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Working with residents and community groups on addressing a season of polluted seas, a series of programmes focus on transitioning from salmon farming to alternative aqua-cultures. The Station expands the possibilities of seaweeds and bivalves as protagonists to care for the shores in Scotland and beyond. Its goal is to activate collective usership of the coast and envision another future for the tidal commons.

Cultural shifts allow us to reimagine entanglements with coastal histories and ecologies. In parallel to the intertidal table, the Station runs pedagogical programmes to unlearn modern approaches to food systems. One of them, Collective Coast, compiled episodes about how the coast of the isles of Skye and Raasay holds and records the memories of multiple generations portraying the changing relationships with the waters around the islands. Photo: Jordan Young.

Relearning

Restaurants across Skye and Raasay have removed farmed salmon from their menu and incorporated bivalves and seaweeds in their dishes—ingredients that can regenerate, filter and oxygenate seawater while breathing. Through new cooking apprenticeship programmes set up in collaboration with the local high school in Portree, restaurants are also training the island’s next generation of climavore cooks to work closely with chefs, foragers, divers, bakers, brewers and kitchen teams. In parallel, the Station assembles memories, recipes, songs through radio, archival photographs and film footage, and captures coastal experiences through Gaelic place names, folklore and traditions—key knowledge for a shared understanding of what the coast once was and what has the potential to be.

Regrowing

Conceived as a sea orchard, a pilot for a community-owned intertidal farm uses the coast as a space for sourcing food while cultivating multiple ecologies. Through collaboration with marine scientists CLIMAVORE promotes a modular system to grow multiple low-trophic species—those that generally feed on plankton and are at the bottom of the food chain. This system on the intertidal zone is accessible on foot, and consists of ropes, trestles and tidal gardens for different species of seaweeds, sea vegetables and bivalves that regenerate ocean water, absorb carbon emissions, contribute to food security, and strengthen food supply.

Rebuilding

Cement is the second most consumed product in the world after water and a major contributor to climate breakdown. Sourcing materials based on waste streams of intertidal origin is a way to connect the food and construction industries. Learning from experiments CLIMAVORE developed in New Orleans, Taiwan and Los Angeles, the Station has worked with fabricators, chemists and material scientists to prototype a new material that replaces cement and petrochemical resins with crushed seashells collected from CLIMAVORE restaurants. Partnering with the West Highland College for their Construction Skills Course, a new syllabus encourages learning from historic techniques for tabby concrete, seaweed thatching and insulation, and shell composites, connecting food-webs with wall building, exploring ways to construct CLIMAVORE.

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