Reimagining a Wilder, Fairer Future for National Parks at Wild Summit

Published: 6 August 2026

As a person of the global majority, I found belonging in National Parks and the outdoors later than many others. Re-conceptualising my relationship with nature as active rather than passive has allowed me to see myself as part of a living landscape, participating in its ongoing story. Now based in Cumbria, I often explore the fells through bouldering, engaging in an embodied conversation where every fragment of rock I hold carries thousands of years of ecological and geological history. Through movement, I become part of that story, woven into the landscape.

I see the fells not as finished paintings, but as active canvases, layered with brushstrokes of the past while continually transformed through interactions like this. Even seemingly static rocks carry the marks of time, reminding us that what sits within the frame is never fixed. The painting will change, but the question is whether we choose to pick up the paintbrush and actively shape what’s next. This is the invitation of National Parks Reimagined, funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, and the conversation we hope to begin at this year’s Wild Summit.

75 years on from the establishment of the UK’s first Peak District National Park, the story of National Parks continues. Born in a context of post-war reconstruction, they were founded on a radical principle: that these landscapes should belong to everyone. They were to be a ‘people’s charter for the open air’, as described by Planning Minister Lewis Silkin in 1949, offering consolation, refuge and renewal after a period marked by conflict and loss.

While this vision resonates today, our relationship with these landscapes has changed significantly. We find ourselves in a new societal context, with different challenges and needs. Not everyone sees themselves reflected within National Parks, a reality highlighted by the 2019 Glover Review and brought into wider focus with movements and events such as Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 pandemic. This has renewed attention on who gets to benefit from these valued landscapes and the respite they offer, presenting a challenge in how we carry forward the founders’ original ambition. Ecologically, the story has also shifted with climate change not just a ‘hot topic’ but a lived reality, felt viscerally this most recent summer as wildfires reshaped landscapes at a staggering rate.

National Parks hold a critical responsibility in responding to the nature and climate crises, and I am reminded of a phrase popularised by Kevin Anderson: ‘there are no non-radical futures in a climate emergency’. Whether we choose it or not, a radically different future is inevitable, necessitating radical imagination. We must be bold enough to imagine new possibilities and reflective enough to recognise we cannot rely on assumptions of the past. While carrying forward the brushstrokes of those who founded National Parks, we must have the ambition to pick up a different colour – or even a different medium altogether.

At our Wild Summit event, National Parks: Reimagining a Wilder, Fairer Future, we will invite attendees to pick up the paintbrush, recognising the power it holds. National Parks Reimagined is grounded in creating the conditions for collective imagination and action and our event will kickstart two major strands underpinning this work: a citizen-led National Conversation, bringing together a diverse and intergenerational voices to co-create proposals for change, and a Network for Transformation to carry those ideas forward into lasting action.  Whilst we cannot predict the story of National Parks in the next 75 years, we can do even better and shape the next chapter together.

There is still time to get your tickets, and I hope you will join Campaign for National Parks with guest speakers Roshni Parmar-Hill (intersectional community organiser), Maxwell A. Ayamba BEM (Founder/CEO, Sheffield Environmental Movement) and Siôn McGeever (Chief Executive of the South Downs National Park Authority) at Wild Summit!