Last Friday, a group of us spent the morning doing something remarkably simple. We looked.
As part of the first Forth Valley Biodiversity Festival, organised by Forth Environment Link, Resonate Together and The Conservation Volunteers held a BioBlitz at Carsebridge Cultural Campus.
The idea was to explore the grounds and begin identifying some of the plants and wildlife sharing this old industrial site with us.
And it made me wonder: can we truly belong to a place if we don’t know what else belongs there?
Most of us move through familiar landscapes every day. We recognise the buildings, roads and perhaps the people.
But how many of us could name the plants growing along the path, the trees above us or the insects living amongst them?
I certainly couldn’t name them all. Yet something happens when we begin to look more closely.
What was simply a patch of green becomes a collection of different species. A plant we might previously have dismissed as a weed acquires a name.
We notice what is flowering, what is feeding upon it and what has found a home beside us. Our place becomes bigger without changing size.
That feels particularly important at a time when many people feel overwhelmed by news about climate change and biodiversity loss.
The scale of those challenges can make us feel powerless. But spending time looking closely at the natural world offers another perspective.
Nature is extraordinarily resilient. Plants push through unlikely spaces, seeds wait for the right conditions, habitats re-establish themselves and life returns.
That doesn’t mean nature doesn’t need our help. Quite the opposite. Perhaps understanding its resilience helps us recognise that what we do matters.
Forth Environment Link’s month-long festival has brought organisations and communities across the region together through wildlife surveys, conservation, photography, gardening, bats, moths, wildflowers and much more - encouraging people not simply to worry about nature, but to discover it.
At Carsebridge, that matters to us. We talk a great deal about culture, heritage and belonging.
But culture isn’t confined to what happens inside buildings. Our natural environment is part of the story of a place too.
Perhaps stewardship begins there. Not with knowing everything, but simply with noticing.
Because once we know what shares our place, perhaps we begin to understand that we share responsibility for it too.
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