What counts as “nature engagement”, and who gets to define it?

Becky’s work, as an artist, PhD researcher, and Ranger, circles around touch, access, and power: who is allowed to come into contact with the places we call home, and whose knowledge is treated as legitimate once they do. 

Imogen comes at it from a different route, environmental journalism to medical school, plus a deep love of music and sound as forces that build community. Her point is straightforward: people are hungry for belonging, and modern life makes it easier than ever to avoid each other, avoid friction, avoid the messy, necessary work of being together.

The episode keeps returning to the same tension: nature connection is often presented as a narrow aesthetic, wholesome, quiet, “proper”, but real contact can be loud, imperfect, and wonderfully ordinary.

Sip: the everyday rituals that rewire attention

Becky shares how her projects often start with a mundane habit and tilt it towards ecology.

A pop-up cafe becomes a way to think about soil, water, trade, and extraction. The morning coffee becomes an invitation, not a lecture. That matters because it suggests a different kind of engagement, one that begins where people already are, rather than demanding they become a different sort of person first.

It is exactly the kind of approach OpenAREA has been championing, reframing nature not as a backdrop, but as a collaborator in culture, design, sound, and shared experience.

Scratch: bodies, senses, and the politics of being there

A thread that runs through the conversation is the idea that the senses are not “soft” knowledge, they are often the most durable kind.

Becky talks about the difference between looking at a river as data and standing beside it, where smell, texture, and proximity do something data cannot. Imogen echoes that, arguing that physical presence, whether on the street in protest or on the dancefloor in community, is a sensory declaration that people care, together.

Camley Street itself is a fitting backdrop: a two-acre nature reserve wedged between major rail infrastructure and constant redevelopment, a reminder that urban nature is not elsewhere, it is right here, and it is political. London Wildlife Trust

Sculpt: making spaces that invite, not instruct

Neither Becky nor Imogen is interested in art as a finished object delivered from on high. What excites them is participatory work, formats that behave like invitations, workshops, rituals, listening sessions, club nights, zines, sensory installations, gatherings where knowledge is made in the room.

That is where their practices overlap most clearly: a commitment to expanding the frame of what “counts”, and widening the door for who gets to enter.

Becky describes building spaces where people who rarely sit together can share a question. Imogen describes the same thing happening when curious strangers drift into a “climate party” and ask, half confused, half intrigued, what on earth that even means. The point is not instant conversion. The point is contact.

The dancefloor is older than the stereotype

A highlight of the episode is the refusal to treat partying as trivial.

Imogen makes the case that music is a tool for regeneration, community, and yes, disagreement. A good space does not erase conflict, it holds it. And when you start to see nightlife through that lens, “nature connection” stops being a single lane, it becomes a whole network of pathways: sound, vibration, breath, sweat, joy, mutual support.

Club SOL sits in that lineage, experimenting with lower impact ways of gathering, and using the magnetism of music to make climate engagement feel accessible, social, and alive.

Elders, ancestry, and intergenerational knowledge

Imogen also speaks beautifully about elders, ancestry, and the strangeness of modern life where intergenerational friendships can feel “unusual”, despite being how humans have always passed knowledge along.

She mentions Jane Goodall as an example of an elder whose legacy is not just academic, but cultural, someone who modelled lifelong devotion to community, learning, and care. Goodall died on 1 October 2025, and tributes highlighted her impact far beyond science, into public imagination and hope.

What happens next

By the end, they are already future-casting, new projects, new collisions, more spaces where culture and ecology blur on purpose. Becky hints at work riffing on the UK’s 1994 “repetitive beats” policing clause and what it means for sound, solidarity, and public space.

Imogen, mid-finals, is dreaming forward too, more parties, more collaborations, more chances to build community that can actually hold the scale of what we are facing.

And then Becky says the quiet part out loud: funders, if you are listening, we need more of this, and we need it to be visible.

Credits and links

Becky Lyon, Ranger story

Camley Street Natural Park (London Wildlife Trust)

Background on “Sip, scratch, sculpt” event note