At 7:30am on the 11th June, I stood in a room that could only be described as ‘militantly separatist’ where the tables were staggered in rows facing the front. An apt classroom environment but not a desirable workshop space. Challenge accepted: I spent an hour re-configuring the room. At 10:30am, the workshop commenced. 

Why science requires imagination

We already know how to rewet a field. The hydrology, the species, the carbon math - the paludiculture evidence base is growing every year. What we are much worse at, I have come to believe, is picturing it. Most of us have inherited a very particular idea of what “good” land looks like: dry, tidy, productive in a way we can recognise at a glance. Wet land, by contrast, reads as waste, or worse, as failure; a farm that has given up. This is what I have been calling, in my Capstone research at the London Interdisciplinary School, the imagination gap: not a lack of evidence, but a lack of pictures we know how to trust.

Sitting alongside it is a second, quieter problem: the trust gap. Even when people can picture a wetter, wilder kind of farming, many still doubt it can pay the bills, or worry that the people telling them it will are not the people who understand their land. A stakeholder survey I am currently running is gathering responses from farmers, conservationists and land managers, has already shown both gaps clearly and shown that they don't always move together. Some people could picture the future beautifully and still didn't trust it. Others trusted the economics but simply couldn't see it. The survey is still open, and if you work with land, water or peatlands, I'd welcome your voice in it: take the survey here. 

Nine people, one very large sheet of paper

So for the Swansea conference, instead of another slide deck, I ran a workshop called Paludi-Imaginaries: nine participants, a roll of paper the size of a table, and an open invitation to draw, cut and write their way into a version of the future where wet farming is simply normal. No right answers, no pitch decks; just felt tips, collage scraps and a fairly ridiculous amount of glue sticks. 

What emerged was, frankly, better than anything I could have scripted. One corner of the paper became “Floating Gardens,” a coastal settlement built around water rather than in spite of it. Another held a small, careful drawing of a crane standing in open water. And in the middle of it all, one participant wrote a short, three-line monologue in a farmer’s voice that I think about often:

Underneath it, they had sketched a simple green field and labelled it with three words: carbon, water, food. It is, in miniature, the entire argument for paludiculture - written not by a scientist, but by someone who will actually have to live it.

Why a mosaic, and not a survey question

I could have asked participants to rank statements about paludiculture on a five-point scale. I have, in fact, done exactly that, it is most of what my survey does, and it is useful data. But a Likert scale cannot tell you why a crane matters, or that someone’s first instinct for a wetter future is a garden that floats rather than a field that drains slower. Speculative, participatory methods like this one - drawing on design theorists such as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who argue that imagining alternative futures is itself a way of critiquing the present. Let people show you the shape of their hope, and their hesitation, in a way that words on a form often can’t.

By the end of the session, the group’s closing reflections kept circling two ideas: that this future needed to feel abundant rather than sacrificial, and that trust would have to be earned by messengers who looked and sounded like the communities they were talking to; not just scientists, but farmers, neighbours, and people already known and believed.

Where this goes next

Everything from that afternoon at the conference: the mosaic, the farmer’s monologue, the floating gardens, is now feeding into the main output of my Capstone: a speculative magazine. The idea is simple. If part of the problem is that we lack everyday, trustworthy images of a wetter future, then part of the solution is to make some; not as abstract policy graphics, but as something that could sit on a coffee table and look, feel and read like a magazine anyone might pick up. My hope is that it becomes one small, permanent object in that imagination gap: something people can hold, rather than just a message they’re told to believe.

If there is one thing I took away from watching nine strangers fill a tablecloth-sized sheet of paper with reed beds and nature collages in under two hours, it is this: people are not short of imagination. They are short of permission, and of pictures that have already been drawn for them by people who understand the land. Give them the paper and the pens, and the future draws itself in faster and stranger and more hopeful shapes than any of us on the research side tend to expect.

About the author

Felix (they/he) is an MASc Capstone student at the London Interdisciplinary School, researching the cultural and psychological barriers to paludiculture and peatland restoration. They are Social Media Representative for the BES Peatland and Wetland Research Group and co-produce the RE-Peat podcast, including its Echoes From The Bog series. From August, you’ll find them in North Wales working with the RSPB for 6-months in Lake Vynwry.