What is an Interspecies Council?
The Interspecies Council at Paper Garden. Picture: George Simons.
On a spring morning in Paper Garden, an airy community centre in Canada Water, East London, I am sitting in a circle of about 30 people drawn from across land, food and systems change sectors. Convened by research and practice project Moral Imaginations, food systems charity Feedback and wyrd futures, working for land-centred transformations, we are here to shape a response to a key document in the future of ecology in the UK, the government’s draft Land Use Framework - and we are here to shape it from the perspectives of other species. From River and Mayfly to Sheep and Bramley Apple Tree, each participant has been allocated a more-than-human being to speak on behalf of. They are depicted on our lanyards. Gaze around the room and the British countryside gazes back at you. It’s the feeling you get when you sit under a tree, watching the sunlight on the leaves: peaceful but expectant.
This is an Interspecies Council, a chance for people to exercise their more-than-human imagination. Each person reflects and communicates through the eyes of a certain species, changing the way they respond to the issues in front of us. Developed by founder of Moral Imaginations Phoebe Tickell, it is vital work. Planetary systems are in freefall. The soils are exhausted; the seas roiling in pollution. Forests are being torn down. Extreme weather due to the climate crisis is intensifying. Unchecked, the destruction of nature will result in major shocks to food supplies and safe water, the disappearance of animals and the loss of ecosystems fundamental to human culture by the middle of this century. And yet, action has been painfully inadequate. On darker days, it feels as though football matters more to people than human and animal survival. Whatever we’re doing, it’s not working.
What’s missing? Increasingly, advocates are pointing to the profound break between most humans and the rest of the natural world, leading to an absence of both connection and accountability; preventing responses that sail even remotely close to the scale of the emergencies. Thinking in silos dominates research. The focus on climate, for example, has led to a corresponding focus on emissions; only within the last decade has ecological breakdown and its symbiotic links to both the causes of (and the responses to) climate been recognised. Where efforts are made, the rich complexity of natural systems is ignored - at cost. In a 2020 paper for Cambridge University titled Multispecies Sustainability, Christoph D. D. Rupprecht pointed out: ‘true sustainability can only be achieved if the interdependent needs of all species of current and future generations are met.”
Applying shifts in worldview to governance
In a time when traditional responses seem to have failed, Moral Imaginations explores approaches that tackle the deeper drivers of the crisis: namely, colonialist worldviews, corrupted values, that terrible break with the natural world and myths of human supremacy. “Rationally, materially, we have all the solutions,” says Tickell. “What we’re lacking is empathy, will and action. The Interspecies Council is about making a connection, allowing people to extend their moral imagination, to see through the eyes of a non-human other, experience a profound shift in perspective, and then engage in thought, collaboration, decision-making and action from that shifted position.“ What emerges, she says, is very different from what initially goes in.
The centrepiece at the Council. Picture: Bel Jacobs
Moral Imaginations was born in 2021, four years after Tickell came across The Work That Reconnects, by Joanna Macy, environmental activist and scholar of Buddhism. Under Macy’s mentorship, the Interspecies Council adapts Macy’s own Council of All Beings, transforming the methodology from a grief practice to an exercise of more-than human deliberation, by blending it with elements from citizens assemblies. “The Council of All Beings focuses on surfacing the pain of being more-than-human on Earth right now,” says Tickell. “It allows the humans in that council to hear that pain and to reconnect with themselves as ecological selves. The Interspecies Council takes that shift in worldview and applies it to systems of governance.”
It is, quite deliberately, instinctual: balancing rational approaches with imagination and empathy. In Paper Garden, I am a Holstein Friesian cow, used for milk and meat. I’m not an expert but, having written about the dairy industry, I know cows suffer terribly. “Research about your species creates a scaffolding,” elucidates Tickell. “Once you’ve got that, you then have freedom for more imaginative, playful ways of giving voice to your being. It’s as much about the person playing that role as it is about trying to predict what a cow would say. If we don’t at least try, their voice would be completely absent.” For a generation for whom many of these species are a moment in a wildlife documentary or an ingredient in a meal, this is radical work.
Tickell trained originally as a plant scientist and microbiologist. “I spent a lot of time as a child in unstructured play in nature,” she says. “And I have always felt there’s a magic in nature beyond anything we can put a language to. There’s beauty and an intelligence that is a source of joy, curiosity, solace, healing and connection. Rocks and trees have existed for millions of years. Nature operates on a different time scale and it’s so important to be able to tap into that consciousness.” Confronted by social and environmental injustices, Tickell began to track issues back to the root, originally to ideas of governance and systems thinking - “I was interested in the decentralised, non-hierarchical governance systems of trees and mycellium” - then to the mindsets that drove them. “Changes in governance aren’t enough. We need to change the way we relate to the world, perceive and imagine - within a governance system.”
Nature in governance
It was a Council of All Beings, facilitated by Macy, that opened Tickell’s eyes to the possibilities of changing minds and opening hearts. “My first question was: what if we took a Council into formal decision-making contexts such as the UN and used it as a way to make decisions differently?” Then, in 2017, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was given legal personhood. The decision was the result of decades of campaigning by indigenous Maori people, for whom the river was awa tupua, the “river of sacred power”. The legislation refers to the river as an “indivisible, living whole,” conferring it “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities” of an individual, protecting it from the mining and extraction that had polluted its waters for almost 700 years.
For Tickell, it was the final piece of the puzzle. “Because then the question was, ‘How can a river participate in governance systems?’” she says. “And how can we, as humans, start to integrate the voice of the river in decision-making? It’s about looking at the whole infrastructure of human thought and asking, how do we actually change this from the inside out?”
For the past four years, Moral Imaginations has worked with different groups in the public, private and community sectors to re-imagine systems that respect the learnings of the past, re-centre nature and all of life, and take responsibility for those yet-to-be-born. Last year, when Policy Lab and Defra Futures met to explore what decision-making in relation to the UK’s freshwater system could look like, they turned to Tickell to host the UK government’s first Interspecies Council. Centred on the River Roding in Barking, the Water Post 2043 project invited participants from the catchment partnership, the Environment Agency and civil society groups to consider - for the first time - the more-than-human, with questions such as “What concerns does the bee have? Or a local reed warbler?”
“The aim of the project was to demonstrate how the more-than-human ontological approach could be used as a way of engaging local communities around a common issue,” says Tickell. “The Council unlocked conversations that weren’t possible before because it de-centered the human and allowed people to reconnect with a goal far bigger than any one perspective.” Groups within Defra continue to practice with approaches inspired by the Council and the river partnership is currently looking for a permanent representative of the river.
In Paper Garden, the species speak urgently about living in a land gouged by human interference. Bluebell, Hawthorn and Barn Owl want their mystery remembered and revered. Glowworm, Beetle and Bat want to protect the dark that nurtures them. Lichen, deer, curlew and butterfly worry that their peoples are disappearing. Chicken and Pig want to be seen for who they are, not simply resources for human consumption. As a dairy cow, I talk about the anguish of losing all my babies to milk production and of being slaughtered when young myself. Others talk about the capacity of regeneration (the Soil), revitalising traditions (the Swift), remembering the co-evolution of all life (the Fungi and Moss), calling in abundance and appreciating diversity (the Red Grouse).
Deliberation and discussion at Paper Garden. Picture: Moral Imaginations.
We spend the afternoon working through questions from the Consultation: How can land support nature, food, people, and infrastructure together? How do we protect and restore land for biodiversity? And just who gets to decide? We are, by turns, moved and indignant, frustrated by destructive human behaviours; bewildered by their lack of concern but also full of love for small attempts. Throughout the day, I handle my lanyard like a totem; turning it occasionally to see the cow’s gentle face. When we are invited to leave our more-than-human entities, it is a parting unwillingly undertaken.
Confronting fascism
Earlier this month, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor wrote an article titled, The Rise of End Times Fascism, in which they chart the transformation of the far right into a “monstrous supremacist survivalism.” In the future we see playing out in front of us, in the United States, under the despotic control of the Trump administration, Klein and Taylor describe billionaires “retooling and rebranding the old ambitions and privileges of empires … [dreaming] of splintering governments and carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies.”
How to break this death trance? “First, we help each other face the depth of the depravity that has gripped the hard right in all of our countries … Second, we counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind.” Klein and Taylor describe “a story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.”
Sharing sensibilities with evolved earth philosophies such as ubuntu (‘humanity and oneness', from South Africa), ahimsa (in the Indian religions of Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, the ethical principle of not causing harm to other living things) and seva (the Sikh and Hindu principle of "selfless service"), as well as deep ecology, the Interspecies Council sits firmly in the second. “I do sometimes think of Moral Imaginations as an antidote to neoliberal capitalism,” murmurs Tickell. “Because it de-natures the assumptions that justify exploitative ways of doing and being.”
Inevitably, participants of Councils emerge transformed. The natural world feels richer, closer and more vibrant. And this, in the end, is what Moral Imaginations is all about. “It’s not just an exercise in imagination and then back to business-as-usual,” says Tickell. “Our hope is that people start to de-centre belief systems and reconnect with the enchantment of nature and the love of the more-than-human world that will propel our action to protect it and defend it. Because to lose all the myriad biodiverse ways of knowing … “
She pauses, lost for words, before continuing: “It’s one thing to want to protect nature because it's useful to humans or pretty to look at. This continues to play into the utilitarian logics that destroy the natural world. It’s a very different thing to want to protect nature because it has a right to exist and be protected - intrinsic value - as well as being an inherent source of joy and companionship, of wonder and of awe. Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar captures it really well. He calls for a revolution of what we see, what we value, what we believe is possible. I hope the Interspecies Council can serve as a space for people to remember something fundamental: that we are not separate from nature, but part of it. It’s an invitation to remember our place within the living systems of the Earth, and to participate once again in the wider web of life.”
