Shifting our relationships with the natural world
By IIPP MPA student Coralie Gervaise
I wrote a dissertation contributing to the development of practical tools aiming at co-creating with non-humans using caring practices in public institutions. If you want to read the full thesis you can access it here.
Living in an age where the amount of climate change science is expanding exponentially, (since 2014, more than 202,000 papers on climate change were published), it appears that it is not more cognitive scientific evidence that is needed, but a shift in perceptions. Reports and catchy graphs are important, but it distracts us from the natural world around us and leave little room for the beings these projects aim to protect at first.
The ecological crisis is described by the French author Baptiste Morizot as a ‘sensibility crisis’; the crisis in our relations with living species is the result of an ‘impoverishment of what we can feel, perceive, and understand, and the relationships we can develop with living things’. The ‘art of attentiveness’ to living organisms — being available, sensitive, caring, listening to the multiple forms of lives we encounter everyday — has been lost. How many times do I hear a bird singing in London as a background noise? Children have lost touch with nature too (a study revealed that kids can identify 1,000 corporate logos but are not able to name 10 plants from their hometown).
By damaging or decreasing our experiences with the natural world, we have alienated ourselves from it. We are currently lacking the sensory experiences and vocabulary necessary to reconfigure new relationships with the non-human world.
My researcher journey: focussing on our interconnections to shift perceptions
My researcher journey started with one obsessive sentence that would play on a continuous loop in my head: ‘my heart is a mycelium, branching out to every species, capable of communicating with all life around me’. I wanted to explore this intuitive feeling. What if we are all interconnected, and we could all communicate with each other, but not necessarily with language? Invisible to the human eye, mycelium is a network of mushrooms, using their branching to build a communication network between plants and trees. The communication extends to interspecies relationships — plants ‘talk’ by interacting through this ‘Wood Wide Web’.
Interdependence between humans and their natural environment feels quite far-reaching and complex. The fact that we all share the same life, and that we are all connected, reopens the question of the place of human beings and their relationships with all the other elements of the natural world (animals, plants, viruses, trees, water, minerals, microbes, fungi, etc).
Making sense of these interactions in ecosystems is particularly difficult; exchanges are articulated through various forms (flows, energy, matter) and most of the time, are invisible to the human eye. As much as it is viewed as a radical concept for Western philosophies, relational thinking is central to indigenous philosophies that have long claimed the interconnections of all forms of life.
The main driving forces fuelling the current non-relational paradigm
Through centuries of conquest, colonisation, decolonisation and globalisation, western nations have created an exploitative and dominative relationship with their natural environment. Current environmental strategies attempting to resolve the climate change problem are informed by institutions (the market) and logics (growth) infused by neoliberalism ideology shaping our world since the 1980s. The mainstream way to relate are a resource, a key asset, a ‘natural capital’, driving wealth creation; ultimately preventing our connections with the natural environment.
Our current belief systems establish human beings as superior and separated. The anthropocentric worldview, a product of the Enlightenment era — linear thinking, mechanistic philosophies, and rational reasoning — has contributed to the conceptualisation of the separation between nature and culture and the dysfunctional representation of the human relationship with the living environment.
Governments are not considering the majority constituents of the earth’s community — the ‘non-human world’ — when implementing environmental strategies. For example, COP27 shows slow progress in terms of setting CO2 emissions targets. In the book Gouverner le climat? by the science historian Amy Dahan and political scientist Stefan Aykut, the authors identify an incantatory system of governance, where international climate summits are performing a spectacle with diplomatic rituals. Therefore, there is a dislocation between the representation of non-human interests at the national or international level and the current strategies being implemented to address climate change issues.
Collaborating with non-human entities in public administration
What would it mean to listen, understand, and collaborate with non-human beings? What behaviours and processes would reflect this new relational model? What would it look like to be attentive to the natural world, negotiate with it, or develop an interspecies diplomacy?
I work in a diplomatic environment and therefore chose to focus on a familiar place: public administration, especially since government portfolios and local authorities’ prerogatives affect the interests of animals, trees, green spaces and other symbiotic relationships. However, listening to non-humans’ needs involve some practical difficulties. I ask myself, if non-human entities were to be seen as users of public services or social partners, what are the attitudes and competencies that a public agent would need to develop to co-create with non-human world?
The key: developing the arts of attentiveness
We can’t properly ‘talk’ to non-humans, therefore developing other forms of communication is essential to develop human-non-human collaboration. Care practices allow an individual to be attentive to other forms of life and generate knowledge through emotions, perceptions and feelings.
Joan C. Tronto (2013) defines care as activities ‘that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world’. The work of care transcends the human-centred capacity and extends to the non-human world. A care approach is adequate a) to foster an attentive posture to non-humans’ needs and b) paves the way for the concrete application of what it would mean to develop a different relationship with nature.
Tronto developed a five-step cycle. Caring about, where it is about activating a state of radical listening. Then, the second stage, caring for, is about feeling responsible toward non-humans. The third stage involves the competence of care giving, concerned with implementation and technical skills. Last, care receiving where those being cared for are entitled to respond to the strategy of care provided, eventually generating new needs. Caring with is representing the whole cycle process. This framework provides a clear structure and could be used in public administration to guide interspecies’ relations exploration.
The Tronto Care approach enables a step by step understanding of human-nature connections, generating competencies to listen to non-humans. I identify a couple of relevant practices aiming at fostering interspecies relationships, including mindful walks and meditative sessions, experimenting in places through co-sensing practices (like painting, movement and forest bathing) and generating a local map from the results, interspecies ritual acts (blowing, chants, breathing, drumming) or ensuring the interests of the natural (non-human) world are shared through a specific spokesperson on corporate boards (the Zoop experience).
At a time where it is very challenging to imagine non-human ‘voices’, because no precedent exists, speculative works generate new knowledge by providing shape, granularity and texture to interspecies conversations. It can inspire fruitful partnerships between public administration and creatives industries. Such initiatives could include role playing, legislative theatre, art installations, and stories with non-human protagonists. For instance, in 2015, Make it Work is a three-day simulation of a reinvented COP that gave shape and familiarity to non-human voices by including them in the negotiations. ‘Forests’, ‘Atmosphere’, ‘Oceans’ delegations were equal in sovereignty to all the countries represented. Challenging, we said. And it might fail because of human biases, but there is a sense of getting closer and closer to non-humans.
To conclude
The living worlds are currently absent from Western nations’ decision-making processes, resting outside the field of collective and political attention, outside what counts. Not so long ago, it seemed unnecessary to give women a voice. It can feel uneasy, unsettling, and uncomfortable to represent and shape non-humans’ needs, but is it is not impossible. Communication between species have always taken place in mysterious ways: it is not a ‘cafe conversation’, but it is nonetheless rich in meaning. Morizot coined the term ‘alien kin’ which describes fabulously the fact that other life forms are simultaneously a part of my family (if I pay attention to them) and their ‘otherness’ incarnates a sort of extra-terrestrial life texture.
