Nature Archives - ClimateCultures - creative conversations for the Anthropocene

Flora-Persona: “We are all related”

Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”

1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

I am excited by an artistic theme I have been pursuing these past months. I have named the series ‘Flora-Persona.’

Using only natural materials, including plants, trees and associated leaves and seeds, and avoiding the use of any manmade materials during the creative process (such as paints, adhesives, and dyes), I purposefully manipulate plants and other flora in a zoomorphic or anthropomorphic manner.

Relying solely on Nature’s bounty is an artistic departure for me in some ways, yet a continuum of my focus on addressing the rising environmental damage, including climate-related disruptions, which our industrialized world has wrought.

Inspired by my research in support of my painting entitled ‘Wood-Wide Web’ (which I previously presented on ClimateCultures in my post with Eva Strautmann), I became acutely aware of the ability of various tree and plant species, along with fungi, to communicate and share resources with one another in a symbiotic manner.

Showing ‘Wood-Wide Web’: 24″ x 30”, mixed media on used, repurposed canvas – oils, acrylics and melted wax. Artist: Michael Gresalfi © 2025 — ‘Wood-Wide Web’: 24″ x 30”, mixed media on used, repurposed canvas – oils, acrylics and melted wax. Artist: Michael Gresalfi © 2025

‘Wood-Wide Web’ portrays a forest, field, or meadow not merely as a collection of competing individuals in a shared location, but rather as an interconnected community where resource sharing and communication play a significant role in the health and resilience of the entire ecosystem.

Mitakuye Oyasin: we are all related

My research led me to read about the Mother Tree Project. This large-scale, decade-long research effort led by Dr. Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia, revealed that neighboring trees and plants are in communication with one another via an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in our brains.

I was astonished to learn that in one study, Simard documented that a Douglas fir tree that was injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a Ponderosa pine tree growing nearby. The pine tree then produced enzymes to protect itself against the nearby insect invasion.

To me, a form of collective consciousness was in play within the web of life, across at least two Kingdoms. In biological taxonomy, life forms are organized into hierarchical groups: Kingdoms are at the top, with phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species being progressively lower tiers. Fungi are in a separate Kingdom from trees and plants, yet they support one another in a mutually beneficial way.

Not so with respect to humanity, the alpha species in the Kingdom of Animalia. I began to see more clearly that we don’t support the interconnected web of life, and in fact we continue to disrupt the very symbiotic fabric that the wood-wide web illustrates.

During my daily walk in the woods behind my home, I began to consider more thoughtfully how alienated we all are from the natural world, and I began to ponder how a conscious wood-wide web of interconnected life that surrounds me might view humankind. Yes, not a comforting thought.

We are all related. Showing leaf art by Michael Gresalfi, 2026. — Art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026. A note on captions: I really hadn’t thought of specific captions for images of these works, seeing them more like an anthropological or archaeological ‘find’, where present-day humans have to surmise the intention of long-ago peoples when assessing disjointed remains of their social and cultural mores and beliefs.

The artistic concept of ‘Flora Persona’ formed slowly. My evolving viewpoint was also informed by a Lakota phrase, “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“We are all related”). The phrase expresses the idea that every living entity shares the same divine origin and life force, and that humanity is part of a complex reciprocal web of existence, rather than separate from, or superior to, nature.

My artistic interest was thus stimulated by both non-Western and ancient beliefs concerning the shared web of life and by my newfound understanding that plants and trees have some form of elementary consciousness, as demonstrated by their ability to communicate across species, genus, families, and all the way up the hierarchical groups, to include across the two noted Kingdoms.

Reaching back to our roots in art

Both climate and human culture, including artistic expression, have intersected in many ways throughout our species’ course of time. In this evolving series, I delve deeply into our ancient past for artistic inspiration. I suggest that we have been creating art across the various climate epochs we have inhabited, since times immemorial. I believe that both the flora and fauna available in long-ago times provided source materials used to create art, back into earlier hominin eras.

It is reasonable to assume that humans have been making art from biodegradable materials, including masks, figurines, and sculptures, for more than one hundred thousand years.

Masks and sculptures have been my primary focus to date. My artistic goal is to present man-manipulated natural elements in a manner that harkens back to our early ancestors.

With respect to cave paintings, the earliest known artistic expressions for both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, consisting of non-figurative symbolic markings, are more than 70,000 years old. They are still in existence today, due to their isolation and protection from the weathering elements. Other art, made from natural materials and not contained within caves, clearly has not been preserved.

One of my flora-persona series interests is using burdock (Arctium lappa) seed heads to create extinct local animals that were plentiful in my region of Maryland, USA during the Woodland and Archaic Periods — such as the wooly mammoth and the cave bear. It is my contention that such natural materials were used to create art by these ancient native ancestors, and indeed perhaps as far back as our early hominin ancestors.

Burdock plant and collected seed heads, as well as a few examples of my ‘Burr Art ‘, are presented below:

Collected burdock seed heads. Photograph: Michael Gresalfi © 2026

We are all related. Showing burr art by Michael Gresalfi, 2026. — All art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026. See note above on captions.

Plant masks: viewing how our relatives might see us

With respect to making human-like faces from plant leaves, I was inspired to begin this Flora-Persona series when pondering the wood-wide web and, particularly, the nascent consciousness documented via chemical communication networks formed between fungi, plants, and trees.

These leaf masks are not necessarily made to be worn. Rather, they are meant to present these wonders of nature as a member of our distant family, aligned with the Lakota phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”: we are all related.

I continue to experiment with different plants, seeds, leaves, and tree bark, all picked up along my daily walks in my neighboring Black Hill Park. I find myself drawn to creating leaf masks that present the viewer with an unsettled view of how we humans might be viewed by our distant plant relatives, such as displaying sorrow, shock, disappointment, and anger. These sentiments seem very proper to me, considering the continuing harm we cause to the interconnected web of life.

Below are three photos. The first shows how I applied juice to several of my leaf masks, a natural dye from ripe purple pokeweed berries that I had gathered.

American pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) is natively established in Maryland, and its berry juice served as a primary source of makeshift ink during the American Civil War. Art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026

The next is a photo of one of my framed leaf masks:

All art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026. See note above on captions

The final photos show a large 36” x 36” canvas I painted and then displayed, with four of my leaf masks within its four quadrants, followed by close-ups of the masks.

We are all related: Showing a36” x 36” canvas with four leaf masks. Art by Michael Gresalfi, 2026 — 36” x 36” canvas with four leaf masks. All art: Michael Gresalfi © 2026. See note above on captions.

Find more

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Michael — “I used Gemini AI as a background search tool — looking for other examples of both my ‘burr art’ and ‘leaf art.’ Frankly, not much out there — at least from my initial research.”

***

Michael adds: “A young friend from Scotland, after looking at my burr art, brought to my attention the annual ancient event called the ‘Burryman,’ which happened to occur mid-August. The Burryman is a centuries-old Scottish folk tradition where a local man is covered head-to-toe in thousands of sticky burdock burrs and paraded through the area.” Find more at Wikipedia.

You can see Michael’s work with fellow ClimateCultures member, artist Eva Strautmann, in their post The Wood Wide Web – Fruitful Collaboration, which features both artists’ paintings on the topic.

This piece for the Ecological Disciple by Lenore Three Stars, The Way Forward: Mitakuye Oyasi — A Worldview (11/6/26) explores the value of an approach to our shared world that starts from the position that “We are all related” (Mitakuye Oyasi can also mean “All my relations.”)

More on the Mother Tree Project, founded by Dr. Suzanne Simard, can be found at The Mother Tree Project & Program, a research and outreach initiative housed in UBC’s Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Stewardship, rooted in the idea that forests are deeply interconnected systems, not just collections of individual trees.

Michael Gresalfi

An artist who seeks to incorporate art with climate change data, and whose work in encaustic medium, glass paint, oils and acrylics includes 'Our Changing Planet'.

Beyond Ecosystem Collapse: New Stories to Live By

Ecopoet Helen Moore discusses the importance of econarratives and ethical leadership for how we interact with each other and the more-than-human, and how a new free online programme can help us find the new stories to live by.

1,550 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes

In January 2026, the UK government published a report entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, which linked the deleterious state of local and global ecosystems and biodiversity loss with the increasing risk of ecosystem collapse and threats to national security.¹ Despite its huge significance, the report received very limited media attention, and this goes for much of the scientific research that sounds the alarm about the climate and wider ecological emergency. Research led by Stockholm Resilience Centre has stated the importance of remaining within planetary boundaries and describes how “transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be […] catastrophic […] to human well-being”, and that of countless other species.²

Showing the cover of the Planetary Healthcheck 2025 report.

At current consumption levels, seven of the nine boundaries have been exceeded: Climate Change, Biosphere Integrity, Land System Change, Freshwater Use, Biogeochemical Flows, Novel Entities, and Ocean Acidification.³ Given the perilous situation we collectively face, effective forms of environmental communication are urgently needed to support community resilience, ecosystems regeneration and deep adaptation.

Econarratives for planetary life

Fundamental to human communication are the stories that influence how we interact with each other within the ecosystems that sustain us and that we influence. Pioneering work by my colleague (and fellow ClimateCultures member) Arran Stibbe, Professor of Narrative Ecology at the University of Gloucestershire, has shown how stories play an important role within the global ecosystems that life depends on, by shaping how humans conceptualise and act in the world — some stories encouraging people to destroy the ecosystems that life depends on, other stories encouraging attention, care and protection of the natural world.

Showing the home page banner or The Search for New Stories to Live By — Home page for The Search for New Stories to Live By

Building on his 2024 book, Econarrative: ethics, ecology and the search for new stories to live by,⁴ Arran led a team of colleagues at the University of Gloucestershire and a wider international team as part of the CLADES project (Critical Language Awareness, Democratic Engagement and Sustainability, funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme), to develop a free online 8-part course The Search for New Stories to Live By. In this course, which included my own contribution on ecopoetic activism in part 4, guiding themes are econarrative and ethical leadership.

Econarrative is defined as stories which see humans, more-than-human species and the physical environment in interaction with each other, while ethical leadership is defined as shaping how others perceive themselves and the society around them based on an ecological vision. As Arran Stibbe encourages, “We can all be ethical leaders, in our lives, our families, our communities, our companies, or our countries. All we need is a clear ethical vision, critical awareness of the stories that underpin our unsustainable society, the ability to seek out new stories to live by, and to communicate those stories in inspiring ways.”

The Search for New Stories to Live By examines the use of narratives by ethical leaders who are doing just that work. They include community elders, writers, poets, activists, campaigners, scientists and politicians, all of us storytellers in one way or another. The course also examines the stories we tell and how we tell them, seeking out ways of imagining a radically different society and bringing that society into being. My own contribution, which focuses on Ecopoetic Activism, looks at how ecopoets challenge the stories we live by and create new stories to transform social reality. There is a prevailing cultural narrative, maintained by literary gatekeepers, that ‘good’ poetry should not convey an apparent message. However, this is often a privileged position, arising from people who have high levels of material security and who occupy a part of the world (I’m writing here in the UK) which has yet to be severely impacted by the intersecting climate, ecological and social crises.

Acknowledging that all art is essentially political (being ‘apolitical’ is in itself a political position) and recognising the urgency of the challenges we collectively face, ecopoetry charts another course, a consciously activist stance, seeking to raise awareness, witness, mourn, commune, speak truth to power and vision new ways of living and being, among other approaches. Frequently, the work of ecopoets critiques extractivist Western attitudes and behaviours towards the ecosystems on which humans depend, along with the neocolonial exploitation of people in the Global South. Understanding that we humans are part of ‘nature’, ecopoetry may also seek to re-enchant our relationship with the more-than-human world. Or an ecopoem may narrate the restoration of a polluted river, such as the Merse in Tuscany, which the Italian ecopoet, Massimo D’Arcangelo describes, and which I explore on the course.

The search for new stories

Designed for anyone who is aware of the trajectory of society towards collapse under ever-growing inequality and environmental destruction, and who wants change at the only level that can make a difference, The Search for New Stories to Live By is a self-study course, where participants work their way through the eight parts — the introduction, Creation Stories, Identity, Ecopoetic Activism, Enchantment, Ethics, Emotions, Apocalypse – watching video talks, reading notes, completing exercises and looking through the detailed PowerPoint slides. Educators are also welcome to use the materials for their courses, and there is advice on teaching in the extra materials section, with stated course goals being for learners to develop critical awareness of the stories that underpin our current unsustainable civilisation, to develop skills in using language in inspiring ways to convey new stories to live by, and to contribute to bringing a new sustainable civilisation into being.

Finally, it is worth noting that this course builds on a previous course, The Stories We Live By, which explores the dominant stories that drive industrial civilisation and which have contributed to creating the destruction and far-reaching interconnected issues we currently face. Given sufficient time and interest, that first course could be explored before The Search for New Stories to Live By.

Helen’s references

DEFRA, 2026, Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, UK Government
Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F.S., Lambin, E., Lenton, T.M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H.J. and Nykvist, B., 2009. Planetary boundaries: exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and society, 14(2).
Kitzmann, N., Caesar, L., Sakschewski, B., Rockström, J., Andersen, L., Bechthold, M., Bergfeld, L., Beusen, A., Billing, M., Bodirsky, B.L. and Botsyun, S., 2025. Planetary Health Check 2025: A scientific assessment of the state of the planet.
Stibbe, Arran, 2024. Econarrative, Ethics, Ecology, and the Search for New Narratives. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Find more

You can access the new, free course at The Search for New Stories to Live By.

Helen mentions an earlier course, The Stories We Live By, which builds on an awareness that the issues the world faces are so severe they call into question the stories that our societies are based on. Through topics such as Ideologies and Discourses, Framing, Metaphor, Evaluations, Identities, Convictions, Erasure and Salience, it provides tools for revealing the stories we live by, questioning them from an ecological perspective. You can access that here — and read a ClimateCultures review of the early version of that course.

In a previous ClimateCultures post, Ecopoetikon: Global Ecopoetries for a Cultural Tipping Point, Helen celebrates global ecopoetries through a new project gathering poets from Global South and North. Ecopoetikon offers a powerful indicator of intersecting crises and inspiration for a tipping point in our relationship with the living world.

Helen’s latest ecopoetry collection, The Last Lighthouse in Rising Seas (Palewell Press, May 2026), explores ‘petronarcosis’ (fossil fuel addiction) and the links between forced migration and the climate crisis and has been celebrated as confirming her “as the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time.” In this piece for our Creative Showcase — which includes one of the poems in full — Helen reflects on the book and the genesis of the poem, which conveys hope in how we can resist the forces of destruction and seek Thrutopian paths forward.

You can read a review of her 2024 collection, river / run, by fellow ClimateCultures member and poet Fiona Moore, here.

***

From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.

Helen — “I am deeply suspicious of AI for multiple reasons, including the ecological and social impacts of data centres; the disproportionate power and influence wielded by the techbro oligarchs; growing evidence of biases within AI, which one study reveals only reinforce Islamophobia, sexism, racism etc; research also evidencing it as a form of technocolonialism; the impact it has on our critical thinking and writing skills; and, last but not least, because of its theft of creative work by often poorly remunerated artists and writers.

“I have not used AI in compiling this article, although some of the text is recycled from the online course blurb. The occasional use that I do make of AI is when researching a topic, and then only where it pops up freely as part of a Google search.”

Helen Moore

A pioneering British ecopoet, socially engaged artist, writer, translator and academic based in Bristol.

Hey! Earthlings! A Field Guide to Connecting

Artist Andrew Howe shares a collaborative project with fellow artists and migrants to bring together creativity, community and heritage, building trust, reframing narratives in an era of climate crisis and showing we are all earthlings, connected with nature.

2,230 words: estimated reading time = 9 minutes

At a time when the ground beneath us is shifting — politically, ecologically, socially — what does it mean to belong?

Environmental crises are intensifying and so is human movement — quietly, unevenly, and often without recognition. Creative practice has a vital role to play in response: not simply to draw attention to change, but to hold space for connection, dignity, and shared experience.

Hey! Earthlings! emerged from this context as both a project and a provocation — an invitation to rethink how we connect across difference, and how art might help cultivate belonging in an age of displacement.

Beginnings — from idea to collective action

This project began as an idea some years ago to invite people who have moved across borders, or with connections to other places through family and heritage, to join with us and share stories, sounds, and creative responses through walks and making. A simple idea, but multi-layered and rich with potential to help participants build stronger connections to local nature and heritage and, perhaps, find a new sense of place and belonging in Shropshire.

As conversations developed, a core team formed: myself, as an artist working in sound, painting, printmaking, and other media; Jill Impey – an artist working in video, sound and printmaking; and Jean Atkin – a poet and writer. Together, under Participate Contemporary Artspace CIC (now Participate Co-labs), we shaped the project and secured funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund in Summer 2024. After a period of careful planning, our activities got underway during Spring/Summer 2025.

Hey! Earthlings! unfolded amid increasing social division in the UK and growing hostility toward migrants and refugees. Against this background, the project took on a deeper significance: to offer a counter-narrative grounded in generosity, creativity, and welcome.

“The project challenged the idea that we live in a world of ‘not enough’. In reality, the Earth is abundant, and people naturally want to contribute meaningfully to the places they live and without the negative narrative and fear-based leadership in the world, humans would naturally share without fear.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Climate Change and the movement of people

Practitioners engaging with climate themes cannot ignore migration.

The relationship between climate change and migration is complex, but the global effects of both phenomena are undeniable. Extreme weather events — floods, storms, droughts — are already forcing millions to move. Slower environmental changes, such as desertification or rising sea levels, impact on livelihoods too. The frequency and severity of these events are increasing.

UNHCR estimates indicate that tens of millions of people are displaced each year by sudden environmental events, while projections produced by the World Bank indicate that by 2050, hundreds of millions could be internally displaced due to long-term climate impacts.

These figures reduce human lives to statistics and do not capture the lived experience of losing home, identity, culture, agency, assets and dignity and the search for belonging.

This is where art has a humanising role to hold spaces where people can speak, create, and connect.

Walking as method: reconnecting through landscape

We held three Hey! Earthlings! creative events at each of two pairs of locations in Shropshire, offering important natural and historic heritage to explore by walking together:

Old Oswestry Iron Age Hill Fort and Oswestry Memorial Hall
Doctor’s Field countryside site and Darwin House, The Mount, Shrewsbury (Charles Darwin’s birthplace and childhood home).

These are all located within or very close to the towns of Oswestry and Shrewsbury, and so were relatively easily accessible, with the potential for participants to return again in future.

Each of the events comprised an artist-led walk followed by a creative workshop.

We were inspired by artist Henna Asikainen and her use of walks in projects with refugees and migrants. Walking offers a shared rhythm. It dissolves hierarchies. It allows for informal conversation, chance encounters, quiet reflection and freedom to explore the surrounding landscape.

The group bonded through creativity and shared experience, taking opportunities to translate for each other and share food and song whilst gathered around a fire.

Showing Hey! Earthlings! participants listening to the river. Photo: by Anna Martin 2025. Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! listening to the river. Photo: Anna Martin © 2025

Each walk started with a grounding meditation. We then listened to the river and trees, we foraged, shared stories and words about nature, and played parachute games. The group(s) learned about local history and nature, sharing oral histories, making films and co-creating art.

After scrambling over steep ramparts to the top of the Old Oswestry Hillfort, we used a compass at this 360-degree viewpoint to orient ourselves to local landmarks and distant homelands.

These multi-sensory walks enabled people to compare common or shared experiences from other places, and find meaning, empathy and compassion.

“Being in nature evokes a sense of home and belonging (the trees are not lost): the wind is the wind, the rain is the rain, the sun rises for all the stars and moon are the same ones their families see across the world. This reinforced the idea that humans are children of the Earth and of the stars. The Earth has no borders; birds and fish do not need passports.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Hey! Earthlings! Expressing belonging through creativity

Following the walks we returned to workshop venues to respond creatively.

The approach was intentionally open, flexible and welcoming. We offered printmaking, drawing, writing, small book-making, and other collaborative activities, allowing participants of all ages and abilities to engage in ways that felt comfortable, safe and meaningful.

The workshops were not set up as places of instruction, but as opportunities for exchange. Participants brought their own knowledge, skills, and creative traditions. It was a delight when two young Ukrainian participants asked if they could lead some creative sessions during the workshops — an offer we embraced and celebrated.

The shift from facilitator to co-creator crucially challenges the notion of participants as recipients and instead recognises them as contributors and artists with knowledge to share.

Showing Hey! Earthlings! participants preparing cyanotype prints. Photo: Andrew Howe Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! participants preparing cyanotype prints. Photo: Andrew Howe © 2025

The resulting artworks were vibrant, layered, and deeply personal. They spoke of journeys, memories, loss, resilience, and joy. They reflected not only the challenges of displacement, but also the richness that diverse communities bring to local contexts.

Building trust: the role of an ethical framework

Underpinning the whole of our project was an ethical framework devised by Jill Impey. This guided our delivery to ensure everyone involved felt safe and welcome, providing a reference or set of prompts to guide actions and relationships throughout from beginning to end.

The ethical framework aims to embed respect, honesty and understanding in working with participants, with our supporting organisations and with each other. When working with people who may have experienced trauma, displacement, or marginalisation, the stakes are high.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! Ethical Framework. — Hey! Earthlings! Ethical Framework.

The framework emphasises:

Empathy and compassion as foundational values, cultivating a culture of care
Inclusion and accessibility to remove barriers to participation
Respect and honesty in all interactions
Agency and consent, ensuring participants retained control over their stories and contributions
Reciprocity, recognising that exchange must be mutual, not extractive.

This framework was not simply theoretical. It informed practical decisions — from how we structured workshops, to how we developed relationships with partner organisations, to how we shared outcomes.

It also provided a crucial anchor for the team, offering a shared language and set of principles to navigate complex situations.

Partnership and participation

The project was made possible through a network of partnerships, including community organisations, cultural institutions, and local authorities.

Participants came from a wide range of backgrounds: young people from Bulgarian schools, asylum seekers from countries including Afghanistan, Iran, Sierra Leone and Vietnam, newly settled Ukrainians, and individuals connected through refugee support networks and community groups. Each event was tailored towards the particular group attending.

We were very fortunate to be able to appoint two experienced community co-ordinators, Anna Martin and Marina Churm. During project planning, we consulted with various community groups to gauge interest and shape the activities for the events.

Both Anna and Marian proved invaluable to the project as they engaged so positively with groups they had existing connections with and with other community leaders who could help link to a wider network and invite people to work with us. Building trust takes time, sensitivity, and existing relationships. Their work ensured that participants felt welcomed, informed, and supported throughout the process.

The team were supported by local artists, Jamila Walker Thomas and Niki Holmes, and project evaluator and mentor, Cerin Mills.

Meaningful engagement cannot be rushed or assumed. It requires investment in relationships, and often collaboration with those who already hold trust within communities.

Sharing responses: rethinking the ‘Cabinet’

We showed the work made at the events in a travelling cabinet at exhibitions in local libraries and museums. These took place at Oswestry Library; Gateway Arts and Education Centre, Shrewsbury Library and Shropshire Archives. The mobile cabinet is made with reclaimed furniture and is able to host and display a range of materials, sounds and video. Its many drawers, compartments and fold-out doors invite visitors to interact with the cabinet and explore for themselves.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! cabinet in Shrewsbury library. Photo: Andrew Howe 2025. Project by Andrew Howe. — Hey! Earthlings! cabinet in Shrewsbury library. Photo: Andrew Howe © 2025

Cabinets like this one have long been used to collect and display objects deemed unfamiliar, unusual or exotic — often telling stories about people rather than with them. We aimed to do things differently by inviting the participants to have a stake in curating the exhibition and deciding how to present their work on their own terms.

Rather than turning lives into curiosities, this Cabinet asks us to be curious with empathy — and to reflect on how we might tell richer, more respectful stories in the future.

Shared responses also included a series of collaborative poems edited by Jean Atkin, a short film edited by Jill Impey and a series of soundscapes of stories, reflections and field recordings edited by me. The soundscapes were installed as audio trails at Old Oswestry Hillfort and at Doctor’s Field in Shrewsbury, and can also be streamed from the Participate website.

A Field Guide to Connecting

Towards the end of the project, we prepared a Field Guide to Connecting: a resource for sharing our experience to help other practitioners deliver multi-cultural community arts and heritage projects effectively.

The Guide is aimed towards:

Artist peers/creative practitioners
Community workers and organisations
Fundraisers seeking funding for similar projects

The Guide provides some key reference sheets, such as the Ethical Framework and Ingredients for Success, which include prompts and practical advice. This is supplemented by information from our Hey! Earthlings! project describing our approach, supported by sample documents.

The document is designed not as a fixed methodology, but as a flexible, adaptable resource — something that can be used, questioned, and reshaped. It moves beyond theory into practice, offering grounded insights into what works, what challenges arise, and how they might be navigated.

Showing the Hey! Earthlings! Field Guide to Connecting — Hey! Earthlings! Field Guide to Connecting

Reframing migration: from crisis to contribution

One of the most powerful shifts within Hey! Earthlings! is its reframing of migration.

“Many displaced people are treated as passive objects, moved like pieces on a chessboard. Used for political games and leverage and discarded when no more use. This results in adding to their deep grief, a sense of betrayal, and a loss of agency. It can feel as traumatising for them as the reason why they are here — just in a different way. Reframing migrants as contributors, creators, and community members is vital for their healing and for the communities that receive them.”
— Amanda Jones, Founder of Shropshire Supports Refugees

Too often, migrants and displaced people are positioned as problems to be solved, burdens to be managed, or victims to be pitied. This narrative not only dehumanises individuals but also obscures their agency, creativity, and potential contributions.

By contrast, Hey! Earthlings! foregrounds participants as creators, collaborators, and community members, and aims to foster more inclusive communities. Our project offered alternative narratives to dominant, often divisive discourses and engaged with global issues through local, embodied experience.

Hey! Earthlings! offers an invitation to recognise ourselves as Earthlings – a condition we share with every living organism inhabiting and depending on a single, fragile planet.

Find more

The projections Andrew gives on displaced people due to long-term climate impacts are from Climate change-induced migration: UK collaboration with international partners by Thomas Weston (September 2023).

You can explore Hey! Earthlings! at the project pages on the Participate Co-labs website — including a download of A Field Guide to Connecting, an 8-minute video, a guided grounding meditation and two audio trails of Old Oswestry Hillfort and Doctor’s Field, consisting of collaborative poems performed by Jean Atkin, shared stories and reflections on the events at the Hillfort, and a soundscape of an imagined Iron Age village. This series of soundscapes was edited by Andrew Howe using field recordings made at the Hillfort, and poems created using words by participants at events and edited by Jean Atkin.

Participate Co-labs (formerly Participate Contemporary Artspace) is an artist-run community interest company, set up in 2015 by Jill Impey, Elizabeth Turner and Keith Ashford to create space for artists to work and exhibit in Shrewsbury, Shropshire.

Shropshire Supports Refugees was established in 2016 to bring relief and support to vulnerable families displaced by unrest in their home countries relocating to Shropshire.

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Andrew – “I occasionally use AI for some functional, time-saving tasks like transcribing spoken word recordings or helping to reduce word count in written drafts before I re-edit into my own style. It can be useful to provide simple, clear summaries or comparisons between options when I have gathered and checked material myself, as I don’t fully trust AI with factual research. In my artist practice, I often move between analogue and digital processes, which I control, but I don’t like the aesthetics of AI-generated imagery and I don’t find it very effective in developing creative ideas.”

Andrew Howe

An interdisciplinary artist and project manager using walking and mapping to explore how people interact with places, drawing attention to human entanglements within a multi-species environment.

Eternal Forest Sanctuary: Vision to Living Commitment

Artist Evgenia Emets shares the development of her Eternal Forest sanctuary vision into its latest phase as the Seed of Eternal Forest, with opportunities for artists, scientists and thinkers globally to become a movement and mutually supportive network.

2,100 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe has followed Eternal Forest since 2019 and, for this post, shared questions with Evgenia as she was drafting it.

***

“Eternal Forest is a living commitment that reminds us across generations: we are nature, and by regenerating forest, we regenerate ourselves.”

Looking back at your decision to start Eternal Forest, what was your inspiration for this, and what did you set out to achieve? How do you feel about that looking back now?

My original inspiration to start Eternal Forest came from witnessing the deep disconnect our culture has created between forests and people. I began Eternal Forest in 2018, six months after moving from the UK to Portugal, and shortly after witnessing the aftermath of devastating fires that destroyed large areas of land here.

These were not just forest fires. They were the result of pervasive monocultures, especially eucalyptus plantations, which have profoundly altered the landscape, increased its vulnerability and reduced its resilience. My initial question was to explore how we might reconnect humans and forests, not only through art, but also through remembering and reactivating our sacred relationship with forests.

Much of my inspiration came from seeing that for millennia, Indigenous and traditional communities across the world have lived in deep reciprocity with their natural environments, holding forests as spiritually significant and relational beings. The understanding that our material and immaterial cultures come directly from forests became a foundation for my work.

Showing artist Evgenia Emets at forest cave. Photograph by Marco Piano, Eternal Forest, 2025 — Photograph: Marco Piano, Eternal Forest © 2025

Eternal Forest Sanctuary

In the early years, I created the vision for an Eternal Forest Sanctuary — a physical space (reforested or restored and protected) focused on biodiversity and natural habitats, created through art with communities as long-term stewards of this forest. While my experience and practice are rooted in Portugal, where I live, I see the intentional creation of forest spaces, which we can call sanctuaries, as necessary and timely.

Looking back now, I can say that dedicating my time to Eternal Forest has opened many possibilities in my artistic practice. It revealed new paths of knowledge about forests, showed new ways of learning and being with this wonderful and complex organism. It also opened new relationships with people and organisations: scientists, artists, researchers, and regenerators of many kinds. And artistically it offered me a completely different medium — I started exploring how forest itself can be a methodology and what I could do differently with my art if forest were my studio, my medium, my collaborator and my gallery.

As the project evolved, and as I evolved with it, my perspective also shifted. In the beginning, my focus was more on what was missing and where the gaps were. Gradually, this changed into uncovering and witnessing the beautiful possibilities that already exist in our relationship with forests around the world. Whether we encounter healthy forests or forests in need of restoration, there is always a way to experience joy, to lean into the deep unlearning and receive wisdom directly from the land and its beings.

“We are forest, and we are not separate from it” — this core perspective led me to explore subjects such as forest sentience, plant intelligence, finding ways to communicate with nature and being led by the land while working on projects.

Embodying deep connection

What have you learned so far that was maybe a surprise? Or what have others brought to the project?

One of the most surprising experiences for me last year was realising how deeply we are connected to the land through our bodies, our psyche, our imagination, and our emotions. Intellectually, this is something we already understand, or at least we think we do. But it was only through working closely with the land, especially while walking with the land and designing Eternal Forest in Faia Brava, that this understanding became fully embodied.

Showing Evgenia Emets, Eternal Forest. Photograph by Marco Piano, Eternal Forest, 2025 — Photograph: Marco Piano, Eternal Forest © 2025

I began to sense how intrinsically interconnected we are, almost like entangled bodies that, once they have encountered each other, remain in communication. What happens to the land happens to us, and what happens to us also affects the land. When we work with land that has been disrespected or shaped by extractive behaviours, we feel that impact in our own bodies and inner landscapes.

The healing that takes place through restoration and through re-revealing the land’s beauty is mirrored by a healing within our own psyche and physical being. The experience of pain, the witnessing of beauty, the awe of natural phenomena, the sensual moments of being in close touch with the beings of the land, the spiritual closeness of encountering a rare animal — all that goes both ways, it’s a constant conversation. And then how all of that can be woven into practice, into artwork, linked back into the loop of co-regulating and co-evolving.

I am still exploring creative ways to tune more deeply into this field, and to find forms of expression that allow me to transform and alchemise these experiences and share them with others by creating sanctuaries, trails, poetry, and landmarks.

The Seed of Eternal Forest

What is the latest phase of work? What comes next?

One of the latest phases of my work is the creation of the Seed of Eternal Forest in Faia Brava in Portugal. The Seed represents a beginning. It is usually a small-scale intervention that initiates a much longer process of an Eternal Forest Sanctuary on a bigger size land.

In this case, we are working with a conservation organisation in Portugal called Faia Brava, on a very beautiful site along the wild and ancient Côa River, a UNESCO heritage site, with 30,000-year-old engravings of wild animals dotted around the river valley from the hunter-gatherer era. It is such an inspiration for any artist to be connecting with this ancient land. We are working in a context of ageing and declining rural populations, severe deforestation and land degradation, and extremely low rainfall, with conditions that increasingly resemble a semi-desert landscape.

Showing The Eternal Forest 'Seed' image on the ground. Aerial photography by Marco Piano, Eternal Forest, 2025 — Photograph: Marco Piano, Eternal Forest © 2025

The first intervention we created is a 30-metre-diameter Seed. This is a symbolic moment that emerges from working closely with the land: observing it, listening to it, and understanding the ecosystem, including which species might arrive and which might remain over time. Our next phase is to go through the process of developing an artistic regenerative design for forest and ecosystem restoration across a much larger area of 10ha, a process that will unfold over many years.

When I approach design, I ask myself: What is the experience people will have when they visit this place? What is the experience of the local community and their relationship to the land? What kinds of experiences can other artists have here, and how might they contribute to the evolution of Eternal Forest and Faia Brava? Another important question is how younger generations will interact with this place, and how they might become stewards and guardians not only of this specific area, but of the wider surrounding landscape, which requires long-term care and attention.

The idea for the design of the Seed in Faia Brava is a symbolic labyrinth, an infinite loop tracing a four-petal meandering path. It takes you through several turns that mirror the inner journey of the pilgrim, the psyche of the land, and the land’s own long story.

‘The Seed’: Eternal Forest, Faia Brava. Design: Evgenia Emets, Eternal Forest, Fractal Regenerative Technologies © 2025

Trees, bushes and other plants selected for The Seed. Click for larger images.

The Seed holds trees, bushes and plants chosen for their white blossom, but also being native plants from this area. The idea is that as you visit this Eternal Forest in any season, the Seed always presents itself in colour — a variation of white, where every plant is medicine for the land, animals, and each other. Everything in the Seed is designed to attract biodiversity — pollinators, wildlife — and to create a deep experiential space for humans.

I am further developing designs and possible interventions for different locations. At this point, I am increasingly interested in creating concrete, physical projects that are co-created in collaboration with land and communities, rather than focusing solely on visual artworks.

What follows in the coming months is the formalisation of this work through the organisation Eternal Forest, which was registered in December 2025. Over the past year, and continuing into this year, much of the focus has been on developing projects and creating fundable proposals together with communities, landowners, and land stewards.

What is your vision for Nature Connectedness?

When we speak about nature connectedness, I feel it is important to acknowledge that the term itself already implies separation. To say that we need to ‘connect with nature’ suggests that nature is something outside of ourselves. In reality, we are not separate from nature, but we are living the great illusion, as we have disconnected ourselves from the understanding that we are part of it.

We have moved very far away from seeing ourselves as embedded within natural systems. For me, this is why creating physical spaces is so important. These spaces allow us to create conditions where we can return to harmony with a place, learn directly through practice with the land, and be in direct, embodied relationship with a specific landscape over long cycles of time. Only then we can truly embed ourselves into the land, just like an animal does — find out own paths, find our own rhythm, find our own sacred place, find our own home within the land again.

Inviting all: artists, scientists, thinkers

Is there a way for other ClimateCultures members to reflect on this work? Maybe to get involved?

There are several ways for ClimateCultures members, artists, to reflect on the work and to get involved.

First of all, Eternal Forest is held together by a set of questions that I hold personally and that we also hold collectively as an organisation. This is the first year that Eternal Forest is formally operating as an organisation, and while we are building this new structure, we are also opening the space for reflection and dialogue around these questions.

We are inviting artists, scientists, and thinkers to imagine together with us how Eternal Forest can become a movement and a mutually supportive network. How can artists anywhere in the world catalyse and create their own Eternal Forest with their local communities? And how can the Eternal Forest ‘mother tree’ organisation support them over the long term?

Showing Evgenia Emets planting Eternal Forest. Photograph by Marco Piano, Eternal Forest, 2025 — Photograph: Marco Piano, Eternal Forest © 2025

This year in September, we will host an Eternal Forest camp at The Gathering in Portugal, a gathering for regenerative culture. I warmly invite everyone to join. We will release invitations in March, and alongside this, we will be running a series of online conversations. These will be spaces to reflect, contribute, and connect both artistically and philosophically with the community.

In the meantime, people can follow the project by subscribing to our Substack or joining our Telegram channel.

As we establish our first four sanctuaries, we will start opening art residencies.

The success of Eternal Forest depends on people around the world who raise their hand and say, “We have land, with or without forest, that needs protection, and we feel the local community is ready to engage. We want to create a legacy that lasts.”

We are open to collaborating with artists, art foundations, curators, landowners, public institutions, conservation organisations, rewilding initiatives, and tree-planting projects. So I invite everyone who resonates with this work to follow the project, connect with us online for now, and, over time, to become part of this co-creation journey.

Find more

Discover more at Eternal Forest — which includes the short film below on Eternal Forest in Faia Brava 2025 and other videos and art — and on the project’s Substack and Telegram channel.

***

Evgenia — “I use AI to transcode my speech because the way I write a lot of the time is I speak (sometimes walking in the land!). Then I edit my text. Once in a while, I use AI selectively for research — more technical and comparative. All the stories, images and illustrations are original.”

Evgenia Emets

An artist intersecting land-art, sound and visual poetry through experiences, forests, artist books, calligraphy, performance, objects and community engagement, and whose 'Eternal Forest' integrates ecological thinking.

A Strange Country

Psychotherapist Susan Holliday discovers an intricate world of imaginal possibility (a strange country) in an overlooked detail of a familiar landscape. Turning away from global events for a moment reminds us that change often starts with something small.

2,060 words: estimated reading time = 8 minutes

It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or the traveller who enters a strange country.¹

– Bill Brandt, photographer (Camera in London)

I wake before dawn to the sound of a robin’s song piercing the morning chill. It takes me less than an hour to dress and make my way to the wrought iron gates which mark the entrance to Richmond Park. A heavy dew rests on the still shadowed grass, seeming almost to hover above it like an overnight spell. All around, the bracken is rusting into its autumn glory. I make my way up a gentle slope through a stand of birch, beech and oak trees to reach the crest of the park. Here the sun has just tipped over the horizon and cast every leaf, blade and branch into fine gold. A huddle of deer nuzzle the grass, making the most of the quiet before the weekend cyclists arrive. I must have walked in this park a thousand times and still it takes my breath away.

The park is always a ‘strange country’ to me, a correlation of ever-changing elements, light, season and subjectivity. At first I just see what I have seen before, but with every step my preconceptions fall to the floor. Unclad, my eyes begin to see beyond recognition. What I’ve come to realise, over many encounters with the park, is that as my perception deepens, it moves from the general and the big, to the particular and the small. On this occasion it shifts from the broadbrush palette of grass, tree and sky, to the particular curve of a branch; the tritone beech leaves rustling their blessings over the waking park; and the oceanic wave structure of ageing bark.

Walking for days at a time, nature writer Nan Shepherd notices how her perception deepens gradually, so:

The eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen.
So the ear, the other senses.²

This strikes me as a beautiful description of how we come to see more keenly. The word ‘gradual’ refers to something coming into fullness over time (from Latin gradus, meaning ‘step’). Gradually, we see what we ‘didn’t see before’. We begin to see ‘in a new way’.

So it is only on my way back down the slope, as I re-enter the shadows, that I notice the dazzling spiders’ webs which jewel the bracken. They were there all along. I passed them on my way up. I just didn’t have eyes keen enough to see them. Crouching down now, to take a closer look, I see a lattice of tiny pearls, strung together with impossible intricacy. To me, their beauty stems in part from their near perfection (the essential word here being ‘near’). Each little rectangle of negative space is uneven, each one an incomparable structure, building through repetition into something greater than the sum of its parts. These lines have not been measured or calculated. They have been drawn through countless micro movements of the spider’s body.

A strange country. Showing: Jewelled spider's web. Photograph by Susan Holliday 2025 — Jewelled spider’s web. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

A strange country: the gift of intricate hinterlands

Each web is a ‘strange country’ all by itself. The longer I look, the more I feel drawn into this other world. I imagine any one of these webs would be fine enough to grace a noblewoman’s robes in a Tudor court. I find myself wondering what it might be like to shrink down in size, to place my feet on its little ladders, or to hold one of the pearls in my hand. Children quite naturally see this way. The most unremarkable detail becomes an opening onto an intricate hinterland. Through their imagination and the suspension of preconception, these details become enormous. We have only to think of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, or the wardrobe in C.S Lewis’ Narnia adventures to remember the power of this portal vision.

And this brings me to the heart of the matter. For as adults we tend to regard the ‘small’ as lesser, as marginal and of little consequence. This has never been more so than at a time when everything is valued according to quantity and scale. The small can so easily be dismissed as a mere trifle, rather than valued as a coherent whole with its own integrity and particularity.

Indigenous peoples, artists, philosophers and mystics have long held a different view, in which every speck of the whole reveals universal patterns and principles. Fourteenth-century mystic, Julian of Norwich, encapsulated the essential paradox of the ‘great little thing’ in one of her revelations:

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought, ‘What can this be?’

And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.³

Four hundred years later, William Blake encouraged us to “see a world in a grain of sand”.⁴ Romantic fancy, some might say. In defence of the small, I could stray into the ways in which quantum mechanics and fractal geometry are opening up our contemporary understanding of the complexity and correspondence of micro and macro dimensions of our world; the profound influence of the minute. But I want to stay with my own experience, to say something about why I believe we need to turn our attention away from the titanic battles, the larger-than-life characters, the numbers, trends and averages, and lean towards the small, the slight and the fleeting.

They say ‘the devil is in the detail’, but maybe the sacred is there too. I don’t mean this in any religious sense, but in the context of everyday experience. We live in an age of distraction and consumption fuelled by fear of boredom and emptiness. As a psychotherapist, this word ‘boredom’ has intrigued me for years. It comes up a lot, either in the sense that life has become ‘boring’, or that a person fears they will be perceived as ‘boring’. It seems to me that ‘boring’ is the state we arrive at when we believe there is ‘nothing much to see here’, or perhaps ‘nothing new’. Boring is the ‘same-old-same-old’. It feasts on abstractions and averages, on preconceptions and generalisations.

‘Boring’ signals I have lost faith that within me, or in front of me, there could be more than meets the eye. More to be discovered. More strangeness. Perhaps I believe that I’ve seen all there is to be seen, or I’ve seen it all before. So I stop looking, or I start looking elsewhere. This is a bit like looking down from an airplane window on an outstretched continent, and believing it to be boring, simply because at this height (and at this speed) I can’t see the incomparable particularity, the infinitely varied and ever-changing detail of its topography. At close quarters, what I thought was entirely self-evident reveals itself to be a ‘strange country’, full of surprises and unplumbed depths.

Showing: Bark detail. Photograph by Susan Holliday, 2025 — Bark detail. Photograph: Susan Holliday © 2025

Each of us contains an inner landscape. A place, like the park, we may have visited many times. Perhaps we think we have seen it all. Until one day, if we are really paying attention, we notice a slight shift, a little anomaly, an overlooked detail ‘for the first time’. Virginia Woolf suggests these glimpses are “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”.⁵ How often we overlook or dismiss these curious intimations. Un-midwifed by our beholding, the inkling moment is stillborn. Yet the moment we start to notice the details of our experience, life no longer seems so boring, so barren.

Just imagine how this simple practice of attending to little daily miracles could change our relationship to each other and to the whole. When every detail (like the jewelled spider’s web) opens a door onto a world of imagination and possibility, life feels rich and vital. Perhaps then we would no longer need to consume our way out of emptiness.

Finding my niche

We differentiate ourselves through our particularity. It is through paying attention to the subtle qualities and slight nuances of character that we start to appreciate we are not just a number, a statistic or a type. Each of us is one of a kind. There is only one of us in all time.

In his 2021 book, The Journey of Soul Initiation, Bill Plotkin articulates the principle that each of us occupies a distinct ‘ecological niche’:

Soul, for me, is an ecological concept, not a psychological one nor a spiritual or religious one. Specifically, by Soul I mean a person or thing’s unique ecological niche in the Earth community.⁶

Hauled into the trawler nets of socio-economic grouping, diagnostic typologies, or target markets, it can feel increasingly challenging to distinguish our authentic singularity, the significance of our particular ecological niche.

Could it be that the current polarisation of society into crude groupings of ideology and identity originates in a deep wound, which is the experience of not mattering in our smallness. If everything around me reinforces the narrative that what I imagine, feel, think and long for is of little importance ‘in the grand scheme of things’; if what I choose to do with my life doesn’t really matter ‘in the end’, then I will find my sense of mattering through identifying with something larger. Through this amalgamation, I lose sight of the details which define my singular significance.

The tragedy is that this obscuring of the little things which make me uniquely ‘me’ robs the wider whole of my particular contribution. Collectively, this self-effacement quickens the degeneration of the planet.

If I am to find my unique ecological niche in the Earth community, I will need to give some time to wandering about the inner ‘park’ of my life, until my eye sees what it didn’t see before, or sees in a new way what it has already seen. Sensing my responsibility to my own particularity, I no longer look to ‘kill time’ (with distraction and consumption), but to realise my life ‘through time’ in all its richness and distinction.

Perhaps the Earth can teach us

Absorbed in the intricacy of the little spider’s web, my eye flickers between the lines and the spaces between them, the negative shapes. I start thinking how the whole structure of the web depends on these little spaces. I begin to breathe more deeply, as though taking in this airy structure as a blueprint for my own existence. Like most of us, my life is pretty crammed, packed with activity, crowded with ideas, obligations and intentions. Loaded with stuff. Drawn into the ‘strange country’ of the little web, I begin to sense what it might be like to live a more spacious life.

It occurs to me then, perhaps the Earth can teach us. Perhaps the small, the slight and the fleeting, in all their intimate beauty and particular significance, can show us other ways of living. To heed this minute and infinite intelligence, we may need to create little gaps in our lives, tiny spaces. Change starts with something very small. A deep breath, perhaps.

Walking on down the slope, I feel a little lighter.

Susan’s references

Bill Brandt, Camera in London (Focal, 1948)
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain (Canongate Books, 2011)
Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998)
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, A Choice of Blake’s Verse (Faber and Faber, 1970)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (The Hogarth Press, 1927)
Bill Plotkin, The Journey of Soul Initiation (New World Library, 2021)

Find more

Susan Holliday is a psychotherapist and photographer and you can find more of her writing at her website.

Susan’s book Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart was published by Matador in 2021. You can read James Murray-White‘s review for ClimateCultures, Seeing Nature’s Wonders in the Human Heart.

Susan Holliday

A psychotherapist and writer committed to the rewilding of human nature, exploring the correlation between despoiling our natural world and the desolation of the human spirit ...