Together we stand with the oaks, listening, gently leaning into the spaces between. The stream we followed through the forest has brought us across some unseen threshold. Silence coaxes us into place: A palm finds bark as if guided, a boot settles into a root’s nook, shoulders slough bags to the floor and ease into stillness. A call – chiff-chaff – ripples searchingly through the vast quiet, as if testing the shape of the air, made complex by the undulating earth and the textured tangles of fur, flesh, feather, foliage. The group begins to shift, their attention circling back to one another. Faint smiles flicker in recognition of something shared and yet, for now, unspoken. Kneeling, I reach into my bag, take out a book, and nestle it into the moss, where a fern’s frond-tip lightly keeps the page open. I meet each gaze in turn, and begin to read.

We first began to see how reading walks could profoundly shape the way people encounter the natural world in a secluded corner of the Wyre Forest National Nature Reserve in central England. From that work grew a conviction that some may initially regard as strange, frivolous or whimsical, but those who have taken part understand: Reading walks cultivate a depth of attention that neither reading nor walking alone can summon. They allow ecological possibilities to be felt as lived futures rather than abstractions. They invite people into a different mode of perception, one in which the line between the real and the imagined becomes generatively blurred, creating space to imagine alternatives to how we live now.[1] News from Nowhere, written by artist, writer, and activist William Morris in 1890, is one text particularly well-suited for such an invitation.

Reading this utopian vision in a forest unsettles our sense of time. Morris’ conception of late 21st century London – its orchards blooming in Trafalgar Square, its overhanging willows along a crystal-clear Thames, its post-capitalist abundance of beauty and biodiversity – doesn’t feel naïve when read beneath the canopy of a working forest. It feels like a provocation. I once read the orchard passage with students standing in Ruskin Land’s own cherry orchard, a place whose fruit was once sent by rail to Victorian markets. Morris’ imagined future and the forest’s lived past came together, revealing how easily we forget that landscapes are made, unmade, and remade across time. Reading walks refuse the shallow present and open a deeper field of temporal reflection. Morris’ vision disrupts the fatalism that says our current trajectory is inevitable. It exposes how readily we fall into shifting baseline syndrome – the quiet erosion of memory that makes each generation accept ecological diminishment as normal. Reading Morris in the forest reminds us that the world we inhabit is neither timeless nor naturalised, but the product of choices and imaginations before us.

If Morris expands our sense of time, Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant expands our sense of space. His Thinking with Trees shows us that the forest is never neutral but shaped by race, migration, memory, and the politics of belonging. Reading his work in place opens the landscape sideways, revealing the cultural, geographical, and historical layers that conventional environmental discourse flattens. Allen-Paisant writes of ‘reclaiming time’ and ‘reclaiming what middle-class people call leisure’, a call that resonates with Morris’ anti-capitalist critique of the division of work and leisure in Nowhere.[2]

On a reading walk, poems like Allen-Paisant’s enable people whose knowledge, histories, and lived experiences are too often treated as peripheral to find themselves not only listened to, but recognised as essential contributors. Again and again, participants describe feeling newly entitled to speak, to question, and to claim their agency in shaping ecological futures. The particular impact varies with the book, the place, the audience, but it is always deep. This plurality is not an optional enrichment; it is the fertile ground of any meaningful nature recovery.

Our methodology used repeated reading walks with students and locals, supported by walking interviews, journals, artwork and questionnaires that allowed us to trace how collective reading in the forest enriched their understanding of both literature and nature.[3] Imaginative literature, when read in place – especially the place where it is set, or a place somehow related – becomes a form of ‘narrative evidence’, a potent way of knowing that sits alongside scientific, historical, and experiential knowledge.[4] To act, people must first be moved, and our research suggests that literary imagination has the power to move us toward the futures we hope to recover.

I finish reading and close the book. The group lingers in the living light of the stream. Slowly, a conversation begins to eddy and gather, flowing with the strange, generative dynamic of people who have shared an experience yet arrived at it from different places. Perceptions, memories, ideas, and feelings surface that would never have surfaced without the simple act of walking and reading together.

Policy alone cannot secure the future of our landscapes without the attention and care of diverse publics, especially in urban societies marked by inequality and nature deprivation. The reading walk offers one way to cultivate that care: An adaptable, participatory method that invites people to slow down, to listen, to bring their own histories into dialogue with place, and to imagine futures they might help create