On the 26th of November 2021, ESA Scotland held our Ramble Craft Nature Walk in coordination with besea.n’s ESEA Heritage Month.

ESA Scotland strongly believes that access to open green spaces should be a priority of all members of the East and Southeast Asian community. Studies have shown that most BAME communities in the UK lives in urban spaces and often have the least amount of access to natural environments and green spaces. Asian communities in particular were found to visit natural environments the least according to collected government data from 2016.

As Black naturalist and psychotherapist Beth Collier writes, minority communities have become deprived of the benefits of being in nature, resulting in many of us feeling unsafe or unwelcome in environments that many of our cultures used to have a strong connection with.

ESEA people in particular are often automatically assumed to be tourists or foreign in many spaces as “perpetual foreigners”. Sometimes, wanting to resist feeling alienated means that we deprive ourselves of otherwise mentally beneficial experiences.

This is the first of ESA Scotland’s Green Spaces: We Belong Here! series of events of encouraging and fostering a safe environment for our community’s exploration and re-discovery of nature (to be continued in 2022 across Edinburgh and Glasgow).

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, ESA Scotland co-founder, Sarah Kwan, hosted a number of online Arts and Craft workshops inspired by East and Southeast Asian art styles and stories. It was a great experience in sharing unique stories and art styles from East and Southeast Asian culture with friends across the United Kingdom and beyond!