This is the story of one woman’s return from her Devon home to her father’s islands on a voyage of discovery. After her father’s death, environmental journalist Marianne Brown heads to the Shetland Islands.
There she finds herself trying to unravel the complexities of this distant community’s relationship with the construction of a wind farm that will export energy to mainland Scotland.
As the then editor of the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine faces the elements, her quest takes the form of investigative journalism with her search for personal connection as the backdrop.
Grief
Her father left when Brown was just two years old, and she seeks to build a picture of his legacy, her Shetland heritage and her own place within it.
But what I enjoyed most about this book was not the ins and outs of the wind farm protests and backlash but rather Brown’s writing about place. She is adept at creating such a strong sense of her surroundings.
“I knew the skylark,” she writes. “The tiny bird that parachutes in the air over moors and farmland. In Shetland and out on the Dartmoor hills in Devon, the cascade of chirps from high up in the sky heralded the start of spring.”
I feel like I have travelled to the UK’s northernmost isles and have met some of the charming characters shaping this moody landscape just like the earthworms and the kelp quietly do.
Brown explores what the natural world and human life there really entail. Her own grief is as raw as the eco-grief some people experience when their Nature connection is threatened by industry, albeit a renewable energy one.
Wild
Brown’s voice is an authentic one. She’s curious, without judgement, and keen to dig deeper into the debate around large-scale wind farms, the conservation of degraded peat bogs, and the protection of precious whimbrel populations.
She’s no idealist – Shetland’s herring fisheries, whaling heritage and profit from the North Sea oil and gas industry are writ large.
All sides of the story are given space, from the folk involved in Sustainable Shetland, a group with more than 800 members and Shetland’s largest organisation ever, to the high-vis-wearing organiser of the Bressay parkrun, the most northerly race of its kind, who works for Viking, the wind farm company, and invites Brown on a site visit.
Throughout The Shetland Way, Brown weaves urgency into her words. The planet faces a critical juncture. Climate action is vital, but at what cost?
Through her conversations with locals and friends of her father, she realises that having wild places where there is ‘nothing’ is important. That ‘nothing’ is special and needs protection.
Transformation
As with all great questions, there is no simple black and white answer. Brown brings a richness of nuance to the debate and her work is a reminder of the importance of listening – to each other and to Nature.
I now understand the real meaning of ‘topophilic’, a word that describes a person’s bond with a place. Brown’s writing made this visceral.
Another word, ‘solastalgia’ – the pain or distress caused by a sense of loss connected to the present state of your home and territory – conveys the importance of place identity for rural people.
On Shetland, wind is the main driver of change. For Brown, this transformation is a personal one and I can imagine her new appreciation for this place, her father and his people.
This Author
Anna Turns is an environmental journalist, radio broadcaster and the author of Go Toxic Free: Easy and Sustainable Ways to Reduce Chemical Pollution.
The Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on My Father’s Islands by Marianne Brown. HarperCollins, 2025.