Scotland “is the most beautiful country in the world, but in a generation or two there will be no one left in the glen,” a far-sighted Highland engineer said in 1943. Jutting out his chin, he added: “We will not let that happen, we shall make a difference.”
That little clip, from a Ministry of Information film about the transformative potential of hydroelectric power, is taken from one of 80 films mashed up in Living Proof — A Climate Story, an evocative new documentary that asks difficult questions about Scotland’s historical role in the climate crisis.
Over 90 minutes it covers about 35 years of history from the 1940s, cut together from state propaganda, corporate videos and news reports.
Focusing on the economic hopes and dreams of politicians, planners and the people who lived through the first blush of postwar optimism, in the end it shows how that optimism evaporated.
Living Proof will open Take One Action, billed as the UK’s leading global change film festival, which takes place on September 22-26 in Glasgow, Edinburgh and online, with editions in Aberdeen and Inverness in October. Chosen as a curtain-raiser to Cop26, the climate conference in Glasgow, the film asks a key question, according to Emily Munro, its director: “Are we going to get trapped again in an agenda of promises we can’t keep?”
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As her film makes clear, in the three decades after the Second World War Scotland’s economy boomed on the promise of 300 years of coal and plentiful natural gas and North Sea oil.
The white heat of change was nowhere more obvious than in Lanarkshire, according to a 1963 film about its “big mill”, Ravenscraig steelworks. The sequence about the benefits of industrialisation ends with a shot of much poorer people, apparently in Africa, with the voiceover saying: “So many more have nothing at all. They are on the fringes of the stream that pours from the big mill.”
Ravenscraig, the largest hot strip steel mill in western Europe, was shut down in 1992, and with it Lanarkshire’s postwar optimism. “I felt we needed to revisit voices, as they really were,” Munro said.
In the final part of Living Proof, an earnest woman at a protest offers what was then a fringe opinion. “We demand,” she says, “the radical re-channelling of resources into wave, wind and solar power, and other forms of renewable energy.”
