Time travelling to imagine the River Culm's future - Blackdown Hills National Landscape

Time travelling to imagine the River Culm’s future

By Sarah Ward

Posted 22nd June 2021

May and June have been busy months for the Connecting the Culm project, we’ve been continuing work with local communities to co-create a vision for the River Culm and initiate an action plan, with some amazing people getting involved!

In May we hosted three fantastic visioning workshops. During the workshops Rob Hopkins, co-founder of the Transition movement and author of ‘What if?’, took everyone time travelling into the future to imagine how the River Culm and its catchment might look if we were all to take positive action today.

The ‘what ifs’ – the positive futures imagined at the visioning workshops – helped us draw up a draft ‘vision’ for the River Culm and its catchment, which was shared and voted on at our Blueprint Forum in June.

A mini river model made by a school child

Connecting the Culm school visit. Photo: Cat Farnell

We are delighted that our educational specialist Cat Farnell has recently been able to return to visiting local schools (in a Covid-safe way of course). She’s been enthralling children with her hands-on river time-travel activities, which the children absolutely love! More school visits are planned soon.

We will be taking a short break from our online and working group events over the summer (with the exception of our Understanding Soils for the Culm workshop on 14 July) but there are still plenty of opportunities to get involved in the coming weeks.