Thank you. My name is Alan Riach. I’m a poet and professor of Scottish literature at the University of Glasgow. Bashabi asked me to say a few words to draw the evening towards an end. She asked me to do this in two ways: first of all, by reading a little passage here and then by adding something to it. So these are the words I’ve been given to read.

Tagore’s poetry has always reflected the unity and shared vitality between humans and nature. His work celebrates the dance of existence that transcends individual forms and connects all beings in one continuous living tapestry. Tagore and Geddes had a vision for the future of this planet, and their friendship was a symbol of this vision.

However, a somber and startling fact burns amongst us here today: Scotland’s ancient woodlands were taken, our love for leaves forsaken, species lost at great cost. Today, only 17% of Scotland’s land area has been covered again by forests. Unbelievably, our beautiful Scotland is one of the least biodiverse countries in the world, ranking in the bottom 25%.

At one time, Scotland was covered in the Caledonian Forest, a vast native species that stretched across the Highlands. Today, only 1% of the original forest remains. This is a result of centuries of habitat loss, deforestation, intensification of cattle farming, overgrazing, and overexploitation of land.

India is naturally more biodiverse, yet it ranks very low for habitat protection and has the highest rate of loss of biodiversity in the world. Again, this is because of deforestation, overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss. Our world is in a huge crisis with climate change, unsustainable development, and overurbanization. We are losing our leaves; we are losing our oxygen.

Many indigenous people rely on forests for their livelihood, culture, and identity. We are losing our identity; we’re losing love; we’re losing life, and we are losing face to Tagore and Geddes, who tried to warn us that this would happen. We need to fight together to raise awareness, to bring in stronger conservation measures, to balance development with environmental sustainability, and most importantly, to make nature a part of our daily lives.

As we end our little story here today, we remember the wise words of Geddes: “We live not by the jingling of our coins but by the fullness of our harvests.” Now, Bashabi asked me to end with a few words of my own, and I’ll do that via a poem.

It’s so curious, the coincidences that connect. This is a recent poem I was writing, thinking actually about these very things before Bashabi introduced me to the text and the performance of this fantastic event that we’ve just witnessed.

“By leaves we live,” said Patrick Geddes, the leaves of trees, the leaves of books, the leave-taking of childhood, of home. The “grand thing it is to get leave to live” in the words of Nan Shepherd, quoted in beautiful tiny script on the Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note. We still live in a country where most of us can walk or go by bicycle, or bus, or by train, or by car, and then walk again into nature. Nature is not something in Scotland we are always immured from. We can touch it. We can be part of it, if we want, to choose, into the wild, into the wilderness. Scotland’s still a good country to live in, and some of us can see directly into nature simply by looking out of the window. So my poem to end with is called “The Forest Floor.”

The Forest Floor

From my window, the blue sky sails

through high Scots oaks and beech,

sycamore, ash, hawthorn and spruce,

lights and makes shadows on

innumerable tangles of branches,

angled, twisted, stretching horizontal,

thinning, leaning, curving down

or thinly sloping out above their neighbours,

almost touching, slender,

as the tall slim sturdy trunks might sway

a little, in the wind,

or in a storm, might bend, and leaves

shiver green like flames in a flaring fire,

but cold in the rain

or even just the early spring blue air,

coming among them, there.

That squirrel,

moves so fast then stops,

dead still, legs spread,

claws caught on the bark,

then heads up, races again, and leaps

to how can it know where, or how secure,

how pliant and connected,

how brittle or broken the next branch

might be?

Hits safely, darts on,

up and around, into the woods,

reappears further on, stops, still,

then moves again,

and is gone.

There is an endless tension, day and

night. Animals and trees don’t sleep.

The beasts might close their bodies down

a while. Trees never do.

The tension never goes away entirely.

A forest at night is dark, but never asleep.

Night creatures move and sound

in their own time, darkly, but highly awake:

the tension is acute.

Day creatures, that squirrel,

gone elsewhere, stay fast in their proprioception:

we look on and study, can only imagine,

get into, sometimes, for a moment or two.

The wilderness things are within it, all of their lives.

Almost none of them die of old age.

Predators, invaders, diseases brought in,

removals, destructions,

the industry mind, the numbers folk,

the dollars talk, disrupt. Pollution spoils.

But wilderness things connect.

Trees, squirrels, birds,

from sky to the forest floor.

Voles, mice, spiders, ants.

and under the earth, the worms.

And nutrients of corpses.

At dusk the crows coagulate,

their throats fill out

with flowing music craws,

cacophonies of polyphonic soaring

growing massive, individuations, as the sky

gets duskier and darker and the darkness

starts to close things down.

They gather on the branches of the tall Scots oaks

and other trees and mass.

A Catholic conglomerate of Protestants,

and then, at one moment, they rise, flying out

of the mesh of the traps of the branches,

all in curves and angles, fast, freely,

Then in a cloud of winged black bodies, connected

and singular, curve up and out

and into the air,

and turn in an arc,

then bar in another,

then over our heads

and return once again,

and then take themselves off into darkness,

and go as the sound of their crying and calling

grows less, and then less,

and then settles, into silence. Not silence.

And we turn, go indoors,

to our rooms, to our beds,

to our warming, and silence. Not silence.

Dhonnobad; Mòran taing; Thank you.