Scotland’s Billionaires Are Turning Climate Change Into a Trophy Game
Photographs by Niall McDiarmid
The wind turbine judders to life with a boom that echoes down its central shaft. It rotates slowly at first, then gathers speed as its blades pick up the direction of the wind. Andy Clements, who looks after the small wind farm on the tiny Scottish Isle of Gigha, steps out of the control hub at the base of the turbine and looks up with satisfaction. A minor problem required a restart, he tells me, but now the turbine is once again generating “pennies falling from heaven.”
Gigha is long and narrow, about six miles north to south, and the surrounding sea is bright turquoise, shading to deep navy over the nearby kelp beds. A 20-minute ferry ride to the east lies the Scottish mainland, deep green and brown under a moody autumnal sky. To the west are the much larger islands of Islay and Jura. Beyond them, the open sea stretches all the way to Canada.
The turbines dotting the hill are Gigha’s three “dancing ladies,” nicknamed Faith, Hope, and Charity. Harmony, a newer model, was added later. Since 2005, Gigha’s residents have sold power from the small wind farm to the national grid, generating hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. Twenty years ago, when the inhabitants of Gigha—who numbered about 100 at the time—decided to buy their island from its millionaire owner, they were at the forefront of a national wave of community buyouts. Now more than 500,000 acres of land are in community ownership—almost 3 percent of the country—and more buyouts are in the pipeline.
The buyouts are part of Scotland’s decades-long effort to modernize its system of land ownership. Lingering medieval practices and laws that favored the rich have resulted in the “most concentrated pattern of private land ownership in the developed world,” according to a briefing paper given to U.K. lawmakers in 2013. The paper reported that about 500 people—less than 0.01 percent of the population—still hold about half of the country’s privately owned land. Since 2001, grants from the national Scottish Land Fund have allowed Gigha and other rural communities to buy their land from often-absentee “lairds,” or landlords. Residents of these communities can now rent their housing from communally owned trusts, and use income generated from assets like wind farms to improve their local infrastructure.
Clements, who married a Gigha local and has lived on the island for 25 years, says that 95 percent of its houses were “below tolerable standard” before the buyout: “They were shocking—you had water running down the walls and windows.” Many houses have not yet been renovated; the community trust spent too much, too quickly, and has had to rein in its ambitions after finding itself in significant debt. But before the island was in community hands, Clements says, they “didn’t have the opportunities
