Beyond Human Design - The Multi species Revolution
Image courtesy of Spur Magazine
The following article was originally published in SPUR magazine in my Tomorrow column.
Back in 2023 I wrote about Interspecies Harmony, a movement for design and society that fosters multispecies wellbeing. The movement is accelerating and it seemed fitting to follow up 2 years later.
Challenging our one-sided relationship with Mother Earth isn't new. Indigenous cultures have ancient awareness of being at one with nature. The Global Alliance for Rights of Nature Timeline shows the first legal ideas in 1972 with law professor Christopher Stone’s seminal article, “Should trees have standing – toward legal rights for natural objects.” Check 2025 and you’ll see the acceleration is clear: from New Zealand's Taranaki Mountain gaining legal rights to Brazil's Constitutional Amendment recognizing Nature as subject of fundamental rights.
Daniel Christian Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures argues “We have to learn to design as nature. The first step in this process is to accept that as biological beings we are participants in and expressions of natural processes.”
New Governance and Decision-Making Models
In his 1990 book ‘The Natural Contract’ Michel Serres identified a fundamental flaw dating back to the 1700s Age of Enlightenment when we started creating fair human exchange through social contracts yet entirely neglected the natural world, turning it into a subject of appropriation, in an era busy colonising new territories and communities.
The World Economic Forum acknowledges our systemic crisis centuries’ old origins. During 2025’s Open Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, in Making the Case for Nature, Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Munoz, Coordinator for Earth Elders, questioned how it was possible that we live in a world where “corporations have more rights than the rivers, the mountains, the sea”. Legal personhood for nature addresses this absurdity.
The legacy of Serres’ Natural contract lives on. Moral Imaginations’ Interspecies Council methodology is a template for civil assemblies where civilians embody different species in decision-making processes. For example, when someone channels a tufted duck, they observe how humans partition areas in ways that would be incomprehensible to other species. Since its creation in 2021, the UK government hosted its first interspecies council in February 2024, as part of a Water Post 2043 project, exploring non-human perspectives in water policy. The results are profound, acting as an equalizer to find common goals.
The key is to stop these efforts from becoming ornamental. Research by activist-lawyer María Ximena González-Serrano on Colombian rivers shows rights frameworks fail to dismantle legal arrangements enabling extractive projects often driven by ruling class interests. In Is ‘legal personhood’ a tool or a distraction for Māori relationships with nature? Monica Evans highlights the risk that aligning traditional worldviews with Western legal instruments may entrench unhelpful paradigms. Indigenous voices are also raising critical concerns with Māori expert Jessica Hutchings arguing that humankind is the "youngest sibling," and that "elevating natural features through human personhood status feels presumptuous and likely ineffective."
The continuous stream of breakthrough initiatives, and its debates, show how we now require new forms of leadership and education to implement effectively.
Leadership and Learning Frameworks
Education and communities of practice are multiplying. The Institute of Natural Law connects students, specialists, activists, high profile leaders and wisdom keepers to organize for multispecies socio-political and ecological justice, shifting from "the illusion of separateness towards the awareness of Natural Law. The Bio-Leadership Fellowship connects 300 Fellows globally to change the story of leadership, as “a human mycelium” supporting nature-centred innovation to build resilience, systemic awareness, and deeper connection to natural life.
In the emerging field of Multispecies Studies, academics, Scientists, farmers, indigenous peoples, and artists are developing new methodologies for studying what constitutes life beyond human-centric frameworks and how we can better inhabit shared spaces. The field focuses on developing "Arts of Attentiveness": ways of noticing and responding to the non-human world that could reshape how we understand our place within larger ecological systems.
Design for Multispecies Thriving
The Future Observatory’s issue ‘More Than Human’ asks: "What does it mean to design not just for ourselves, but for other species and for the health of natural systems?”. Featuring Studio Ossidiana’s ‘Manual for More-than-Human Design’ six principles emerge, from 'Be animal, be human' to Design for proximity, design for distance.' In ‘Entering The Neo-Natural”, creative, insights and strategy agency Space Doctors challenges the separation between nature and society: “This separation limits our understanding of how intertwined these worlds are - of the ways flora and fauna can be a part of our social and cultural life, and the ways we are inextricably part of theirs.” The proliferation of research, though leadership and practical tools to upskill designers and leaders never stops, with recently the Design Council’s Skills for Planet blueprint which places nature as a stakeholder as a key principles.
The work of placing nature-as-key-collaborator from a biomimicry perspective is facing a wave of momentum. Ehab Sayed's Biohm research lab of designers, engineers, scientists, and business innovators from around the globe creates high-impact and high-performance solutions that harness the power of mycelium collaboration. Nature’s intelligence is also being mimicked in computational systems designed for multispecies interactions. In 2024, designers and researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands identified three distinct types of multispecies incorporating living and interactive organisms within human-made technology. Their work strives to facilitate connectivity, collaboration and reciprocity between multispecies and computers.
Collective Flourishing
To secure humanity's future by integrating harmonious strategies into socio-economic systems, what is the vision? At a time when there is so much conflict and economic challenges, don’t lose hope. True good is happening and perhaps Thomas Berry’s vision of an Ecozoic era, a new age of mutually enhancing Human-Earth relations, will fully come to life. For Fashion’s future this is a moral choice, that informs how we ideate, design, produce, shop, follow legislation. We need new terms of agreement, because our wellbeing will thrive when we experience our interconnectedness with all living systems.
By Geraldine Wharry
