Paper short abstract:

This paper offers ethnographic reflections on how people in the Outer Hebrides live in the shadow of frequent predictions of the disappearance of the Gaelic language and the islands' vulnerable ecology, and how these prediction circulate in the building of socio-ecological futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers ethnographic reflections on how people in the Outer Hebrides live in the shadow of frequent predictions of their own ecological and cultural disappearance. Inhabitants of the islands hear frequent pronouncements of the imminent death of Gaelic as a community language in one of its last remaining strongholds. They also live with near-constant reminders of the threat of climate change and biodiversity loss: the islands, being low-lying and with a dune-based west coast, are particularly vulnerable to rising seas and extreme weather events, while the islands’ valuable biodiversity is menaced by a wide variety of potential hazards, not least among them climate change itself. There is a widespread understanding that crofting and Gaelic are closely connected. This accompanies significant evidence that crofting lifeways have the potential to produce and maintain habitats for a wide variety of internationally important biodiversity. As such, climate change threatens biodiversity directly by altering the habitats on which wildlife depends, but it also indirectly threatens biodiversity by menacing the sustainable human livelihoods which create and maintain the complex naturecultures on which both Gaelic and natural ecologies rely. Additionally, those “returning to the land” with idyllic notions of protecting and enhancing rural nature play a role in imaginaries of Gaelic’s disappearance. In this paper I reflect on the ways in which these predictions of doom are understood, the forms in which they circulate, and the ways in which they are used to spur different kinds of future-making political practices.