'I SAW BEYOND DEATH' THE LOSS OF A SON BROUGHT ALASTAIR M CINTOSH

Sunday Herald, The, Jun 22, 2008 by VICKY ALLAN

WHEN Alastair McIntosh's publisher approached him about his new book, it was to discuss a short treatise outlining a climate change strategy for Scotland, to be launched in the run-up to the 2007 election. Events in McIntosh's life got in the way of that.

In December 2006 his seven-months pregnant wife was taken into hospital, and their son Ossian was stillborn. As a result, two journeys seemed to fuse: a personal and a political one. Both involved engagement with the idea of death, whether it be at an individual or global level. Both contained elements of anger and denial. McIntosh had already seen, looking at the facts and figures around climate change, that there were no easy answers. Given that almost everyone seemed to be involved in some sort of denial about the disastrous consequences of climate change and how to deal with the problem, what hope was there? Yet, in facing his son's death, he had found a form of acceptance. He started to write a different book, adding the word "hope" to the subtitle. The completed work, entitled Hell And High Water: Climate Change, Hope And The Human Condition, is published next month.

When we meet, in the garden of the Govan terraced house McIntosh shares with his wife, Verene Nicolas, he confesses his book is less about climate change than "drawing people out of the straitjacket of mainstream culture". Its central argument is that we need to stem the intense consumerism that drives so much of global CO2 production. We need to stop focusing on wants and start focusing on needs. In other words, we need to get real - and that also entails learning to deal with the despair and death that arises from the more terrible consequences of climate change.

"Before we lost our son Ossian, " he explains, "I was trying to crystallise my argument into something bigger, but it wasn't happening. Then I had that experience of seeing beyond death and realised it had a relevance to how we deal with many difficult issues in today's world."

McIntosh's living room is heated by a stove fuelled by wood sourced from skips and the waste off-cuts produced by the Govan- based Galgael trust, a community project which builds and sails traditional boats, and of which he is a founding director. Although he tries to keep his carbon footprint small, he is a fairly moderate carbon abstainer.

A footprint evaluation puts him at just 20per cent below average, most of his contribution taken up by the six return flights each year he takes to conferences and events.

"We're all environmental hypocrites, " he says. "I just don't try to hide it. We have to bite the bullet and say that we need to be at the leading edge of change, but be careful of going over the edge of change. Because if you go too far people will say, 'Well there goes another hippie with an inheritance who has bought his smallholding and cut himself off from the world'."

Although McIntosh has paid off his mortgage using GBP50,000 he won on the Channel 4 gameshow Without Prejudice, for which he was selected as a contestant after a Channel 4 researcher hit on his website, his income from writing and teaching at the Centre for Human Ecology - an academic organisation that describes itself as "a network for ecological and social transformation" - is modest.

Success and controversy, after all, have equally been his. Soil And Soul: People Versus Corporate Power, his book about the Harris super-quarry battle and the fight of the community for Eigg, sold 10,000 copies and became an eco-classic.

His radical ideas and embracing of what he calls "eco-feminism" may, he believes, have been part of what led to the cutting off of the Centre for Human Ecology from Edinburgh University. McIntosh is a marginal, yet visionary, fi gure.

He uses a story about the Middle Eastern wise fool Nasrudin, as a metaphor for the climate change situation. One night Nasrudin is found thrashing around looking for his keys in the garden of a neighbour. When asked why he's looking there, Nasrudin replies: "Because this is the only place where there is a streetlight." McIntosh believes that "governments and corporations are looking where the light is shining, unaware that the streetlights are dazzling them to the universe of the stars all around". Those stars, for McIntosh, are in fact our own inner lights, our soul and imagination. "Whenever I feel disillusioned, " he says, "I go outside and look up at the stars and set things in cosmological perspective and say to myself, reality is a much bigger picture."

He is also happy to step outside our cultural comfort zones. There are, for instance, faeries lurking in his new book. Though McIntosh's faerie is a metaphorical one, representing "the inner source of poetry, music, art and myth", and has little connection with Tinkerbell types, it does sit uncomfortably with the hard facts, gleaned from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . He knows this. A literary agent once said to him: "Don't do anything on the faeries or you'll never be taken seriously."