Tom Longmate, Norway
@tomlongmate
@flumenlabs
Which actors, disciplines, and modes of knowledge can be interwoven to facilitate ecosystem regeneration?
“No one will protect what they don't care about, and no one will care about what they have never experienced”, David Attenborough
“We are enabling people to pre-experience the future; by pre-experiencing the future those embodied experiences become part of people’s memories” Anab Jain, Superflux
My proposal explores collaborative multidisciplinary methods to activate collective watershed care; predicated on two foundational principles. Firstly, that nature connectedness is one of the most powerful levers for transformational change* available to us, and secondly, Conviction Narrative Theory**, which posits that identifying and embodying possibilities manifests those possibilities in reality.
Anchored in a coastal inlet, in the Southern Norwegian archipelago, Indre Fidjekilen, my work addresses urgent concerns around ecosystem degradation. Turf algae are present in abundance during the summers, where they become a severe threat to seagrass meadows, in an area where they have historically flourished. Seagrass is a key nursery habitat for juvenile cod and shellfish, providing an array of ecosystem services, as well as sequestering significant amounts of carbon. Local people talk of how 50-60 years ago people had to cut down the seagrass in order to be able to swim, and of the variety and size of fish that used to be caught here.
Fine-threaded algae grows on the sediments in spring, floating to the surface and forming dense mats in summer. This prevents access to light for photosynthesis, starving the ecosystem of oxygen as a result. Later, these mats sink to the bottom, trapping organic matter, which decomposes, creating hypoxic or anoxic conditions. These conditions promote hydrogen sulfide growth, which is toxic to seagrass roots and rhizomes. Beggiatoa thrives at the boundary layer between sulfidic and oxygenated sediments, and thus indicates sulfide rich low oxygen conditions.
A community has already formed in support of this issue, and is actively campaigning for change. However, challenges of private ownership - deterioration, pollution and inaccessibility - public consensus building, together with dwindling council budgets and conflicting land use priorities represent serious barriers to the implementation of restoration measures
A three-part activation, toolkit and manifesto to encourage awareness and galvanise community action toward waterway stewardship.
1 | An invitation to be present, sense and experience
- Working with artistic practitioners to create a site-specific sculptural land-art intervention to draw people into the space.
- Collaborating with local outdoor groups, to expand footpaths, and create bespoke orienteering routes.
2 | Pre-experience a future flourishing ecosystem
- A set of mixed-reality viewing devices, presenting the ecosystem in peak health, contrasting with its current degraded state (periscope, telescope etc)
- Public display / information boards about the importance of seagrass to local ecosystems
3 | Engage communities in democratic stewardship models
- Voice the needs of the waterbody
- Inviting stewardship and social engagement
- Opening discussion on land access and responsibilities
- A space to propose and discuss interventions and host events (such as a communal clean-up and restoration, or a visit to a flourishing seagrass meadow).
- Convey and invite diverse ways of knowing
- Ecological (species observations / food webs / cyclical time)
- Social (intergenerational, connecting family names to places)
- Scientific (ie, run-off from housing, sediment disturbances)
- Oral histories
- Heritage practices
- Political
Future ambition
Create community consensus to drive policy recommendations. This intervention involves participation from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, expertise and viewpoints, to create an experience, and toolkit that invites reflection, embodiment, and care on the part of diverse communities connected to the waterbody, and activates these communities in collective action.
Manifesto (see image below)
The manifesto is intended not only as a code of conduct for waterbody stewards, but also to guide the design process together with the development of any tools and services. Important consideration should be given to the ownership of and infrastructure behind the underlying technical architecture, and inherent goals of any such ‘platform’.
*https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13280-025-02275-w
**https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/conviction-narrative-theory-a-theory-of-choice-under-radical-uncertainty/A952C601339C479DB8CBBDA46BD3C1F9