Heading north across the North Sea, my heart always starts to lift - leaving the overpopulated and grimy waters of the fringe of continental Europe.

Early morning in Scrabster to load a few drums of helicopter fuel and the reality was already plain. Although the sky was grey and rain showers passed, it was a clear clean grey, the water alongside crystal clear. The Orkney islands across the Pentland Firth, sharply defined to the horizon, except where a curtain of rain draped a hillside mauve grey. The air is a joy to breathe, to fill the lungs with a smile on ones face.

Later we would coast past the western Orkneys, the old man of Hoy., pass through western Shetland in a sleepy moonlight hardly a human light to be seen, but the white breakers close at hand , at the foot of shear black cliffs, under smoothly rounded hummocked hillsides.

We encircled the remote islands of North Rona and the St Kilda group. Always the wild free birds of the North in attendance, the Auk family, puffin, guillemot and razorbill the majestic Gannet occasionally a shearwater or a storm petrel. We would see a few grey seals, dolphins, harbour porpoise, and pilot whales. I am convinced there should be more, many more birds and sea creatures.

We see the beginning of creeping industry - the Foinaven FPSO, with its attendant drilling rigs, dive rigs and supply vessels, the beginning of "Atlantic Frontier" oil exploration. Along the edge of the continental shelf are huge multi-million pound stern trawlers taking out deep sea fish, a new "bonanza" on slow growing, slow maturing species, which will all end in tears as usual, except for few rich industrialists. These fish destroyers aren't "fishermen" any longer, not on this level, any more than the majority of agricultural operators are "farmers". No they revel in calling their work an "industry" and industrial it is. Their work and their lives are thus reduced from a kind of vocation, a way of life, to a mere mechanical or technical process, not much to do with real fish, but all to do with figures on paper.

It is clear to me why I should be here now, my own interest in supporting the Greenpeace campaign of the Atlantic Frontier. It's not quite the climate change, the risks to all large life forms on the planet, real as these dangers are. Maybe the human race will pass before too long, maybe. What disturbs me more is the way that, as before, we want to turn the cathedral into a McDonalds. We have to desecrate all that is pristine, free, wild, clean, - to blemish and sully. We take it upon ourselves to "manage" eco systems, to intrude beyond our right.

The Tao Teaching says- " when men lack a sense of awe, there will be a disaster". In another way it also says: the hard and strong will fall the soft and weak will overcome.

Oh please great ocean and all your children and life forms, your great watery swirling currents and billows, your crags and sands, hills and mountains your grasses, wracks and kelps, your rounded pebbles, your salt fresh tang, do not be subverted as the land has been, to the tawdry reckoning of hard eyed men with chiselled hearts. So I pray.