Sir John Lister-Kaye Bt. OBE

At the heart of Aigas Field Centre is Sir John Lister-Kaye, one of Scotland’s foremost naturalists and well-loved nature writers. For John, a defining moment came in 1967, when he witnessed the infamous Torrey Canyon oil spill (100,000 gallons) on the Cornish coast. He was inspired to work as a freelance environmental journalist and began a career as a writer. In 1968 he moved to the Isle of Skye to work with author/naturalist Gavin Maxwell of Ring of Bright Water fame.

After the death of Gavin Maxwell, John Lister-Kaye found himself in a wild landscape that allowed him the freedom to be brave and ambitious about his future. Having the idealism characteristic of youth, John realised his passion was not just natural history and wildlife, but also for nature conservation through education. He believed that prohibitive nature conservation did not work; that people had to have the opportunity to see and to enjoy and to learn if they were to value wild places and wildlife, and so conserve them. For this reason he was committed to starting a field centre which provided environmental education for children, as well as enjoyable nature tours for adults and special interest groups.

30 years later Aigas is Scotland’s principal environmental education provider, handling well over 3,000 school children on programmes every year. We serve 78 Highland schools, as well as many from further afield. Schools programmes are run entirely separately from all adult activities, in different places at different times of the year. 450 adults attend residential programmes each year at Aigas and a further number on external programmes in the islands and overseas.

The influence of Sir John’s work, writing, lecturing and thinking on the people and wildlife of the Highlands is widely recognised. In 1996 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Stirling University, in 2003 he received an OBE for nature conservation, and in 2006 he received an honorary doctorate from St. Andrews University and was made a Vice President of the RSPB.  

Click here to read an article from The Scotsman about John Lister-Kaye and Song of the Rolling Earth.

John Lister-Kaye’s new literature website will be launched soon. In the meantime, here are two extracts from his latest best sellers, Song of the Rolling Earth and Nature’s Child.

“Joy and delight are nature’s gift to those who seek it and strive to reveal its truths. Nature comes free and in full Technicolor. It is neither fussy nor personal. It recognises no cruelty, tolerates no flaws. It makes no promises and tells no lies. It is utterly original, constantly recreating itself anew, dazzling and inspirational. Its laws are absolute, without amendments. It just bowls along in its meticulous, random way, handing itself down from generation to generation, making the most of its rocks and its climate and its simmering broth of genes. For those who are fortunate enough to be able to know it well, it reveals the triumph of creation. In its birdsong and its trees, in the river and the mountains and the loch, in small tortoiseshell butterflies and its inscrutable trout, in its swifts and wrens and rooks, in its badgers and its pipistrelle bats, in the adder and Uroceros (the woodwasp), in praise of all of these and more, the nature of Aigas has handed me my life”.

Nature’s Child:

From chapter 10, Deception Valley expedition to the Kalahari Desert with his daughter Hermione in 2000.

“If only children of the industrial west could experience real wilderness like this. Not just because it would provide an uplifting experience in their lives, or because they would enjoy it, although I am entirely sure most children would. But because it would provide them with a comparative base against which to measure the artificial, destructive, world of human intervention in nature, and, unlike a television programme or reading a book or a magazine article, it would claim them as nature’s children, an awareness that I believe would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

I could not see Hermione. I had only her small hand from which to assimilate her mood. I don’t believe she was aware of any great philosophical import loading the space between us, but I know that she has remembered this silence, and the stars and the awe that involuntarily wrapped us round that night, that held us in our place. I know that the experience helped her to understand that this is how nature created the earth and the lions and the repetitive lark and the scorpions, and that not so long ago man, the San Bushman, belonged there too. And I know that she has instinctively comprehended that it is to nature’s tune, not ours, that the desert dances in this spiritual, soul-scouring place.

If I had a prayer to hurl into the night sky, to loose off into the great primed emptiness of the desert darkness, it was that this rare moment would make her understand that she, too, belongs to nature; that she is a proper part of it, then and now and forever, and that she will always value wildness for wildness’s sake. That starry blackness out there brings you curiously close to God – all gods and any god. It resonates with the hum of creation itself. It is wondrous and thrilling, and a little menacing. After a while the solid shapes of bushes seemed to lean in on us – more mirages – adopting form, as if about to spring. Hermione’s hand tightened again. Suddenly the deception was gone. This was the desert, after all”.