Why ecological folklore?
Because...
In an age of unraveling ecologies, we need new stories that root us back into relationship. The wisdom of lichen and mycelium—networks of reciprocity, resilience and quiet cooperation—offers a blueprint for how we might otherwise live. Because imagination is an ecology too, and folklore is how cultures seed futures. By co-creating ecological folklore, we cultivate shared ecologies of care, reciprocity and belonging—stories not of conquest and decay, but of regeneration and kinship with the living world.
What if embracing the mystery of unknowing could draw us closer to nature? Might it reveal hidden threads of connection?
A short film by narrative arts collective artist James W. Norton
LORE.LAND.LIVE
How might ecological folklore—the co-creative weaving of stories grounded in reciprocity, multi-species entanglement, and place—become a form of imagination activism, capable of reshaping cultural imaginaries (shared visions that shape how societies dream, act, and relate to the living world)? In an age of fracture, might new folklore ecologies reframe decay and seed more relational, regenerative futures, inviting communities to dwell differently with the wild?
What if museums adopted a mycellial approach, becoming less like vaults and more like forest floors—messy, interconnected and burgeoning with the unexpected? Museums could move beyond preserving heritage to actively exploring how past, present and future intertwine—helping us face the challenges ahead.
Developed in conjunction with narrative arts collective as part of the Mycelial Futures showcase at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Today, dominant cultural narratives often cast nature as a backdrop, a resource, or a threat—something to be tamed, extracted, or feared. Ecological folklore asks us to imagine differently: to co-create stories where humans are not separate from, but entangled within the living, breathing world around them. These stories can serve as imaginative infrastructures, offering new pathways for understanding interdependence and mutual flourishing.
Through projects like Ecology Re-Wired, The Living Museum, and Edgeland Inks, we demonstrate how artistic practices can act as connective tissue between communities and the ecosystems they inhabit. We believe ecological folklore can extend this work—seeding cultural imaginaries where lichen, rivers, fungi, forests, and humans are collaborators in a shared story of adaptation and resilience.
Curiosity and wonder spark imagination, driving us to question, explore and reimagine the world. This exhbiition invites you to step into an Ecology Re-wired—a vision of nature transformed by evolving ecosystems, human influence and advancing technologies.
A futures exhibition developed in conjunction with Natural England's Futures team and narrative arts collective
Our work with shared ecologies has taught us that resilience is not about dominance or growth, but about adapting needs, reciprocity and symbiosis. Drawing inspiration from the architectures of mycelium and the wisdom of ancient commons, ecological folklore invites communities to move beyond heroic, transactional myths towards relational, co-flourishing futures.
In this way, storytelling becomes not just an act of reflection, but one of cultivation—an ongoing, collective practice of re-weaving the ties between people, places and more-than-human kin.
It’s a form of creative activism: tending the soil of culture itself so that new ways of living, thinking and belonging can take root. Ecological folklore reminds us: we are not outside of nature.
We are nature, dreaming.
A fUTURES CALENDAR
What if the cyclical nature of the seasons became our guide, synchronising human lives and technology with nature's rhythms and expanding our sense of time to an ecological timescale?
'Our land is like a poem, ' writes farmer and author James Rebanks, 'with each generation adding new layers of meaning and experience.' These images, a collaboration between narrative arts collective and AI, are inspired by the English Pastoral tradition. They reimagine seasonality in the UK, where spring might be heralded not by blooming flowers, but by a flush of energy renewal, and autumn marked by shifts in cultural tides rather than falling leaves. In these blended landscapes, nature, technology and human presence fold into an unending variance of deep terrain, redefining our connection to place.
