We’re delighted to share a guest blog written by Gregor Sinclair, Director of award-winning production house Scotica.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with Scotica on several projects over the years, creating films that champion nature and showcase the landscapes and stories that make them so special.

In this blog, Gregor explores his own relationship with nature and the power of environmental storytelling, reflecting on the importance of telling nature’s stories and sharing insights into how film, language and narrative can deepen our connection with the natural world. He also explores fascinating connections between Gaelic language, communication and nature, and how the ways we describe and understand the landscape can shape our relationship with it.

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“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. […] To the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”

 

William Blake, 1799

In some ways, trees are still a novelty to me. Growing up on a small, windswept island in the far north which hasn’t supported trees since the late Neolithic period, my first exciting forays into the dense, lush woodlands of the West Highlands were always moments of giddying, childlike wonder. Grand old oaks with tangled, sprawling limbs became great castles, thickets of birch and hazel became endless mazes, and the mossy hollow a luxuriant abode to steal away and read in utter peace. These mysterious and serene encounters were a far cry from our native habitat of breezy, open coastal health-land and sea-battered cliffs abuzz with kittiwakes, fulmars and skuas.

It was perhaps these early encounters with Nature – always seeming to set my mind on one adventure or another – that bred a desire for storytelling deep within me. Over time, that desire slowly manifested itself into a career in environmental filmmaking with the occasional ill-advised diversion into writing, but the foundations laid long ago were an almost primal urge to share this love of Nature with others. With a little help, I carried out my first wee piece of environmental activism aged five, writing a letter to then-Prime-Minister Tony Blair to express my worry of the rate of global deforestation. Woodland, rainforest: habitats my sheltered island mind knew so little of and yet could not help but be totally enraptured by.

I share these early experiences because they demonstrate the wonderful power stories and imagination hold over us – the power to make us care, the power of empathy. But before we progress any further down this path, it is important to clarify our definition of what storytelling actually is. If imagination is the story our mind creates to understand the world, storytelling is the twin art of imagination and communication. Storytelling is where the internal meets the external, the private meets the public. It is crucial to not confuse story with narrative. A story may have a narrative, indeed, but chronology as defined narrative is not an essential component. A painting or a piece of instrumental music tells a story, as does a landscape photograph, and the success of them relies on both the imagination of the artist and their ability to communicate that imagined reality with the audience.

In the professional sphere, brands too tell a story. Brands are fundamentally intangible, ultimately existing only within our minds. Visual design, copy, and content are the artists’ tools through which we allow that brand to exist in the minds of the public, and our success in doing so lives and dies in our storytelling. So, how does an artist tell a brand’s story?

“Before landscapes die, they first vanish in the imagination.”

 

Bhavani Raman, 2017

As a filmmaker, I have been working with Forest Carbon since 2022 to create a series of pieces telling the stories of those at the beating heart of Nature restoration on the ground: from community-powered agroforestry in the hills of South Wales, to family farmers in the Scottish Borders, to mountain peatland recovery on a huge scale in the Northwest Highlands. This content was strongly narrative-focussed, using characters to share their passion for these wonderful landscapes with audiences. Film can be time-consuming and expensive to make, and so in making best use of it one must focus on what film can accomplish that the other tools of brand storytelling cannot. These films, these stories, are a call for empathy.

We discussed how we could take this a step further. Joining forces with Scottish writer and actor Raymond Wilson, we settled on a vision for a series of film-poems – stories without a narrative but which embody the voice of Nature through language, rhythm, shape, colour and motion. Each a call from Nature for humans to reflect and appreciate the seasons’ distinct characters, to adapt to its natural cadence and allow the landscape to soak into them. It was the job of Raymond, Forest Carbon and myself, through these pieces, to keep the precious landscapes of the UK alive in the public’s imagination. As to whether we succeeded – that can only be decided by you, the viewer.

 

 

In The Quants & The Poets, Paul Kingsnorth states boldly: “The green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers.” In order to come together to protect Nature, he argues, the ‘Poets’ must be at the front and centre of our movement (‘Poets’ here referring not just to those who communicate in verse but all storytellers who trade in imagination and empathy). Fellow environmentalist George Monbiot, while disagreeing that ‘Quants’ have too long dominated discussions around climate change and nature restoration, likewise concedes: “We also need stories. We need stories that tell us where we are, how we got here and where we need to go.” Whichever way one takes this, the conclusion is clear. Imagination and storytelling are the tools of change.

However, there is one more element to tackle in this journey towards understanding the Poet’s role in preserving our landscapes.

The heritage of language’s intersection with Nature dates back to the very earliest human communications: noises inspired by the sound of wind, the flow of water, the cry of an animal; or something more abstract, the feeling of the bark of a tree, the emotion of witnessing a storm. Nature is, quite literally, the root of language. But language is nothing if not a reflection of society and, as our modern lives become increasingly separated from Nature, so do our words. When the Oxford Junior Dictionary removed a number of natural words from its pages including ‘nectar,’ ‘acorn,’ ‘otter,’ and ‘wren,’ replacing them with ‘broadband,’ ‘cut-and-paste,’ and (ironically for this writer) ‘blog,’ there was national outcry. But this change was simply a manifestation of how far we ourselves have fallen from the tree.

Much more worrying, and permanent, is the rapid loss of indigenous languages, with 90% threatened to disappear by the end of the century. These languages have generally kept their more intimate linguistic bonds with Nature and so with their loss we are also losing our ability to articulate, and thus understand, the landscape. Scots Gaelic, our local threatened indigenous language, has no grammatical concept of ownership but does have dozens upon dozens of words for mountains and bogs – as well as words such as duthchas and dualchas, terms of connection to place better understood with the heart than with the head. A growing awareness of this issue, along with the experience of working with Raymond’s poetry, inspired me to go further with my practice and embrace intersectionality.

Intersectionality is a somewhat academic-sounding word for a rather simple concept. Simply put, it is the understanding that societal issues – discrimination, economic inequality, climate change, cultural decay – are compounding in nature. It highlights the effectiveness of addressing multiple issues and finding allies in other areas of activism in creating mutually-beneficial progress. It became clear that the societal faults causing the disappearance of the Gaelic language and culture were the same faults behind climate change and habitat loss, which are all keenly felt across the Gàidhealtachd in the 21st century. The resulting artistic endeavour, the fruit of this thought process, was BEURA.

Adapted from countless sources ancient and modern (including a 9th century poem, an excerpt from which is given above), BEURA is a Gaelic-language retelling of the legend of the Cailleach Bheur, the Goddess of Nature, winter and storms. It is a melding of live music, poetry and film by Highland composer and writer Lisa Robertson and myself. To us, Gaels, lamenting the decline of their language and storytelling traditions, and environmentalists, anxious about the indelible and deepening footprint we are leaving on this planet, were the best possible allies in the preservation of our landscapes for future generations. All we as artists needed to do was bring them together.

If there is one message I can leave you with, it is this: Tell stories and listen to as many others as you can. Look for allies – even in the most unexpected of places. And let your imagination run wild.

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BEURA will premiere on October 3rd at Guthan Nàdair (Voices of Nature), alongside the work of other musical artists combining environmental and Gaelic cultural themes. Follow this link for a ticket.

 

This article was originally published on Forest Carbon in September 2026.