Forecast: Wind, Rain, Occasional Sun

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For most of the twentieth century it was tragicomic stuff, a product of Scotland's archaic land tenure system. A parade of eccentrics, fancying themselves lairds with sovereign powers over the island's inhabitants, bought and sold Eigg like a rich man's trinket. There was a retired armaments dealer, a foul-tempered London shipowner who turned the island into a shooting estate, a cabinet minister, a Welshman with a yearning to become a gentleman farmer, and a former naval commander who wanted to open a residential home for disturbed boys from wealthy families and turned out not to be a naval commander at all.

And then, most famously, there was Keith Schellenberg, the heir to a gelatin fortune and a former Olympic bobsled champion. He brought his socialite friends to Eigg to play croquet and dress up for reenactments of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, and they cruised up and down the island's single paved road-one lane, three miles long-in his yellow 1927 Rolls-Royce, waving champagne bottles from the windows.

The yellow Rolls-Royce burned one cold January night in 1994. The islanders were shocked, shocked. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, Schellenberg sold out to a man who was described by the island's historian, Camille Dressler, as "a mysterious fire-worshipping German artist who went by the name of Maruma, a name he had read in a pool of water in Abu Dhabi." Maruma visited the island twice, Maggie Fyffe told me. "Then he buggered off again." She laughed raucously. Rumor had it that he was fleeing a fraud investigation.

The idea took root among the people of Eigg that perhaps, if they could raise the funds, they might buy the island themselves, eliminating the centuries-old residue of Scottish feudalism. So raise the funds they did, with the help of an anonymous English sugar mommy, and the sale went through in 1997. Large quantities of Talisker single-malt whiskey from the nearby Isle of Skye fueled an all-night celebration.

The islanders decided that reliable, renewable energy was the key to Eigg's economic survival. Electricity used to be available for only a few hours a day. You couldn't run two appliances in one house at the same time. "There was never anywhere on the island where you couldn't hear a diesel generator chattering," Booth said.

"People were committed to green ideas from the trust's inception in 1997," he went on. (Islanders like to cite the Gaelic concept of duthchas, or kindness to the land.) But it was also a question of necessity. Laying a submarine cable from the mainland was just too expensive. The whole scheme -- wind, solar, and small hydro -- became operational in February 2008, soon after the tenth anniversary of the islanders' buy-out of Eigg. The equipment and installation cost about $3 million, roughly the same as the island's purchase price. Booth said, "As far as I'm aware, no other scheme in the world has integrated all three renewables into a single grid system that supplies a whole community."

On my second day on Eigg, I followed a rutted forest track for a couple of miles through one of the island's few intact stands of woodland, tall conifers interspersed with patches of heather and tufts of snow-white bog cotton. The only sounds were the onomatopoeic two-note call of a cuckoo and the distant murmur of surf. Eventually I reached a 20-foot-wide concrete dam on Abhainn Gleann Chàradail, the island's largest stream, which drains the slopes of An Sgurr. This is the workhorse of Eigg's electricity supply. At first, Booth told me, the idea had been to rely more heavily on wind power, but the emphasis shifted in favor of small hydro to tap the energy from the island's fast-flowing burns. Hydro now generates four times as much power as the wind farm and ten times as much as the photovoltaic array, the utility of which is limited by the fact that the sun shines here reliably for only four months of the year.

But it had shone today. One of the pleasures of life at these latitudes (56°52 N, the same as northern Labrador) is the endlessly drawn-out summer twilight. As I hiked back uphill from a white sand beach called Traigh Chlithe, the sun finally receded behind the jagged peaks of Rhum. It was 10 o'clock, and I could see the first lights burning in one or two of the crofts at the foot of Eigg's soaring basalt cliffs. These days they could burn all night if needed. And burn without an ounce of carbon rising into the Hebridean sky.