Photo: Emergency services and volunteers at the incident control centre – Nethy Bridge’s community centre. Picture: Callum Mackay.
“Multiple organisations were involved in fighting this wildfire and involved hundreds of people, including many volunteers. These individuals directly supported efforts to extinguish the flames, helped construct access routes and firebreaks, or provided rest and refreshment facilities and media updates. It was a welcome demonstration of collective citizen effort, over many exhausting hours, day and night, often associated with significant personal risk, resilience and courage. This needs to be documented so that there is a better understanding of the scale of community input that was needed to prevent any loss of lives as well as built property, along with fortuitous changes in wind direction at critical moments.”
Dave Morris- Draft Report on the Wild Fires
Nethy Bridge, RSPB Abernethy and the vicinity has a variety of people, with diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Some farmers and others in the local community have long riled against RSPB Abernethy and their land management practices. Nethy Bridge has one of the largest concentrations of second homes and holiday lets in the area. It is also home to many incomers, who do not come from the traditional farming background and often hold different views about conservation and rewilding (See my research in my book). Yet, the fire brought everyone together.
Here is an inspiring quote from a book called Lifelines by Julian Hoffman, speaking about his own house catching fire in a remote village in Greece where he and his partner had settled. He stresses the importance of solidarity and how it seems to be an innate instinct.
“My abiding memory of that day, beyond the fear we’d experienced from the moment we first saw the smoke, will always be of how people, despite many and considerable differences that exist in communities the world over, came together with a singularly fierce desire to put out a fire. A focused and instinctive to save a home. The key to solidarity is that it has the capacity to embrace difference when it draws other into its wider circle of care and concern.”
This approach of solidarity, embracing difference, and extension of care, coming from the grass roots, needs to be extended beyond immediate emergencies to the emergencies of climate change and loss of biodiversity, as well as the issues of economic and social injustice.
