Interspecies Council
In early April, 2025, I participated in an Interspecies Council for the first time. The event was a collaboration between Moral Imaginations (who created the practise), Feedback, and Wyrd Futures. The council was convened for the specific purpose of writing a response to DEFRA’s Land Use Framework from a more-than-human perspective.
In an Interspecies Council, each participant attempts to represent another species. A week prior, the organisers circulated a preparation pack, explaining the Land Use Consultation. I was assigned ‘Daubenton’s bat’, and encouraged to research their habitats, behaviour, and how they would be impacted by DEFRA’s framework. I did that through the internet, on a crowded train from Scotland to London.
That lead to a feeling that I, frankly, know nothing about bats. I arrived with a bundle of ‘did you know’ facts, some sprawling questions, and a curiosity as to how that would fit in. On the day, about 30 people gathered in a light-filled venue called Paper Garden in London. The facilitators opened the council and helpfully re-explained the Land Use Framework. Then, we flowed into general reactions in the round, smaller breakout discussions, and a closing session.
Attempting to keep my contributions linked to life of the bat had a tempering effect, I felt less pressure to understand every intricacy of the Land Use Framework and permission to embrace the areas that resonated with my slowly growing understanding of how bats live. The council teased out the intricate connectedness of the species and conversations culminated in a mutually strengthening set of points to be returned to DEFRA after careful processing.
The species represented included widely beloved native wildlife; industrially farmed animals; endangered and dwindling species; invertebrates; fungi; and plants. Many shared that doing research prior to arrival increased their ability to engage with the process and deepened their thinking about how the principle of interspecies empathy intermixes with daily life.
I pondered the affinities and biases people feel for different elements of nature. Those biases cast light and shadow on the world, meaning we can look at the same land as a neighbour and see a different mix of priorities and problems. It’s impossible to totally shed one's own positionality and, from my experience, that didn't feel like the point. My attempt to represent the bat was memorable because of tensions and synergies I noticed between the ‘species’, and imperceptibly between the humans in the room and the non-human characters they played.
Trying to tune into the experiences and behaviours of another species seems to dissolve some of the usual human ego. It’s worth noting that the absence of any sense of affinity for a part of nature tells a story in itself, and I wonder how the Interspecies Council method would go down with a crowd who report feeling little to no connectedness with other species.
My current understanding is that the IC is a way to indirectly interface with the more-than-human.
In that process, we are confronted with the extent to which relationships between people and the rest of nature have been dismembered or stunted. The process encouraged honest conversations about nature’s pressure points and thresholds in ways that rang with honesty, grief, disdain, and motivation.
Importantly, more-than-human species are expressive regardless of the attention we give them. The human voice is not the height of communicative sophistication and our attempts to ‘give voice’ to other species using our own will always be an act of estimation, compromising to fit into fabricated decision making systems. The exercise felt like a consciously imperfect form of representation shining light into the cracks of the anthropocentric status quo.
I am under no illusion that I could decipher, for sure, what a Daubenton’s bat wants or needs. I knew they are nocturnal; learnt why they dangle upside down; their preferred homes and commuter routes. I then thought about the association between them and the gothic, vampires, and haunted houses. I pondered on the discomfort and fear that bats elicit and wondered whether that’s because they blur the imposed lines of animal categories. Bats are flying mammals, they're five-fingered (like us) and winged (unlike us). I thought about how and when my path has crossed with bats - often on balmy days, at dusk, as they flicker in and out of sight, and my eyes dart after them in hopes of a clearer glimpse.
A recurrent theme in my head, throughout the council, was why humans are drawn to care for other animals. I thought about a passage that has shaped my work and vision since first reading it about 5 years ago. The pages have worn soft, the words paled by light. Robin Wall Kimmerer relives a night spent carrying salamanders, moving en masse to a safer place to reproduce, across a busy road. Kimmerer writes:
“What kind of species is it that leaves a warm home on a rainy night to ferry salamanders across a road? It’s tempting to call it altruism, but it’s not. There is nothing selfless about it. The night heaps reward on the givers as well as the recipients. We get to be there, to witness this amazing rite, and, for an evening, to enter into a relationship with other beings, as different from ourselves as we can imagine.” (1)
(image reference: Chavanelle, 2018)
Curiously, another member of the April IC reflected on the act of carrying bucketful’s of amphibians across busy roads. They were representing a native frog species, and spoke about the design and road management problems which lead to droves of locals massing, often at night, to fill containers with migrating creatures and ferry them across busy roads. See here for a recent, related story from the UK.
Kimmerer’s distinction of altruism and vindication came to mind as it captures the complexity of the emotions at play - the guilt, love, loss, and the lost-ness I feel more often than I say. Ferrying amphibians across roads both salves and stirs something deeper. Those salamanders don't belong to anyone, but their fates, in these cases, depend on whether people show up with torches that spot them time to find a decent spot on the other side. This is a complicated act of care, similar to those I had with ex-caged hens in my youth, in which the fractured power balance between humans and others is palpable.
The Interspecies Council tries to pull some of these tangled connections to the surface, verbalising them where possible, and having the tact to know the limits words. I was struck by the role of restraint by the facilitators, in guiding conversations which could have snowballed into something more like a debate, group therapy, or a sermon or sorts. Restraint came also on the part of the participants. There was generally a second of quiet separating contributions, reflecting a. intent listening b. knowing when to round up contributions. The fact that most could have gone on felt implicit. That feeling, of standing in a room of as-yet-unsaid stories is a curious feeling.
During the closing, the person to my left, John Conradi, shared that he arrived with scepticism. He then shared a simple sense that the Council had left him feeling ‘fundamentally less lonely’. Loneliness, in myriad forms, is at the roots of so much of this work, as a driving force as well as a side-effect.
Being honest, some attempts to deepen nature-connection leave me lonelier. That's not because they're poorly explained or facilitated, but that they claw open a gulf that I can’t always bridge in daily life. I've had that feeling for a while, and felt somewhat validated by a passage of a 2024 book called ‘Burn Out’.
Author, Hannah Proctor, traces the medical origins of ‘nostalgia’ through the 1800s and explores the shunt towards Urbain Briets understanding of a ‘political nostalgia’ which “looks to the future rather than the past”, and “does not result from a displacement from a preexisting home, but instead evinces a desire to feel at home in a just world” . The political nostalgic yearns for transformed social relations, living conditions, and governance structures. That longing, in each of us, is complex and shaped by context. Proctor then says,
“The concept of political nostalgia addresses the paradox - central to this book - of healing while living in a wounding social world, and it does so by suggesting the possibility of psychological healing in a socially just future.” (2)
That description chimes loudly with the question of learning to love a natural world that we know to be depleted, stressed, and broken. How do we grapple with the conflict waged on nature whilst seeking enchantment with the wild? At the furthest extent: what does it mean to love a dying place? There’s no one answer to that, but a number of connected lessons and an imperative to talk about loneliness more often.
The Interspecies Council stirred up my loneliness by highlighting the gap between where we are, and where we have to be - a “sustainable and regenerative social-ecological transformation” (3). Many attendees discussed the daunting reality that the future we long for isn’t at our fingertips. To find our way, we need more inclusive decision making forums, to consider competing interests, and explore tensions as they arise. That's more than any one can do in isolation.
There needs to be an appreciation for the fact that, to click into the practices of nature-connectedness being espoused by many with the best intentions, people can't be stressed, they can't be hungry or exhausted by life. That creates an invisible barrier to entry that I'm scared could get deeper. This came up at the closing of the IC in April. One person reflected that, as motivating and wonder-filled as the day had been, it is a rare privilege to be able to dedicate so many hours to stretching the imagination.
It is a privilege to be able to afford the time to challenge the status quo in a methodical and artistic way.
To be clear, the questions and angles I've laced into this piece stem from the power and potential I think the Interspecies Council holds. It is heartening to feel like that, and motivating to think about the possibilities future evolution will undoubtedly release. Thinking broadly about the Interspecies Councils held since Phoebe Tickell created the method in 2021, my understanding is as follows.
The method stands as a prototype for more thoughtful deliberative processes and highlights how our ability to perceive the complexity of wild-life is stunted. Each Interspecies Council is issue-specific, and held up by a skeleton of ecological and technical research. This creates stability and input legitimacy. The emotional underbelly of the process is what generates the strong ripple effects, shifting the way we look at others inhabiting shared places long after the Council closes.
With thanks to the organising team and other participants.
Lucy Gavaghan.
To explore the Interspecies Council method more deeply, visit the Moral Imaginations website.
Interspecies Council, created and stewarded by Phoebe Tickell at Moral Imaginations, CC BY-NC 4.0
References
Kimmerer, R.W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions.
Proctor, H. (2024). Burnout. Verso Books.
Alban Krashi, Moran, G., Carter-Gordon, A., Lacey, M., Lock, J. and Cotterrell, D. (2024). The Rights of Nature: A call for a policy of mutually assured flourishing. People Place and Policy Online, [online] 18(2), pp.82–96. doi:https://doi.org/10.3351/ppp.2024.6728445459.
