In a village in Norway, humans representing flora and fauna of all kinds meet to reimagine ‘nature-centric governance’
“My ask of humans is quite large,” says the northern bat to a room of reindeer, wolf lichen, bog, and other beings. “It’s a shift of consciousness, and an understanding that … we are a relation.”
The scene could come from a sci-fi novel imagining a more-than-human uprising. In fact, it’s from a recent “interspecies council” in Oppdal, Norway, in which non-humans – spoken for by humans – convened to discuss the region’s future.
In the 1980s, the environmentalists John Seed and Joanna Macy developed the Council of All Beings: a practice in which humans embody and represent other species in a ceremonial council.
The scientist and “moral imagination” activist Phoebe Tickell was a mentee of Macy’s. Together they imagined integrating the practice into governance structures. This inspired Tickell to develop the interspecies council, which she describes as a “decision-making methodology that expands who has voice and representation in governance beyond humans alone”.
