This season, three remarkable beings join the I Stand Beside community, each carried into our circle by a human ally whose work bridges art, science, and practical conservation. Together they remind us that much of life’s beauty lies hidden in plain sight (or beneath the surface) and that standing beside nature is both an act of attention and of love.
Helen Woolston stands beside the Flame Shell (Limaria hians)
Beneath the cold waters of Scotland’s west coast lives a small mollusc with a secret fire: a flicker of orange tentacles that wave like tongues of flame from a fragile shell. These Flame Shells build their homes from fragments of the sea, from gravel, shells, and silt all knitted together with fine silk threads called byssus. Over time, their nests grow into living carpets that shelter hundreds of other species: “These beds are habitat to 265 invertebrate species, 19 algae species and provide important protection for developing cod young and scallop spat,” Helen explains. “Beautiful wonders lie under the surface of our waters, and that is one of the reasons many seabed species are threatened: they are not commonly seen by the humans who live nearby.”
Once abundant in the Clyde and the Isle of Man, Flame Shell populations have vanished from many of their former homes, eroded by dredging and neglect. Yet Helen’s work is rooted in the Argyll Hope Spot and brought alive through mask-making, puppetry, and animation, and it invites us to look again. “If we don’t know they are there, how can we care when they are lost?” she asks. Later this year she joins the Argyll Hope Spot Snorkelling Residency to draw inspiration directly from these hidden ecosystems, transforming underwater encounters into art that helps others to see, and to care.
Jeremy Leggett stands beside the Northern Emerald Dragonfly (Somatochlora arctica)
Where peatland meets woodland above Loch Ness, a flash of metallic green arcs through the summer air. Behold the Northern Emerald Dragonfly. Its iridescent wings and luminous eyes once captivated artists of the Art Nouveau era, and they still catch the imagination today. “It feels like a good omen,” Jeremy writes, “an indication that the conservation work we are doing at Highlands Rewilding is moving in the right direction.”
This dragonfly’s lifecycle is a lesson in patience and metamorphosis. The female lays her eggs in still waters beneath sphagnum moss, sundew, and tussock grasses. The larvae live for two years or more beneath the surface, shedding their skins as they grow, hunting aquatic insects and tadpoles until they emerge into light.
Although listed as “least concern” globally, the Northern Emerald is considered “near threatened” in the UK, its habitats vulnerable to peat extraction, drainage, and the accelerating pressures of climate change. For Jeremy, it has become both symbol and sentinel, proof that rewilded landscapes can again sustain complexity and beauty. “Biodiversity is collapsing, the climate is in meltdown… and as the founder of Highlands Rewilding, I long to do something meaningful about it,” he writes.
Mark Hope stands beside the Unknown Beings
Some stand beside a single species; Mark stands beside the countless ones we have not yet named. “It’s an extraordinary fact that we have not recorded the great majority of species on the planet,” he writes. The IUCN Red List recognises roughly 2.16 million known species, yet recent estimates suggest there may be tens of millions of living forms on Earth. Most of them invisible to human eyes, unstudied, unnamed, and disappearing faster than we can discover them.
Mark reminds us of what the Zen master Thich Nhât Hanh once wrote, “We will fall completely in love with the Earth… When we are in love with something, there is no separation between ourselves and the thing we love.”
Mark’s act of standing beside these unnamed lives challenges us to honour what we do not yet understand: the unseen microbes shaping our soils, the deep-sea creatures glowing in darkness and all the species evolving as we speak.
Welcome, Helen and the Flame Shells, Jeremy and the Northern Emeralds, Mark and the Unknown Beings. May your companionship remind us all that to know the world is to love it, and that every act of attention is an act of repair.