Energy that brought Beatriz to Lewis, via Mongolia

An engineer by profession, she now finds herself firmly at home on Lewis, a world away from her previous experiences, and pursuing her passions of environmental sustainability, both in terms of her working life and in her spare time assisting with her partner’s horticulture enterprise on their croft in North Lochs.

It’s been a roadmap marked by serendipity, covering some of the extremities of the compass. Studying in university in the Spanish capital, she had little idea that her life’s journey would take her to a crofting community in the north-west of Scotland, via one of the remotest countries of Asia.

“I was working for many years with a charity in Spain called Energy Without Borders, improving access to electricity and water in places like South America and Africa,” said Beatriz.

“It was through them that I was able to make contact with a French charity that was working in Mongolia. They had similar principles and values to what I was looking for; they were looking to make an impact.

“I was open to work anywhere I was needed. This opportunity came up in Mongolia and, of course, I was fascinated by the country. The project I was leading was in fighting against air pollution in the capital, Ulan Bator, which is the most polluted capital city in the world in the winter.”

Their focus was on the settlements on the edge of the city, home to a growing population of Nomadic herders who were having to leave the countryside and their traditional way of life in order to eke out some sort of a living in the city.

“Their living conditions were difficult,” said Beatriz. “Despite being around six times the size of the UK, Mongolia is only three million people and half the population lives in Ulan Bator.

“It was a city planned for a third of the population. It’s in a valley and the smoke just lies on top. The people are coming from the surrounding areas and it's constantly expanding. Some 60 per cent of them live in yurts and houses they built themselves, which are very inefficient, and they use coal for heat.”

Beatriz’s work with the French charity was not in encouraging a move away from burning coal – that was impossible given the circumstances, it’s minus 25 degrees in a winter which lasts for seven months – but to work on improving the energy efficiency of their homes, “because it doesn't matter what heating system you use if you can’t keep the heat inside”.

She was in Mongolia for a total of four years, including during the Covid period, and the project which she led won a prestigious international award.

“It’s an amazing country,” said Beatriz. “Mongolia is beautiful, the nature there is amazing. It was so different to what I was used to. The people live in such harsh conditions but it means they are so adaptable.

"It’s amazing to think how much the country has changed in recent times. It’s so vast and it’s only in the last 10 years or so that they’ve seen things like the internet or even things like escalators.”

The country has been badly affected by what seems a perennial problem the world over - people leaving the countryside and rural living to reside in cities on the pretence of better economic opportunity and services. But it comes with consequences, for Mongolia and indeed, as we see ourselves in Scotland, in much wealthier economies, too.

“They have changed the Nomadic traditions in the last half century and it’s brought big problems,” said Beatrriz. “People are leaving the countryside because the land is suffering from overgrazing.

“There are 60 million livestock in Mongolia. I think, in part, it's a reaction to what happened when the Soviet control of livestock was removed and it was left open to the free market with no control over numbers.

“So the animals grew vast in numbers, they are not well fed over the summer because of the overgrazing and a lot of them die in the winter, so the herders are losing their way of life and having to move to the city in search of work, mainly in the construction sector in low wages and bad conditions. The women generally work as cleaners.”

After ensuring a second four-year phase on the Charity´s project and enduring COVID-19 in Mongolia far away from her family, Beatriz decided to return to Spain.

“I was wondering what to do with my life and what would be the next step. I was very interested in eco villages and how to live more in harmony with nature. After seeing how some people live, you realise that the system we have is not sustainable, it is going to collapse.

“So I was searching for different ways of living and more holistic ways of designing projects to help with that. I was looking into permaculture as well and that’s what took me to Scotland.

“I came two years ago to the eco village in Findhorn and I was doing a permaculture course. I fell in love with Scotland and had the chance to do forest restoration work in Findhorn’s Forest Hinterlands”

It was there that she met her partner, John, and “he told me how he was living in Lewis”. Seven years ago John and his family moved permanently to Lewis, after being regular visitors, and set up their horticulture business at Croft 44 Ranish.

It’s been very successful. Based very much on organic principles, they produce a variety of vegetables which are sold locally and host regular open days to give the public a chance to see what they do, and maybe inspire a sense that they should follow suit.

Beatriz, came to see for herself what John had been talking about, and very much liked the whole idea. She decided to stay, as the entire ethos was very much up her street.

“We need to look back at our traditions of old and how people were living in this environment and what we can take from that to serve us today,” she said. “That’s one thing I learnt from Mongolia: we get so blind by modern life and technology that we no longer value the knowledge that we had.

“It’s sad to see all that knowledge being lost and the biodiversity that’s being lost with it. So when John told me how he was living and that his sisters were learning to do tweed from a 90-year-old man and growing vegetables using some of the traditional ways, I liked what I was hearing.”

And from that came another fortuitous opportunity to expand her horizons further. One of John’s friends is Matthew Logan who heads up the Islands Centre for Net Zero team at Community Energy Scotland, based in Stornoway.

A vacancy came up in the organisation for a community support officer. Given Beatriz’s background, interest and speciality with developing energy projects, she seemed an ideal fit. She applied, got the job and now works alongside Mathew in Stornoway.

“Our aim is to support communities that generate energy to keep going and support them in any way we can,” said Beatriz.

“We think community energy is a way of democratising the energy market. And it’s also about people. Many projects that we see here in the islands are a result of support from community energy schemes. We also support decarbonisation projects and the energy transition.”

One of their main concerns right now is to try and ensure that capacity is retained on the Minch inter-connector for community projects, amid real concern that large commercial generators are being given preference in a way that will see community initiatives being squeezed out of the picture. (See news article elsewhere in this week’s Gazette.)

“It’s a difficult one because the market conditions are not suitable for small community groups so you are not competing on a level playing field,” she said. “We are trying to influence a shift in that, to see the social value in community groups being recognised and to give them the tools so that they can compete with commercial developers.”

Dealing with politicians and multinational energy companies may be a far cry from the yurts of Ulan Bator, but it is no less challenging and, albeit in a different way, just as important, certainly for the island community that she now calls home.