‘Stitching the threads’: UK book offers radical vision of a grassroots ecology

Wild Service contributors from front clockwise: Nick Hayes, Nadia Shaik, Jon Moses and Paul Powlesland at the River Roding near Barking, Essex. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

It is a call to action that might just be the founding text for a new environmentalism. A forthcoming book by a diverse band of right to roam campaigners offers a radical new vision of how people can repair both the natural world and their broken relationship to it.

Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You, inspired by the rare wild service tree, calls on communities to develop new relationships with the natural world, combining the hard graft of conservation science with the ceremony, gratitude and fun bound up in festivals, Indigenous traditions and even church services.