which connects from that device down through a socket that's on the seabed to a substation on land, which is where the electricity then has to essentially be cleaned because it's never the end of the story.

Speaker4: [00:50:55] Just generating electricity from the tide energy then got to make it nice, tidy, clean electricity. You can then put on the national grid. And that's another big piece of work that the European Marine Energy Centre does for their clients. So there's a quite a complicated infrastructure. There's the device which most people would think of as a thing in the water that turns. But then you also need what's called the power take off, which is how you get that energy from the device onto land. You also need land infrastructure in the forms of substations and cabling. So it's quite an extensive infrastructure that needs to be done. And of course, around that, there's a sensor equipment, so you're keeping track of what's happening in the sea. You've got sensors on the device. So, you know, if it's working, OK, so there's a lot of data involved. And so it's quite a complex infrastructural package that needs to be done. And the other piece, which is also sometimes forgotten but crucial, is the anchoring. So like I said, we're talking about what's interesting, so difficult about marine energy and the reasons I get super excited, possibly slightly geeky about it is that is that as my friends and women, as you say, it's like going, it's like going to Mars. It's that level of technology. Called difficulty, it's incredibly difficult because of the fact that the kinds of water where you want to put your device, i.e. the water that has the most energy in it. Ergo, it's the water with the most energy is the water that's the most dangerous.

Speaker4: [00:52:15] It's the here be dragons. I have a whole little chat to my book called Here Be Dragons, because that's the bit, you know, it's the bit that mariners and fishers sail around. It's the bit on the maritime map you don't go into because it's so powerful as water and the only we now going into these waters, we're now trying to anchor devices in them. So understanding that the complexities of how these things have to fit together and that it's a mechanical problem as well as electrical problem, those are the pieces that help us understand how we do marine energy and also perhaps helps answer people's frequent question, which is why isn't there wave and tidal energy everywhere in the world since we can do it? And then one of the answers is because it's so technologically difficult, and we're essentially trying to do something like going to Mars, but with nothing like the budget of going to the Moon or. So I think that that's one of the things to bear in mind, but that's an overview. Essentially, you're looking at underwater turbines, principally with wave energy. There's other ways of doing it. We have a device called the Willow or a penguin, and that works on a gyroscope mechanism within the way. So as the waves come in, it basically rolls with a gyroscope movement, but that generates the energy. So we're talking about essentially going from kinetic energy into electrical energy. That's for those listeners who understand that that's what we're doing. That makes sense to you.

Speaker3: [00:53:31] It does. But can I just channel my students because I teach on tidal energy a little section two and they always ask about fish getting chopped up by the blades of the turbines?

Speaker4: [00:53:42] Yes. So the relationship with the marine wildlife is a really important part of marine energies. And I imagine so. You know, that's one of the things that goes on at Emek is constantly monitoring what's going on with the marine life. How are the dolphins doing, how the whales are doing? You know how the fish are doing, right? So there's two things. One is fish tend to swim around things in the sea rather than swim at things. So that's the first thing is that that happens there. There's a lot of monitoring goes on, but there's a strange I hate to disappoint people who are listening. I think there's some kind of imaginary that somehow gets circulated that people think that these blades are going to be operating like on a blender and they're going to be making kind of fish paste, right? I agree. I'm really sorry to disappoint people like that idea. It's nothing half so nefarious. What actually happens is fish swim around because these are static devices in the sea. You know, obviously the blades turn, but we're not turning at speeds which are going to be turning fish into paste. What's interesting is obviously birds. Marine birds are also a really important part. The thing to look at and there's a lot of care taken about not just the marine wildlife, but also the birdlife and ornithologists do a lot of work with that. What's interesting is that some of the devices, because I said they have floats on top those floats, the devices become kind of roosting sites for the birds. So actually secondsAnd sometimes potentially be beneficial to marine wildlife. So it's a complicated interaction and it's important to recognize that there is an interaction. Things change in the sea when you put stuff at it. But we're not. We're not blending fish. Sorry.

Speaker3: [00:55:20] I just want to make sure that that was,

Speaker1: [00:55:21] Yeah, I think it's good. We got that cleared up.

Speaker4: [00:55:23] Yeah, yeah. Anything else? I'm here to try and answer, you know, debunk mythology story.

Speaker2: [00:55:27] Yeah. Yeah, that's

Speaker5: [00:55:28] Important. I want to ask you a question about futures, though, Laura. You talk a bit in the book about how Orkney Islanders feel a certain ambivalence to to being part of a living laboratory, a certain pride. But then there's also a sense of, you know, inconvenience that can go along with that. And is it possible to talk about, you know, what or Canadians want from their future? I mean, is that something that there is a kind of a dominant discourse around? Or do you find that different folks in the Orkneys have very different imaginations of what they'd like to have? And I suppose I'm thinking here of kind of infrastructure specifically and you know what might be made available to them, what opportunities would be available, and if this living laboratory indeed becomes the engine of a whole new global apparatus of marine energy is, I think we hope it will, because the potential there is enormous. How might that change the Orkneys sense of themselves as a place in the world?

Speaker4: [00:56:22] Oh, three different questions. Let's start living lab, I think is a really important term, and I'm really glad you brought that up, Dominic. Yeah, there is a real ambivalence about that, as I'm sure many people listening can imagine. No one wants to be a lab rat, you know, and the term living lab has these colonial histories that aren't good, right? And although when people when I'm talking to folk on the street, they've got this sort of like sense ambivalence about being a living lab. You know, they wouldn't be able to articulate the colonial histories to that term, but they feel they feel it instinctively. And so on the one hand, as you say, there's, you know, there's a certain pride because there. They're on this kind of like on this list, on this edge. I use the term edge both in the geographic sense and in the technological sort of leading bleeding edge sense. So there is a pride about being that, but there is. It's complicated, not just because living, you know, living laboratory, you know, I have this section of the book where I try and deal with this term quite carefully because it's a living laboratory for whom. Right. And one of the things I talked about when we started talking on this podcast is that the living laboratory aspect of Orkney for me is exciting and interesting because it's largely not big multinational companies landing their various devices in Orkney and then leaving again, having tested their stuff and leaving nothing behind. It's much more of a collaborative, you know, Bottom-Up embedded relationship with the energy technology that's being deployed and tested in Orkney.

Speaker4: [00:57:51] So the although we have international developers that come in, I mentioned, well, that's a Finnish company. We've got companies coming in from around the world testing their devices in Orkney, but they tend to come. They might set up offices in Orkney. They're encouraged to to collaborate and integrate with the other companies in other parts of the supply chain. And I mentioned the hydrogen, which is another thing that's going on, which is incredibly exciting. This whole new fuel, which is being generated in Orkney out of tight energy and community wind energy, which is extraordinary. So that's, you know, that's that's basically a community. It's largely community led. It's complicated. There's a lot of organisations, but it's it's local organisations who are driving that. So the living laboratory is the worst for me, living lab, for whom? And if it's a living lab for for, for for those who are local, that's a very different to being a living laboratory for someone who's basically prodding you as a lab, right? And that's that's the ambivalence. So I think that's a really crucial thing to bear in mind. But I also want to texture this slightly because it's, you know, as I cannot. And in the book, I try and be really careful to say I'm not speaking for acadians. I can't possibly do that. And not least of which I can't keep track of everything that happens in Orkney. That's 21000 people, over 20 inhabited islands, so much going on.

Speaker4: [00:59:05] And so I talk in the book about saying that I'm talking about the energy islands, which is my mnemonic for the fact that I'm talking about a subset of groups of people who I've spoken to, who are involved more and less around the energy technologies and innovations and communities that are happening in Orkney. And of course, like any place, you know, it's not like everyone in Orkney thinks wind turbines are a great thing or thinks marine energy is a great thing. Of course not, right? You know, there's but I think what's crucial is that if you go to somewhere in Orkney and ask about wave or tidal energy, they're likely to have an opinion. This is very different to going to many other places. We ask about wave and tidal energy and they go, Well, what's that? Right? So for me, it's about engagement in the debate, and that's what I think we all want. We want to be engaged in debate. It's hard. It's not about there being right or wrong answers or the best way to doing something. It's about how do we have the discussion? How do we listen? How do we go? Well, this is difficult and not everyone's going to agree on this. But what's your opinion? Can we be informed about this? And that's for me, is the crucial thing when I'm thinking about the, you know, an understanding about what happens with energy in Orkney. It's not that there is anything like universal agreement, but there is an ongoing informed debate. And that's what matters.

Speaker5: [01:00:21] Absolutely. So, Laura, maybe it's a way to to take us out of the conversation. We could ask you to talk a little bit about your own dreams for the future. What's coming up next? Now that you've just put out this marvellous book, which I feel must encapsulate a good amount of what's been a very fascinating, multi-year project, will you stay in the Orkneys? Are you thinking of exploring projects elsewhere?

Speaker4: [01:00:43] So I think my relationship with Orkney and for listeners and Dominic and Simone, it's Orkney and the singular OK, right? And it's quite important. So we have on the West Coast, we have the Hebrides, which is plural, but there's only Orkney in the singular and Shetland in the singular. That's my top tip. When you come into, you know, when everyone comes to Orkney, which I hope they do come visit Orkney, it's fabulous Orkney and you'll make more friends.

Speaker2: [01:01:06] So, yeah,

Speaker1: [01:01:09] I have been shamed.

Speaker3: [01:01:10] Bust it.

Speaker4: [01:01:12] You wouldn't know. But I just as I'd like to just remind people, so that's my public service over. So, yeah, let's hope for the future. Well, I think my relationship with Orkney, you know, I Orkney is inside me. I'm, you know, I'm part of the place. I've been incredibly lucky and privileged to collaborate with people over what ten years I've been back and the forwards. And you know, there isn't an end to what's happening there. The struggles continue. I'm involved in a new project called Reflex, which is in trying to basically make the entire island's small energy islands, trying to address the issues of fuel poverty in the islands. That's going to be potentially we've got hundreds of electric cars which are going to be coming to the islands, a whole kind of energy trading scheme to essentially manage the heat transport and the grid as an entirely smart system. In Orkney, it's extraordinary, and I'm involved in that, which is a massive UKRI funded project, so there's those pieces that are going on for me sort of in the future. I think there's sort of two things which I'm I'm I'm sort of really developing my my thoughts around the first one is the thing which we haven't talked around quite so much, but is incredibly important to me. And that's writing and the role of of words and writing. I'm a creative writer. I am really interested in I, you know, the writing that I do is bound up with a commitment to the fact that words make worlds and the words that we write as academic as scholars change the future.

Speaker4: [01:02:41] And therefore it feels really it's really important to me to think through what literary tools do we have? You know, what kinds of choices do we make around our point of view about the voices we use, about the figures we talk about, about the characters we raise, about the way we construct our paragraphs, about how we speak, about the choices of language that we make. You know which language we write. All these make different futures more and less possible and that attention to. I'm by no means the only person looking at this by any stretch of the imagination, but that sense of the choices that we make in the words that we choose and the way that we write and the way that could open and close different futures for me seems incredibly pertinent if we're committed to making new futures and opening up new possible futures. With climate change right here right now, we need to open up the possibilities of what we can think and we can't. We don't think in isolation, at least for me as a scholar. I think through words, I think through writing and therefore opening up what the writing toolkits we have is the most scholarly thing to do. And that means I'm thinking through things like, How can I work through science fiction, right? Not just say, how do we critique science fiction as a sense of possible futures, but how could we, as scholars use the tools of science fiction to create possible worlds, are still empirically informed? I'm interested in how how can we collaborate together as writers? You know, Simone, you and I and Jeff Barker have been incredibly lucky to work together to look at a graphic novel form.

Speaker4: [01:04:13] You know, that's a different form of writing, which creates different ways that we can not just express ourselves as scholar, but work through different scholarly problems because we're working with different literary mediums. And that, for me, is something I think is really interested in looking at how to set up kind of writing retreats, get scholars together who are interested in chewing away and writing away, paying attention, really careful attention to the writing that we do, thinking about the different ways. It's not again, not for me, just about communicating our research, although that's part of it, but changing the way that we write to change what we can write and change the worlds that we can create. So that, for me, is really crucial. As many of listeners might know, I write poetry as another way to do that, because poetry is a mechanism by which you can express things that you can't do in prose form. And that again, is a scholarly work of thinking through how do we how do we find a mechanism to to explore the futures we want to create to create the methods that are going to be most useful for us to do the work we want to do to most accurately reflect empirically reflect the kind of worlds that we encounter? And that's something I've learnt from Orkney because I encounter a place which is which is rich with with a mythology.

Speaker4: [01:05:23] It's rich with experiences that I can't just write in cold, black and white. So that's one of the things I'm ongoing. And that's probably a large part of what I'm going be doing moving forward is really, you know, exploring what can be done and also trying to support, you know, scholars, you know, PhD students, postdocs, scholars are coming along to give them space to do that work because I think that it's often there can be challenging for some people to to create the space where they feel safe, where they can do that because we we need safety to get it wrong, right? As well. And so for me, that's part of how can we do that work? How can we support that work across different scholarly communities? So that's I think the key thing at the moment I'm going to be doing moving forward and then I have other whole separate projects which are looking around the inseparably of energy and data, and that's a whole other thing as well.

Speaker1: [01:06:10] Well, that sounds amazing. It sounds like you're going to be busy. Yeah, but busy in a good way.

Speaker3: [01:06:14] Well, I have to say, Laura, I mean, you know, what is happening on Orkney is inspirational, but so is it's also inspirational to hear you speak about writing and your passion for it and the different forms and modalities of expression that we can manoeuvre through in these troubling times. It's really important, I think, for us to remember that there are ways to write a different and a better future, and you're one of the people who is actively engaged in that. And I really appreciate that work that you're doing. Absolutely.

Speaker4: [01:06:42] Well, I'll also both of you. I mean, you're both been very active in finding different forms of expression and communication of your work. So I think, you know, I feel that what I just talked about is very much a collaborative, collective effort by so many of us around the world who are at this. And I think that's what I find really exciting the moment it feels like. So many of us are trying to find different ways to create new and possible futures.

Speaker5: [01:07:04] Word yes. And so with that, we shall say we will see you hopefully in the energy islands sooner rather than later.

Speaker4: [01:07:11] Yes, I very much hope to see you. See you in the energy islands. And for those who are listening, do feel free. If you're, you know, read the book and want to talk more about what's happening in Orkney and come to the energy islands, come to Orkney. It makes a big difference by going there. It makes a real difference by actually being there and living it.