Strategic Research Council projects ForTran (Forests in systemic transition) and MUST (Enabling multispecies transitions) organised a workshop in September 2025 for the Forest thematic group of the Nature Restoration planning group at the State House. Our researcher Satu Aavanranta designed the envisioning part of the workshop ‘A journey to a future forest’.
The workshop brought together the members of the Forest thematic group working on the Finnish Nature Restoration Plan to discuss the steering methods and actions of the restoration programme and to enhance the acceptability and effectiveness of it. The workshop consisted of expert presentations, interactive group work and lively discussions.
As part of it, I facilitated a session that invited participants to embark on ‘A journey to a future forest‘ with me.
For this journey, I had prepared an audio track from various audio recordings we had recorded with the MUST team in the forests at Sipoonkorpi and Tampere earlier this year. As we listened to the forest sounds – several birds chatting with each other, the leaves shuffling in the wind and a moose munching dinner – the participants walked with me to the year 2050 and into a forest they each wished to visit. We engaged our bodies, senses and imagination to observe and co-create the future forests, where nature would be successfully restored by 2050. As we reflected on the well-being of trees, animals, mosses, mycelium and water, amongst others, we envisioned some desirable futures in our minds.
One might wonder why participants would walk around the room, stand with their eyes closed and spend their time imagining. Aren’t the visions in our minds only our imagination and nothing to do with reality? Barbara Adam and Steve Groves (2007) once said that:
“Engagement with the future is an encounter with a non-tangible and invisible world that nevertheless has real and material consequences.”
This statement resonates with me on two levels. Regarding the first part of the sentence, if the future is non-tangible and invisible then we may benefit from tools that make it even slightly more tangible and visible for us, allowing us to explore the potential futures. Experiential futures comprise a set of envisioning approaches that help translate future possibilities into more tangible, explorable and interactive experiences (Candy & Kornet, 2019). These approaches emphasize embodiment and experience, often enriched with media and material elements (Candy & Kornet, 2019).
For the purpose of this workshop, I adopted the journey to the futures approach, facilitating it in an embodied manner and integrating the audio recordings. Additionally, practitioners argue that the experiential nature of these approaches enables transformative change in the mindsets (Candy & Dunagan, 2017). In pursuit of sustainability transformations, it made sense to utilise these experiential tools to facilitate our journey to a future forest.
Regarding the second part of Adam and Groves’ statement, encounters with the imagined futures have “real and material consequences”. I am curious about the types of forests, forest habitats, encounters at the forests and relations with the forests we can envision today, as these imaginaries may influence the ways we co-create and build possible, desirable futures ahead of us. In the workshop a participant remarked that upon returning from 2050 back to 2025, they felt well-prepared to discuss the actions and steering methods needed for the nature restoration plan.
Now, I would like to invite you to imagine your local forest in 2050. What would you like the forest to be like? Who will live there in 2050? What are their hopes for the forest?
Text: Satu Aavanranta, University of Helsinki
Pictures: 1. Unsplash, 2. Satu Aavanranta
References
Adam, B., & Groves, C. (2007). Future matters: Action, knowledge, ethics (Vol. 3). Brill.
Candy, S., & Dunagan, J. (2017). Designing an experiential scenario: The people who vanished. Futures, 86, 136–153.
Candy, S., & Kornet, K. (2019). Turning Foresight Inside Out: An Introduction to Ethnographic Experiential Futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 23(3).
