The Natural Contract

One can debate the aptness of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to our current geological period, but there is no denying the influence it has had across a spectrum of academic thought when it comes to acknowledging the effects of human-centrism on the planet. Anthropologists, for one, have been engaged in a decade-long reckoning with the limits of human-centred anthropology. The more-than-human turn in anthropology has sought to understand the ways in which human activity is bound up with living systems. Following in their footsteps, designers are increasingly coming to terms with the limits of human-centred design as a way of addressing the climate crisis. Rather than privileging some hallowed ‘user’, more-than-human design seeks to bring other species into consideration. This might be by designing with or for other species specifically, or by respecting an ecosystem more generally.

As a form of practice, more-than-human design is still nascent, more a mindset than a clear methodology or a set of practical solutions. But then its power may lie in a radical form of hesitancy. Designers – always so confident to design, to build, to solve – are encouraged to flip their perspective, to notice the previously unnoticed beings and to try to understand the implications of intervening in a living system. As an approach, more-than-human thinking is a powerful challenge to the very idea of design as we currently understand it, and the market-driven systems that it operates within.  It is certainly more radical than the reformist efforts to use design to drive ‘sustainability’ or ‘net zero’ goals, urgent though these are. Rather, it hoists design out of the mode of solving symptoms and seeks to address one of the root causes of climate breakdown, a failure to understand the ways human activity is entangled with complex living systems. It is precisely that shift from symptoms to larger narratives with which this journal is so preoccupied.

The question is, what new frameworks would need to be developed to encourage more-than-human design as a widely applicable approach? What historical traditions could we draw on to reposition contemporary design practice? And what policies, legal frameworks or incentives might be brought to bear? These questions reflect the main areas of activity when it comes to exploring a more-than-human politics, and structure what follows: the question of legal rights, the question of historical precedents and the question of representing non-humans in human decision-making.

In his book The Natural Contract, Michel Serres points out that while the Enlightenment had finally arrived at a fair model of exchange between humans – the social contract – it had entirely neglected any contract with the natural world. Nature was reduced to ‘passive objects for appropriation’. ‘That means,’ wrote Serres, ‘we must add to the exclu­sively social contract a natural contract of symbiosis and reci­procity in which our relationship to things would set aside mastery and possession in favour of admiring attention, reciprocity, contemplation, and respect; where knowledge would no longer imply property, nor action mastery.’

It is apposite that Serres, following Rousseau, frames this as a contract because the most notable achievements in the more-than-human trajectory thus far have been legal documents. The growing movement to secure legal rights for natural bodies such as rivers sees legal personhood as a key strategy for the protection of nature. Such rights have been enshrined in the Ecuadorian constitution, which grants Mother Nature (Pachamama) legal standing, including the rights of rivers not to be polluted. While Ecuador stands out, there are hundreds of initiatives around the world seeking legal rights for natural bodies. Almost forty of these relate specifically to rivers, including the Ganges in India, the Atrato in Colombia, the Marañón in Peru and the Whanganui in New Zealand – interestingly there are no cases yet in the UK. Of course, legals cases are one thing, but even when enshrined in law, natural rights still need upholding and enforcing, and that will often fall to engaged citizens.

The More-Than-Human Rights Project (MOTH) at New York University School of Law exists to document and advance such initiatives. As its director, César Rodriguez-Garavito points out, the law remains largely anthropocentric, and thus the project is to challenge ‘the categorical distinction between human and nonhuman forms of life that is at the core of modern law’. 1 1 César Rodriguez-Garavito (ed.), More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narative for earthly Fluorishing, New York: NYU MOTH Project, 2004, p15. For MOTH, this is far from merely a legal undertaking, but benefits from diverse collaborations with writers, philosophers, musicians and designers. Crucially, the collective also collaborates with and learns from Indigenous peoples and worldviews that take the aliveness of their surroundings as sacrosanct.

While more-than-human design is still an emergent field, the fact is that it has been a part of human activity for thousands of years. Mesopotamian farmhouses were multispecies dwellings, even in urban contexts, as was the European longhouse or peasant dwelling. Similarly, the Tongkonan in Sulawesi, which is still used today, is a house typology designed around the buffalo first and the human second. In such cases, cohabitation was a form of care, allowing for the sharing of heat and the rituals of co-dependency. Were these relations extractive? In one obvious sense, yes, the animals provided meat or milk or labour, but the term ‘extractive’ has a tendency to erase much of the care and craft that went into human–animal relations.

With industrialisation, and the urbanisation that accompanied it, these relations moved swiftly from a co-dependency model to one of efficiency. Land use and architecture followed suit, with the development of feedlots and batteries and other forms of intensive farming, which mimicked the aesthetics of the plantation. While we have transitioned out of our once symbiotic relations with animals, the shift is relatively recent – little more than a century ago, which is a blip in more-than-human relations.

In modern cities, our relations with non-humans tend to be confined to our companion species. Of course, more-than-human design persists but it is exclusionary rather than symbiotic – just imagine how much time and money a city like London invests in pigeon spikes. Meanwhile, activists and architects who advocate for greater biodiversity in cities often do so from a narrow perspective. Witness recent proposals in the UK to mandate the use of bee bricks and swift bricks – made with holes that encourage habitation – in new developments. Designing for a single species is hardly a holistic approach and its efficacy is questionable.

What might truly more-than-human urban design and policy-making look like? How can we factor in multiple non-human perspectives in human decision-making? And do our fellow species require some form of political representation in the process?

As the River Roding experiment reveals, we are still some way from more-than-human thinking at the policy level. And yet there is a policy in the UK that effectively addresses more-than-human concerns. In 2024 the government made Biodiversity Net Gain mandatory for all local planning authorities in England. The policy requires developers to increase the biodiversity of a site by at least 10 per cent. For instance, if a developer chops down some trees, it has to replant them, with at least 10 per cent more on top. That rule applies to all habitats on the site, whether or not they are affected by the development. If the developer is not able to achieve the net gain on the site, then it has to find an appropriate off-site habitat within the local area; if this is not possible, then it has to buy biodiversity credits from the government. As with net zero carbon, that ‘net’, with its accompanying credits system, reveals an accountancy logic fraught with loopholes and credit trading. And yet it is a major step forward in planning law.

One might ask how effective policy is at all on this issue given the slow progress since the first environmental policies were introduced in the 1960s and ’70s. As a planet, we have lost 69 per cent of our wildlife since 1970, and we continue to see between 10,000 and 100,000 species disappear every year. Agriculture and urban development are the primary cause of this loss. And yet political levers have to be more effective than relying on businesses, whether in agriculture or construction, to prioritise biodiversity.

The question is, when is more-than-human policymaking enabling, and when is it disabling? In other words, there is a spectrum of more than human approaches, from ‘do not touch’ (rewilding) to ‘make amends’ (the Biodiversity Net Gain model). Governments are likely to frown upon approaches that limit economic activity – we’ve seen the nesting grounds of the crested newt spell the end of developments – and yet that seems a necessary trade-off if we embrace genuine more-than-human relations. What is the acceptable face of more-than-human policy-making for governments that have promised they will grow the economy? Is it Biodiversity Net Gain, a model that builds responsibility into development? Let’s hope that is only a starting point, and much will depend on how well it is monitored and enforced.

A genuinely more-than-human approach to planning would go beyond repairing the damage of new development and would measure value by the way they incorporate functioning ecosystems into their design. For example, the municipality of Curridabat in Costa Rica has developed a long-term community plan built around pollinators as citizens, which shapes decision-making, urban design and evaluation.

Those questions were taken up by the UK government’s Policy Lab and Defra Futures, the futures unit at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, in April 2023 when they set out to explore what more-than-human decision-making around a freshwater system might look like in 2043. To do so, they adopted the experimental model of an ‘Interspecies Council’ developed by the activist design lab Moral Imaginations. Focusing on the River Roding, near Barking in east London, the aim was to attempt decision-making from the point of view of the River itself, by empathising with different parts of its ecosystem. What was novel to those in the policy sphere was the method: each participant was supported to embody and represent one of 25 different species endemic to the River Roding, be it a water vole, a reed warbler or a tufted duck. These were chosen with the help of a Defra ecologist, and each person was given time and guidance on how to prepare to represent their species, as well as the artistic and imaginative support to do so.

Both playful and serious, the role-playing aspect helped participants imagine not just the needs of different species but the tensions between them in a complex ecosystem. The council then prepared its recommendations for the river, which included creating wide river margins to create more habitats for new species, protecting reed beds and establishing preservation zones for nature to restore itself. The intention was never to produce policy but rather to test a radically different mechanism for decision-making about water. The biggest impact, according to the evaluation, was a shift in mindset and individual behaviour among participants, with 92% of participants noticing a lasting change in their perception of nature, and a significant reduction in their human bias. Equally intriguing was the idea that changing the micronarratives of a place can lead to changes in the macronarrative. At the very least, the exercise of asking civil servants to adopt non-human perspectives embedded the idea of belonging to a more-than-human community. As one participant put it, ‘I now know the tufted duck better than my own MP.’

We’ve seen that granting natural bodies legal rights is an increasingly popular way of safeguarding nature. If, for instance, the UK’s rivers had rights, it would expose the water companies currently polluting them for profit to a raft of class-action lawsuits that would make their operations deeply unprofitable. This route relies on local authorities or concerned citizens to defend those rights, and for the legal apparatus to uphold them.

Then there is the idea of expanding the representation of other species in policy-making. This is intriguing but certainly not without its complications. Human civil-servants would have to be prepared to cede some power to other species. And then the inevitable question becomes, which species have priority? Because any situation is likely to advantage some species and disadvantage others. We might think of this as a form of diplomacy, negotiating between species just as we do between nations. It requires us to design political forums in which non-humans are represented because, however inauthentic it may be, the very act of representing them builds empathy and expands the matters of concern beyond the human.

Ultimately, what we are talking about is an expanded set of relations. And those relations will never be fixed or static, but are unruly. They must include so-called invasive species such as Japanese knotweed or the non-native parakeets that may disrupt ecosystems but nevertheless delight visitors to Hyde Park. The very act of considering other perspectives is a challenge to business-as-usual and the prevailing metrics of growth and GDP. If lawmakers were to take such methods seriously, there is no way in which it could not be politically radical. To return to Serres’s notion of the natural contract, this is a set of relations that demands we ‘set aside mastery and possession’.