Chris Collier is based in Lewisham. He works in further and higher education and has been a Ranger since 2021. His focus is on fostering imagination and connection in the natural world.
Q1
what inspired you to become a ranger?
As a child I loved fantasy and fairy tales, and lucky enough to grow up in the countryside, I filled my time roaming the woods and fields. There, imagination and nature became one, and the trees were alive with ghosts and goblins. As I got older, I could have grown out of that, but instead I realised my intuition wasn’t wrong: the world is alive, and, to paraphrase scholar Graham Harvey, full of persons, only some of whom are human. It’s the connection I’ve always felt with these others that inspires me to bring more of that into the world
Q2
How are you making London greener, healthier, and wilder?
I’m involved in a few projects: I’m on the committee of the Friends group of my local park Blythe Hill Fields, helping develop several biodiversity initiatives, such as a ‘tiny forest’, an orchard, wildlife garden, and tree planting. I organised a Wassail there – funded through LNPC’s Small Grants Programme – to greet the trees, and was privileged to play the part of ‘green man’, a role I’ve also reprised around South London, supporting other Rangers with their wassails! I’ve likewise helped create foraging events, and a ‘forest school for adults’, and outside my Ranger activities, I’m an environment rep at one of the colleges where I work, helping advocate for green issues in the workplace.
I also occasionally write, but prefer to keep it offline. Putting writing online often turns it into ‘content’ – part of a constant production cycle – whereas something printed and quietly circulated feels more singular, more intentional. I tend to write reflective pieces – sometimes philosophical, often tied to local nature or place – and share them in small newsletters (Circulars) left around the area or sent to friends. There’s an ongoing joke that it’s “the circular on the South Circular” – a small, hyperlocal gesture towards alternative thinking in urban settings.
The writing often explores themes like animism and more-than-human agency, rooted in the unlikely terrain of South London’s urban sprawl. It started from a surreal conceit – the idea of animism on the South Circular – and developed into a wider reflection on how meaning, myth, and ecological awareness might find space in the overlooked or mundane. Where people usually look to forests or national parks for ‘nature’, I’m more interested in what lives – and what stories can be told – between pavements, tower blocks, and roadside verges.
Q3
What do you think has the single most positive impact of the environmental initiatives you’ve been part of?
Who knows? Causality isn’t linear; that’s the thinking that got us where we are. In fact, everything is a web of interconnections. Everything has consequences, most of which we cannot know, let alone measure, or indeed, often even control! The hope is that if we build those connections in a positive way, the ripples will resonate towards the wider outcomes we want to see.
Q4
What have you gained from being part of the LNPC Community?
Relationships. Again, it’s interconnections that hold the world together; the point is to make positive ones, and so doing remove our reliance on the parasitic, exploitative, and damaging ones, those that pretend to stand as surrogates for the right relations we crave.
Being part of the LNPC/Ranger community it’s great to know what different projects are being worked on. I’ve collaborated with Ranger Lesley on several events with their Orchard. Meanwhile, I’ve invited Rangers to some of my events in South London, and I’ve helped support their events. For example, a few years back I helped Ranger Paula with a forest school and foraging event which ended up with participants moulding mud mushrooms in the rain.
Q5
Describe your proudest moment as a ranger
Becoming Green Man, and acting as compere for the Wassail event in our local orchard. We had over one hundred people in a cold, wet field, sharing food, drink, laughter, and song, and making right relations with the trees and seasons.
Q6
Describe your most challenging moment as a Ranger and how you overcame it
Ditto. I grew up quite shy, scared of public speaking. If my child-self could have seen me dressed as a tree, leading a song for over a hundred people, I suppose he would have had a meltdown!
Q7
What’s next for you as a ranger?
I recently took part in an Interspecies Council, inspired by Joanna Macy’s Council of All Beings. Participants each embodied a different non-human entity – a plant, animal, river, etc. – and spoke from their perspective in a council setting. While Macy’s version often involves addressing humans directly, in our version there were no humans present; instead, we were collectively crafting a consultation response to DEFRA’s Land Use consultation, attempting to represent the voices and interests of more-than-human beings – voices typically excluded from governance and policy-making.
It was a profound and moving experience, and I’m interested in exploring how such imaginative, empathetic methods could be incorporated into planning and governance processes for local green spaces and workplaces.
Q8
What continues to motivate you on your Ranger journey?
Again, connections. Connections imply responsibility. To be connected to others – human or more-than-human – is to be obligated. Although ‘obligation’ is often seen negatively in today’s society, associated with control, true freedom is impossible without it. Our first obligation is to the world itself. We are not detached consumers of nature, free to act on whim; our freedom is grounded in nature’s limits and necessities.
People often speak of freedom in abstract terms – like the freedom to drive – without acknowledging the complex web of dependencies that make it possible: roads, vehicles, fuel, labour, materials. These aren’t givens; they’re products of systems and effort. Likewise, the freedom to consume relies on the foundation of a functioning ecosystem. Without that, freedom becomes meaningless.
Q9
What has been your most memorable encounter with nature in London?
Many, daily. Lately, I’ve been kindling relationships with the other beings who inhabit the small communal garden outside our flat. Blackbirds, robins, and various blue tits, great tits, coal tits, magpies, pigeons, squirrels, and foxes, as well as rarer occasional visitors like jays, goldfinch or woodpeckers.
After a few years, I’m not only aware of the different birds and beasts visiting, but I’ve come to know most of them as individuals, recognising them within a few blocks of home. This becomes possible by giving attention to relations; treating the rest of the world as something other than a backdrop to one’s own drama.
Q10
How can we encourage more people to ‘Do London Differently’?
Action arises from obligation, and obligation from relationship. With the right relationships, we form the right obligations. Right relationships are rooted in empathy – especially empathy for the non-human beings we share the world with. Empathy, in turn, is built on imagination: to imagine the world from another’s perspective. While our embodied experiences differ, what we share is having a perspective. This shared condition is the basis for empathy.
Recognising that all beings – human and more-than-human – have their own point of view allows us to meet them with understanding. A Hawthorn, for instance, has its own needs, interests, and way of being in the world. If I can understand that I have a perspective and needs, I can also understand that the Hawthorn does too. This mutual recognition is the foundation of empathy, which gives rise to ethical relationship, obligation, and action.
Q11
It’s 2029…as a community, what do you hope LNPC would have achieved by our 10th anniversary? And what might London look like as a result?
In an ideal world, LNPC has contributed to a huge change in attitudes towards the living world. The majority have come to realise that the world is not some dead, inert matter, existing simply for human convenience. Rather, the world is alive and open to everyone who is able to meet it halfway, to listen and be attentive, to speak and communicate, and greet it with respect and consideration. Thus, our parks are swathed in trees, not dog shit and cans; our pavements are brimming with wild plants, not fly-tipped waste; our rivers are abundant with fish and insects, not sewage and shopping trolleys; our mornings not just filled with traffic and aircraft noise, but resonant with birdsong; and there are places yet where one sees stars, not just security lights.
Learn more about the work that Chris is doing by locating a copy of his Circular, to be found sporadically in various bus stops and hostelries along the A205.
Read more Ranger Stories here.
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Together, we can make London greener, healthier, and wilder..
