Time Travelling
pollen, in conversation with Helen Lucocq
This article has been written in collaboration with LANDED, a narrative project ‘Bridging Land, People & Policy Through Creative Storytelling’. More details at the base of this page. The piece that follows is a conversational Q&A with Helen Lucocq - co-founfer of LANDED, ex-national park policy person; and newly appointed Policy and Advocacy Manager at the Woodland Trust.
Honestly, I could talk to Helen all day, asking hundreds of questions and traversing countless rabbit holes. That in mind, I set myself a limit of 10 to send her way. I love Helen’s approach. We were first introduced a few months ago on account of a shared fascination with the concept of time travel and the uniquely productive space it unlatches.
In her former role at Bannau Brycheiniog, Helen pioneered the Future Food Project. That's where we start our discussion, giving us a launchpad to discuss ideas from ‘utopia’ to intergenerational dialogue, immersive workshops and climate communications.
This is a longer read than past pollen articles. So, sink in, let Helen's insights signal that there are often useful tools hiding in plain sight, and let that linger - asking yourself in a few days time what the idea of time travel could unlock in your own line of work and the way you understand connected matters like food, farming, and nature in the place you live now.
Lucy Gavaghan.
1) How did the time machine idea come into the Future Food Project?
Which came first, the idea of time travel, or the idea of future food? One really did influence the other. I had long been talking about the food system as being at the crux of many of the challenges we were facing as a National Park, so it made sense that any big investments in future involvement strategies were food orientated.
For context, we’d just released a holistic 25 year strategy based around the idea of heading for an ecologically safe, and socially just future (inspired by the work of Donella Meadows and Kate Raworth).
To help structure the plan we conceptualised five interrelated and interconnected missions relating to Climate, Water, Nature, People and Place, but we had done that reluctantly - our mantra was, these are intersecting problems and they need to be considered in the round. So, we drew the concept as a picture that referenced the embedded economy model. All issues nested, like a Russian doll.
However, we were finding that despite our best efforts, it still ended up like a list of objectives, or separate topics needing separate plans and teams. The policy team was really trying to avoid that, as it creates false dualisms. We needed to start thinking in systems, not just subjects! My work in the Usk had made me really address this head on, with the debate over intensive chicken waste and river pollution polarising conversations and preventing progress.
I had read Dimbleby (and Lewis’s) Ravenous and there was this great quote that started the chapter on Nature by Richard Waite of the World Resources Institute,
Worried about biodiversity loss? Focus on food. Worried about freshwater supply and quality? Focus on food. Worried about deforestation? Focus on food. Worried about overfishing? Focus on food. Worried about climate change? Focus on energy and food.
It really struck a chord. I also remember thinking, worried about poverty and equality, focus on food. This is where the ‘great chicken nugget rant’ was born:
‘Remember that your expertise is only ever partial, you always need to stay curious for the things you don’t know, the things that lie beneath – don’t take your problems to the people, and ask them to solve them by consulting on something you think you’ve already got the solution to. That is faceless placeless paternalising that generates conflict rather than collaboration. I’ll give you an example:
In my world, as an environmental policy maker I see the problems in the environment and I want them solved. Take river health, experts will tell us that the rivers are dead because of all the waste from the 20 million chickens that are intensively raised in the catchment. ‘It's terrible’ we say. They must be banned. Problem solved.
Stay curious
Because to many, the fact that there are 20 million chickens being intensively raised every day is actually a solution to the problem of what to feed their kids when they are busy, and short of money and time.
Stay curious
The commodification of our diets through the ubiquitous ultra processing beloved of the profit motivated multinational conglomerates who bombard us with messages that this is the food we need, because we are busy and this is quick and easy, and our kids will eat it with glee, and we deserve the treat because we work so hard for so little and what is more, this food is on offer, and lives in our freezer, it’s a super convenient bargain. When everything else is so complicated and costs so much.
Like the bill to the NHS to treat diet related conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. Which means that you can’t get a doctor's appointment when you need one, or your nanis waiting three years for a hip replacement.
We must stay curious
We must create curious spaces to explore all the issues in the round. That is how we move beyond the partiality of our biases and actually edge towards sustainability’
I once delivered ‘the rant’ at an event focused on river health just before lunch, and a whole tray of chicken nuggets were mysteriously uneaten, which made me realise it was hitting with people in some way, even if potentially and sadly just that was missing the point of what I said. I wasn’t demonising chicken nuggets, I was just explaining why we are where we are. Pride comes before a fall I guess.
At the same time, we were also reflecting on some findings of our own failings as a policy team. Our ‘consultation’ on the draft strategy had been as rigorous as we had thought able, we had held a citizen’s assembly, we had a external advisory panel scrutinisation, policy deep dives with ‘experts’ etc etc, but what we found was we were still only managing to reach a tiny proportion of the residents, let alone the millions of visitors to the area. We tried and failed to get a youth policy forum going, so we were left pondering on how to democratise our decision making. This felt urgent, because we knew that were were about to start work on some critical planning policy documents (the local development plan, which is used to define ‘growth’ both the type (affordable housing or open market, out of town retail or town centre protection etc), the quantum (why the growth is necessary, is it economic value, is it social support, is it something else?) and then finally where such development should be a located. Where is ‘sustainable’?
Such plans have been totally capitalised by the technocratic both in terms of how they develop and how they are formulated. As a result we were concerned that the nature of the outputs would get captured by these technocrats, what we had started to refer to as the ‘placeless expert’ who would be able to exploit their knowledge of the system to extract wealth. That’s a policy wonk way of saying we needed a way of ensuring that the voice in support of the community and their needs (and in saying community I mean all ecological communities including the human) showed up in a really persuasive and powerful way to ensure that the volume was enough to drown out the ‘anywhere rhetoric’ of the volume house builder or the supermarket.
Which is where my colleague Liz Hutchins comes in, she had been to a weekend course on organising for Community Climate Action held at CAP. There she met the wonderful Rob Hopkins, who had given a presentation about Time Travel as a means of shifting perspectives.
She spoke about how his playfulness lit up the room, and kept sharing this image, which seemed to make us all instantly smile. From there, time travel for Future Food was born in the coming together of a whole heap of ideas and people. The culmination of this was the idea to repurpose an inflatable planetarium the Park purchased as part of our Dark Skies Work to create a Time Machine to create really interesting ways of engaging non-technical experts in evidence led, policy development.
We started floating the idea with everyone we came across, to see what they thought about it, and we got some really positive noises, but funding it was the sticking point. By amazing serendipity when Liz was out shopping she bumped into the South Powys Local Food Partnership Coordinator and they got talking. The food partnership had some capital underspend that year and they were looking for a way to engage young people in their food strategy development/implementation. From that conversation, we finally saw the shape of those two strands of thought coming together to create something really different and hopefully impactful. It just seemed to fit so well, food was a cross mission exemplar for us in Y Bannau, it was also a priority of the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales (Focus on Food) so we knew it would have key policy crossovers locally and nationally.
How Future Food then developed was more co-creative as we pulled together a team to develop the proposal. The idea of working directly with the young people grew in importance as we started thinking more about the outputs from the sessions. The idea of layering of different visions of place and the future, became more and more important, and the hope that the futures created, would become a type of tapestry, or patchwork quilt of an artefact that would have a value and a power beyond the individual engagements become important. So it became important that the session became a chain event, each new cohort of time travellers would be led by the last.
The shape of the project developed as it was designed, and I hope it will continue to grow in this way as it moves forward. It is after all just a tool to start conversations. The real value is in what happens as each vision of the future is passed to the next cohort, how those conversations take place, and how we value the findings.
2. How did students respond to the time travel element of your workshops?
The students loved the adventure of it, which made landing the information about the past/present of the food system really straightforward. We had taken a cue from the BBC’s Horrible Histories in thinking on how the information could be presented without losing the interest of the audience. The mechanism of the presentation allowed the information to be easily conveyed, and absorbed, meaning that the students were then better able to undertake the task we had set them (to make documentaries from the future, showing how the world had changed on the back of the decisions they were advocating for).
I also have some really lovely quotes from some of the student participants. It's interesting that their focus has been on the impact of taking the decision makers through the Time Machine (the cohort chain discussed above).
Fergus: The Time Travelling project with the national park was very rewarding . We enjoyed making the films and presenting what the future could look like for farming around the area. The making of the films was a lot of fun; although it was a broad subject, we chose different ways of how food was produced and consumed in the area. To be a part of this project as the future generation was amazing, and we hope that we’ve made a difference, as change doesn’t happen to people who don’t feel passionate about it!
3. What role does sound and noise play in the experience? (I’m thinking about the 360 ° planetarium we discussed).
The immersive experience, of being in a defined and unusual space, plays to the theatre of the experience. It provided a bit more magical realism that we really were travelling in time. I think we would like to work on that element more moving forward, and really make it more ‘in character’ to allow the playful creativity to soak more deeply into the systems of policy making.
We have shown the films ‘flat’ - not in the domed space, and undoubtedly they were less impactful. They seem more like funny films, a lot easier to remain situated in the every day around. Maybe that’s linked to sound, and other sensations (the darkness, the scale of the images, the display of different timed images across the three window displays when its shown in 360 °)
I’m not sure we focused enough on sound. We wanted it to be really visual, but sound is an interesting concept in terms of connections to time. I know Rob Hopkins has done lots of work around this, and potentially in the future that is something that we should explore depeer.
Interestingly when we do less high-tech futures work, like postcards from the future, we always ask about how the future feels to the participants, and that feeling is something that we draw out through the senses, so smell, touch, sound, sight. We find it makes the visioning work far more visceral and believable, again it allows that bit of magical thinking to come into play to make the imagined futures feel more of an anchor to hold us to, something real, and worth working towards.
4. Is there a sweet spot in terms of ‘how far back’ and ‘how far forwards’ you imagine travelling?
As we are embedded and working within communities where food production (agriculture) grounds cultural memory of place, there is something key about intergenerational thinking in knowledge formation. The lives of many young people we were working in are already grounded in a deep sense of history. Farms are often multigenerational businesses, and often decisions made on farms are made by Grandad, who will have learnt from their father (apologies it is that gendered still), so we wanted to have a span within that memory frame of around 100 years. It was particularly relevant in terms of change within land management practice too as it did reflect a period of major change.
So, our past started around the 1930s and our future related to decisions being made in 2030 (although the documentaries from the future could be much further off). That way we see how food was being farmed pre green revolution (mixed systems, low impact), how subsidy, technology and globalism had swiftly changed the system to what we have today (intensive and high impact dominated by supermarkets as purchasers), and how by harnessing the best of the things that are happening today (these were shown in the present film too) and putting them into practice in the 2030s (the period of time our students would have started working and having agency) things could quickly shift towards more sustainable futures.
5. How does critical evaluation of the past change the way we imagine our futures?
I think context is really important to all decisions. Often I think that we assume things are the way they are because of some natural order. We’ve always done it like that, so we will keep doing it like that because that’s what works. But what history shows us is that the ‘status quo’ is nothing of the sort. We haven’t ‘always done it like that’ our actions today are totally influenced by the decisions people made in the past in response to the challenges they were facing. These decisions have long lasting, often unintended, consequences on how we live our lives. In our time travel films, we talk about the introduction of farm subsidy, and supermarkets, etc in changing how we produce food and how it is sold to us as consumers, the shift from the 1930s to the 1980s (a couple of generations) is huge and allow the participants to call into question the validity of our normative assumptions.
Just to add, in defence of my forebears:
I believe that all (well most) decisions are made with the best of intentions, doing the best with the resources we have available to us, so I’m not trying to criticise or diminish the value of past decisions, just showing the power of human agency to the next generation of policy makers.
6. Do you think it is productive or motivating to imagine ‘utopian’ futures?
Yes and no, sorry to be so on the fence. I think it's important to imagine realisable futures, which may well lead to a version of utopia for some. I like how Donella Meadows frames the idea of determining our futures based on what we know from the past, in the present (Limits of Growth: The 30 Year Update, Meadows & Randers, 2004, pp.272-3)
“Some find the exercise of visioning frightening or painful, because a glowing picture of what could be makes what is all the more intolerable. Some people never admit their visions, for fear of being thought impractical or “unrealistic.” They would find this paragraph uncomfortable to read, if they were willing to read it at all. And some people have been so crushed by their experience that they can only explain why any vision is impossible. That’s fine; skeptics are needed, too. Vision needs to be disciplined by skepticism. We should say immediately, for the sake of the skeptics, that we do not believe vision makes anything happen. Vision without action is useless. But action without vision is directionless and feeble. Vision is absolutely necessary to guide and motivate. More than that, vision, when widely shared and firmly kept in sight, does bring into being new systems…
… A sustainable world can never be fully realized until it is widely envisioned. The vision must be built up by many people before it is complete and compelling.”
7. What kind of audiences would you like to engage with more through immersive events?
I really would love it if we could take this process on a tour of Welsh Schools, allowing all children, urban, rural, from all backgrounds the opportunity to learn and participate and contribute towards the future of their food. To learn the significance of decision making on their lives, it feels like it's an important part of an education, almost like the literacy of governance, or democracy, of their role in shaping the futures. I’d also love to see how that could play out in creating different futures for food policy in Wales, if all Public Service Boards, or all Food Partnerships, or all Local Councils participated in the young people’s visions. That in itself could then be looked at in terms of health and wellbeing outcomes, as well as nature and climate benefits.
I’d love that to culminate in an all Wales vision - one that ended up in the Senedd with the young people across Wales taking Cabinet Members on the time travel experience, and that led to actual national level policy making.
But I’d also love to see if we could expand the more local reach of the pilot, to use it in planning policy development, as was our original idea, would that lead to more locally appropriate strategies. I’d also love to take the Planning Inspectorate through the Time Machine as part of the Examination phase (the public inquiry into what gets put into the plan!). Imagine how brilliantly disruptive that would be, how it would be the start of breaking down the sanctity of the technocratic in favour of the lives of the people who live in a place, especially younger generations.
8. Has experimentation with time travel changed your own theory of change?
More expanded and amended, and reinforced the value of reflexive process in policy making.
I think the most profound impact it has had in the nature of our decision making, and the reaslisation of the long term opacity unless we keep exposing the human agency in norm creation.
I also like to reflect on how hard it was to get funded and into existence (it was a real labour of love that took place on the edges of everyone’s desks, where we really pulled in favours from far and wide) but once people see it, they get it and get enthused over the possibilities. It’s almost like a moment of our own quiet disruption, all of a sudden it is being valued beyond the bounds of our national park policy making, and that is really interesting to see that creative approach take hold with others. Why that is so hard to bring about in the everyday, is something that I’d love to examine more, but it has certainly led me to think about how to ‘land’ projects, and my theory of change with my colleagues first and foremost, not just the decision makers or the policy development itself.
As part of our own publicity around the project I was asked to give a quote to summarise how I felt it had gone, and I think this is the bit that really captures how I will be showing up in future policy work, so yes, it has impacted my own theory of change ….
”As policy makers we always seem to start the wrong way round, the adults get together and then think about how they can better bring in future generation thinking into decision making. The refreshing thing about this approach is it starts with the perceptions of young people, and young people hold the space in which decision makers are then asked to think - it totally shifts the dynamic - it's so powerful. All the adults that participated in the workshop kept talking about how impressive the young people were in their thinking, they seemed surprised, I think it was because no one has ever really given the kids the voice, I suspect it's always been there we just weren’t listening.”
9. How could the concept of time travel enhance wider communications around climate breakdown?
Where evidence suggests existing entrenched cultural norms are acting in opposition to best social and environmental outcomes, and where previous attempts at intervention have failed to get traction, the use of alternative mechanisms to frame the challenge, such as time travel, could prove effective at building new pathways towards sustainable change.
In the case of Future Food, unlike traditional policy development processes characterised by opposition and entrenched positions, the emphasis on youth voices can create a more collaborative environment. Our theory of change posits that by reframing the conversation to focus on the youth voice, the world building exercise with decision makers should instinctively become softer, less adversarial and more open to ideas drawn from different ways of seeing the world.
The presence of young people, with their inherent optimism and openness to new ideas, can help to de-escalate tensions and foster a more constructive dialogue among stakeholders and intergenerationally. This can lead to more effective and inclusive policy outcomes that address the root causes of the issue, rather than simply managing its symptom. With continued support and expansion, Future Food can become a model for how creative education can drive tangible policy shifts, ensuring that the voices of those who will inherit the future are not just heard but actively shape it.
10. Where next? Do you have hopes to expand this thread of work in the coming years?
Personally I would love to be a professional time travelling policy maker! But that might need some time off.
This whole project was so uplifting and energising, in a world (public policy making) that often is the complete opposite, you know, demoralising and despairing and just totally ineffectual. The sense of hope (and hope as a verb) that this project garnered was infectious, and caught the hearts of all those who worked on it.
I’m hoping that through the creatives that helped bring this project to life, there will be more opportunities to work with different groups to help navigate areas of conflict or areas where traditional policy making hasn’t worked, and that a co-creative, co-produced approach could really move the dial. Together we have now formed a network of practitioners Landedfutures.org thinking about land management in the future and providing these creative, softer skills to explore the world differently, skills that not all policy makers have had the opportunity to develop, but which are going to be really important in the future.
Again Donella Meadows is a real inspiration, I keep quoting her, but it is to her I owe so much…
“In our own search for ways to encourage the peaceful restructuring of a system that naturally resists its own transformation, we have tried many tools. The obvious ones are rational analysis, data gathering, systems thinking, computer modelling, and the clearest words we can find. Those are tools that anyone trained in science and economics would automatically grasp. Like recycling, they are useful, necessary, and they are not enough.
We would like to conclude by mentioning five other tools we have found helpful. We introduced and discussed this list for the first time in our 1992 book [Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future]. Our experience since then has affirmed that these five tools are not optional; they are essential characteristics for any society that hopes to survive over the long term. We present them here again in our concluding chapter “not as the ways to work toward sustainability, but as some ways.”
“We are a bit hesitant to discuss them,” we said in 1992, “because we are not experts in their use and because they require the use of words that do not come easily from the mouths or word processors of scientists. They are considered too ‘unscientific’ to be taken seriously in the cynical public arena.” What are the tools we approached so cautiously? They are: visioning, networking, truth-telling, learning, and loving.
It seems like a feeble list, given the enormity of the changes required. But each of these exists within a web of positive loops. Thus their persistent and consistent application initially by a relatively small group of people would have the potential to produce enormous change–even to challenge the present system, perhaps helping to produce a revolution.
Also, because context is everything, I listened to the podcast, John Seed in conversation with David Rutledge, about the philosophy of deep ecology,
“The Earth has destroyed itself many times before, we have survived six major extinction spasms where at least 50% of all of the species around us died, and our ancestors made it through the eye of that needle. Indeed we survived the Permian extinction, where 95% of all the species around us perished, and somehow, here we are, shell-shocked, suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, and that this is not unique, that there’s nothing sentimental about the Cosmos. .. It’s a place full of violence, full of terror, and somehow we need to get a grip and to recognise the struggle that its been that we find ourselves here, stop blaming ourselves for, you know, what perhaps was inevitable: that any monkey subjected to the stresses that we’ve been subjected to would be in exactly the same position and try and take stock to figure out how we can move forward in a compassionate way that’s going to allow us to have a few million years before our final extinction, which you know, is inevitable.”
To me this is it, right, time travel is the way of accepting our position as not necessarily something that we could have avoided, but finding that compassion to stop shouting, start listening, and create visions of the futures we actually want to build.
Explore LANDED by following this link to their website. This bold, beautiful initiative is shaped and driven by Helen and her ‘co-conspirator’, Jodie Bond. Here is a window into their work & interests.
Meet Helen Lucocq: Helen grew up in Swansea and spent her childhood longing at every moment to be exploring the British landscape. She was named one of the Welsh Government's Changemakers for the work she has done to help bring about the ambitions of the Future Generations Act. She was also the first to introduce the concept of Doughnut Economics into a UK National Park, pioneering fresh approaches to sustainable land use.
Find Helen's blog here.
Meet Jodie Bond: Jodie grew up on a sheep farm near Machynlleth and has spent over a decade shaping stories that inspire action. An award-winning communicator, her environmental campaigns, films, and writing have gained international recognition. Now based in the Black Mountains, she draws constant inspiration from the land she calls home.
