Co-Creation with More than Human learning session: Interspecies Councils

Recent years have seen a surge in interest for how we engage with and represent or involve nature and the ‘more-than-human’. With this surge of interest comes an expanding community of practitioners, some of which are relatively new to the topic, while others have been practicing for years well before the topic started going more mainstream.

An increasing number of people have expressed a desire to connect, collaborate and learn from each other. And the growing application of different approaches allows for an expanding pool of inspiration that we can draw from.

To this end, Kincentric Leadership in association with The Repatterning Collective is organising an initial learning series as part of a Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox. The 'sandbox' provides a virtual place for experiential learning, where we can shine a light on different approaches & explore their development and application, their workings, and future directions, to advance our understanding of and ability to genuinely co-create with the more-than-human.

In the next learning session, we’ll be exploring the practice of Interspecies Councils. Our guest speaker Louise Romain works with Moral Imaginations, while also being a sound artist/documentarist, and a trained anthropologist.

The Interspecies Council is a life-centric practice created as part of the Moral Imaginations body of work to cultivate imagination on behalf of the welfare of the whole. The aim of the latter is to catalyse a movement of Moral Imagination bringing the voices of future generations, the more-than-human world and deep time ancestors into culture, organisations and decision making. It's thereby pioneering cutting edge practice, that bridges inner transformation with policy and practice to centre Life and all living beings. One of these practices is the Interspecies Council, a form of more-than-human citizens assembly.

The Interspecies Council introduces more-than-human ontologies and perspectives into systems through decision-making and governance. This methodology was created by Phoebe Tickell through her mentorship with Joanna Macy, and adapts elements of the approach ‘The Council of All Beings’ to decision making and deliberation. It's therefore an exercise of more-than-human deliberation, that balances rational and analytical approaches with imagination and more-than-human empathy applied to real world issues, and thereby bridges inner and outer shifts.

The aim of this practice is to catalyse the inclusion of the voice of nature and more-than-human beings into organisational decision-making, governance mechanisms and policy development; bringing awareness and respect to the Life and the sentience of our natural world; and highlighting their very real presence in issues that directly concern them. Rather than a discussion about nature, it becomes a discussion from the point of view of nature. It takes roots both in the deep ecology movement and in ways of knowing and being in relationships that have been stewarded by Indigenous wisdom traditions for generations.

This learning session will introduce and discuss the concept through semi-structured dialogue, as well as look at practical examples and principles behind the practice. We warmly welcome your thoughts and questions as participants in the session.

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