ONLINE LEARNING SESSION for practitioners at all levels, as part of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox

Learning Session #14:
Rights of Nature by Tribal and First Nations

What if the Rights of Nature were not a legal innovation, but the oldest law there is?

Rights of Nature is a growing global movement seeking to give rivers, forests, species, and ecosystems legal standing and protection. But there is a version of this story that predates the Western legal system by thousands of years: the understanding, held by Indigenous and Tribal nations across the world, that the natural world has its own inherent rights — and that humans carry a sacred responsibility to uphold them.

In this session, we explore what happens when that ancient understanding meets the modern legal system and how Tribal Rights of Nature differ from standard Rights of Nature approaches. At the heart of this discussion is a fundamental tension: how do you translate a living covenant between a people and their territory into a legal instrument that can hold in a court of law? And what is gained — or lost — in that translation?

We will explore landmark cases including the Rights of Manoomin (wild rice), a Tribal law passed by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe that gave wild rice the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve — and led to the first Rights of Nature enforcement case filed in a Tribal court. And we will look at the Sauk-Suiattle Tribe's landmark lawsuit to protect the Rights of Salmon on the Skagit River, which in 2026 resulted in a $4 billion settlement requiring fish passage to be built past three hydroelectric dams that had blocked salmon migration for nearly a century.

But beyond the cases, we want to explore the broader movement: how Tribal Rights of Nature differs from its Western counterpart, what it takes for a legal win to become a cultural and ecological reality, and what genuine co-creation with the more-than-human actually requires when it enters the courtroom.

Frank Bibeau is an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe and a free-range Tribal Attorney working extensively with Chippewa treaty rights, civil rights, and sovereignty — on and off reservation. He serves as Executive Director of the 1855 Treaty Authority and as Director of CDER's Tribal Rights of Nature Program, which focuses on working with federally recognized Tribes of the United States.

Frank processes wild rice and smokes whitefish on Leech Lake Reservation, living the relationship to the land that his legal work seeks to protect. He has developed pioneering legal defense strategies grounded in water protection and the Rights of Manoomin, and has represented Manoomin and the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in cases that have pushed the boundaries of what Rights of Nature law can do. “Rights of Nature is cutting edge,” he says. “It’s not the old paradigm, and people aren’t prepared for it.”

Join us for this landmark session, and bring your questions on what it truly means to govern with — and for — the web of life.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

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Lurking in the inky shadows of the Modau near Darmstadt, the Black Queen - an ancient and venerable, dark Brown Trout - watches the river’s long history drift toward the Rhine. After ten summers of survival, she rests with quiet majesty, finding hope in the healing waters and the bypass channels that carry her legacy into the future (image by Sara Mark; caption after Torsten Schäfer: “Die Wildnis in uns. Von ungezähmter Natur und inneren”)

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🌿 Field Dialogue #3 - Talking Salmon

The salmon has been connecting oceans, rivers and forests for millennia. Can we learn to tell that story from inside it rather than from a distance?

What would it mean for a story to genuinely cross the boundary between human and more-than-human — not as a rhetorical move, but as something that actually shifts how we see and relate? And what does it ask of the person trying to tell it?

In this third Field Dialogue, we spoke with Torsten Schäfer — environmental journalist, nature writer, wilderness pedagogist, and professor of journalism at Darmstadt University of Applied Science. For over twenty years, Torsten has worked at the intersection of environmental storytelling and ecological relationship. His current research project, Talking Salmon, funded by the Okeanos Foundation for the Sea and developed with Oslo Metropolitan University, follows the salmon across field sites in Germany, Scandinavia, and the Pacific Northwest — not just as a subject, but as a lens, a connector, and an invitation to tell stories differently.

The conversation moved through questions of language, method, kinship, and the limits of journalism as it currently exists. What does it mean to write as a fish rather than about one? What do Sami languages carry that Western ecological science has no words for? And what actually happens to a journalism student when they try to interview a tree?

The outcome of Talking Salmon will be a massive open online course (MOOC) on ecological storytelling, due in September 2026 — but the questions it is working through feel far larger than any course. Rather than a finished methodology, it provides a glimpse into work that is actively being built — in fieldwork, in classrooms, in the space between a river and the person learning to listen to it.

Why salmon?

The salmon is one of the few beings that makes visible what Western thinking tends to keep apart — ocean and river, sea and forest, ancient and industrial. Born in freshwater, migrating to the open sea, returning to spawn and die in the very streams of their birth, salmon have been fertilizing forests with their bodies for millennia. Their carcasses, spread by predators into the trees, are a literal bridge between water and land. In certain indigenous legal traditions in North America, that link is not metaphorical but constitutional: you cannot separate water from forest in law, because the salmon is the living link between them. To understand the salmon is to understand that these are not separate worlds.

And then there is the other salmon. Alongside the wild salmon as ecological anchor, sits the farmed salmon — one of the world’s most industrialized food commodities, implicated in habitat destruction, species loss, and pollution across fjords from Norway to Chile to Iceland. Torsten holds both realities deliberately. The lens of the salmon, he says, can show you the whole world. The wild fish and the farmed fish are not opposite stories. They are the same story, seen from different ends.

This holistic view on the salmon is also expressed in the book “Being salmon, being human” by natural philospopher and deep ecologist Martin Lee Mueller who is working with Torsten in the project.

The salmon family — including brown trout and many other species distributed across the globe — also makes the work geographically coherent across very different field sites: a small trout river near Darmstadt, the Sami fishing cultures of northern Scandinavia, a salmon farm in Norway, and planned fieldwork with indigenous salmon communities in the Pacific Northwest. What connects those places is not geography alone, but a shared question: what stories do salmon and trout make possible that other framings foreclose?

There is a well-known criticism of conservation communication — that it reaches for charismatic species that live far away, lighting up ecosystems elsewhere while leaving people estranged from the places they actually live in. Torsten knows that critique and takes it seriously. The salmon is a deliberate counter-move: not a distant symbol, but something findable in the river at the end of the road.

There is also a climate dimension that rarely gets named clearly enough: the answer to adaptation in an overheating Europe lies substantially in water — rivers, wetlands, swamps, coasts. Coming from climate journalism, Torsten sees water as a largely underplayed answer — and the salmon as a door into exactly that conversation. One that he also explored in 2021 with his nature writing book “Wasserpfade”.

Talking salmon — four ways of being in conversation

Talking Salmon is not a single gesture. It holds four orientations at once, drawn from IPBES — the global science-policy platform on biodiversity: we can tell stories about the salmon; we can tell them in the presence of the salmon; we can tell them with it; and — as an experiment — as it.

These are not stages to graduate through in sequence. They coexist, and a practitioner of ecological storytelling might move between all four in a single piece. What matters is that the third and fourth orientations — with and as — ask something different: a willingness, at least provisionally, to let the salmon set the agenda.

Giving voice to a fish is contested terrain. Anthropomorphization attracts criticism, and rightly so. But that tension is held consciously here, rather than resolved. The experiment seems worth making, because the alternative — keeping the salmon permanently at the distance of an object — has its own cost. Objectification has consequences. The question is which discomfort to choose.

A species can go extinct twice

The conversation turned to what restoration actually means — and whether it can stop at habitat and species, or whether something else needs to come back too. With it, the notion surfaced that a species can go extinct twice. Once from the land and water. And once from human memory and imagination. Habitat restoration can address the first. Only stories can prevent the second. And when that second disappearance happens, something is lost that habitat restoration alone cannot bring back: the sense of what it meant to be in relationship with that being. The stories that held it in meaning. The felt knowledge of why it mattered.

The conversation brought up Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass here — her description of restoration as re-storying: not just returning the plant or the fish, but returning the human imagination that could hold them as kin. It is also what connects Talking Salmon to Torsten’s recently published nature writing book, Die Wildnis in uns (The Wilderness in Us). Rewilding, in this framing, is not about returning to a fixed past. It is dynamic, generative, open to what a good life for all beings — human and otherwise — might look like now.

The language the Sami have that we don’t

After seven or eight years of building trust in Sami communities in northern Scandinavia — years before the work deepened, before the right doors opened — what Torsten keeps returning to is not a practice or a method. It is language.

Sami languages are languages of the land in a way German or English simply are not. There are twelve or more words for different kinds of valley — each capturing a particular quality of moisture, breadth, orientation. There are distinct names for salmon depending on when in the year they enter the fjord: not biological classification, but relational taxonomy, organized around behavior and presence. One entire doctoral thesis was even written at the Sami University of Applied Science just on the richness of Northern Sami expressions specific to salmon net fishing. The world that exists in that language is staggering.

The example that cuts deepest: the Northern Sami word bivdit — to go hunting, to go fishing — simultaneously means to ask for permission. Harvest and consent are a single word. The relationship is already inside the language, not something you add to it afterward.

One of the people Torsten returns to again and again in his fieldwork is an elderly Sami professor — someone he has interviewed before and will visit again — who has retired to his tiny fjord village, a place that does not appear on Google Maps, and is now spending his days recovering place names from oral tradition and old maps, working to have them included in Norwegian official cartography. His argument is precise: when a place loses its name, it loses its individual existence in the conversation between humans and land. A named place is an interlocutor. An unnamed one is background.

Journalism has no language for this. Science, mostly, has no language for this. Nor for the culture of offering and gratitude — the seidi, the offering stones for salmon, still present and still used. Nor for the moments of silence in fieldwork that carry more than the interviews do. Poetry, Torsten reckons, might reach closer. He will be writing poems during his September fieldwork with the coastal Sami — not as a creative indulgence, but as a scientific method. Some things, he says, probably cannot be reached any other way than with “artistic research”: a discipline that Darmstadt’s University op Applied Science is currently establishing at its media campus.

The tension of going

The field raises hard questions about positionality. A European academic arriving at an indigenous community with a research agenda to learn how to tell stories differently can raise legitimate concerns. Torsten does not minimize it.

What has made it ethically navigable — slowly, imperfectly — is time and reciprocity. Years before trying to go deeper. Working only through a trusted colleague who acts as gatekeeper and bridge. Going nowhere alone. Being entirely transparent about his role and what he will do with the material. Fishing alongside, cooking, helping with reindeer corrals. Being present in ways that are not extractive.

And crucially: giving something back. Indigenous communities he has encountered — Maori visitors coming to Darmstadt, women from Peru’s Río Marañón fighting for the rights of their river — are genuinely curious about what comes from the rivers and woods of Germany, about how Torsten relates to his own landscape, his own river, his own rituals. Reciprocity is not a courtesy. It is what makes the exchange real.

A concrete expression of this: an Austrian fisherman who has dedicated his life to protecting the Danube salmon — itself nearly extinct — handmade a fishing lure and gave it to Torsten as what Torsten himself calls a ritual object: a physical token of one man’s dedication to a river. And when he was invited by a Sami salmon elder along the Tana River, he brought it as an offering — passing it from the world of the Danube salmon to the world of the Atlantic salmon, two cousins, two species on the edge of disappearing, held together for a moment by one person acting as bridge.

One of the sharpest insights came from a Sami hunter and fisherman living a modern but land-close life. He did not want to discuss traditional knowledge. He wanted to talk about indigenous values. The specific knowledge might be outdated — changed by climate, by time, by circumstance. The values — sharing, offering, reciprocity, a different relationship to time — these remain alive, and these are what can genuinely travel across cultures without appropriation.

This distinction matters. Not specific practices rooted in specific ecologies, but orientations that can inspire different ways of moving through one’s own landscape. In Germany, this carries its own complexity: homeland and nature rhetoric can shade toward the political right. That risk is named, held consciously, navigated. Caring for one’s own river is not nationalism. Making that distinction legible — again and again — is part of the work.

What happens when you write with a tree

The outdoor writing practice is now nearly ten years old. The laboratory of ecological storytelling — its most recent iteration — started this week (April 2026). It begins, as it always has, with repertoires of strong environmental journalism. Then it moves toward something stranger.

Students arrive with well-established reflexes — environmental journalism means crisis reporting, species profiles, policy analysis. Changing those reflexes asks for invitation, not instruction. Not everyone is ready, and that is accepted. But the invitation is extended.

One exercise: write interview questions for a tree — in the journalistic way, as if preparing for a real interview. Then, as a next step, generate only the tree’s answers. For many students, just arriving at the questions is already a lot. But it is the start of something — the beginning of taking a kinship perspective, of granting an individual existence to a being that journalism normally treats as backdrop.

What happens is consistent and visible. Students go quiet. Attention sharpens. Senses open — to smell, sound, texture — because the assignment requires it. And something shifts in their sense of responsibility: once a particular existence has been granted to a being, once it has been given an individual life in the imagination, it becomes harder to look away.

The exercises also surface how deeply estranged from water German language already is. There are everyday idioms — Ausufern, to leave the shore and dissolve into something uncontrolled, out of normal boundaries in a negative sense — that encode disgust and distance, the need to keep water contained and managed. Language as fossilized estrangement. Noticing it is the beginning of being able to choose differently.

Climate adaptation is not only a technical project. It is a linguistic and narrative one. New relationships with rivers and wetlands require new stories about them. The laboratory is not peripheral to the climate question. It may be working at its root.

A closing seed

Deep ecologist Thomas Berry spoke of the “great work” of our time as recovering the capacity for conversation among species — a conversation that modernity interrupted. Torsten is drawn to the same idea but comes at it through practice: through the river near his house, through fieldwork in Lapland, through students learning to be quiet in the presence of a tree.

The salmon has been doing this work for millennia — connecting oceans, rivers, and forests, fertilizing what seems separate. The question Talking Salmon keeps circling is whether we can learn, again, to follow its lead. Not metaphorically. Actually.

Torsten Schäfer's most recent book is Die Wildnis in uns. Von ungezähmter Natur und inneren Landschaften (2026). An English translation will come out by 2027.

The epilogue of the book has been written from a trout’s perspective and has subsequently been translated into English. She, a dark Brown Trout — a trout species native to Germany —, is the “Black Queen” (refer to main image) and becomes a river narrative herself.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

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The 12th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in April 2026 explored Beyond Nature-Based Solutions with two team members of the European COEVOLVERS project: Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, Professor and Permanent Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at Erfurt University, and Oriana Mosca, social and environmental psychologist at the University of Cagliari.

The session examined what it means to move from nature-based solutions as technical interventions serving human needs toward a co-evolutionary approach in which humans and other species jointly shape the design, maintenance, and governance of shared places. Carsten introduced the theoretical framing behind the COEVOLVERS project - running seven Living Labs across Europe - while Oriana brought the concrete, lived experience of the Molentargius-Saline Regional Natural Park in Cagliari, Italy, where multi-species methods are being developed in practice.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿 Learning Session 12 (April 2026) — Synthesis
Beyond Nature-Based Solutions,with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Oriana Mosca (COEVOLVERS)

What happens when nature-based solutions are no longer primarily designed to solve human problems — but understood as co-evolutionary processes in which humans and other species shape each other, and the solution itself, over time?

1. What is wrong with how nature-based solutions are typically understood?

The technocratic logic
Conventional nature-based solutions follow what Carsten described as a “quasi-technological” logic: humans identify a problem, define a solution, and then harness natural resources and ecosystem services to meet those human-defined needs. Even when participatory methods are used, the frame stays the same: humans are the beneficiaries and designers; nature is the means.

The limits of this in a radically uncertain future
COEVOLVERS starts from the recognition that we are navigating a triple environmental crisis — climate change, biodiversity loss, and social fragility — in which the future is radically uncertain. A nature-based solution designed to deliver specific outcomes today may not be able to sustain those outcomes across the changes ahead. Carsten’s argument is that humans alone cannot find the solutions we need: we need to collaborate with other species to achieve them. That is not a poetic claim — it is a practical one about what co-evolution actually produces.

From solutions to assemblages
This is why COEVOLVERS shifted terminology: from nature-based solutions to nature-based assemblages. The word assemblage — drawn from new materialism and actor-network theory — signals that agency is distributed across humans, non-humans, materials, and systems. What begins as a designed intervention becomes something that co-evolves: unexpected changes take place, new elements enter, and the original design idea is gradually transformed by the process of living with and within it.

🌱 Seed:
The problem with “solution” is in the word itself. It implies a problem that can be definitively resolved, a human who resolves it, and a fixed endpoint. Assemblage keeps the process open — and in doing so, keeps it honest about the complexity it is trying to navigate.

2. What does a co-evolutionary approach actually look like in practice?

Intervention as starting point, not endpoint
In the co-evolutionary framework, an NbS ( = Nature-based Solution) intervention — say, a healing garden in a hospital, or a wildfire buffer using sheep — is a starting point, not a finished design. Once implemented, it is expected to co-evolve: humans observe what happens, other species respond and adapt, and the arrangement changes accordingly. Human designers give up exclusive control of the process and enter a genuine learning relationship with the site and its non-human inhabitants.

Transdisciplinary learning — extended to other species
Co-evolutionary NbS is also a transdisciplinary learning process, but one that extends beyond the usual understanding of transdisciplinarity (which typically means engaging diverse human stakeholders). COEVOLVERS adds the idea of including other species as genuine partners in that learning — not as passive objects of study, but as participants whose responses, movements, and presences shape what the assemblage becomes.

The seven Living Labs
COEVOLVERS is developing this approach across seven Living Labs in Finland, Spain, Italy, Slovakia, Scotland, Hungary, and Estonia. As Carsten noted, only two of the labs are implementing nature-based solutions in a narrow technical sense (a healing garden and a wildfire management project using sheep and goats). The others — including Cagliari — are community-based and multidimensional, working at the intersection of ecological and social transformation.

🌱 Seed:
Co-evolutionary NbS requires a different relationship to uncertainty: not trying to engineer it out, but learning to design in ways that open up possibilities for co-evolution rather than foreclosing them. The starting point matters, but so does the willingness to be changed by what follows.

3. What does it mean to treat an NbS as an artwork — and why does this matter?

Moving from causal to aesthetic principles
One of COEVOLVERS’ central conceptual moves is to argue that the design and maintenance of nature-based assemblages should be guided not only by linear, science-based notions of causality — if we do X, Y will result — but by aesthetic principles. Carsten’s formulation: NbS as artwork. This does not mean making something beautiful. It means designing in a way that opens up affordances — possibilities for action and interaction — for other species to enter and participate in the assemblage.

Affordances and the creation of possibility space
Affordance, in this context, means what an environment makes possible for a given species: whether it invites a bird to nest, a person to linger, an insect to forage. What ecological data and metrics measure is the current state of affairs — what has already happened. What an aesthetic approach adds is the creation of a possibility space: designing arrangements that invite forms of life and relationship that could not have been predicted in advance. These two are complementary, not competing.

Art-based methods as integral, not decorative
This reframing also changes the role of art-based methods in NbS practice. Typically, these methods — sound mapping, sensory walks, participatory observation, storytelling — are used in early stages to build community awareness and engagement. COEVOLVERS argues that they should become integral to the ongoing management of the assemblage: deployed continuously, not just at the beginning. They are not communication tools; they are governance tools.

🌱 Seed:
Treating NbS as artwork is a claim about what kind of intelligence is needed to sustain multispecies communities over time: not only the intelligence of ecological science, but the intelligence of perception, attentiveness, and relational response. Both are necessary; neither is sufficient alone.

4. What is “embodied reciprocity” — and how is it different from abstract commitments to biodiversity?

The problem with abstract reciprocity
Most governance frameworks for NbS include a requirement that interventions should contribute to biodiversity. Carsten named this as a form of abstract reciprocity: a quantitative, aggregate criterion assessed after the fact — biodiversity indicators have improved over five years — and that bears no necessary relationship to what happens on the ground, in concrete interactions between specific humans and specific other species.

Embodied reciprocity as the alternative
Embodied reciprocity, by contrast, means that there is real exchange on the ground: concrete other species who actually benefit from the nature-based assemblage, not only in the statistical aggregate but in ways that are perceptible, located, and ongoing. This requires designing not just for ecosystem services but for relationship — for the kinds of repeated, sensory, attentive interactions between humans and non-humans through which care actually develops.

Silvio the pelican
Oriana offered a vivid instance from Molentargius: Silvio, a solitary pelican who arrived in the park during migration and stayed. Silvio is not a managed or planned element of the Living Lab. He simply appeared, became known to park visitors and staff, acquired a name, and became part of the storytelling of the place. People track his movements through the park — not exploitatively, but with respectful attention and affection. As Oriana noted, charismatic wildlife like Silvio can play an essential role in the environmental meaning-making of a place, becoming an unexpected advocate for greater emphasis on aesthetic, relational approaches to NbS.

🌱 Seed:
Abstract biodiversity commitments can coexist with the complete absence of genuine relationship between humans and other species. Embodied reciprocity asks for something more specific and more demanding: that other species are actually present, known, and cared for in the lived texture of a place.

5. What is the aesthetics of care — and how does it connect to governance?

Saito’s framework
COEVOLVERS draws on the philosopher Yuriko Saito’s concept of the aesthetics of care — the idea that aesthetic experience and ethical commitment are not separate domains but woven together in how we actually attend to, perceive, and inhabit shared space. Care is not only a moral attitude arrived at through reasoning; it is an embodied, sensory, relational practice that shows up in how we engage with the world around us.

Sensory governance — the material arrangement as governance mechanism
Carsten extended this into governance: if the goal is to cultivate forms of embodied reciprocity between humans and other species, then the material arrangement of a nature-based assemblage must itself become a governance mechanism. Drawing on concepts from environmental psychology (environmental cues, grounding normative commitments) and behavioural economics (nudging), he described what the literature calls “sensory governance” — governance through the shape, texture, and materiality of the place itself, designed to induce care-full behaviour rather than relying solely on rules and regulations.

Learning new aesthetic preferences
This is more than making things beautiful so that people feel positive emotions. As Carsten was careful to note, that would be “extremely naive.” The deeper claim is that certain material arrangements — designed with attentiveness to what affords relationship and care — can induce behaviours of care-full engagement with other species. This also requires a learning process: humans, including different groups with very different starting points, must develop new aesthetic preferences and sensory attunements over time.

🌱 Seed:
Sensory governance is governance through encounter: designing places in ways that make care not just possible but natural, not just encouraged but felt. The challenge is that this requires changing not only institutions but perceptions — and that is a long, practice-based, and fundamentally relational process.

6. Can including other species actually reduce human conflict in NbS projects?

The conflict problem in conventional NbS
One of the practical limitations of conventional nature-based solutions is that they tend to become contentious precisely because they serve human interests — and human stakeholders disagree about whose interests, and how. When different human groups have conflicting views about what a place should be for, NbS becomes a political battleground, and financial sustainability suffers.

Multi-species framing as a partial buffer
Oriana offered a hypothesis — developed in conversation with Carsten shortly before the session — that including other species, particularly vulnerable or endangered ones, might help to restructure the dynamics of human conflict. The reasoning: humans have a natural aptitude for biophilia; we are born with the capacity for care toward other living beings. When the frame shifts from “which humans benefit?” to “how do we cooperate to care for these species?”, it may temporarily reorganise human groups around a higher-level shared goal. This does not eliminate conflict, but it creates a different kind of social field — one oriented toward cooperation rather than competition over human interests.

Vulnerability as a point of alignment
Carsten added a related observation: there are often structural alignments between the vulnerabilities of marginalised human groups and those of other species. Groups who have been excluded from conventional participatory processes may share interests with species who have been excluded from conventional governance frameworks. Recognising and mobilising these alignments — making them visible as stakeholder coalitions — can open up new possibilities for both human and more-than-human inclusion.

🌱 Seed:
Multi-species framing is not a way of avoiding the political. It is a way of reorganising it — offering a different ground on which human groups might find common cause. That is a fragile and contested possibility, not a guaranteed outcome, but one worth taking seriously.

7. What do practitioners need to learn — and what might they need to unlearn?

Extending, not replacing, participatory methods
The question came up whether practitioners already skilled in human participatory methods — community engagement, co-design, stakeholder consultation — need to unlearn those methods to work in a co-evolutionary frame. Carsten’s answer: probably not unlearning, but extending. The same participatory tools can be adapted to include other species — for example, role-play approaches where participants take on the perspective of a bird or an insect, or ecopolicy simulations where species are given a seat in decision-making. This induces a learning process toward greater inclusivity without requiring practitioners to abandon their existing toolkit.

The harder ask: cultivating attentiveness over time
What is genuinely new — and genuinely demanding — is the cultivation of a different quality of presence in the field. Oriana described this in terms of sustained observation: spending real time in the park, doing guided observation grids, developing perceptual sensitivity to soundscapes, soils, and movement. This is not a skill that practitioners typically develop in conventional NbS work. Sound mapping, affordance mapping, mindfulness practices in the park — these are the methods through which that attentiveness is built, and they require sustained engagement, not one-off workshops.

Legitimacy is not the only barrier
The session poll asked whether most NbS practitioners already sense what a place needs but just lack the language, tools, and legitimacy to act on it. Most participants responded somewhere in the middle — not strongly agreeing. The implication is significant: the challenge is not only one of legitimacy and language. There is also a deeper question of readiness and cultivated attentiveness that cannot be resolved simply by changing institutional permissions.

🌱 Seed:
Extending participatory methods to include other species is a meaningful step. But it is not sufficient alone. What is also needed is the development of a different quality of perceptual relationship with specific places and their non-human inhabitants — and that takes time, practice, and genuine presence in the field.

8. What is the role of rituals, indigenous wisdom, and non-indigenous translation?

Rituals as aesthetic practice for sustaining relationship
Carsten pointed to ritual as one of the most important and underexplored aesthetic practices for sustaining NbS over time. Seasonal rituals, place-based practices, collective ceremonies that engage people with a green space beyond its instrumental uses — these are ways of building and renewing relationship with place and its non-human inhabitants across longer timescales. They create the kind of repeated, embodied engagement that makes care a lived practice rather than a stated commitment.

The indigenous paradigm as a model — with honesty about the challenge
For indigenous peoples and first nations, ritual practices have sustained relationships with land and other species for centuries. As Carsten acknowledged in response to a question, this is an indispensable model. But the translation into non-indigenous, urban, North European contexts raises a genuine challenge: how do you create ritual practices that are culturally rooted in a context where those roots have been severed or never existed in that form? His answer was not to resolve this but to take it seriously, and to point toward the growing practice of secular, non-religious ritual creation — and to the movement for revived European traditions — as places from which one can learn, without imitating.

🌱 Seed:
Ritual is not a marginal addition to NbS work. It is one of the most powerful technologies we have for sustaining relationship with place and other species across time. Creating it in non-indigenous contexts is a genuine challenge — but it is a challenge worth meeting rather than avoiding.

9. Where does this approach hit the hardest walls — and what might help?

Institutional and regulatory frameworks
A second session poll asked whether current funding and evaluation frameworks make this approach structurally impossible, not just difficult. The majority of participants agreed strongly. Carsten confirmed this from COEVOLVERS’ experience: municipal administrators typically require months if not years of engagement before the value of multi-species perspectives can be accepted. Existing regulatory frameworks in most cities simply do not contain the conceptual infrastructure for nature-based governance. The Cagliari Living Lab, as a protected area with a conservation mandate, operates in a more enabling context than, say, the Tartu Living Lab — where the ambition to build a “multispecies city” faces a regulatory and stakeholder landscape that does not yet support it.

The coalitional gap — and the entrepreneurial opportunity
Carsten’s most pointed observation about hardest walls was that the coalition currently doing this work — researchers, activists, and sympathetic administrators — is too narrow to achieve meaningful scale. Other groups need to join for this to move beyond niche contexts. He pointed, perhaps surprisingly, to the entrepreneurial dimension: entrepreneurs who can find genuine value in biodiversity and multispecies approaches, cities that market themselves as “biodiversity” destinations, businesses that build identities around place-based ecological relationships. These actors may not share the full vision, but they can create momentum, visibility, and financial pathways that make the work more sustainable. Mobilising them requires meeting them where they are — not as a compromise, but as a necessary expansion of the coalition.

🌱 Seed:
The walls are real, but they are not all the same kind of wall. Some are conceptual, some are institutional, and some are coalitional. Each requires a different kind of effort — and none of them can be moved by researchers and activists alone.

Cross-cutting insight threads

From linear design to co-evolutionary process
The deepest reorientation COEVOLVERS proposes is not methodological but temporal: moving from designing a solution and implementing it, to entering an open-ended process of co-evolution with the place and its non-human inhabitants. This changes what success looks like, what governance requires, and what practitioners need to be capable of.

Abstract vs embodied reciprocity
One of the sharpest distinctions in the session was between abstract reciprocity — the kind tracked by aggregate biodiversity indicators assessed after five years — and embodied reciprocity: real exchange, on the ground, between specific humans and specific other species. The latter is harder to measure, harder to govern, and harder to sustain. But it is what genuine co-creation with the more-than-human actually requires.

Art-based methods as governance, not communication
The conventional role of art-based methods in NbS work is awareness-raising and community engagement — something done at the start. COEVOLVERS argues for a different understanding: these methods should be integral to the ongoing governance of the assemblage, continuously cultivating the perceptual attentiveness and relational sensitivity on which embodied reciprocity depends.

The coalitional challenge
The session made clear that the community currently advancing this work is insufficient to achieve the institutionalisation that would make it genuinely transformative. Widening the coalition — including to entrepreneurial actors — is not a compromise of the vision. It may be one of the conditions of its realisation.

Silvio as method
Oriana’s story of Silvio the pelican was small but pointed. A solitary, unplanned bird arrived in a park and became, over time, known and cared for by the community around him. No methodology produced that relationship; sustained presence and attention did. It is a reminder that the most important outcomes of co-evolutionary NbS may not be the ones that were designed for.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

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🌿 Field Dialogue #2 — A Nourishing Toolkit to the More-Than-Human (Ariel Sim)

What would it look like for the more-than-human world to actively participate in design, and for human minds and systems to take the multispecies approach more seriously?

In this second Field Dialogue, we sat down with Ariel Sim - a design anthropologist working at the edges of human-centred design and ecological thinking. We spoke as part of the Co-Creation with the More-Than-Human sandbox, exploring how designers can meaningfully co-create and listen with the living world in ways that shape decisions and outcomes that echo across the worlds of city planning, community research, digital product/service, and policy-making.

The conversation unfolded around Ariel’s upcoming book, A Nourishing Toolkit to the More-Than-Human: 22 Ways to Design Differently - a project which invites readers to step sideways, shifting from human-centred design into a more entangled way of designing with the full web of life. Moving through theory, reflection, and practice, the book traces the limits of traditional design approaches, and explores behavioural and multispecies design tactics that gently unsettle the idea that humans are the sole authors of change. Introducing more-than-human design as both mindset and method, the toolkit questions designers’ inherited habits and offers a living catalogue of traditional and emerging design methods that shift our ways of noticing toward interdependence.

In our Field Dialogues, we move through questions of practice, perception, and possibility, where this work is already taking root, and where it meets resistance. The following summary does not retrace the conversation step by step. Instead, it draws out the key insights and tensions that surfaced, and considers what begins to take root if our more-than-human kin are more meaningfully asked to ‘hold the pen’ across pluriversal design worlds.

A living, evolving collection of design tools

“A Nourishing Toolkit to the More-Than-Human” does not read like a resolved framework, but more like a moment of personal consolidation within a longer trajectory of learning. It’s positioned as an open bookmark within a long arc of practice, sharing the author’s evolving learnings, methods, and curiosities.

A compilation of reflections and theoretical framings accompany a practical collection of 22 tools for both designers and “my grandmother” (the general public). The toolkit portion of the book explores how to adapt popular design practices toward meaningful collaboration with the more-than-human world, while gently shifting human behaviours and systems to embrace the multispecies mindset. The underlying invitation is not “this is how it works,” but rather “this is what I have been trying, this is what I’ve witnessed, this is what I’ve seen made possible so far… and here is what feels unresolved.”

The book embraces that more-than-human design is deeply intertwined across ancient and emerging technologies, cross-cultural communities of practice, Indigenous & Western sciences, socio-ecologies – items almost impossibly stabilised into a clean framework.

There is also a shift in authorship and authority embedded in the more-than-human design approach. From revenue sharing with more-than-human collaborators (termed “sharing fruits”), to repositioning the designer as apprentice and facilitator–documenting attempts, uncertainties, partial understandings, humblings and limits.

Two questions that are actually one tension

The book is organised around two guiding questions:

• How might we include plants, animals, and ecosystems in our design process?

• How can we shift human systems and mindsets to take this multispecies approach more seriously?

At first glance, one reads as a methodological challenge and the other as a systemic one. On revision, they collapse into a single tension, two arteries at the heart of the same relational turn.

On one plane sits more-than-human design craft. Methods, tools, and practices that extend design beyond human participation. Grounding into place, collaborating with proxies throughout the design process, multispecies ethnographies, adaptive multispecies prototyping. Intentional adaptations of widely practiced human-centred design techniques, informed by multispecies design, community-based participatory action research, pluriversalism, Indigenous and Western sciences.

On the other plane sits behavioural transformation. The slow work of reshaping our identities, preconceptions, social norms, habits, institutional routines, so we might become more receptive to these new tools. Applying behavioural design to loosen calcified agreements, to reset our social compass away from human-first worldviews and toward the more-than-human.

Designing behaviour, not just systems

One of the more grounded insights in the conversation is that the barrier to more-than-human design is not primarily informational. We already have extensive knowledge about ecological harm and interdependence.

The difficulty is that this knowledge does not reliably translate into different behaviour. We have been presented with decades of evidence and language mapping environmental degradation, proving planetary interdependence. Our collective failure seems more our inability to act on the knowledge in a consistent way. To become different enough – individually and collectively.

More-than-human futures falter from our collective inertia, while thriving in our collective imagination. We can introduce new tools and still find that nothing fundamentally changes. We can run a multispecies workshop and default back to human priorities when decisions are made. We can agree with a premise and still reproduce the same patterns in practice.

To understand why, it becomes necessary to look at how behaviour is shaped in practice. For example by:

• identity, how people see themselves

• preconceptions & norms, what is expected in a given context

• assessment, how an idea is presented

• feedback loops, how we internalize and reflect on experience

These factors are not abstract. They show up in everyday structures. The toolkit draws on behavioural design to engage with this layer more directly. Rather than focusing only on changing ideas, it considers how patterns of action can be shifted over time.

This reframes the challenge. It is not only about making a compelling argument, but about creating conditions in which different behaviours can take hold and be sustained.

An excerpt from our dialogue:

“Ariel: Behavioural tools are already at play in the world we live in, so can we look at that behavioural science and think about how we can actually use that same information to break out of it, or to repattern towards a more-than-human perspective–an appreciation of the multispecies lens.

I was working at a group called Doblin, which was a human-centred design group, for a number of years and they developed a toolkit called Behavioural Design by Doblin. The second part of the book (A Nourishing Toolkit to the More-Than-Human) really looks at a lot of the ideas in that toolkit. There is a framework that says that all of our behaviours are based on this loop of feedback:

We start with our identity–which is “Who am I? How do I see myself in the world?” Then, what are my preconceptions? I see an idea–maybe the “more-than-human” idea–and based on everything I’ve experienced in my life, based on everything I’ve been told, all the community norms that I subscribe to based on either where I work, or who are my friends, or my family, I might have a preconception about what that is and how I feel about it. And then a new idea might be presented to me, and as I move into it, I’m going to assess it. Depending on how you present something to someone, you can create more or less connection with it. And after I go through an experience, I’m making a mental log (reflection) of everything that felt good, everything that didn’t feel good, everything that resonated with me versus not. And I might be really surprised by something.

Every once in a while an experience might actually shift your identity. And I’ve had those experiences in my own life, where something was just so touching, whether it was a product I used, or a conversation I had with an individual, or a place I visited in the world, and it touches you so profoundly.

Renilde: It created an opening. It maybe didn’t align with the patterns, because we all have these IDs, programs, patterns, etc., and we’re not always necessarily willing to shift out of that, but sometimes certain things create an opening and that opening is like “Oh, maybe there’s a different truth. Maybe there’s a different way of looking at this and I think I’m actually willing to change my mind on this.”

Ariel: Absolutely. And so, our identities aren’t fixed. They are constantly either in tiny tiny tiny ways, or bigger ways (depending on what’s happening in your life) being shifted by everything you’re experiencing in your life. And so, it may seem kind of obvious, but I don’t know if we always take the time to step back and really think about that – which is, you know – how can we look at behaviour and make this invitation … to try to be better relations? To try to design better and listen better with the more-than-human?

How can we look at this as a human behaviour problem, and throw compassion at the problem?

Renilde: Yes, you said that the book moves through theory, reflection, practice. I guess that’s a really important reason why you have that reflection layer, as it can do certain things that the other two cannot.

Ariel: Absolutely. One of the tools in the second part of the book (how do we change ourselves and our systems to appreciate the multispecies framework), one of the first tools is a Mirror Interview, where you sit with yourself and consider your own perspectives. (Do I have a relationship to the more-than-human? And what does that look like?) And I think even someone who might hear the word “more-than-human” and think “ah, that’s not for me.” If you really investigate your deeper thoughts, I think almost everyone has at least an entrypoint into that connection. It’s a great universal truth.

We also have in that part of the book tools about creating maps and processing that just remove the uncertainty out of this difficult thing. I think one of the biggest obstacles we see when we bring this to organizations is just how different it can feel. And so how do we create those maps? In the same way that human-centred design came up in the latter half of the 1900s and people poured effort into building these frameworks, these repeatable frameworks that people could rely on and hold so it felt material. It took the uncertainty out of trying to design with people.

Right, because it used to be a strange idea to design with people. There was this great designer who had wonderful ideas, and they held the pen. And the proposition of human-centred design–that we should design with people. It needed its whole own change management process in the field. And so I think “more-than-human” is just at that place now. We need to make those tools to make it tangible. So people have something to hold onto.

Renilde: Yeah, it’s also often too you see that somebody comes in with a concept that gives a frame and words that people can sort of align their logic around, because they may understand that this is something they want to act on or need to act on, but not have sort of the logical frame, the mental frame, for “Where do I put this? Where are the hooks?” And someone can come with a frame and suddenly feel “Ah. Yes, this is it. This is a way that I can actually relate to it.” And now it makes more sense.

Stepping back, stepping sideways, learning to walk together

The book explores complementary calls to action – stepping back and stepping sideways. Stepping back often asks practitioners to withdraw, opening space for nontraditional voices to be heard. Stepping sideways is less about full withdrawal and more about repositioning among a broader web of design contributors, moving in relation, in humility, walking together.

This raises more complex questions. How might we reshape the design room itself, the agenda, and what is recognised as valid input? How might we learn to work alongside other forms of life, rather than organising processes around human priorities from the outset? How might we increasingly centre Indigenous communities as design leaders and decision-makers?

Why 22 tools instead of one framework?

Ariel explains her passion for relentless incrementalism, and her love for the number 22. Breaking down an overarching framework into 22 smaller tools reduces the barrier to entry, and invites more play. It lowers the threshold for engagement and makes it possible to begin without committing to a complete overhaul of existing practices.

Transformation is fragile. Large, coherent systems often trigger resistance, not necessarily because people disagree, but because the shift feels too total and too immediate. It demands new language, new practices, and new ways of evaluating success all at once.

Breaking the work into small tools creates many points of entry. A single tool can be introduced into an existing workflow, tried out, and adapted. Over time, these small shifts can accumulate and begin to affect how decisions are made.

We do not become a more-than-human designer in one move. We begin by changing how we pay attention, and then follow where that change leads.

The most surprising tool: multispecies noticing

Among the different tools, multispecies noticing stands out in how consistently it emotionally affects people who try it. Building on familiar practices such as ethnographic observation or empathy research, extending our field of focus to more-than-human community members who are participating in space alongside humans. The exercise quickly reveals how selective and conditioned perception actually is.

When people attempt to notice the more-than-human world in a structured way, it leads to a series of realisations. For example, that perception is shaped by training and habit. That human language is biased in how we describe what we observe. And that what feels like a neutral perspective is in fact deeply human-centred.

Using tools like the iceberg model or empathy mapping, we have many methods to help to surface our limits and bias when we research with people. Extending that curiosity to explore how our bias impacts how we perceive our more-than-human kin is fascinating.

The result is not a sense of mastery, but a shift in posture. Certainty gives way to attentiveness, and control gives way to a more humble form of engagement.

From there, a different question emerges: If we cannot fully communicate with or understand the full web of life we are engaging with, how do we still act responsibly in relation to it?

An excerpt:

“Ariel: I think just the act of taking some of the social science we know – for any of the social scientists listening to this, maybe the iceberg model or the empathy map (“think/say/feel/do”). You know, we’re given all these maps on how to think about our own bias as a researcher, and how to name it, and how to try to limit the impact of our bias when we are working with communities of people.

And when we extend that to the multispecies perspective, and ask people to say, “Okay, try this tool, but instead of stopping at the human community that we’re noticing, or instead of stopping and acknowledging the bias that you have and how it impacts what you see and how you describe what you see, can you extend that to say that, ‘I am biased not only based on who I am as a human, but the fact that I am a human biases me.’”

In that as I try to notice all of the kin around me – whether that’s the trees, or all of the minerals in the buildings that surround me, whether it’s the birdsong I hear, or the vibration of soil under my feet, or the insects I’m noticing – you know this cornucopia, just thousands of voices that envelop human life – how do I name my human bias and how do I – with love and compassion – say, “I know that there is so much language and communication happening around me that I don’t have the skills yet to reach into. But I want to listen.”

And that, that activity, is deeply unlocking for a lot of the practitioners that I’ve had the joy of working with over the last decade or so in this work, and really drives the most interesting conversations. If we know that our human language is limited, if we know that our human ears and listening are limited, what interesting and unlimited library of tools can we unlock and add in here to become better listeners? To become better researchers? It really becomes an invitation to become a biologist. I will never be a biologist, I don’t have that training, but I can walk through the rest of my career in admiration of wanting to learn as much as I can. And to bringing other people in where I know my limits are.”

Where this approach is landing, and where it isn’t

The approach is place-based, so resonates quickly in contexts where the more-than-human is materially present. Fields such as urban design, architecture, and place-based policy already deal with land, water, and ecosystems in tangible ways. This makes it easier to identify who or what is affected, and to consider how those entities might be engaged.

The approach is still finding its way with digital product & service design, which can often feel ‘placeless.’ We might “ground into place” through the location of team members, through the lands connected to supply chains and means of production. But it can easily become unanchored, superficial, diffuse. Given the scale and invisibility of impact, this may precisely be where more-than-human tending may be most needed.

A living process, and an unfinished knowing

Describing the book as living reflects the nature of the work rather than a stylistic choice.

Engaging with the more-than-human repeatedly brings one up against the limits of what can be known or fully understood. The boundaries of your own knowledge, and the need to be in continuous learning with teachers.

Writing, in this context, becomes a way of articulating a position within an ongoing process. That it is possible to begin without having resolved, as long as the process remains open and responsive.

What this ultimately asks of us

If the more-than-human is treated as a genuine participant in design, then something has to shift at a fundamental level. Ariel suggests that, in the end, it asks us to consider “what are we willing to give up?” … And in return, “what will we receive?”

This shift is not only methodological, but material. And it is not only about loss. It acknowledges that – in surrendering human space, human noise, human agency to others – we receive something truly tremendous in return.

Excerpt:

Ariel: We talked about taking a step back, and we talked about taking a step to the side. I think, at the end of the day, if we are to do this really well, we have to give something up. You know, the human world has to give something up, whether it’s convenience, whether it’s a hoard of resources that we’re sitting on that need to be redistributed, whether it’s the permission to speak loudly all the time such that other voices can’t be heard, going silent because the human voice has become so loud.

So I think, what are we willing to give up? It’s a really personal question, that we can each investigate at our own level. What am I, Ariel, willing to give up – materially, emotionally, to cede space, to listen better, to receive better?

And then collectively, whether it’s a small organization or a national government, or an international organization, what are we willing to give up and how do we live?

In Canada, we have a culture of Truth, Reconciliation and Reparation that guides a lot of our community of practice’s work in righting the wrongs of a lot of the colonial history of Canada’s settlement and giving land back to Indigenous populations. The more-than-human question I think asks a really similar question, which is what active role, active motions can I engage in to reconcile and repair?”

Renilde: I mean, at the same time, even, we may not be very conscious of it, it is a very common thing that, to participate as a citizen in society or to be a neighbour, a friend, etc., in a way we always have to give something up to be able to enable the relationship.

Ariel: And then it gives so much back to you.

Renilde: And then it gives so much back to you.

Ariel: It’s not a zero-sum game.

Renilde: We understand that we give something up in order to get something back. To be able to participate in that relationship.

[...]

Ariel: We have to be ready to give something up to get back the thriving of the planet, to get back the joyful, neighbourly communication that we’ve lost with the more-than-human world.

Closing

Our more-than-human kin are already present, responding, speaking, shaping, co-designing our world. The question is whether humans are willing to become quiet, humble, and curious enough to evolve into better collaborators.

“A Nourishing Toolkit to the More-Than-Human: 22 Ways to Design Differently” is expected to be released later this year (2026), published by Set Margins (Netherlands), with distribution in North America. You can join the release list at arielsim.com.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

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Image: poppies at Casa Gaia in Spain (2025). As Joanna says “they always bring me a surge of joy. I especially like the fact they represent beauty to share with to anyone who passes – you simply can’t pick them and take them home and keep them for yourself, they have to be enjoyed exactly where and as they are.”

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🌿 Field Dialogue #1 — Joanna Crowson (Casa Gaia)

Listening for what is already speaking

What happens when you stop trying to “include nature” as an idea—and begin relating to it as a participant?

In this first Field Dialogue, we spoke with Joanna Crowson (Casa Gaia / Almenara), briefly joined by Andrew Zionts (Almenara), about what it actually means to work with the more-than-human—not as a concept, but as something that shapes how we design, decide, and relate.

This is not a polished methodology. It’s a glimpse into work that is still unfolding—alive, searching, and at times unresolved.

The Work — Designing with life, not just for it

At the heart of Joanna’s work is a quiet but profound shift: moving from working on the land to working with it—and increasingly, allowing it to guide decisions.

Through Almenara, a land-based regenerative project in southern Spain, this begins very concretely: stewarding land, working with permaculture principles, and creating spaces—like Councils of All Beings—where the more-than-human is actively invited into the conversation.

But a next step is emerging. Not just including nature in dialogue, but asking:

What would it mean to include the more-than-human in governance itself?

This question is now being explored through the EMCCINNO project, where Almenara is is collaborating with Be.Time as one of several “transformation sites.” Here, climate change is approached not only as an environmental issue, but as a cultural one—requiring shifts in how we think, organize, and make decisions.

Across both contexts, a shared premise becomes visible:
human systems cannot transform if they remain disconnected from the living systems they are part of.

The Protocol — Learning to listen (without claiming certainty)

A central challenge in this work is deceptively simple: how do you listen without projecting?

What Joanna and Andrew are experimenting with is not one method, but a layered practice of attention.

On one level, listening is tangible. The land responds. After unusually heavy rains—the most in decades—the movement of water across across the water retention landscape they had designed became a form of feedback. It revealed what worked, what didn’t, and where assumptions needed to shift. Design becomes a loop: act, observe, adjust.

Alongside this, there is a more subtle layer of listening. One that involves the body, perception, and what Joanna describes as a “symbolic or poetic” register. Practices drawn from constellations, activism, and shamanic traditions are used not to claim “this is what nature says,” but to notice:

What arises when we are in relationship?

The line between perception and projection is never fully resolved. Instead, it is navigated with care—and with a certain lightness.

Not everything is taken as a message. But neither is everything dismissed.

The Friction — Where different worlds collide

When this way of working meets institutional contexts, the tensions become very visible.

Part of the friction is practical. Human systems run on timelines, deliverables, and measurable outcomes. Living systems operate on entirely different rhythms—seasonal, cyclical, often unpredictable.

But the deeper friction sits elsewhere: in what we consider valid knowledge.

Within the EMCCINNO consortium, this becomes tangible. Some partners rely on dense environmental data—sensors, metrics, real-time monitoring. Others, like Almenara, work through embodied observation and relational sensing. Both are forms of listening, yet they don’t easily translate into one another.

There is also a cultural layer. In the local context, many farmers carry a history of having their knowledge dismissed. As a result, there is both richness and resistance: deep ecological memory, alongside understandable mistrust.

The challenge is not just how to include the more-than-human—
but what we recognize as knowledge in the first place.

The Insight — Life responds (but not on our terms)

One of the most striking moments Joanna shared was also the most concrete.

After decades of drought, a well long considered dry suddenly refilled following intense rainfall, in a place they hadn’t planned for.

It was both a confirmation and a humbling.

Life responds. But not necessarily where or how you expect it to.

Alongside these larger moments, there are quieter shifts. Even simple embodied practices—pausing, taking a few breaths—change the quality of interaction in groups. There is more presence, less friction, more space for listening.

And perhaps most tellingly:
no group has ever resisted those moments of slowing down. If anything, people seem relieved by them.

The Shift — From expertise to participation

Working in this way doesn’t just change outcomes—it changes the practitioner.

There is a gradual movement away from being the expert who knows, toward someone who creates conditions for something else to emerge. This requires letting go of certainty, control, and sometimes even professional identity.

It also exposes a deeper tension within Western culture: the split between what is considered “objective” and what is dismissed as subjective, intuitive, or even irrational.

Much of this work sits precisely in that gap.

Not fully measurable—yet not arbitrary either.

The Unfolding — Small openings, real shifts

Despite the challenges, Joanna notices subtle but important openings.

Younger generations, in particular, show a willingness to engage with more-than-human perspectives—not as an abstract idea, but as something experiential. Even among scientifically trained participants, there is often curiosity—and even relief—when given permission to relate differently.

At the same time, there is a renewed appreciation for knowledge that has been sidelined. When invited, older generations readily share detailed memories of landscapes, water systems, and cultivation practices—stories that can inform present-day regeneration.

This points to another layer of the work: not just restoring ecosystems, but re-storying them. Reconnecting with what has been forgotten, lost, or devalued.

The question now is how this work can travel further without losing its essence—how to share practices that are inherently relational, without turning them into fixed tools or formulas.

A closing seed

This conversation does not offer a finished approach. It reveals a field in motion.

But one thread runs through it:

The more-than-human is not absent.
Our systems—and our ways of paying attention—are simply not yet designed to include it.

And perhaps the work, for now, is just this:
learning how to listen again.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

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The 11th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in March 2026 explored Biomimicry - Learning from Nature with Amanda Sturgeon, CEO of the Biomimicry Institute, architect, and long-standing practitioner in regenerative design.

The session examined biomimicry not only as innovation inspired by nature, but as a practice that requires a shift in perception—from extracting ideas to developing the capacity to learn with living systems. Drawing on examples from architecture, cities, and systems thinking, the dialogue explored what it takes to translate ecological principles into human design, where this works, where it breaks down, and what this reveals about our current ability to co-create with the more-than-human world.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿 Learning Session 11 (March 2026) — Synthesis
Biomimicry - Learning from Nature, with Amanda Sturgeon (Biomimicry Institute)

What changes when learning from nature is not just a methodology, but a practice that reshapes how we understand ourselves in relation to the living world?

1. What is biomimicry — and how is it different from simply copying nature?

Three modes of engagement
Biomimicry engages with nature in three ways: as a model (emulating nature’s designs, processes, and systems), as a mentor (treating nature as a teacher rather than a source of extraction), and as a measure (using life’s principles as an evaluative standard for what we create and how we organise ourselves).

Biomorphic, biophilic, bio-based — and biomimetic
These are related but distinct. Biomorphic design copies form; biophilic design works at the level of the human-nature connection and the psychological wellbeing that comes from it; bio-based materials literally use biological matter. Biomimicry, properly understood, goes deeper — it seeks to understand the function and strategy behind a natural phenomenon, and to emulate that at the level of principle.

Function over form
A key example: iridescent beetles and berries produce colour not through pigment but through a spiralised nano-structure in their surface. Understanding and emulating that function has led to innovations in coloration that use no mining, no toxic dyes, and produce no waste — because the insight was functional, not merely visual.

🌱 Seed:
Copying nature’s appearance is relatively easy; understanding why something works the way it does — and what principles are at play — is where biomimicry’s real depth lies.

2. What does it actually look like to learn from or listen to an organism or ecosystem?

Reconnect first
The first step in biomimicry practice is reconnection — returning to embodied relationship with the living world through immersions, nature journalling, and extended time outdoors. Even scientists who study organisms under a microscope have often never spent a week outside in actual relationship with the ecosystems they study.

Then deepen curiosity
The second step is building genuine curiosity about how and why a particular strategy or system works — not just what it looks like, but what evolutionary pressures shaped it, and what its function is in context.

Then work with principles and ethos
The third step is ethos — understanding the deeper principles at play and asking: what does this suggest about how we might live, design, or organise ourselves? This is where life’s principles become a lens, not just a checklist.

Ask Nature as a bridge
The Ask Nature platform — now including a chat function trained on Janine Benyus’s writing and thousands of biological strategies — was built to bridge the gap between deep ecological knowledge and nature-curious practitioners. It allows someone to arrive with a design challenge or a social problem, find examples from nature, and begin the process of translation.

🌱 Seed:
Listening to nature is a practice, not an event — it requires slowing down, building attentiveness over time, and being genuinely open to learning something that disrupts what you already thought you knew.

3. Can biomimicry be applied to systems — not just products — and what does that look like?

From innovation to systemic change
Biomimicry has historically been strongest in product design and material innovation, and those pathways are now well-developed. But the field is increasingly turning toward larger questions: how might we look to nature for insight into financial systems, governance structures, social behaviours, and the conditions under which minority approaches become the majority?

How does systemic change happen in nature?
One of the most interesting questions being explored is: when we look at how a marginal system becomes dominant in nature — how things “go viral” in living systems — what can we learn about how societal values shift? This represents a still-early but genuinely new frontier for the field.

Nature of Fashion and buildings & cities
Current programmes include work on fashion waste (learning from nature’s decomposers to rethink chemistry and materiality) and a 12-month Co-Lab on buildings, cities, and infrastructure — bringing together engineering firms, thought leaders, and various organisations to ask how to leapfrog incremental improvements toward a genuinely nature-positive built environment.

🌱 Seed:
Applying biomimicry beyond the product level means asking not only what we should make differently, but how we might organise and decide differently — and what nature might teach us about that.

4. Where does biomimicry hit its limits — and what lies beyond them?

The ceiling of the current economic system
Biomimicry in product and business-model innovation reaches a ceiling when the underlying economic system cannot move any further — a pattern also visible in sustainability and circularity work. The system itself — its incentive structures, its time horizons, its notion of value — becomes the constraint.

A new frontier: learning from nature to shift values and behaviours
The more recent and still-emerging focus is on using nature’s principles to understand how to shift not just what we make, but who we are as a society — our values, behaviours, and relational patterns. This is the work the co-lab and the Nature of Trust project are beginning to open up.

None of it is easy
There are tried and tested pathways for entrepreneurial innovation in biomimicry. There are not yet equivalent pathways for transforming economic and political systems. That work remains to be done — and its difficulty should not be underestimated.

🌱 Seed:
Biomimicry is mature enough that its limits are becoming visible — and those limits are the frontier: the places where the practice must deepen or transform in order to address what is most urgently needed.

5. How do you navigate the tension between nature’s operating principles and the systems we actually live inside?

Nature doesn’t recognise profit, quarterly targets, or nation-states
Human economic and political systems are built on constructs that have no analogue in living systems. When biomimicry practitioners work within those systems, there is an inevitable tension — between the principles that emerge from deep engagement with nature and the constraints of the world as it currently exists.

Resource flows and financial systems
Biomimicry 3.8 is currently exploring what nature can teach about resource flows and financial systems — how the circulation, distribution, and metabolism of resources might be redesigned with life’s principles as a guide. This work is early and not yet public, but it represents the field beginning to engage directly with the systems that most constrain its application.

The question of what gets distorted in translation
Not all translations of natural principles into human systems are faithful. Concepts can be taken up shallowly, or used to legitimise practices that are fundamentally at odds with the underlying principles. The work of maintaining integrity in that translation is ongoing.

🌱 Seed:
Nature operates without the constructs that most constrain human systems — and that makes engaging with those constructs, rather than working around them, one of the most important and difficult challenges for the field.

6. Is there a role for biomimicry in governance and leadership?

The Living Systems Alliance
The Biomimicry Institute is a partner in the Living Systems Alliance — a collaboration with Kincentric Leadership, the Global Ecovillage Network, Transition Network International, and Permaculture UK — which is currently (March 2025) running an open call for pilot regions. The project explores how life’s principles can serve as a lens for governance structures, decision-making, and leadership in communities.

How does nature build trust? How does nature change governance?
These are, some of the most interesting questions the field can now ask. The Nature of Trust, a project by Biomimicry for Social Innovation, is one early example of applying biomimicry to the question of how trust emerges, is sustained, and can be rebuilt in human systems.

Untapped potential
The application of biomimicry to governance and leadership remains largely underdeveloped. The examples exist, the questions are forming, but the field is in early stages — and the potential, given the governance crises of this moment, seems significant.

🌱 Seed:
If nature has 3.8 billion years of experience in building systems that are resilient, adaptive, and capable of sustaining life — then the question of what nature can teach about governance is not a marginal one.

7. What tools and indicators does the Biomimicry Institute use to evaluate its work?

Life’s principles as the primary framework
Life’s principles — a set of deep patterns found across all of life — serve as the primary evaluative lens. They are not a fixed checklist but a set of generative questions: is this approach adaptive? Does it use life-friendly chemistry? Does it build resilience through diversity? Does it optimise the whole rather than maximising a single part?

Context-dependent metrics
For entrepreneurial and product-level work, there are now fairly developed matrices — adapted for products, platform technologies, and business models. For systemic and behavioural work, measurement frameworks are still emerging. What is consistent is the anchor: life’s principles as the standard, rather than conventional sustainability metrics.

Platform technologies over isolated products
In the Ray of Hope accelerator, a shift is visible: the most promising innovations are not single products but platform technologies — whole new approaches to dyeing, fabrication, coatings, and materials that open up new possibility spaces rather than improving existing ones.

🌱 Seed:
Measuring against life’s principles is not a formula — it is an ongoing practice of asking whether what we are creating is moving toward or away from the conditions that sustain life.

8. Are there limits to how quickly we can apply nature’s intelligence — and are there aspects of nature we should not mimic?

Everything in nature can be learned from — even the difficult parts
The question is not whether to engage with challenging aspects of natural systems, but what we choose to emulate and why. We can learn from predation, from parasitism, from extinction events — what matters is the quality of attention and the ethical framework brought to that learning.

The deeper challenge: time horizons
Nature operates across timescales that dwarf the human lifetime. The transitions we need to make — in our built environment, our social systems, our economic structures — will also take more than one lifetime. The fundamental mismatch is not between human ingenuity and natural complexity, but between short-term thinking and the long-term responsibility that living systems demand.

Humility about our own smallness
Amanda described carrying a heart-shaped rock as a reminder of her own place in the vastness of Earth’s story. Human society has developed an inflated sense of its own centrality — and the practice of biomimicry, at its best, dismantles that. The work of shifting from short-term extraction to long-term responsibility may be, above all else, a practice of recovering humility.

🌱 Seed:
The question is not whether we can apply nature’s intelligence fast enough — it is whether we can develop the patience, humility, and long-term thinking to stay in genuine relationship with it over the time that real transformation requires.

9. What does biomimicry practice look like applied to cities and infrastructure?

A leverage point for change
Buildings, cities, and infrastructure represent the environments in which most people spend most of their time — and therefore one of the most powerful leverage points for shifting lived experience. The built sector is also one of the most conservative, fractured, and resistant to systemic change.

The Co-Lab approach
Rather than prescribing a vision, the Institute’s Co-Lab on buildings, cities, and infrastructure has used genuine co-creation: bringing together large engineering firms, thought leaders, and organisations including the World Economic Forum to surface what is actually blocking change. What has emerged is that the barriers are not primarily technical. The tools and innovations exist. What is missing is a behavioural and values shift — and a new story about what the built environment is for.

Telling the story of the current system’s absurdity
One direction the group has moved toward: making the dysfunction of the current system visible. Buildings that make people sick, cut them off from fresh air and natural light, reduce productivity, and poison waterways — once you look at how we currently build, the question becomes not “why change?” but “why did we ever accept this?”

🌱 Seed:
The built environment is not an infrastructure challenge — it is a values challenge. And values change through stories, relationships, and the slow accumulation of different experiences of what is possible.

10. How does the practice of biomimicry change how we see ourselves in relation to the living world?

Humility as the foundational shift
For Amanda, biomimicry has been, above all, a practice of humility — not as a virtue to be cultivated, but as a natural consequence of genuine learning. When you slow down enough to truly observe, when you quiet the certainty of what you already think you know, when you remain open to being surprised: the experience of your own smallness becomes not diminishing, but clarifying.

Quieting cleverness
One of the most consistent things biomimicry seems to do for those who practice it, is to quiet our “cleverness” — the habitual reaching for what we already know, the tendency to frame every problem through existing categories. What takes its place is a different quality of listening: slower, more open, more genuinely relational.

A different relationship space
Over time, the practice shifts not just what you design or decide, but how you relate — to the living world, to others, and to your own uncertainty. It places you in a different kind of relationship space: one where listening is primary, where reciprocity is not a nice-to-have but a foundation, and where the measure of good work is whether it creates conditions for more life.

🌱 Seed:
The deepest return of biomimicry practice may not be better products or more resilient cities — but a different sense of who we are, and what we are part of.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Observation → Curiosity → Principle → Application
Biomimicry practice begins not with a solution but with a practice of attention — and it is the quality of that attention that determines the depth of what becomes possible.

Form → Function → System → Values
The field has evolved along this trajectory: from copying forms, to understanding functions, to applying systemic principles, to — now — asking what nature can teach about the values and behaviours that shape human systems.

Western science ↔ Indigenous knowledge
Biomimicry has largely developed within a Western scientific framework — but the wisdom of long-term, embodied relationship with specific places and species that Indigenous knowledge holds may be its most important complement. The Institute is beginning to explore this through its Indigenous Advisory Council and the braiding of knowledge frameworks in Ask Nature.

Short-term thinking ↔ Long-term responsibility
The mismatch between the time horizons of human systems and those of living systems is one of the deepest structural tensions in the work — and addressing it may require not just new tools, but a different relationship to time itself.

Knowledge → Trust → Action (not automatic)
As with emotional ecology, the pathway from learning to care to changed behaviour is not guaranteed. What bridges the gap is relationship — and relationship requires time, attention, and presence that modern institutions rarely support.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

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The 10th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in February 2026 on Remember You are Wild explored the work of the Sea Change Project with Swati Thiyagarajan, nature storyteller and part of the team behind the Oscar-winning film My Octopus Teacher.

The session examined the proposition that the ecological crisis is not only a crisis of systems, but a crisis of relationship—rooted in a deep disconnection between humans and the living world. Drawing on immersive, science-based storytelling and long-term engagement with the Great African Seaforest, Swati unpacked what it means to remember we are wild—not as an idea, but as an embodied practice that reshapes perception, behavior, and ultimately, what becomes possible in conservation.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿 Learning Session 10 (February 2026) — Synthesis
Remember You Are Wild, with Swati Thiyagarajan (Sea Change Project)

What if the ecological crisis is not primarily a failure of knowledge or policy—but a failure of relationship? And if connection is something we must remember, not learn, what does it actually take to recover it in a modern, highly mediated world?

1. What does it mean to say the root crisis is disconnection?

Disconnection as the underlying driver
Climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological degradation emerge from a deeper condition in which humans experience themselves as separate from the living world. From that perceived separation, extraction becomes normalized, and systems are designed without reference to the wellbeing of the larger living systems they depend on.

“Remembering” rather than learning
Framing this as remembering is significant: it suggests that the capacity for connection is not absent, but dormant. The ability to feel kinship with other beings, to sense belonging within ecosystems, is something humans already carry—but which has been eroded through modern ways of living.

Domestication of perception
Modern life has not only distanced humans physically from ecosystems, but also narrowed perception itself. Food, seasons, animal life, and ecological processes become abstracted or invisible, shaping a worldview in which nature appears external rather than relational.

🌱 Seed:
Disconnection is not just about physical distance from nature—it is a way of perceiving the world that makes separation feel normal, and in doing so, quietly legitimizes extraction and indifference.

2. What is “emotional ecology”—and how do you navigate the tension with rigor?

Emotional ecology as a missing layer
Conservation efforts often rely on science, policy, and economics, yet these alone rarely shift behavior at scale. Emotional ecology works at the level of felt relationship—how people experience, value, and connect with the living world.

Curiosity and wonder as entry points
Rather than beginning from fear or urgency, this approach often starts with curiosity—paying attention, becoming interested, allowing wonder to emerge. These are not superficial emotions, but gateways into deeper forms of relationship.

Rigor and emotion are not opposites
The work does not position emotion against science, but alongside it. Scientific knowledge provides understanding, while emotional connection creates the conditions for that understanding to matter. Without connection, knowledge risks remaining inert.

The challenge of legitimacy
In many institutional contexts, emotional approaches are seen as secondary or lacking rigor. Yet the absence of emotional connection is precisely what limits the impact of otherwise rigorous work.

🌱 Seed:
Data can inform and persuade, but without felt relationship it rarely compels change—emotional connection is not a soft layer on top of science, but the condition that allows knowledge to translate into care and action.

3. What is the “language of the wild”—and how do we lose (and recover) it?

A language beyond words
The “language of the wild” is not spoken, but sensed. It includes the ability to read patterns, track movement, notice subtle changes, and attune to rhythms and relationships within an ecosystem.

Loss through disconnection and disuse
This capacity fades when it is no longer practiced. Without regular immersion and attention, perception becomes coarse, and the subtle signals of the living world recede from awareness.

Tracking and attention as practices of recovery
Practices such as tracking—reading animal signs, following patterns in the landscape—train a different quality of attention. They rebuild sensitivity and restore a relational way of knowing that is otherwise lost.

🌱 Seed:
When the language of the wild disappears, it is not because the world has gone silent—but because we have lost the practices and attention required to remain in conversation with it.

4. Why storytelling—and what makes science-based storytelling work?

Story as a bridge into relationship
Storytelling allows people to enter into relationship with other beings in ways that data alone cannot. It creates emotional resonance, identification, and a sense of shared experience.

Why My Octopus Teacher resonated globally
The film did not succeed because it explained octopus biology, but because it revealed a relationship—one that unfolded over time and invited viewers to feel part of it. The specificity and intimacy made it universally relatable.

Science-based storytelling as integration
The work combines rigorous ecological research with narrative, ensuring that what is felt is also grounded in reality. This integration allows stories to carry both emotional weight and ecological truth.

From individual impact to collective change
While stories can move individuals deeply, translating that into sustained behavioral or systemic change remains an ongoing challenge that requires additional layers of engagement.

🌱 Seed:
Stories do not change the world by delivering information—they change it by reshaping what people feel connected to, and therefore what they are willing to care for and protect.

5. What changes when we name, see, and relate differently?

Naming as recognition and presence
Naming the Great African Seaforest did more than just describe a place—it brought it into collective awareness as a distinct, living system with identity and significance.

Visibility as a driver of protection
What becomes visible becomes harder to ignore. Recognition can shift how ecosystems are valued, discussed, and ultimately protected within public and policy spheres.

Visibility as a double-edged dynamic
At the same time, increased visibility can attract pressure—tourism, exploitation, or commodification—making the act of revealing something both protective and potentially risky.

🌱 Seed:
To name and make something visible is to bring it into relationship with the human world—and with that, into both care and potential vulnerability.

6. What tensions arise in combining storytelling, science, and relationship?

Documenting vs relating
Filmmaking and research require observation, framing, and ultimately representation—capturing moments, behaviors, and interactions in ways that can be shared. Yet deep relationship with the more-than-human often calls for the opposite: restraint, non-interference, and allowing things to unfold without intrusion. This creates an ongoing tension between the impulse to witness and share, and the responsibility to not disrupt or instrumentalize the very relationships being formed.

Visibility vs extraction
Bringing attention to ecosystems like the Great African Seaforest can strengthen recognition, care, and protection. At the same time, visibility can attract increased human presence—tourism, commercial interest, or other forms of pressure—that risk degrading what is being protected. Visibility is therefore not inherently positive; it must be navigated with care.

Integrity under scale
As storytelling reaches global audiences—as seen with My Octopus Teacher—the challenge becomes maintaining depth, nuance, and authenticity. There is a risk that complex relationships are simplified into narratives that travel well, or that nature becomes instrumentalized as a vehicle for impact rather than engaged with on its own terms.

🌱 Seed
To make something visible is to bring it into relationship with many more humans—and with that, into both care and pressure, protection and potential harm.

7. What has this work revealed about the relationship between storytelling, science, and conservation?

Integration rather than separation
The combination of storytelling, research, and daily immersion creates a form of “living science” where knowledge is not only produced, but continuously experienced and embodied.

Tensions within practice
Filmmaking, research, and relationship do not always align seamlessly. Choices about what to show, how to engage, and how to represent other beings involve ongoing ethical navigation.

New pathways into conservation
By engaging people emotionally and relationally, storytelling opens pathways into conservation that differ from traditional approaches, expanding who participates and how.

🌱 Seed:
When science, story, and relationship come together, conservation shifts from something we understand intellectually to something we experience as part of our own lives.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Disconnection → Extraction → Crisis
A perceived separation from the living world underpins many forms of ecological harm; reconnecting shifts the foundation from which decisions are made.

Attention → Relationship → Care
What we learn to notice shapes what we come to value, and ultimately what we are willing to protect.

Story → Feeling → Action (not guaranteed)
Stories can open emotional connection at scale, but the pathway from feeling to sustained action remains uncertain and requires further development.

Visibility → Protection ↔ Exposure
Making ecosystems visible can strengthen recognition and protection, while simultaneously increasing their exposure to new pressures.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

The 9th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in December 2025 on What Whales are Saying explored he work of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), led by Dr. David Gruber, Founder & President of the initiative and Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York.

Project CETI brings together over 50 scientists across disciplines—including AI, linguistics, robotics, and marine biology—to decode the communication of sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean. Using advanced machine learning and non-invasive sensing technologies, the project is working toward understanding whether whale communication constitutes a form of language and what it would mean to translate it.

The session explored not only the scientific and technical dimensions of this work, but also its ethical, legal, and philosophical implications—particularly in relation to Rights of Nature and the possibility of whales being recognized as communicative subjects with standing.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿 Learning Session 9 (December 2025) — Synthesis
What Whales are Saying, with Dr. David Gruber (Project CETI)

What changes when communication across species moves from speculation to evidence—and what becomes possible, or necessary, when another species can no longer be treated as silent?

1. What are we actually discovering about whale communication?

From sound to structure, not immediate meaning
The work of Project CETI does not begin with translating whale sounds into human language, but with identifying whether there is structure, pattern, and repeatability in those sounds that would indicate something like language. This involves analyzing vast datasets of “codas” (click sequences) to detect patterns that resemble elements such as phonetics, syntax, or contextual variation.

Dialects, clans, and cultural variation
Different whale groups appear to use distinct patterns, suggesting the presence of dialects tied to specific clans. These differences are socially learned rather than genetically encoded, pointing toward the existence of culture—shared communication systems transmitted across generations.

A threshold crossed, but not yet understood
While structure is increasingly evident, meaning remains largely unknown. The step from identifying patterns to understanding what they signify is substantial, particularly given that whales inhabit a sensory world fundamentally different from our own.

🌱 Seed
The first breakthrough is not understanding whales—it is realizing that something structured, shared, and persistent is being expressed.

2. How do you approach translation without projecting human assumptions?

Letting patterns emerge without human bias
A deliberate choice has been made to train AI models directly on whale vocalizations, rather than using human language as a reference. This allows patterns to emerge from the data itself, reducing the risk of forcing whale communication into human linguistic categories.

Encountering a fundamentally different sensory world
Whales perceive and navigate through sound in a three-dimensional aquatic environment. This raises the possibility that their communication encodes information in ways that do not align with human concepts such as objects, sequences, or discrete symbols.

Translation as partial and situated
Even if translation becomes possible, it is unlikely to resemble a direct conversion into human language. What may emerge instead are partial mappings—correlations between sounds, contexts, and behaviors—that allow for interpretation without full equivalence.

🌱 Seed
The deeper the difference, the less translation becomes conversion—and the more it becomes an ongoing negotiation with the unknown.

3. What has the process of building this work revealed so far?

Progress is slow, iterative, and data-intensive
Understanding whale communication requires analyzing enormous volumes of data, where distinguishing signal from noise is an ongoing challenge. Progress is incremental and depends on sustained, long-term effort rather than rapid breakthroughs.

Working at the edge of current capabilities
The project operates at the limits of existing AI and machine learning systems. While these tools can detect patterns, they are not yet capable of reliably assigning meaning in a non-human communication system.

Designing research that does not interfere
A strong emphasis is placed on non-invasive methods, including passive acoustic monitoring and “gentle robotics.” This constrains the type and speed of data collection, but ensures that research does not disrupt whale behavior.

🌱 Seed
The constraint is not only technical—it is learning how to study another species without reshaping it in the process.

4. What ethical questions emerge when we begin to “listen”?

Access and control of translation technologies
If meaningful interpretation becomes possible, the question of who has access becomes critical. Open access may accelerate understanding and protection, but also increases the risk of misuse.

From protection to potential exploitation
Making whales more intelligible could expose them to new forms of harm—whether through tourism, military use, or other extractive applications. Understanding does not automatically lead to protection.

The risk of premature certainty
There is a significant risk of over-interpreting partial findings, assigning meaning where there is still ambiguity. Acting on misunderstood signals could distort rather than represent whale communication.

Ethics as foundational, not secondary
Ethical considerations are embedded in the design of the project itself, shaping how data is collected, interpreted, and shared.

🌱 Seed
The moment we begin to understand, we also become accountable for how that understanding is used.

5. What becomes possible if we succeed in understanding whales?

From observation to interaction
If elements of whale communication can be reliably interpreted, the relationship shifts from observing behavior to engaging with signals—opening the possibility, however partial, of response rather than one-sided analysis.

Strengthening legal recognition and protection
Demonstrating structured communication and cultural variation provides stronger grounds for legal arguments around rights, personhood, and protection—moving from ethical concern to evidentiary claim.

Reframing participation in governance
A more far-reaching implication is that whales could, in some mediated way, be represented in decision-making processes based on their own communication patterns, rather than solely through human proxies.

Challenging human exclusivity
Perhaps most fundamentally, this work challenges the assumption that complex communication—and meaningful expression—is uniquely human, requiring a rethinking of how agency and intelligence are distributed across species.

🌱 Seed
Once communication becomes undeniable, exclusion becomes a choice rather than an assumption.

6. How does this intersect with law and Rights of Nature?

From evidence to legal argument
Demonstrating structured communication and cultural variation strengthens the case that whales are not only sentient, but communicative beings. This supports legal arguments for rights, shifting from moral claims to evidence-based recognition.

Collaboration with legal innovation
Through collaboration with NYU’s More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) program, Project CETI explores how scientific findings can inform legal frameworks around personhood, rights of nature, and enforceable protections.

From protection toward representation
A more far-reaching implication is the possibility that whales could be represented in legal or governance processes in ways that are grounded—however indirectly—in their own communication systems.

🌱 Seed
When communication becomes demonstrable, exclusion becomes harder to justify.

7. What remains uncertain or unresolved?

Limits of translation
It remains unclear whether whale communication can ever be meaningfully translated into human terms, or whether it will remain partially opaque due to fundamental differences in perception and cognition.

Speed of science vs urgency of threats
The timescales required for rigorous understanding are long, while the pressures on whale populations are immediate—creating a gap between knowledge production and action.

Implications not yet fully understood
Even partial success in translation could have far-reaching consequences—for governance, ethics, and human–more-than-human relations—that are not yet fully anticipated.

🌱 Seed
We may reach the limits of understanding long before we reach the limits of implication.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Structure → Meaning (in progress)
The identification of structured communication marks a critical threshold, but translating that structure into meaning remains an open and complex challenge.

Listening → Responsibility (escalating)
As the ability to listen improves, so does the ethical responsibility to act carefully and avoid harm.

Understanding → Exposure (tension)
Making whales more intelligible may strengthen protection, but also increases the risk of new forms of exploitation.

Science → Governance (emerging)
Scientific discoveries are beginning to intersect with legal and governance frameworks, particularly in relation to rights and representation.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

The 8th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in November 2025 explored Nature on the Board with Brontie Ansell, co-founder and managing director of Lawyers for Nature.

Nature on the Board is a governance innovation that brings the more-than-human world directly into corporate and organisational decision-making by giving Nature a formal role at the board level. This includes appointing a legal guardian or proxy to represent Nature’s interests, with the ability to participate in discussions and, in some cases, vote on decisions. The first company to give Nature a board seat was Faith in Nature, marking a shift from treating Nature as a stakeholder to recognising it as a participant in governance.

The session explored how this works in practice: how Nature is represented in decision-making, what changes when it has a voice in the room, and where tensions emerge when ecological interests meet legal, financial, and organisational realities.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿 Learning Session 8 (November 2025) — Synthesis
Nature on the Board, with Brontie Ansell (Lawyers for Nature)

What changes when Nature is not just considered, but given formal power in decision-making—and can this shift move beyond symbolism within existing corporate structures?

1. What does it mean to give Nature a seat on the board?

From stakeholder to rights-holder
“Nature on the Board” moves beyond treating nature as a stakeholder whose interests are indirectly considered, toward recognizing nature as an entity with standing in decision-making. This is not symbolic inclusion, but a structural intervention that alters how decisions are made, by introducing a voice explicitly tasked with representing ecological interests.

A legal and governance innovation
The model works through formal governance mechanisms—such as appointing a Nature Director or legal guardian—embedded within existing corporate structures. This ensures that Nature’s interests are not external considerations, but part of the fiduciary and deliberative processes of the organization.

Shifting the locus of accountability
By giving Nature a seat at the table, accountability expands beyond shareholders, customers, and regulators to include the ecosystems that companies depend on and impact. This reframes business decisions as relational rather than purely transactional.

🌱 Seed:
Granting Nature a seat on the board is not about adding another perspective—it is about redefining who the organization is accountable to, and what counts as a legitimate interest in decision-making.

2. What actually changes in the boardroom?

A shift in how decisions are framed from the outset
The presence of a Nature representative does not only intervene at the point of decision-making, but already shapes how topics are introduced, what information is considered relevant, and how proposals are justified. Conversations tend to move earlier toward ecological implications, rather than treating them as downstream impacts.

The influence lies as much in questions as in formal power
In practice, the most consistent impact is not through voting against proposals, but through reframing the discussion itself—asking questions that would otherwise not be asked, and holding space for considerations that are typically sidelined in corporate settings.

Behaviour changes before outcomes do
Board members begin to anticipate Nature’s perspective, which can lead to adjustments in proposals before they are even formally discussed. This creates a subtle but important shift, where ecological considerations become part of the default thinking rather than an external check.

Not an oppositional or adversarial role
The role of the Nature representative is not to block decisions or act as a constant counterforce, but to ensure that Nature’s interests are present, articulated, and taken seriously within the deliberation process.

3. How is Nature’s “voice” determined?

Representation through an informed and accountable proxy
Nature is represented by a designated guardian who draws on ecological knowledge, context-specific information, and relevant expertise. This role carries both interpretive responsibility and the need to remain grounded in evidence and lived context.

A combination of data, expertise, and situated judgement
Inputs can include environmental impact data, scientific knowledge, organisational context, and consultation with specialists. At the same time, these inputs do not resolve every situation, requiring the proxy to exercise judgement in conditions that are often complex and uncertain.

Ambiguity is part of the process, not an exception
There are moments where Nature’s interests are not clear-cut, or where different ecological dynamics point in different directions. Rather than eliminating this ambiguity, the process requires making it visible and working with it transparently.

The risk of projection cannot be fully removed
Even with structured inputs and good intentions, the possibility remains that human assumptions shape how Nature’s interests are interpreted. The practice therefore requires ongoing reflection on how representation is constructed and justified.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Representing Nature is less about “getting it right” and more about making ecological reasoning explicit, contestable, and accountable within decision-making.

4. What happens when Nature’s interests conflict with human interests?

Trade-offs are surfaced rather than obscured
One of the most immediate effects is that tensions between ecological, financial, and operational priorities become visible and must be explicitly addressed, rather than being implicitly resolved in favour of human interests.

No automatic hierarchy is introduced
The model does not predetermine that Nature’s interests will override all others. Instead, it changes the conditions under which decisions are made, requiring that ecological impacts are actively weighed and justified.

Decisions become more deliberate and traceable
When a decision goes against Nature’s interests, this is no longer an invisible externality but a conscious choice that can be documented, questioned, and revisited.

Complexity increases rather than decreases
Situations where different parts of the natural world have competing needs—such as ecosystem-level vs species-level considerations—highlight that “Nature” is not a single, unified perspective, but a set of relationships that may not align neatly.

🌱 Seed:
When Nature has a real voice in the room, trade-offs are no longer abstract—they become explicit negotiations between fundamentally different kinds of interests, forcing decisions to surface what was previously externalized or ignored.

5. What has been learned through implementation?

What has proven unexpectedly effective
One of the most striking outcomes is how quickly the presence of a Nature Director can shift the tone and depth of conversations. Even before formal votes are cast, the act of consistently bringing ecological perspectives into discussions changes how issues are framed, broadening the scope of what is considered relevant or acceptable.

Where the model meets friction
Integrating this approach into existing corporate structures is not seamless. Legal frameworks, fiduciary duties, and ingrained business norms are not designed to accommodate non-human representation, which can create ambiguity around roles, authority, and decision-making processes.

Iteration rather than blueprint
There is no fixed template that can simply be replicated across contexts. Each implementation requires adaptation—legal, cultural, and organizational—to fit the specific entity. This makes the work slower, but also more grounded in real conditions.

Learning through practice
Some assumptions only become visible once the model is in operation—what seems straightforward in theory often becomes complex in practice. This requires a willingness to experiment, adjust, and learn in real time, rather than expecting a fully resolved model from the outset.

🌱 Seed:
The model does not “prove itself” in theory—it evolves through practice, where its real value lies in how it reshapes conversations long before it reshapes outcomes.

6. What are the main challenges and limitations?

The risk of tokenism is structurally present
Without genuine commitment from the organisation, there is a real possibility that the role becomes symbolic—used to signal intent without materially influencing decisions or behaviour.

The model is highly sensitive to the individual in the role
The effectiveness of Nature’s representation depends significantly on the capability, credibility, and positioning of the proxy, raising questions about consistency and robustness across different implementations.

Existing legal frameworks are not designed for this
Corporate governance systems are built around human stakeholders and fiduciary duties, creating friction when attempting to introduce non-human representation in a way that carries real weight.

Translation into business realities remains challenging
Integrating ecological considerations into areas such as supply chains, financial decision-making, or growth strategies requires navigating systems that are not inherently aligned with these perspectives.

7. What would it take for broader adoption?

Shifts in legal and regulatory frameworks
For this model to move beyond isolated cases, governance structures may need to evolve to formally recognise non-human interests and redefine fiduciary responsibilities.

Development of new professional roles and practices
Scaling would require building a field of practitioners capable of acting as Nature proxies or Earth trustees, with the necessary skills, knowledge, and ethical grounding.

Organisational readiness varies significantly
Purpose-driven organisations may be more open to adopting such models, while others—particularly those operating within extractive or high-pressure financial contexts—may face deeper structural resistance.

Beyond replication toward systemic change
Wider uptake is not simply a matter of copying the model, but of reshaping the conditions under which governance operates, including incentives, accountability structures, and cultural norms.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Broader adoption depends less on the model itself and more on whether the surrounding system is willing to accommodate it.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Consideration → Representation
Nature is no longer treated as an external factor to be considered, but becomes structurally present within governance, changing how responsibility is distributed and enacted.

Influence → Power (in transition)
While the current impact is often indirect—through framing and influence—the question of how this translates into consistent, material decision-making power remains open.

Symbolism → Substance (actively contested)
The model sits in a dynamic tension between symbolic gesture and substantive transformation, with outcomes depending heavily on implementation and organisational intent.

Governance → Expanded accountability
Introducing Nature into governance expands the scope of accountability beyond human stakeholders, challenging existing definitions of responsibility, value, and success.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

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This 7th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in October 2025 explored Knowing Place: A Key to Survival with Michael Kotutwa Johnson, a member of the Hopi Tribe in Northern Arizona, dryland farmer, and faculty member at the University of Arizona.

Michael’s work sits at the intersection of Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge, conservation, and food systems. Grounded in Hopi Ways of Knowing, his practice draws on millennia of continuous relationship with the same land—where crops such as corn, beans, and squash are grown with only 15–25 cm of annual rainfall and without irrigation.

In Hopi understanding, corn is not a crop but “the mother”—a living relative that has sustained the people for generations. This relationship is not symbolic; it structures how land is tended, how decisions are made, and how knowledge is transmitted.

The session explored what it means to know a place over generations, how this shapes practice and decision-making, and what becomes possible—or remains inaccessible—when such depth of relationship is absent.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿 Learning Session 7 (October 2025) — Synthesis
Knowing Place: A Key to Survival, with Michael Kotutwa Johnson (Hopi Tribe / University of Arizona)

What becomes possible when knowledge is rooted in long-term relationship with a specific place—and what is lost in a world characterised by mobility, abstraction, and short-term decision-making?

1. What does it mean to truly “know a place”?

Knowledge emerges through continuity, not observation alone
Knowing a place is not the result of studying it over a short period, but of sustained relationship across generations, where patterns, variations, and signals become visible over time.

Time reveals what is otherwise invisible
Subtle shifts in weather, soil, plant behaviour, and ecological dynamics can only be understood through long-term attention, where knowledge accumulates and is refined across generations. What emerges is not simply more detailed knowledge, but a fundamentally different way of knowing—one that cannot be accessed through short-term study, data collection, or external expertise.

Place is not interchangeable
Knowledge developed in one place does not automatically transfer to another, as it is inseparable from the specific conditions, histories, and relationships of that land.

🌱 Seed:
Place-based knowledge is not something you can extract—it is something you grow into over time.

2. What does it mean to relate to corn as “the mother”?

Learning from corn as kin
Within Hopi Ways of Knowing, corn is not approached as a crop to be optimized, but as a relative—specifically, as “the mother.” This framing fundamentally alters the relationship: rather than extracting yield, the focus becomes maintaining reciprocity, continuity, and care across generations.

Corn as ecological and relational teacher
Corn becomes a teacher because its growth reflects the condition of the entire system—soil, rainfall, timing, and human attention. Observing how corn responds across seasons provides feedback that is ecological, relational, and spiritual at once, guiding decisions in ways that cannot be reduced to metrics alone.

Contrast with industrial agriculture
This stands in sharp contrast to industrial agriculture, where crops are treated as outputs within controlled systems, rather than participants in an ongoing relationship.

🌱 Seed
When a crop is understood as kin, success is no longer measured by yield alone, but by the continuity of relationship—the conditions that allow both the plant and the people to keep living well together over time.

3. How do values translate into actual farming practice?

Values shaping practice
Hopi dryland farming is often described as values-based first, technique second. This means that decisions about when, where, and how to plant are not driven primarily by efficiency or maximization, but by principles such as respect, restraint, and responsibility to future generations.

Farming as a form of listening
Practices are informed by observing and responding to the land, rather than imposing predefined techniques. Values are therefore not abstract—they are operationalized through everyday decisions that accumulate over time into a distinct form of land stewardship.

Working with constraints rather than overcoming them
Farming with minimal rainfall is not approached as a limitation to be engineered away, but as a condition to work with through accumulated knowledge. For example, planting decisions are shaped by careful observation of environmental conditions, but also by an ethic of not overreaching—taking only what the land can sustain. This can mean choosing not to plant in certain conditions, even when short-term gain might be possible.

🌱 Seed
Technique answers the question “how,” but values determine whether something should be done at all—and in place-based systems, that distinction becomes the difference between continuity and collapse.

4. What does co-creation with the more-than-human look like here?

Collaboration with environmental forces
Farming with minimal rainfall and no irrigation is only possible through deep attunement to multiple forces—soil conditions, wind patterns, moisture retention, plant behavior, and more. These are not variables to be controlled, but collaborators to be worked with. Wind, soil, moisture, and other ecological factors are thus not external variables, but become active participants that shape outcomes.

No separation between human and ecological processes
Farming is not something done to the land, but something that happens within a broader system of relationships. This requires a form of listening that is both empirical and intuitive: reading subtle environmental cues while also drawing on accumulated generational knowledge about how these systems behave over time.

Outcomes are co-produced
Success is not determined solely by human effort, but by how well these relationships are understood and engaged. Rather than imposing a plan onto the land, the approach is to respond to what the land is already doing—adjusting practices in alignment with conditions rather than against them.

🌱 Seed
Co-creation begins when the land is no longer treated as a passive surface to act upon, but as an active partner whose responses shape every meaningful decision. This makes co-creation not a concept, but a condition for survival.

5. What happens when this knowledge meets modern systems?

Loss in translation
When Indigenous knowledge is translated into Western scientific or policy frameworks, key elements that give the knowledge its meaning—such as relationality, values, and context—are often reduced or omitted. Practices that are inseparable from values, responsibilities, and cosmology are frequently reduced to techniques or data points, making them easier to adopt superficially but harder to apply in ways that remain true to their origin.

Mismatch of validation systems
Knowledge grounded in lived practice and ancestral continuity is not always recognised as legitimate within institutional frameworks that prioritise different forms of evidence.

Risk of extraction without understanding
There is a tendency to take techniques or insights without engaging with the underlying worldview and relationships that make them work. This creates a paradox where Indigenous approaches are increasingly referenced, yet rarely integrated in their full depth, because doing so would require changes to the underlying assumptions of the systems receiving them.

6. What can people who are not rooted in one place learn from this?

Start with attention and relationship
Even without generational continuity, people can begin by paying closer attention to the places they inhabit and developing relationships over time. Rather than attempting to replicate Indigenous knowledge systems, they can start with consistent, attentive engagement: observing seasonal changes, understanding local species, and recognizing patterns over time.

Accept limits to what can be known
There are aspects of place-based knowledge that cannot be replicated without long-term continuity, and recognising this is part of engaging respectfully.

Shift from control to participation
Rather than seeking to manage or optimise, the focus shifts toward participating in and responding to existing systems. A shift from a mindset of seeking knowledge to use to one of relationship, where learning is tied to responsibility and care for the place itself.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Knowing place begins not with tools or frameworks, but with sustained attention and relationship. Over time, attention itself becomes a form of relationship.

7. What does resilience look like from this perspective?

Rooted in continuity rather than adaptation alone
Resilience is not only about responding to change, but about maintaining relationships and practices that have sustained life over long periods.

Capacity to navigate variability
Long-term knowledge provides a basis for responding to changing conditions without losing the underlying relationship with place.

Not everything can or should scale
Practices rooted in specific places challenge assumptions that solutions can be generalised or scaled across contexts.

🌱 Seed:
Resilience is not just the ability to adapt—it is the ability to remain in right relationship over time.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Across the session, several deeper shifts become visible.

Knowledge → Relationship over time
Knowledge is not accumulated information, but the result of sustained, intergenerational relationship with place.

Resource → Relative
What is typically treated as a resource becomes a living relation, reshaping how decisions are made and what is considered acceptable.

Control → Participation
Rather than controlling environmental conditions, practice is oriented toward participating within them.

Scalability → Situated knowledge (unresolved)
Place-based knowledge challenges dominant assumptions about scalability, raising questions about how such approaches can—or should—be engaged beyond their original context.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

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This 6th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in September 2025 explored the Kincentric Leadership Toolkit with Anna Kovasna, co-founder of Kincentric Leadership.

Launched in July 2025, the toolkit is designed to support communities, organisations, and movements in embodying leadership rooted in kinship with all life. Structured around eight core principles—ranging from Sacredness and Interdependence to Justice, Belonging, and Unravelling—it offers a combination of practices, indicators, reflective questions, and tools intended to guide both individual and collective transformation.

Rather than introducing the framework, this session focused on the realities of developing and applying such a toolkit: what it takes to translate relational and animist worldviews into something usable, where tensions arise, and how these principles hold up in real-world settings.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿 Learning Session 6 (September 2025) — Synthesis
Kincentric Leadership toolkit, with Anna Kovasna (Kincentric Leadership)

Can relational, kincentric worldviews be translated into practical tools without reducing their depth—and what happens when these principles meet the constraints and contradictions of real-world contexts?

1. How was the Kincentric Leadership Toolkit developed?

An emergent process rather than a top-down design
The toolkit did not begin as a fixed framework, but evolved over time through practice, collaboration, and ongoing engagement with communities working in different contexts.

Principles grounded in lived practice
The eight principles were not abstractly defined in isolation, but distilled from patterns observed across different initiatives, cultures, and ways of working with relational worldviews.

Translation as a central challenge
A key part of the development process involved translating ways of knowing and relating—often rooted in specific cultural or spiritual traditions—into forms that could be shared more broadly without stripping them of meaning.

🌱 Seed:
The toolkit is not a system imposed on practice—it is a condensation of practice that continues to evolve.

2. What tensions arise when applying these principles?

Human vs more-than-human priorities are entangled, not separate
The question of whether to prioritise human suffering or ecological wellbeing does not hold in practice, as the two are deeply interconnected. Attempting to address one in isolation risks reinforcing the very separation the work seeks to undo. In practice, this means that kincentric approaches do not “shift attention away” from human issues, but reposition them within a wider field of relationships, where social and ecological harm are understood as entangled rather than competing priorities.

Respect for life does not remove the need for boundaries
Principles such as Sacredness and Kinship do not eliminate difficult decisions, such as managing ecosystems, dealing with invasive species, or taking life. Instead, they require engaging with these realities more consciously and with greater accountability.

Authority and representation remain unresolved
Questions around who can speak for the more-than-human, and how, persist within the work. While the toolkit offers guidance, it does not fully resolve these tensions.

🌱 Seed:
Kinship does not remove complexity—it makes it impossible to ignore.

3. What challenges emerged in making this usable in real-world contexts?

From principle to practice is not straightforward
While the principles resonate with many people, translating them into daily decision-making, organisational processes, or strategy remains challenging. In practice, this often means that the tension is not conceptual but operational: how to remain in relationship when decision-making timelines, financial pressures, and institutional expectations pull in a different direction.

Risk of overwhelm
The richness of the toolkit—multiple principles, a handbook with capacities and practices, a benchmarking tool, and more—can make it a bit challenging for users to know where to begin. Rather than asking “how do I apply this?”, a more workable entry point is: what is the situation I am in, and which principle becomes immediately relevant here? This shifts the toolkit to a situational companion, allowing it to be used in sections without losing coherence.

Different entry points for different users
People engage with the toolkit from very different starting points, depending on their background, experience, and openness to relational worldviews.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
The toolkit is not meant to be applied all at once—starting from one principle, question, or practice is often more effective than attempting to engage with the whole.

4. How are people responding to the toolkit so far?

Resonance at the level of values and principles
Many people recognise themselves in the language of kinship, interdependence, and relationality, even if they have not previously articulated it in those terms. However they frequently encounter friction when these principles challenge timelines, performance metrics, or decision-making hierarchies.

Challenges in sustained application
While initial engagement can be strong, integrating the principles into ongoing practice—especially within organisations—requires continued effort and support. The difficulty is therefore not primarily intellectual, but structural: the environments in which people are trying to apply these ideas are rarely designed to accommodate them, requiring ongoing negotiation rather than straightforward implementation.

Use across different contexts
The toolkit is being engaged by a range of actors, from grassroots initiatives to organisational settings, each adapting it to their own needs and constraints.

5. What happens when the toolkit is applied in practice?

From principles to practice
While the toolkit offers clear principles, applying them in real contexts reveals complexity. Situations rarely align neatly with frameworks, requiring adaptation, judgment, and ongoing reflection.

What breaks when applied
Certain assumptions embedded in organisations—speed, efficiency, control—can clash with kincentric approaches that require time, reciprocity, and relational awareness.

Context matters
What works in one organisational or cultural setting may not translate directly to another. The effectiveness of the toolkit depends heavily on the willingness of the context to engage wit

h its underlying values.

🌱 Seed:
A toolkit can open the door—but it is only through lived practice, friction, and adaptation that its deeper potential is revealed.

6. What would need to happen for broader uptake?

Alignment with existing systems and structures
There is a tendency to adopt tools at a surface level without engaging the deeper shift in worldview they require, leading to partial or performative implementation. For wider adoption, the principles need to find ways to interface with organisational, institutional, and policy frameworks.

Capacity building and facilitation
Supporting people in how to work with the toolkit—rather than just providing the resource itself—is critical for meaningful uptake.

Holding depth while scaling
Without sustained practice, the language of kincentricity can be adopted without the corresponding change in behaviour or decision-making. A central challenge is how to expand the reach of the toolkit without diluting the relational depth that underpins it.

🌱 Seed:
Broader uptake depends less on distributing the toolkit and more on supporting the conditions in which it can be meaningfully engaged.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Across the session, several deeper shifts become visible.

Framework → Practice-in-use
The value of the toolkit does not lie in the framework itself, but in how it is engaged, adapted, and lived in specific contexts over time.

Principles → Tensions in reality
Each principle—whether Sacredness, Justice, or Kinship—reveals tensions when applied in real-world situations, rather than providing straightforward guidance.

Access → Depth (unresolved)
While the toolkit is designed to be accessible, meaningful engagement still depends on people’s willingness and capacity to work with its depth.

Distribution → Embodiment
Making the toolkit available is only the first step; its impact depends on whether it becomes embodied in practice.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

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This 5th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in July 2025 explored I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp: Resonating Worlds, with Svenja Keune, connected to the Design + Posthumanism network.

The I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp is an experimental, multi-day gathering that brings together designers, artists, and researchers to explore how humans might relate differently to insect worlds. Through a combination of fieldwork, artistic practices, and collective inquiry, the camp creates a space to engage with insects not as objects of study, but as beings with their own sensory worlds and modes of existence.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿 Learning Session 5 (July 2025) — Synthesis
I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp: Resonating Worlds, with Svenja Keune (Swedisch School of Textiles)

What does it mean to engage with forms of life whose sensory worlds are so radically different from our own—and how far can we meaningfully relate without projecting human interpretations onto them?

1. What is the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp trying to do?

An exploratory space rather than a defined method
The I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp is not designed as a structured methodology with predefined outcomes, but as an open, experimental space where participants can explore different ways of relating to insect worlds.

Shifting attention toward non-human sensory realities
Rather than focusing on ecological function alone, the camp invites participants to consider how insects perceive and inhabit the world—through sensing, movement, and interaction patterns that differ significantly from human experience.

Working through artistic and embodied practices
Approaches include observation, sound work, movement, and other forms of artistic inquiry that allow participants to engage beyond purely analytical modes.

🌱 Seed:
The aim is not to understand insects better in human terms, but to encounter the limits of how we understand at all.

2. How is the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp structured in practice?

A temporary, immersive setting
The camp takes place over several days, creating a dedicated environment where participants can step out of everyday routines and engage more fully with the surrounding ecosystem.

Combination of individual and collective exploration
Participants alternate between solitary observation or practice and shared reflection, allowing different forms of engagement to emerge.

Open-ended process rather than fixed curriculum
While there is a framework, the direction of the camp evolves through the contributions and explorations of participants rather than following a strictly predefined path.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
The format relies on immersion and openness, which makes it generative—but also difficult to translate into conventional formats.

3. What do participants actually experience?

Heightened attention to the more-than-human
Participants often begin by noticing how little attention they typically give to insect life, and how much becomes visible when that attention is deliberately shifted.

Encountering difference rather than similarity
Rather than finding easy points of connection, participants are often confronted with how fundamentally different insect ways of being are.

Moments of resonance and disconnection
There can be instances where participants feel a sense of connection or alignment, but these are interspersed with moments where the limits of understanding become very apparent.

🌱 Seed:
The experience oscillates between connection and incomprehension—and both are part of the practice.

4. What are the challenges or limitations of this approach?

Risk of projection
In attempting to relate to insect worlds, participants may unintentionally project human interpretations or meanings onto what they observe.

Difficulty in articulating outcomes
The kinds of experiences generated in the camp are not easily translated into clear outputs, frameworks, or actionable insights.

Limited direct applicability
Compared to other approaches, the connection between the camp and concrete decision-making or design processes is less immediate.

5. What has been learned through running these camps?

Value of sustained attention
Spending extended time observing and engaging with insect life reveals patterns and dynamics that are otherwise overlooked.

Importance of collective exploration
Sharing observations and interpretations with others enriches the process, as different participants notice and interpret different aspects.

Limits of human-centered frameworks
The camp repeatedly exposes how quickly human-centered assumptions reassert themselves, even when participants attempt to move beyond them.

6. How does this connect to broader more-than-human practices?

A different layer of engagement
While approaches such as legal frameworks or design methodologies operate within decision-making contexts, the I.N.S.E.C.T. Summercamp operates at the level of perception and experience.

A shift in entry point
Rather than starting from problems to be solved, it begins with how humans perceive and relate to other forms of life.

Indirect but foundational influence
The shifts in attention and perception developed through the camp may influence how participants engage in other contexts, even if this influence is not immediately visible.

🌱 Seed:
This work does not directly change decisions—it changes the way we arrive at them.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Across the session, several deeper shifts become visible.

Knowledge → Perception
The focus shifts from accumulating knowledge about insects toward engaging with how they might experience the world, even if only partially and imperfectly.

Understanding → Limits of understanding
Rather than aiming for full comprehension, the process makes visible where human understanding breaks down and cannot easily extend.

Application → Exploration
The value lies less in immediate application and more in opening up different modes of attention, perception, and relation.

Engagement → Projection (unresolved)
Attempts to engage with more-than-human worlds remain entangled with the persistent risk of projecting human meaning onto them.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

This 4th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in June 2025 explored emerging insights from the 10-month Cuerpo Enjambre (Body Swarm) program (November 2024 – August 2025) on Interspecies Activations with Isabel Cavelier, the founder of mundo común, a speculative practice of the future in the present.

Drawing inspiration from the collective intelligence of bees—particularly how they sense, decide, and relocate when a hive is under threat—the program combined virtual dialogues, an immersion in the Amazon, and a process of collectively creating “devices for deep listening.” The aim is not only to include more-than-human perspectives conceptually, but to activate different human faculties to engage with them in practice.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

Complementary note from mundo común: At the time of this dialogue (June 2025) Cuerpo Enjambre was in the midst of its creation phase. Swarms of participants were in the process of creating deep listening devices.

At the time of publishing this synthesis (March 2026), most of the swarms finalized their devices. After the intricacies of collective creation, the deep listening devices are being deployed and inviting others, beyond the program, to activate their own agency in entering into conversation with the more-than-human. Three of those creations are:

1. The book “The Fall of the Tree River”

2. The exhibition: “Invisible Worlds”, currently open in Bogotá and about to open for a month in London

3. The short film: “Cuerpo Enjambre”, available on YouTube.

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🌿Learning Session 4 (June 2025) — Synthesis
Cuerpo Enjambre (Body Swarm): Interspecies Activations, with Isabel Cavelier (mundo común)

What does it actually take to move from representing the more-than-human to relating with it directly—and what kinds of practices, capacities, and conditions does that require?

1. What is Cuerpo Enjambre trying to do in practice?

A shift from representation to activation
Rather than working through representation (as in legal or design approaches), Cuerpo Enjambre focuses on activating the capacity of participants to enter into forms of relationship with more-than-human beings. This is not positioned as symbolic inclusion, but as an attempt to engage more directly with living systems.

Designed as a long-duration process, not a one-off intervention
The 10-month structure reflects the understanding that this kind of engagement cannot be achieved through short workshops or isolated sessions. It requires time for participants to develop sensitivity, trust, and new ways of perceiving.

Bio-inspired structuring of the program
The program draws on the intelligence of bees—not metaphorically, but structurally—using their collective sensing and decision-making processes as a reference point for how humans might organise themselves differently in moments of uncertainty or transition.

🌱 Seed:
Cuerpo Enjambre is not about including the more-than-human in our processes—it is about transforming the human capacities required to relate to it.

2. How was the program developed, and what does it require from participants?

Activation of different human faculties
A central focus is on expanding beyond purely cognitive ways of knowing. Participants are invited to work with perception, attention, and forms of listening that are not typically engaged in professional or institutional contexts.

Combination of modalities
The program blends online dialogues, immersive experiences (including time in the Amazon), and collective creation practices, recognising that no single format is sufficient to support this kind of engagement.

Uncertainty as part of the process
There is no fixed “method” that guarantees outcomes. The process itself evolves, and participants are required to engage without knowing exactly what will emerge.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
This work cannot be reduced to a toolkit—it requires sustained engagement and a willingness to operate without predefined outcomes.

3. What does embodiment make possible in this work?

The body as a site of knowing
In Cuerpo Enjambre, the body is not treated as a passive receiver of information, but as an active site of perception and intelligence. Through movement, attention, and sensory engagement, participants begin to access forms of knowing that are not available through analysis alone—forms that emerge through feeling, rhythm, and attunement to the environment.

Collective sensing beyond the individual
When practiced in a group, this embodied awareness extends beyond the individual into a shared field of perception. Participants begin to sense together—responding not only to their own experience, but to subtle shifts in others, in the space, and in the more-than-human environment. This creates a form of distributed intelligence that cannot be located in any single person.

Reconfiguring how knowledge emerges
Rather than knowledge being produced through discussion or interpretation after the fact, it begins to arise within the practice itself—through interaction, improvisation, and shared attention. This challenges dominant models of knowledge production that prioritise abstraction over experience.

🌱 Seed:
Embodiment does not simply deepen experience—it changes where knowledge comes from, shifting it from the mind alone into a relational field where sensing, responding, and meaning-making happen together in real time.

4. What has worked—and what has proven difficult?

Time and continuity enable depth
The extended duration of the program allows participants to move beyond initial curiosity or novelty into more grounded, embodied forms of engagement. Over time, patterns begin to repeat, attention deepens, and participants start to notice subtler shifts in perception and relation. This kind of depth is difficult—if not impossible—to reach in shorter, workshop-based formats where the experience remains at the level of introduction rather than integration.

Not all participants engage in the same way
Participants enter the process with different levels of openness, prior experience, and comfort with non-linear or embodied practices. Some are able to drop in relatively quickly, while others need more time to acclimatise or may remain more at the edge of the experience. This unevenness is not a flaw of the process, but it does shape what becomes possible within the group and how far different individuals are able to go.

Difficulty in translating experience into shared language
A recurring challenge is articulating what is being experienced in ways that can be meaningfully communicated to others. Much of the work operates in a pre-verbal or non-conceptual space, making it difficult to translate into language without simplifying or distorting it. This creates friction when trying to share insights, document outcomes, or connect the experience to other contexts such as organisations or institutions.

🌱 Seed:
What works in the practice does not easily translate into words—and the more transformative the experience, the harder it becomes to communicate without reducing what actually happened.

5. What are participants struggling with?

Letting go of familiar modes of knowing
Participants often default to analytical, interpretive, or sense-making frameworks that prioritise explanation over experience. These habits are deeply ingrained and can make it difficult to fully engage with practices that ask for sensing, presence, and not-knowing. Letting go of these familiar modes is not a single moment, but an ongoing process of noticing and loosening.

Trusting what is being perceived
Even when participants begin to experience shifts—whether in perception, attention, or relational awareness—there is often hesitation in trusting these experiences. Doubt can arise around whether what is being sensed is “real,” valid, or meaningful, especially in the absence of familiar forms of verification or shared language.

Sustaining engagement over time
The depth of the work requires sustained attention and commitment over several months, which can be challenging alongside other demands and responsibilities. Staying with the process—especially when outcomes are not immediately clear or measurable—requires a different kind of motivation than goal-oriented learning.

🌱 Seed:
The challenge is not only to learn something new, but to unlearn the reflex to explain, validate, and control experience—and to remain with what is sensed even when it cannot yet be fully understood.

6. What has been learned so far?

This work is not universally accessible in the same way
Participants with prior exposure to embodied practices, ecological work, or relational ways of knowing may find it easier to enter into the process, while others require more time, guidance, or support. This highlights that the work does not land evenly across all contexts, and that accessibility is not just about invitation, but about readiness and resonance.

Collective processes matter
The group dynamic plays a significant role in enabling or constraining what becomes possible. Trust, openness, and the willingness of participants to engage influence the depth of the shared experience. In this sense, the process reflects its bio-inspired foundations: intelligence and insight emerge not from individuals alone, but from the quality of relationships within the group.

There are limits to how far this can be standardised
Attempts to formalise or replicate the process too rigidly risk stripping away the conditions that make it effective—namely responsiveness, emergence, and sensitivity to context. While certain principles can be carried across, the practice itself resists being turned into a fixed methodology without losing its depth.

🌱 Seed:
What makes this work powerful is precisely what resists standardisation—it depends on context, relationship, and emergence, which cannot be fully captured in a repeatable format without losing what makes it work.

7. How does this translate into climate action or biodiversity work?

Indirect rather than immediate application
The program does not produce ready-to-use solutions or interventions; instead, it aims to shift how participants relate to ecological systems, which may then influence their work in other contexts.

Embodiment as knowledge
Cuerpo Enjambre emphasizes the body not as an object, but as a site of perception and knowing. Movement, sensation, and collective presence become ways of accessing relational intelligence that cannot be reached through cognition alone. This challenges dominant knowledge systems that favour abstraction over lived experience.
The body does not just experience the world—it knows it, in ways that thinking alone cannot access.

Challenges of integration into existing systems
There is a gap between the kinds of experiences and insights generated through the program and the structures within which climate and biodiversity work typically operates.

Beyond individual cognition
Rather than replacing existing approaches, this kind of work may function as a deeper layer that informs how decisions, designs, or policies are approached. Working in groups for examples amplifies this capacity for embodied knowing, creating shared fields of perception where insights arise through interaction rather than individual analysis. This shifts the focus from isolated thinking to relational awareness, where meaning is generated collectively and dynamically.

🌱 Seed:
The impact is not in immediate outputs, but in changing the basis from which action is taken.

8. How replicable is this approach?

Context matters significantly
The program is deeply shaped by its specific context—ecologically, culturally, and relationally—including its grounding in territories such as the Amazon. These conditions are not incidental; they actively shape how participants perceive, relate, and learn, meaning that the outcomes are inseparable from the environment in which the process unfolds.

Replication is not straightforward
While certain elements of the approach—such as practices of attention, embodiment, and collective sensing—can be adapted, the process as a whole cannot simply be copied and transferred. Each new context requires a careful translation that takes into account local ecologies, cultures, and relational histories, rather than assuming universality.

Tension between scaling and integrity
Efforts to scale or replicate the approach introduce a real risk of simplification—reducing nuanced, relational practices into formats that are easier to distribute but less effective. Maintaining the depth and integrity of the work requires resisting the pressure to standardize what is inherently context-sensitive and emergent.

📌 Practitioner takeaway
Replication is not about reproducing the format, but about understanding and recreating the conditions—relational, ecological, and temporal—that make this kind of learning possible in the first place.

9. What does it take to bring this into other contexts?

From immersive practice to everyday settings
One of the core challenges is that Cuerpo Enjambre relies on conditions—time, space, attention, and facilitation—that are difficult to replicate in more constrained environments. Translating these practices into organisational or institutional contexts requires careful adaptation without losing their depth.

Translation without dilution
As practices move into new contexts, there is a risk that they become simplified, aestheticised, or instrumentalised—reduced to techniques rather than held as relational processes. Maintaining integrity means preserving not just the form, but the underlying orientation toward listening, reciprocity, and emergence.

Holding depth under pressure
In contexts that prioritise outcomes, efficiency, or clarity, practices that work with ambiguity, emergence, and not-knowing can be difficult to sustain. This creates ongoing tension between staying true to the work and making it legible or acceptable within dominant systems.

🌱 Seed:
What makes these practices powerful is also what makes them fragile—because they depend on conditions of attention, care, and openness that are easily lost when translated into systems that do not value them.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Across the session, several deeper shifts become visible.

Representation → Direct relational engagement
Where other approaches focus on representing the more-than-human, this work attempts to engage with it more directly, requiring different human capacities.

Method → Process
Rather than offering a defined method, the approach unfolds as a process that evolves over time and resists standardisation.

Output → Transformation of the participant
The primary site of change is not the external outcome, but the participant’s way of perceiving and relating—which may then influence action elsewhere.

Accessibility → Depth (unresolved)
While the approach opens new possibilities, it also raises questions about who can meaningfully engage with it and under what conditions.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

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Image: Hackney Interspecies Council (June 2024), House of Hackney

This 3rd learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in May 2025 explored the practice of Interspecies Councils with Louise Romain from Moral Imaginations.

Moral Imaginations’ body of work aims to cultivate imagination on behalf of the welfare of the whole, bringing the voices of future generations, the more-than-human world and deep time ancestors into culture, organisations and decision making.

The focus of the session was on how such councils are set up, how they function in practice, and what they make possible in contexts such as governance, land use, and organisational decision-making.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿Learning Session 3 (May 2025) — Synthesis
Interspecies Councils, with Louise Romain (Moral Imaginations)

How do you bring more-than-human perspectives into a room in a way that is structured enough to inform real decisions, without reducing those perspectives to simplistic or symbolic inputs?

1. What are Interspecies Councils?

A more-than-human citizens’ assembly
Interspecies Councils are democratic decision-making structures that introduce the perspectives of species, ecosystems, and landscapes into governance and policy processes, positioning them as participants rather than external considerations.

Developed as a contemporary governance practice
The approach was developed by Phoebe Tickell in 2021 as part of the Moral Imaginations work, building on earlier practices while explicitly orienting them toward real-world decision-making contexts.

From ritual to governance application
They draw on the Council of All Beings, originally developed by Joanna Macy and John Seed, translating this from its original context of ecological awareness and grief work into a structured format that can inform organisational and policy processes.

Representation through situated role-play
Participants take on the role of specific beings—such as rivers, animals, or ecosystems—and deliberate from those perspectives, using a combination of factual grounding, contextual knowledge, and informed imagination.

Structured, yet open-ended process
The councils are guided by facilitation, real-world issues, and clear stages, while allowing space for interpretation, emergence, and dialogue across perspectives.

Expanding the scope of decision-making
By bringing more-than-human perspectives into the room, the process shifts not only outcomes, but also how decisions are framed, what is considered relevant, and whose interests are taken into account.

🌱 Seed:
Interspecies Councils extend democracy beyond the human—while making visible the limits of representation itself.

2. How does an Interspecies Council actually work in practice?

Preparation determines whether the council produces anything meaningful
Participants take on a specific more-than-human entity and are expected to build a grounded understanding of it—its behaviour, dependencies, seasonal rhythms, and ecological role. When this preparation is superficial, participants tend to rely on assumptions or generic narratives; when it is done well, the perspectives brought into the room become far more specific and consequential.

The council is a facilitated, role-based dialogue—not an open conversation
During the session, participants speak from the perspective of the entity they represent, within a structure that ensures each voice is heard and that the discussion does not revert to a standard human-only exchange. What emerges is not a unified “voice of nature,” but a set of perspectives that often reveal tensions within ecosystems themselves.

Outputs require translation into decision-making contexts
The council itself does not make decisions. Its value depends on how insights are captured and carried forward into policy, design, or organisational processes, where they can actually influence outcomes.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Without rigorous preparation and a clear pathway into decision-making, the council risks becoming performative rather than impactful.

3. What does this practice do to participants?

It shifts engagement from abstract concern to situated understanding
Participants move from speaking about “nature” in general terms to grappling with the specific conditions and constraints of a particular species or ecosystem.

It surfaces constraints that are usually excluded from decisions
Factors such as timing, habitat requirements, and interdependencies become harder to ignore once they are articulated from within the system itself.

It changes what feels negotiable
What might initially be approached as a trade-off can become less flexible when the consequences for specific ecosystems are made explicit.

🌱 Seed:
The council does not just add perspectives—it reshapes what participants recognise as real and non-negotiable.

4. Where and when is this approach useful?

In contexts where ecological impact is present but not structurally represented
This includes land use planning, infrastructure, environmental policy, and organisational strategy, where ecosystems are affected but not directly included in decision-making.

When the framing of the decision itself needs to be challenged
Interspecies Councils are most valuable when the question is not how to optimise a decision, but whether its starting assumptions hold.

As a way to move beyond impact mitigation
Rather than focusing on reducing harm, the process can surface whether and under what conditions an intervention should proceed at all.

🌱 Seed:
This is not about improving decisions at the margins—it is about questioning whether the decision should be made in its current form.

5. What does it take to organise an Interspecies Council?

Scoping which perspectives need to be present
Relevant species or ecosystems are identified based on the context, rather than selected arbitrarily.

Ensuring participants are properly equipped
Access to ecological data, local knowledge, or expert input is critical for grounding the perspectives represented.

Facilitation as a form of discipline
The facilitator maintains role clarity, ensures the structure is followed, and guides how insights are captured.

Designing for what happens after
Without a clear pathway into decision-making, the outputs of the council remain disconnected from the context they were meant to influence.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Running a council is less about convening a session and more about designing a process that connects preparation, dialogue, and decision-making.

6. How do you deal with conflicting needs between species?

Conflicts become more concrete, not less
Different species or ecosystems may have competing needs, which are surfaced more explicitly through the council.

Limits become visible
Rather than smoothing over tensions, the process highlights where certain impacts cannot simply be balanced or traded off.

Decision-making shifts accordingly
This can lead to different decisions—or to questioning whether a proposed course of action should proceed at all.

🌱 Seed:
Including more-than-human perspectives does not resolve conflict—it reveals where real limits lie.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Across the session, several deeper shifts became visible.

Impact assessment → Decision reframing
The process shifts from evaluating impacts after the fact to questioning the basis on which decisions are made.

Abstract nature → Situated ecosystems
Generic references to “nature” are replaced by specific, context-bound perspectives.

Discussion → Deliberation with consequences
The council is not only exploratory; it is intended to inform decisions, even if integration remains challenging.

Inclusion → Uptake (unresolved)
Including more-than-human perspectives is possible in a structured way; ensuring they influence final decisions remains an open challenge.

For those interested in exploring this practice further—including resources, case studies, and the evolving body of work around Interspecies Councils—please visit Moral Imagination’s website and the online hub.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

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This 2nd learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox on More-than-Human Design in Practice with Anton Poikolainen Rosén (Stockholm University) in April 2025 focused on what it means to bring more-than-human design into practice, moving beyond concept into concrete ways of working.

Rather than approaching design as a human-centered activity, the conversation explored how design processes can begin to include, respond to, and be shaped by more-than-human actors. This raised both practical questions—how to do this in real projects—and deeper tensions around representation, legitimacy, and the limits of current design paradigms.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.

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🌿Learning Session 2 (April 2025) — Synthesis
More-than-Human Design in Practice, with Anton Poikolainen Rosén (Stockholm University)

What does it actually mean to design with the more-than-human—and how do we do this in ways that are not merely symbolic, extractive, or representational?

1. What is more-than-human design in practice?

A shift in what design is accountable to
More-than-human design moves beyond designing for human users or stakeholders, and instead engages a wider field of living systems as relevant to the design process. This is not simply an expansion of the user group, but a shift in what the process is accountable to.

Not an added layer, but a repositioning
Rather than adding ecological considerations onto existing workflows, it challenges the underlying assumptions of design—what counts as input, what defines success, and who or what has standing in decision-making.

Implications for practice
This shift has direct consequences: it changes how problems are framed, what options are considered viable, and how outcomes are evaluated.

🌱 Seed:
More-than-human design is not about designing for more—it is about designing from a different starting point.

2. How do you listen to the more-than-human in a design context?

Expanded notion of listening
Designing with the more-than-human always involves forms of interpretation, translation, and mediation. Listening thereby moves beyond verbal exchange and includes observing patterns, cycles, behaviours, and ecological signals.

Slowing down
Meaningful engagement with more-than-human actors often requires slowing down design processes in order to attune to these dynamics. It requires moving beyond designing solutions for nature toward designing with ecological systems as active participants. This requires new methods for sensing, interpreting, and responding to non-human inputs.

Design constraint
This can create friction with conventional timelines and deliverables within design practice. Moreover, in practice, designers often rely on proxies to stand in for non-human perspectives. These proxies are always partial, raising questions about how faithfully non-human perspectives are represented.

🌱 Seed:
Listening to the more-than-human is less about extracting input and more about attuning to patterns over time.

3. What has it taken to develop this field in practice?

Working against dominant paradigms
Practitioners have had to operate within systems that are fundamentally oriented toward human needs, economic value, and short-term outcomes. In more-than-human design however, the role of the designer shifts from authoring solutions toward facilitating relationships between human and non-human actors.

Lack of established pathways
There are few established methods or institutional supports, meaning that much of the work has involved developing approaches while simultaneously applying them. The shift from creator to facilitator also implies a partial relinquishing of control, where outcomes are not fully determined in advance.

Learning through situated experimentation
Progress has largely been made through projects and experiments, where approaches are tested, adapted, and refined in context. Within this, designers are required to work with greater humility, uncertainty, and responsiveness.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
The designer becomes a participant within a system, rather than its primary orchestrator.

4. What has been learned along the way?

Inclusion alone does not change outcomes
Simply adding more-than-human perspectives into existing processes does not necessarily shift decisions if those perspectives remain peripheral.

Positioning determines influence
Whether more-than-human considerations are treated as input, constraint, or shaping force directly affects whether they have any real impact.

Depth of engagement has consequences
The more seriously ecological systems are taken within the process, the more likely it is that design options will be restricted, altered, or abandoned.

🌱 Seed:
What matters is not whether the more-than-human is included, but whether it is allowed to change the outcome.

5. How do different approaches differ in their engagement of the more-than-human?

A spectrum rather than a single method
Approaches range from indirect representation—through data, models, or expert input—to more explicit forms of inclusion, and in some cases to deeper integration where ecosystems actively shape the design process.

Movement along the spectrum is consequential
At one end, more-than-human considerations inform decisions without fundamentally altering them; further along, they begin to constrain what is possible and reshape outcomes.

The distinction is often left implicit
Different more-than-human design projects operate at different points on this spectrum, but this is not always made explicit, which can obscure what level of change is actually being pursued.

🌱 Seed:
More-than-human design is not one approach—it is a range, and where you stand on that range determines what can change.

6. What does current practice still struggle to do?

Influence decisions early enough
More-than-human considerations are often introduced after key parameters have already been set, limiting their ability to shape outcomes.

Move beyond project-based application
Approaches tend to remain tied to individual projects rather than being embedded structurally within organisations or systems.

Operate within existing constraints
Design timelines, incentives, and delivery models often conflict with the requirements of deeper ecological engagement.

More-than-human design moves beyond designing solutions for nature toward designing with ecological systems as active participants. This requires new methods for sensing, interpreting, and responding to non-human inputs.

In practice, this often involves proxies, data, and interpretation—raising questions about how faithfully non-human perspectives are represented.

7. What would need to change to deepen application?

Earlier and stronger integration
More-than-human perspectives need to be present from the outset and positioned in ways that allow them to shape the direction of the process.

From input to constraint
For these approaches to have real impact, they need to define what is not possible—not just inform what is chosen.

Alignment with structures and incentives
Without changes in how projects are commissioned, evaluated, and governed, the scope for deeper application remains limited.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
The challenge is not only methodological—it is structural, requiring shifts in how design processes are set up and what they are accountable to.

8. Where is this field heading?

Continued development through practice
The field is evolving through experimentation across different contexts rather than through a single unified approach.

Greater clarity on modes of engagement
Distinctions between levels of engagement—from representation to deeper integration—are becoming more visible.

Pressure toward more consequential approaches
As the limits of superficial inclusion become clearer, there is increasing focus on approaches that materially affect decisions.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Across the session, several deeper shifts became visible.

Stakeholder → System
Design moves from focusing on individual users or stakeholders to engaging with broader ecological systems.

Control → Facilitation
The role of the designer shifts from directing outcomes to facilitating relationships and conditions.

Application → Structure
The focus moves from applying new methods within existing systems to questioning how those systems are structured in the first place.

Speed → Attunement
Fast, efficiency-driven processes are challenged by the need to slow down and engage with ecological rhythms.

Inclusion → Consequence (unresolved)
Including more-than-human perspectives is increasingly possible; ensuring they materially affect outcomes remains the key challenge.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.

To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.

Subscribe now

In March 2025, we launched the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox with a learning session on Rights of Nature & Earth Law together with Elizabeth Dunne from the Earth Law Center.

The session explored how legal systems can begin to recognize ecosystems as rights-bearing entities, and what shifts when nature is no longer treated as property but as a subject with standing. Through presentation and dialogue, we examined both the practical applications of Rights of Nature and the deeper implications this has for how we relate to the more-than-human world.

What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and emerging patterns from that conversation.

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🌿 Learning Session 1 (March 2025) — Synthesis
Rights of Nature & Earth Law with Elizabeth Dunne (Earth Law Center)

1. What does it actually mean to give nature rights?

Legal and relational shift:
Giving rights to nature is not merely symbolic; it introduces a legal reconfiguration of relationships in which nature is no longer treated as property, but as an entity with standing within the system itself.

Change in status:
This shift means that ecosystems are no longer positioned as objects to be owned or managed, but as subjects that can, through guardians, participate in legal processes and be represented in court.

System boundary shift:
As a result, the boundaries of the legal system itself begin to expand, redefining who or what is recognized as a legitimate participant.

🌱 Seed:
Rights of Nature is less about protecting nature more effectively, and more about redefining who (or what) counts within the legal system.

2. How is this different from environmental law?

Different starting point:
Environmental law typically operates by regulating harm, asking how much damage can be permitted within existing systems and under what conditions.

Alternative baseline:
Rights of Nature, by contrast, begins from the premise that ecosystems have inherent rights to exist, to regenerate, and to continue evolving.

Shift in orientation:
This changes the legal logic: instead of asking how much harm is permissible, it asks what conditions are necessary for an ecosystem to exist, regenerate, and evolve. It reorients decision-making away from limiting degradation and toward enabling the conditions under which life can continue to flourish.

🌱 Seed:
Where environmental law manages acceptable harm, Rights of Nature reframes the question toward what it takes for life to thrive.

3. Who speaks for nature?

Necessity of representation:
For nature to enter legal systems, some form of representation is required, which immediately raises practical and ethical questions. Guardianship models assign individuals or groups to represent ecosystems in legal and governance processes.

Diversity of approaches:
In practice, this representation takes different forms, including Indigenous guardianship, community-based representation, and legally appointed guardians.

• Indigenous guardianship

• Community-based representation

• Legally appointed guardians

Persistent tension:
Even when carefully designed, these models do not fully resolve the underlying issue, as the act of representing nature can still reproduce human authority over what is expressed. Although representation can make rights actionable, it also raises questions about legitimacy, interpretation, and accountability.

⚠️ Tension:
The challenge is not only to give nature a voice, but to ensure that this voice is not subtly shaped or constrained by human agendas.

4. Can legal systems really hold non-human perspectives?

Structural limitation:
Legal systems are historically and structurally anthropocentric, which limits their ability to fully accommodate non-human perspectives.

Capacity for evolution:
At the same time, they are not fixed systems; they can be stretched, adapted, and reinterpreted over time.

Mode of change:
Rights of Nature operates through this adaptability, working within existing legal frameworks while gradually shifting their underlying assumptions.

🌱 Seed:
This is less a legal rupture than a process of evolving the system from within.

5. Where is this already happening?

Existing practice:
Rights of Nature has been implemented in diverse contexts—from constitutional recognition to local ordinances and specific legal cases. Outcomes vary widely depending on political, cultural, and legal conditions.

Implementation gap:
Success often depends less on the legal text itself and more on the surrounding ecosystem of enforcement, advocacy, and institutional support. Existing cases consistently reveal a gap between recognition and enforcement, with legal acknowledgment often preceding the capacity or willingness to uphold those rights.

📌 Implication:
The effectiveness of Rights of Nature should be assessed not only by formal recognition, but by the extent to which those rights are actively enforced. A right on paper does not act on its own, but depends on the networks of people, institutions, and practices that bring it to life.

6. What role do Indigenous worldviews play?

Foundational influence:
Many Rights of Nature frameworks draw from Indigenous cosmologies in which humans are understood as part of an interconnected web of life rather than as separate from it.

Risk of misalignment:
When these perspectives are translated into Western legal systems, there is a risk that they are adopted at the level of language without corresponding shifts in governance or authority.

Condition for integrity:
The approach becomes significantly more meaningful when it involves an actual redistribution of power, rather than remaining at the level of conceptual inspiration.

⚠️ Risk:
Without this shift, the use of Indigenous concepts can result in appropriation rather than transformation.

7. Is this scalable—or inherently local?

Place-based emergence:
Most Rights of Nature initiatives arise from specific ecological, cultural, and political contexts, making them deeply rooted in place.

Limits of replication:
Because of this, they do not scale easily as standardized models that can be replicated across contexts.

Pattern-based spread:
Instead, what travels is a pattern of thinking and practice that is adapted and reinterpreted in each new setting.

🌱 Seed:
Rights of Nature spreads through contextual adaptation rather than replication.

8. What changes in practice when nature has rights?

Shift in decision criteria:
Recognizing nature as a rights-bearing entity introduces ecological wellbeing as a legitimate and actionable consideration alongside economic factors.

New forms of leverage:
This creates additional legal grounds for communities to challenge extractive activities, not only in terms of human impact but also in terms of harm to ecosystems themselves.

Broader system effect:
Over time, this changes what counts as a valid argument within decision-making processes.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Rights of Nature expands the field of legitimate claims, making ecological arguments structurally harder to ignore.

9. What are the limitations?

System dependency:
Legal recognition on its own does not transform underlying economic or political systems, and remains dependent on broader shifts to be effective. Despite its promise, Rights of Nature faces real barriers, including conflicts with existing property regimes and enforcement gaps.

Institutional inertia:
Existing legal and political systems can be slow to adapt, often resisting changes that challenge entrenched economic and governance structures.

Bridging principle and practice:
Turning abstract rights into actionable decisions also requires new tools, processes, and institutional capacities that are still evolving.

Risk of absorption:
Without these shifts, Rights of Nature can be integrated into existing structures without altering their core dynamics. This leads to symbolic adoption without substantive change—where rights are recognized but not meaningfully upheld.

⚠️ Key risks that emerge:

• Tokenism, where rights exist formally but do not influence outcomes

• Weak or inconsistent enforcement across contexts

• Co-option by existing power structures

🌱 Seed:
Rights on paper do not guarantee change—what matters is how they are enacted, defended, and embedded in practice.

10. What does this mean for co-creation with the more-than-human?

Formal entry point:
Rights of Nature creates a formal recognition of relationship within legal systems, opening new pathways for engagement.

Limits of formalization:
However, legal recognition does not automatically lead to practices of attentiveness, reciprocity, or meaningful engagement with the more-than-human.

Ongoing practice:
Co-creation requires forms of listening and relating that extend beyond what legal frameworks can define or enforce.

📌 Practitioner takeaway:
Law can create the conditions for relationship, but it cannot substitute for the ongoing work of being in relationship.

Cross-cutting insight threads

Across the session, several deeper shifts become visible.

Object → Subject
There is a movement from understanding nature as an object to recognizing it as a subject, which fundamentally alters how it is positioned within human systems.

Management → Relationship
A shift becomes visible from managing nature toward relating with it, where control begins to give way—at least conceptually—to reciprocity and responsibility.

Harm reduction → Regeneration
The focus expands from minimizing damage to enabling the conditions under which ecosystems can actively thrive and regenerate.

Representation → Listening (unresolved)
Running through all of this is an unresolved tension: while legal systems can create mechanisms to represent nature, the question of how to truly listen to the more-than-human world remains open.

Closing

These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved - and that continue to invite further inquiry.

Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across context and practices.

The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.

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