More than meets the eye

Do you ever look around and wonder: why are our clothes, our buildings, our handwriting, our music on average so much uglier than in the past? Like you can see and feel they weren’t built to last, to stay around … like our civilisation? Like you can tell they don’t participate in the web of meaning: they are expressions of a shared vision that what life is about is, basically, “I want more stuff”. Honestly, one of the things that deeply motivates me to imagine a serious alternative to society is: can we please just make things beautiful again?

Immediately to the above one might protest that there is a risk of getting lost in outer beauty – become consumed and hollowed by the pursuit of beautiful bodies, beautiful clothes, beautiful homes or even public buildings – that what matters really is whether things are healthy and fair.

Beauty is the embodied expression of a system that works well: the time devoted to crafting what’s beautiful, the economic distribution such that as many people as possible inhabit beautiful (not necessarily lavish) places and things. Life-giving patterns are beautiful. Whereas there is something debasing, depressing, life-destroying even about plastic-wrapped lunches, a cell in a modular apartment building, the fast-fashion blouse that makes you sweat and itch and you need to throw it out after 7 times in the wash.

When did beauty die?

And by that I mean, when did beauty die as something we should value and uphold as a society. Well, it didn’t happen all at once. But here are some major milestones in the history of mass ugliness we should be aware of:

• Industrialisation (early-mid 19th century): for the first time in history, the majority of working people lived in conditions of systematic ugliness —unlike the humble beauty of vernacular architecture and craft.

• The Victorian backlash (mid-late 19th century): The Arts and Crafts movement1, Gothic Revival and Pre-Raphaelites attempted to keep beauty alive in the industrial world, though only the wealthy could access it. For the first time, beauty was a luxury product.

• Modernism’s principled rejection (1900s-1930s): Loos, Le Corbusier2 and the Bauhaus rejected beauty on moral grounds, and said function is truth.3 They were responding to, frankly real, Victorian excess and ornamentation, but without something to offer in its place. What ended up happening is that these thinkers created an ideology that worked very well with the logic of industrial capitalism. The ‘aethetic’ became that of the machine.

• Postmodern theory (1960s-1980s): Duchamp had already declared the art object irrelevant in 1917; now Warhol completed the argument by making consumer imagery into fine art and viceversa, melding beauty with brand. Jameson, Baudrillard and company theorised: late capitalism had dissolved the conditions for genuine aesthetic experience, replacing it with pastiche4 and simulacrum5 — style without substance, form without myth.

• Market capture (1980s-present): In the Thatcher-Raegan era, art became an asset. Meanwhile, the emerging branding industry turned aesthetic innovation into a marketing strategy. Koons took this logic to its extreme, making multimillion dollar objects which were about nothing but their cash value. Beautiful objects survived but removed from craft, from context, or a shared story about what life is for.

So looking back, we can see how beauty was first made exclusive by industrialisation, then rejected on principle by modernism, further theorised out of existence by poststructuralism, and finally repackaged in luxury items. Each of these was a different kind of defeat, and together they explain why making serious arguments in favour of beauty and its value to public life remains a cultural taboo. Here we are attempting to help restart that conversation.

Why beauty is political

“Real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour. To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use.”

— William Morris, The Art of the People (1879)

It is political because it reflects our incentive structures — what gets produced, how, and what people can actually afford to want. Take clothing, or cheap furniture. These can be made available at low prices because they export the labour to somewhere else in the world where humans’ time is worth less, and because the materials they are made with often cause great damage to the environment, far away from where they get assembled and even further from where they get bought.

Trade agreements, a market where growth requires consumption, and consumption requires things to wear out and break. The assumption that we can endlessly take from the planet at rates higher than we can give back are all necessary – and political – conditions for making cheap and short-lasting clothing and furniture the norm most people can afford.

And what if instead you thought of a table as something a family had to buy every 100 years? Or even 200? I promise you’ll put a lot more effort into making it beautiful. Same goes for a shirt that could last you 15 years, a phone that could last you 20, 30 (or more), a building that lasts 500, or 1000, and the list goes on forever. In practice, this already means taking a view of life that spans several generations, beyond one’s own.

And this different view, which would enable life to be more beautiful, is also a political one insofar as it inspires a different kind of dance between self and another, another understanding of what it means to be, as citizens, creators of history.

Life reproducing itself is beautiful

There is an architect and theorist called Christopher Alexander who spent fifty years trying to answer this question: what are the actual conditions that make a building, a town, a room feel alive rather than dead? His conclusion, after decades of direct observation, was that beauty isn’t actually a matter of taste.

More than just pretty

Before we delve further into this, what do we mean by beauty? Again, many people before us have sat with this question. Beauty differs from prettiness – which is immediately agreeable, symmetrical, inoffensive. A new-build with Georgian windows is pretty, or a lot of what you would see on a Vogue cover. Whereas an old street, carved around the passage of people through centuries, is beautiful in Alexander’s sense because it rewards sustained attention, being in genuine relationship with a place, its people, its history.

“When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must also repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.”

— Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

Keats, echoing the Greeks, wrote that beauty is truth and truth beauty: prettiness is agreeable but makes no claim on reality, while living beauty, as Ruskin put it, involves the whole person, not just the eye. Simone Weil went further by saying that “the attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful.” Prettiness is something that invites consumption rather than contemplation. Heidegger called living beauty the difference between genuine dwelling6 and mere occupation, and saw in modernity’s reduction of everything to function and exchange value the systematic destruction of the conditions for both.

I admire Alexander’s rejection of the idea that beauty is just a subjective preference. To him, this attitude breeds the deadness around us - modular apartments, flat-pack furniture, and anonymous high streets. When we treat beauty as an opinion rather than a reality, we stop trying. And when we stop trying, we trash the world, destroying life.

“The attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful.”

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)

Dancing with life

The quality without a name Alexander saw – which he later called “life” – is measurable in principle, present or absent in buildings and towns and rooms depending on whether they embody certain geometric and relational properties. A hand-carved door handle, a step warped by people’s passage, a room with a window in the right place are beautiful because they are in relationship with their environment. As I said in our first political generation piece, politics, like beauty, is a dance between the self and other.

Making something beautiful is not a surface-level bonus. It is the process and product of participating in the structure of existence itself, throughout space and time. That the same qualities that make a building feel alive are connected to something fundamental about what the universe is and what we are and what we understand life to be about. If we are going to seriously imagine a different kind of civilisation – one where the table lasts two hundred years – we will have to restore and defend beauty as a value.

When Alexander talks about beauty being in a dialectical relationship with its environment he means space, but also time. A truly living structure is one that knows where it is in history: speaking to what came before it and creating space for what comes after. Jameson diagnosed the loss of this quality in postmodern culture as a “waning of historicity” – and you can see it in the postmodern building that borrows spatial vocabulary, such as by using imitative Gothic ornaments, of a tradition while being severed from its continuity across time. Disposable culture makes everything it touches placeless and timeless in the worst sense. The H&M blouse isn’t just cheap. It has no past and no future. It is, in the most literal sense, a thing that doesn’t believe in history, and that if anything does believe in the end of history.

Embodied myths

The heart of this argument is: beauty exists insofar as it participates in mythic reality, a shared narrative that orients a community in time and space, that gives us coordinates for where we came from, what we are here for7, and what is worth building. Every great aesthetic tradition is a myth made tangible. The Gothic cathedral is Christian cosmology enshrined in stone. The Florentine piazza is the architectural body of humanist belief. Far beyond ornamentation, beauty is one of the primary ways the myth becomes fathomable and liveable.

“Without myth every culture loses the healthy natural power of its creativity: only a horizon defined by myths completes and unifies a whole cultural movement.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

A civilisation that has declared the end of history cannot produce this kind of beauty. Liberal capitalism is, as a myth, deliberately thin – it makes a virtue of leaving the questions of what life is about (political questions) to individuals, which by definition stunts political life.

Fascist attempts, and failures

Some of you by now will have wondered, and what about fascism? After all, it did have aesthetic ambition – some even say it was Adolf’s great revenge for not getting into art school! But fascism was ultimately the “aestheticisation of politics” rather than a genuine mythic expression, It was too self-conscious and top-down. Hitler personally designed the movement’s iconography; his architect, Speer, saw himself as playing a part in staging theatre8. Fascism is an attempt at myth that lapses into brand strategy — a catastrophic confirmation of what happens when the form of mythic beauty is seized and no longer in dialogue with the beings that participate in it. Genuine myth cannot be manufactured from above. It emerges from communities living and building together — which is precisely what makes it so difficult to restore, and so vital to attempt.

Beauty, myth, politics: intertwined

Beauty requires myth, myth is political, meaning beauty is political too. Others have made versions of this argument before. Arendt argued that genuine politics requires a common world of shared meanings without which collective action is impossible. Castoriadis called this the “social imaginary”: the collective web of meanings that holds a society together and gives it direction, and whose hollowing out by markets and bureaucracies he saw as modernity’s deepest political failure9. And Taylor more recently argued how liberal modernity has worn down the shared moral compass that once gave politics its orientation, leaving us with procedural freedom and consumer choice but no answer to the question of what we are here for.

My point is that the loss of beauty is not separate from today’s overall crisis – it is both its embodied expression, and one of the most powerful paths to recovering meaning. A society that cannot make beautiful things together has lost, or not yet found, the shared story that makes genuine politics possible.

Beauty isn’t always fair, but it can be

Some beauty was built on the backs of slaves

Now I’m going to have to say something controversial: societies that replicate conditions for life, and thus beauty, aren’t necessarily fair. In fact, many civilisations that have left us beautiful historical artifacts relied on massive inequality to do so – Athenians who were fair only amongst their (male, wealthy) citizens, Romans and Egyptians for whom slavery was just a fact of life – as in the later British Empire, the Renaissance which was sustained by vast patronage (the Medici being the most famous example) whose commitment to humanism was real but reliant on their monopoly on power. The fact that beauty has so often been the aesthetic expression of empire, patronage and inequality is what led modernist and postcolonial critics to treat it as a suspect category altogether — conflating the abuse of beauty with beauty itself. These concerns are worth addressing directly.

Beauty doesn’t have to be lavish, or built by power. Vernacular craft traditions – the beautiful Tuscan farmhouses, English parish churches, Japanese rural buildings – were often produced by ordinary people with relatively modest means. A medieval villager had agency over his or her work: their craft was beautiful not despite the conditions of their labour, but because of them.10 Beauty can emerge from dignified, fairly distributed work. It was industrialisation, not inequality per se, that killed it.

The fairest society ever, and the most likely to bring everyone down with it

Those unequal and often cruel societies weren’t bringing civilisation to the brink of (ecological and general) self-destruction. They paid little attention to individual rights and yet, unlike us, many endured for centuries. To be fair, this probably had a lot to do with the much more limiting technologies they had at hand (take the violence required to slash through someone’s gut or saw their head off, and apply it to a society where basically a red button can blow up the planet).

Here we are – the most formally inclusive society in recorded history, the first to make universal human rights a stated organising principle – and a majority of people in many countries suspect it might collapse within their lifetimes. Inclusivity doesn’t automatically reproduce the conditions for life and beauty. Fairness and beauty are not the same thing as social and ecological stability. It’s time to pursue them together, deliberately. And frankly, nothing like this has been done at scale before.

Why morally imagining societal alternatives requires aesthetic ambition

I am aware that in writing this I am stumbling into a conversation that stretches back at least to Plato11, and that I cannot do full justice to here. Ruskin made a similar argument about the political economy of beauty in the 19th century, connecting Gothic craft to human dignity and industrial capitalism to ugliness, which Morris took directly from him. Simone Weil also saw beauty, truth and justice as a unified whole, and thought that the attention that beauty demands can inspire us to treat each other well, while Hannah Arendt argued that a shared world of durable, beautiful things is the literal precondition for political life – that a civilisation of disposable objects erodes the commons12 that make collective action and belonging possible.

And yet we still don’t talk about beauty enough, perhaps because it clashes with current ideological trends that reify individual taste and expression over building collective dreams.

An effort to morally imagine viable futures in the face of the polycrisis requires us to treat beauty as a real and necessary part of all life reproducing itself. Perhaps being a moral imagination activist means upholding beauty as part of one’s moral compass.

This is just the first of several inquiries on this topic as part of a Political Generation series. We will further explore themes such as:

• What it takes for there to be aesthetic ambition that breaks free of brand

• Recent and past civilisations’ aesthetic ambition

• The current aesthetic of majorities who feel like outsiders in their own society

If you are interested in this kind of conversation, do consider joining this five day residential gathering on September 3–8 at Furnace Brook, a regenerative land and community project near Hailsham.

This is not a set of conclusions, but something to help reignite a vital conversation which, while rooted in venerable philosophical traditions, has become a modern taboo. A first version of this piece appeared on the Raft substack on June 16, 2026.

The Invitation from Feedback, Moral Imaginations and wyrd futures

We are about to participate in an Interspecies Council — a governance tool stewarded by the group Moral Imaginations to bring one of the most underrepresented stakeholders into decision-making — Nature. Each year, WWF estimates 10,000 to 100,000 species go extinct. The climate crisis threatens the systems we need to survive. Modes of governing that disempower our more-than-human community have failed to care for our home — planet earth — let alone those humans who are most vulnerable to catastrophe. How do we step forward?

The night before the Interspecies Council, I had run my eyes over the 30-odd page consultation document. Landscapes sliced up and funnelled into dull-coloured bar charts. Dense, two-dimensional puzzle maps assigning space. Commitments to “balance trade-offs” in the needs for infrastructure, health, and nature. Promises to “co-create delivery” through democratic governance.

Estimated type and extent of land use changes needed to 2035 and 2050 (Defra Land Use Consultation - Open Government Licence v3.0)

The framework is ambitious for its context. For various reasons we could ponder elsewhere, among them deeply unequal land ownership, England has lacked a coherent and integrated vision for land.

I notice my human perspective is shifting already. I thought housing was much more dominant, but urban space is a fraction of the space, let alone new builds. If our fellow more-than-humans are to flourish and return, this will take place on and around farms. That is my human take.

If I am a trout or a river, what do I think of this? I close my eyes and try to imagine and feel myself wrapped in a beautiful speckled brown skin of scales, swimming upstream to spawning grounds. That was nice. But responding to this document? It gave me a headache. Hopefully, the next morning would offer some answers.

Arriving early, I had some sense of the volume of work it takes to make this thing happen. A big team anticipated the dynamic of the day, walking through the colourful community project we were being hosted at, the Paper Garden. Reclaimed railway sleepers mixed with adobe give a warm feel to the room, with wildlife and food snaking through a place made for sharing, events, education, connection. The bell is rung, and we search out the names of those we will represent to find our seats. I feel a trepidation, a mix of stepping into the unknown and feeling the task and responsibility of representing a creature so different to me. I take a first step toward becoming the one to which I am assigned - River.

The River name tag from Moral Imaginations

After a short meditation to help bring us into the room, Introductions also from hosts Foodrise and Wyrd Futures, who are partnering with Moral Imaginations, the creators of this method — Phoebe Tickell of reminds us we are here with a task: to respond the land-use consultation together. Drawing on the lineage of the Council of All Beings, part of the Work that Reconnects of Joanna Macy and John Seed, we are here to embody the more-than-human voices that seem to be little heard by many policymakers and public alike. We can do this, she says, because we are already more-than-human, entire ecosystems of water, bacterial and viral life, intricately bound as superorganisms through the porous boundaries of our inner and outer skin, family to all life. If we hesitate, then let this speak through us.

To read the room, we are asked some questions — have you taken part in an Interspecies Council before? I hovered - I have actually taken part in a similar process to a Interspecies Council before and supported others to embody river beings; yet in all my time by the river, I’ve never become one myself. Have you spoken for more-than-humans? I stand. Even as I cannot recall the moment, concern for them soaks through my choices. Have you practiced moral imagination before? I stand, a bit unsure what this means, but intuitively feeling a yes. Then, do you identify as an activist? I remained seated. I am taken a little by surprise in my reaction. I wonder why I did not move. Near all else stood. What is it about this term that leads me to hesitate?

Time is approaching when we will slip deeper into our beings. To begin this, we are invited to feel into them: the skin, size, shape, temperature, movement and stillness, relations, fears, desires...repeating “I am”....I am...I am river, flowing down from the top of my head out to the sea beneath me, which pulses in the tides. My tendril capillaries pressing, sensing, breathing, into soaked soil and sands, loving the gliding fish and other beings within me. I am warm and green, caressed by blinding sunlight across my rippling surface, multiplying pictures of the sky.

Photo by Thomas Rickard of The River Dart from Totnes Weir

Given the invitation, given someone to listen, an imaginative skill has leapt forth. Unfamiliar, innate? I speak as River. It feels really good. Lizard thanks me for sharing. Then she speaks to me of her smooth scaly body, her hunger for the sunlight, and her infinite patience. A satisfying life, to be held by a stone, in wait for prey, the delicious crunchy bodies that come her way.

Now we have stepped into our species, we step into Council. Many beings speak, expressing their unique qualities, habitats, needs and wants. How little the Defra Land Use Framework acknowledges their presence, contribution, their wellbeing and dignity. Justice, balance, and efficiency for... who? Hawthorn is concerned about the decades-long timeline of the framework, given the deep-time (or long-time) perspective needed to understand life processes. Food production and homes for humans are given precedent, when all beings need homes and food. Mayfly is perplexed and frustrated by human action that ignores her fragile life cycle. Pig, Chicken, and Cow want to be recognised as more than resources for human consumption. Creatures of the night, Beetle and Bat, are struggling with too much light pollution; thus they struggle to feed themselves, others, and pollinate.

Sharing as the Interspecies Council

I begin to formulate my own words, arguing for attention, framing myself in human needs — water to drink and irrigate; the play of wild swimming; the beauty of quiet moments and poetry; our deep interdependence; the time to follow through on commitments humans have made to clean the waters. Yet, as the moment to speak came closer, an anger ran through me.

Go shit somewhere else! You take this beautiful filtered river water and wash your shit with it! Give it to Soil, give it to the other creatures to whom it would be a great gift, and from which they would feed you in return. Get the hell out of the way, pull out the weirs and dams, back off from my banks — however productive your fields are, they are nothing without the life that surrounds them.

Make my human voice strong, in your Rivers Trusts, in your Catchment Partnerships, in every body of people that touch my tributaries — which is them all — stand up for me and my brethren life. Listen. Listen or I will flood your homes and dry your crops and leave the land to burn. This is not a threat, it does not matter how I feel. This is consequence, that I wish neither of us to bear.

The feelings flow through me, and run off like water, though leaving a mark of their path. The waters are witnessed in the Council. Looking back, I wonder if that the deeply felt sense of beauty I experienced in becoming river and the indignation on having the moment to speak run together. How can I know one without the other? To see beauty in river and life today is to see its disappearance and destruction, it is to grieve, and to strike out should the moment arise. If I, if we, have hidden from love of land and life, there are so many reasons to look away.

We have been heard in council. Already a shift in experience and perspective occurring. The work is not over. There is a consultation document to respond to. After a brief lunch, we move to a World Café: 5 simultaneous conversation tables tackling five areas of the consultation, with three 8-minute rounds in which we can move between those we are most drawn to.

My first table is on governance, those who can make decisions and how. My instincts from academic training are to jump to the issues I know: classic problems of including those who are marginalised, have little time, or do not understand technical concepts. But the experience of embodying a river is pushing through me, asking different questions: Who can speak for a river, and for these other beings here? On what grounds? What does human land ownership mean, when we many of us have been here much longer than they have? Don’t humans belong to the land? Future humans and non-humans need a voice, not just in a workshop, but across institutions all the time. More forms of evidence than quantitative data have to be rolled in, consistent but unpredictable, like tributaries to a seasonal, shifting river flow. It’s not a trade-off. As part of a true human and more-than-human ecosystem, synergies and collective benefits abound, unexplored in present arrangements that benefit some humans, by no means all.

Break-out groups at the Paper Garden

8 minutes is up. Next table. The question we are being asked here is: At what scales should a framework operate? Human-drawn boundaries, from private land to county councils, rarely follow the lines laid out by anything resembling bio or biosocial regions — as rivers can. More-than-human beings route paths of little alignment with the roads, rails, and waterways. The consultation document divides places. While repeating an argument for multifunctionality, most of the land is categorised into one or other use. And the market mechanisms cited as a tool — whether carbon or biodiversity credits — optimise for single use over synergy, quite apart from their failure to date.

One of the most striking aspects of the land-use consultation is an absence of place — as in, unique constellations of landscape, ecology, people, history, and culture. It is a national document, of course, and it suggests local involvement in decisions. But, what we come up with through this process is, why don’t you try substituting “using land” with *caring for places*. The difference we imagined through more-than-human lenses is one of humans collaborating as nature in ways that reflect what is unique to those relationships. Of boundaries more like hedgerows than fences, complex, supportive of exchange, full of life. The social contract replaced by something like a human-nature covenant. We imagined local democracy, reimagined, in forms of devolution beyond the collapse of two-tier authorities.

Post its capturing our ideas on a page

The third and last of the conversations I take part in, trusting that our collective wisdom has infiltrated all five: What principles should guide land use? Gratitude. Reciprocity. Celebration. Regeneration. Multispecies justice. Love. Belonging. The resonances of the room take me to a new place, to river-think. What does river teach? What does life teach as principles? Autopoiesis. Thriving in ways that meet the needs of others. Boundaries that facilitate exchange, structures that evolve over time, resources that move like a water-cycle, providing for all in myriad ways, on and on, again and again. The equity and inclusion we envisage is not only between humans and non-humans, but among them. So many humans, like non-humans, are displaced from connection to land, place, nature, home, and made to pay for what could be abundant. My thinking is changing in real time. Why do we repeat this story and perception of separation, when so much is calling us back? We are lonely for connection. What if land ‘use’ made gateways to reconnection with each other, nature, the land?

The bell has rung, and we firmly but playfully carried to a close… for now. Shafts of sun still cut through our industrial surroundings, shimmering off constructed shards, setting off Paper Garden’s oasis of wild plants, soils, insects, birds, and humans. The conversation hosts feedback to us a rough synthesis of what unfolded. All of it to be carefully written up in the coming weeks, translated into formal human language, and posted to Defra. A wren in the rooftops chimes in as the hosts pause for a second to listen to nature, and everyone chuckles — could it be that it’s granting us acknowledgement and appreciation? Discussion of the transition back to our “just” human identities begins, to be walked gently, supported by a chance to scribe, scrape, scribble and paint on paper strewn across the floor.

Snapshot of the outputs from the final sense making and artistic synthesis of our experience and journey throughout the day

And I notice I am sad. The feeling picks up as I attend to it. Filling me up like water, I am a dam that overflows. I compare it to the end of a summer holiday. I don’t want to say goodbye to river. The facilitators tell us we never actually do, to remember that we are always nature. But it fills me nonetheless. The joy of that connection, to river, as river to this raucous mess of wildlife, flinging images and ideas like paint in all directions until the walls become rolling fields, and agroforests, dancing flowers, clean rivers, humming bees, cosy homes, and green energy.

Still. We are here for these last moments. In circle, there is a chance for final words. Bluebell, who in her normal human identity is a rewilding professional, had no idea how little he knew. Bramley Apple shares her gratitude for feeling her roots in the soil and the worms around her toes. The Cow is deeply moved by all the cows that cannot be saved. Yellow Rattle shifted in how time and life look from a new perspective. All are grateful. The day is closed. We chat for a while, and head home with the sunset.

What did we do? What do we hope to achieve? We took the invitation seriously, we played hard. I do not imagine Defra will now publish a place-care framework, based on principles of reciprocity, love, and eco-democracy! But we have not gathered to consider limitations — we have gathered to let our imaginations run literally wild. It offers illuminating contrast. Each of us has had our eyes opened, even those who work with “the environment” as a profession. Together, we have come to know land policy as ourselves and more. Thanks to a lot of post-event work, the Interspecies Council recommendations for Defra might just open some of their eyes too.

We are not alone in this effort. Interspecies Councils represent one important frontier of work among many. All around the world a movement is pouring forth, from Rights of Nature cases to River Guardians, from Nature Directors to Nature-Centric Governance, as well as legal cases, academic discourse, and business reform, and deep, personal nature connection. All answer to a call from without — scorching heatwaves, drenching downpours, that persistent gnawing knowledge that something isn’t right. A call from within — for connection to something beyond ourselves, to care for life in all forms and life itself, a call to stand up for what we know is right, even when we do not know quite what will happen next.

Am I an activist? I stand now. Not to block roads and ground aeroplanes, at least not today. But to say that things are not as they should be, that change is needed, to imagine that change, and that — even as I am uncertain of how to take part — I am compelled to be part of it. I am a river, it is my nature to travel great distances, cut through stone, dance over dam, play in the shallows, pulse in the sands. With a thousand streams, made is the way found.

Link to the event: More than Human Symposium at the Design Museum

We’re very happy to share that Moral Imaginations is collaborating with the Hard Art Collective to bring a more-than-human imaginative intervention to the More than Human Symposium at the Design Museum on Saturday, September 13th (3-4:30 PM).

This session will gather an extraordinary group of artists, musicians, policy makers and thinkers in conversation. It will also introduce the Interspecies Council in a panel format for the first time, inviting speakers and audience members alike to co-create more-than-human realities together. We’re excited to be joined by author Jay Griffiths, musician Madame Gandhi, strategist Sophie Shnapp, policymaker Phil Tovey and musician Auntie Flo in a collective exploration of how more-than-human representation can shape art, design, music, and policy. Our invitation is to listen differently: to imagine what it might mean if rivers, trees, birds or glaciers had a seat at the table alongside us.

💭Here’s a question to start with: If you could bring one more-than-human being with you into a council: tree, bird, river, insect, rock - who would you choose to speak for and why?

The Interspecies Council, one of the core practices at Moral Imaginations, is a method for bringing more-than-human embodiment and perspective-shifting into human decision-making forums. Developed in 2021 with our guide and mentor Joanna Macy - co-creator of the Council of All Beings - it builds on that methodology’s wonder and depth, while offering a simple way to bring it into institutions and decision-making contexts. Our goal is to open this practice to more people, inviting you to step into more-than-human perspectives. Imagine a council where, alongside human voices, you might hear a bee calling for pesticide-free land, or a river reminding us of its flow. It’s playful and imaginative, yet also deeply practical: combining the empathy sparked by art with the solution-focused tools of civic deliberation to generate responses that centre life in all its forms.

Here is more info about our fabulous set of co-creators and collaborators for the session - representing art, music, cultural change, policy and thinking from the Hard Art Collective - whose work stretches the edges of the human and non-human and blurs the boundaries of symbiosis with the rest of the natural world:

📖 Jay Griffiths @jay__griffiths - award-winning author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Why Rebel, and How Animals Heal Us. She has written for Radiohead and the Royal Shakespeare Company and is described by Brian Eno as writing about nature ‘with more beauty and grace than anyone.’

🥁 Madame Gandhi (Kiran Gandhi) @madamegandhi - musician, artist, and activist, named TED Fellow, Forbes 30 Under 30, and BBC 100 Women honoree. Her work includes recording the sound of melting glaciers in Antarctica for her track In Purpose, bringing the voice of nature directly into her music.

🌳 Sophie Shnapp @sophiashnapp - transformative leader bridging policy, culture, and community. As Global Impact Director at FUTR Earth and on the Executive Committee of Brian Eno’s EarthPercent, she harnesses music for climate action while advancing Indigenous leadership, values-driven economies, and nature-based solutions.

🌊 Phil Tovey @being_philt @asranetwork - Director of Nature-Centric Approaches at ASRA, a UN Foundation-hosted initiative. Former Head of Futures at Defra and a Visiting Research Fellow with University of Reading, Phil’s work explores autoethnographic immersions with the River Tone. His reflection: ‘The risks involved with not re-awakening our own animality is possibly the single biggest factor threatening our species’ survival.’

🎛️ Brian d’Souza (Auntie Flo) @auntie._.flo - Brian d’Souza is an award-winning sound artist, DJ, music producer and live performer. His compositions fuse field recording from around the globe with electro-acoustic production techniques to create ‘acoustic ecologies’ that are centred on exploring the psychological and physical benefits of sound.

The session will include:
🌱 A panel conversation about weaving more-than-human perspectives into art, music and policy.
🎶 A live performance from Auntie Flo (10-15min).
🌊 An Interspecies Council, where panelists- and the audience- practice speaking as more-than-human beings.

We see this event as a live rehearsal for what governance and culture might look like if nature really did have a seat at the table. And we are excited to see what will emerge.

📅 Saturday, September 13th | 3 PM - 4:30 PM
📍 Design Museum, London

The event is now sold out - but we’ll be posting reflections and learnings afterwards, so stay tuned! 🌱

With warmth,

The Moral Imaginations team

As usual, Phoebe started her interview by transporting the listener to the year 2050, to demonstrate the power of helping people envision, hear, smell and feel the possibility of a world where our systems were in service of life, and communities and nature all around the world thrived:

“In the future I come from, the Thames runs clean enough to drink by 2035. Bird song fills England's streets as biodiversity returns. And by 2040, creativity becomes a human right, filling the streets with joyful children.”

She goes on to talk about how we have all the resources, technology, and intelligence needed to solve the crises we face. What holds us back isn't capability—it's our ability to imagine what's possible.

The article shares our work with the UK government's interspecies councils, where citizens represented river species rather than humans 🐟🌳. 92% said their relationship with nature changed afterward. 75% changed their behaviour.

This is the power of moral imagination: when we expand our perspective beyond ourselves, to future generations and other species, transformation follows.

Imagination is a muscle. And right now, the world needs us all to exercise it.

What future are you imagining into being?

Read on for the full article below!

Thank you to Sara Vorre Rothstein for the thoughtful journalism and Cecilie Enghardt Rolvung for the beautiful photography. 📸 The full article is below.

Our Imaginations Have Poor Conditions

Interview by Sara Vorre Rothstein and photography by Cecilie Enghardt Rolvung

Phoebe Tickell comes from the future.

Therefore, she knows how the water in the Thames tastes, because the river that winds through London became clean enough to drink from in 2035. When she goes to work, she can hear roaring bird song because biodiversity in the England has been restored to full force. And in 2040, she tells us, creativity became a human right, filling the streets with joyful children eagerly anticipating their school days.

At least that's how Phoebe Tickell presents herself when she holds workshops or participates in debates.

She is an 'imagination activist' and founder of the organisation Moral Imaginations. She has advised English city councils, large corporations, universities, and local communities on thinking long-term and imagining a better future that can lead to concrete solutions in the present.

"Traditional activism focuses on fighting the status quo, and asking how we stop the damage happening today. Imagination activism focuses on envisioning the new, and opens new possibilities," she says.

When the climate engagement has faded a bit, it is because we find it difficult to visualise what a truly regenerative world would look like, according to Phoebe Tickell. If we want to solve the climate crisis, we therefore need to think much further into the future than we are used to.

How far into the future do you think, Phoebe?

"Our society is based on very short-term cycles. In business, there are often five-year strategies, and in politics, there are four-year cycles. We are not trained to think long-term or dwell on the consequences of our actions today. I think at least 100 years into the future because I believe the heart of civilisation is taking responsibility for ensuring there is a civilisation in the future. There is an indigenous sovereign nation in North America called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, who for thousands of years have exercised something called the Haudenosaunee principle: they always think seven generations ahead in their decisions. I find that inspiring. Imagine if we considered the needs of future generations in our decision making in Western societies too?"

Has our imagination become rusty?

"Yes and no. Actually, there is a lot of imagination at play when you see what government leaders and powerful technology giants are doing globally to democracy, social cohesion and the environment. They are changing the world order, putting profit above everything else, and being hugely imaginative – but for the interest of a small group of powerful people. It is certainly imaginative, but it is not morally imaginative. My definition of moral imagination is to envision the welfare of the entire society, including future generations," says Phoebe Tickell and adds:

"Our imagination has poor conditions. There is very little room to imagine another world in a busy everyday life where we are bombarded with negative news and threatening future scenarios. It can be paralysing, and therefore there is a need to awaken the belief that there is an alternative future so we can find the motivation and courage to act. Imagination is a muscle that needs to be built and trained from schools to organisations to activist movements."

Isn't there a danger of getting caught up in imagination without acting?

"When you change the way you see the world and your relationship with nature and other people, it changes your behaviour. You might start flying less or planting more trees in your local area, once you’ve envisioned the kind of regenerative future you would like to be living in. It can also be about imaginatively putting yourself in the place of other people or species," says Phoebe Tickell and gives a concrete example of an exercise she has done in collaboration with the British government's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

"We held a citizen assembly with the government, which was about protecting the River Roding. An ecologist identified the key species that live by the river, and instead of the citizens representing humans, each of them had to represent one of these species. It could be for example a tree, a bird, a fish, or insect. They were then given two weeks to research their species and understand the challenges it faces, so they could subsequently bring the species' perspective into the debate. After the event, which is called an Interspecies Council, we asked people about the changes in their perception and their behaviour. And what we heard back was that 92% of those who participated said afterward that their relationship with nature had changed, and 75% changed their behaviour patterns. The power of imagination, visualisation and perspective shifts is that they go on to influence behaviour. And this is crucial, because action is what really matters."

It sounds like an imagination activist is a climate activist?

“The climate movement stopped making sense to me. I think there is a tendency to separate problems that are interconnected. Feminists fight for women's rights, climate activists fight for the climate, but we are in a crisis that spans broader than that. There is a crisis in the way we imagine ourselves, our relationship with nature, and the future. I fundamentally believe that we have all the resources, technology, and intelligence needed to solve the crises we face. It is a lack of action and belief in what is possible that holds us back."

How do you think people living 100 years from now will look back on us?

"They will question how it was possible to know so much about the impact of climate change and do so little. And they will probably think: Wow, that was the era when you lived with microplastics in your brain, ate meat filled with antibiotics, were addicted to your phones, and worked 10-12 hours a day in totally polluted cities - how did you survive?

Maybe they’ll be shocked at those things. I think they will look back at the epidemic of loneliness and question why we didn’t come together more, and build community. Hopefully they will be in a better situation than we are, rather than worse – and it is crucial to imagine their perspective because it highlights our responsibility to the future today."

You can read the full article on the Politiken website here.

Ultimately, the event aimed to collectively find ways to transform our food systems in the UK that work for people, nature and the planet.

This was the ideal context to present our joint poster with wyrd futures and Foodrise (formerly Feedback) about the Interspecies Council we hosted early April: a more-than-human consultation to respond to DEFRA’s Land Use Framework.. see more below if you’ve missed that!

Our beautiful design and catchy title, especially the wording ‘more-than-human’ stood out, capturing the attention of the participants during the two days conference. We engaged in dynamic conversations about the why and the how of this experience and the methodology behind it.

People reflected on the importance to include the needs of other than human beings in land governance and uses, and most were intrigued to know how our submission had landed with DEFRA.

The day was peppered with sharp and engaging presentations, sharing expertise on diverse topics such as: learning from our archeological past, working with hydrology, creating cultural capital for farmers, supporting genetic diversity appropriate to place, future proofing farming systems in the context of climate change, biodiversity-friendly value chains, mobilizing agroecology and agroforestry… and much more!

Many speakers voiced the need to diversify land use and shift farming practices towards regenerative value systems. In the late afternoon, we were invited to watch Hayfield, a Dutch documentary showcasing a very hopeful story about marshland restoration.

We left Oxford with a renewed sense of hope and possibility, a fantastic response to our work and some great connections to follow suit! We leave you with this prompt shared by MP Roz Savage: What would it look like if Britain put nature at the heart of decision- and policy-making?

The Interspecies Council at the Garden of Tomorrow, June 2024

Dear all,

We’re excited to invite you to an online learning session about the Interspecies Council, happening on 15th May, hosted by the Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership as part of their ‘Co-creation with the More-than-Human Sandbox’.

Read on for the invite…

We’re grateful for your keen interest in the online learning sessions, with both our first two sessions ‘selling out’ for (free) tickets and featuring lively discussion during the session. After having covered Rights of Nature & Earth Law and More-than-Human Design in Practice in resp. March and April, our third session on May 15 will explore the practice of Interspecies Councils.

The learning sessions are not webinars; rather they're a space for semi-structured dialogue & discussion, with each session featuring an expert practitioner who takes a deep dive into the workings, developments, (im)possibilities & directions of a particular approach to engage with the more-than-human in response to (your) questions.

Continue reading below for more information about our next topic, or directly register via this link on Eventbrite to attend the next session on Thursday May 15 at 5 pm CET | 4 pm BST | 11 am EDT | 8 am PDT | 8.30 pm IST.

After registration, an automatic confirmation email and 2 reminder emails will be sent, which all include the Zoom link.

On May 15 we’ll be exploring the practice of Interspecies Councils. Our guest 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 and a form of more-than-human citizens assembly, created as part of the Moral Imaginations body of work to cultivate the muscle of moral imagination—imagination on behalf of the welfare of the whole.

The Interspecies Council introduces more-than-human ontologies and perspectives into systems through decision-making and governance. The 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 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, while bridging inner and outer shifts.

Rather than a discussion about nature, the Interspecies Council turns it into a discussion from the point of view of nature. The learning session will look at practical examples, experiences, and principles behind the practice. We warmly welcome your thoughts and questions as participants in the session.”

Be sure to sign up to the sandbox's mailing list to receive announcements of future sessions.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Background to this provocation

In April 2023, we hosted the River Roding Interspecies Council, in collaboration with the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (Defra) and Policy Lab, as part of their Water Post-2043 Project. The project explored how we can transform the future of decision making around water, asking “How can we transform what the freshwater system looks like, 20 years from now and beyond?”

The Roding Interspecies Council, held in the London Borough of Barking next to the River Roding, included stakeholders with knowledge of the local river catchment area, local community action groups and decision makers from inside and outside government. The topic of the Council was ‘How do we ensure the flourishing of the River Roding?’

As part of the invitation to the Council, Moral Imaginations shared a short provocation, set in 2043, exploring a future where interspecies democracy has become the norm. Inspired by sci-fi writings, the text invites people to imagine a world where Interspecies Councils are a part of citizen democracy and bioregional governance. This set the scene for participation in the Council, which was both a prototype for real-world decision making and policy-making processes, and an act of ‘futuring’ and imagining. Thus, the Interspecies Council was an act of pre-figurative governance, serving as a provocation for the future and a real-world decision making prototype that seeks to sow the seeds of transformation in the practises of today.

A FUTURE OF JUSTICE FOR ALL BEINGS

What does justice for all Earth beings look like in 2043? How could decision making in the future include the more-than-human world? Western worldviews and models of thinking have perpetuated the myth of human exceptionalism over hundreds of years. This also means that our non-human kin has been relegated to background, resource, and property. In this workshop we will explore an immersive, participatory, embodied taste of a more-than-human future, where human chauvinism and individualism have been replaced by principles of entangled coexistence with more-than-human kin.

MORE-THAN-HUMAN EMPATHY AND MORAL IMAGINATION

Interspecies empathy will be a core requirement for future, ecologically sound, decision making. But how might we cultivate interspecies empathy?

The moral imagination is our empathy muscle. It helps put oneself into the shoes of the other, looking through their eyes via the portal of imagination. Taking us out of our self-interested lens, imagination lets us expand the moral circle of concern, and imagine what it’s like to be someone, or something, else.

Imagine if we all cultivated our empathy muscles for the more-than-human world regularly. Would we be better able to include other voices in decision-making? What would the water vole say in response to poor legislation around sewage? When does the kingfisher draw a line on local levels of sound pollution? And how would these species engage in debate, negotiation and solidarity in a deliberative democracy process?

We imagine a future where decision making includes an expanded set of “stakeholders”, including the more-than-human world in all our decisions. Computer scientist Neil Gershenfeld says the idea that people are the only species with consciousness is a ‘human vanity’. What if we could develop the capacity to speak on behalf of more-than-human life, and better represent them in decision making?

A FUTURE OF INTERSPECIES DEMOCRACY

The year is 2043. Things have changed almost beyond recognition when it comes to decision making that impacts nature. The difference is - nature now has a voice. Through the work of thinkers, poets, legal activists, academics and more-than-human allies, governance and law is being completely transformed to incorporate the understanding that all beings have rights and personhood.

In 2043, eight years after the 2035 Interspecies Governance Act, imagine that Interspecies Democracy has become key to our democratic paradigm. What if every person in the UK were paired for a quarter of the year with a non-human species whom they represent in democratic decision making? What if everybody had to serve a term on a local Nature Assembly, representing keystone species and habitats of the area like the river, birds, insects, and trees? What else could this Interspecies Democracy future look like?

Imagine that machine learning AIs have been trained on massive non-human communication data sets and developed an Interspecies Alphabet, where any non-human sound can be fed into Google and will be translated into potential messages, ranked by % accuracy and probability.

Imagine that the skills of Moral Imagining are taught in schools and all lawyers take a regular exam to test their ability to empathise with the more-than-human world.

Imagine that Nature now sits as an active board member on the board of all companies by law. Each decision is first screened by a feral AI, CatGPT🐱, for interspecies alignment. If one or more ecologically deleterious impacts are detected as possible risks in the motion passing, the system flags the decision and it is immediately devolved to the local or bioregional level, where an Interspecies Council is assembled.

The Councils adhere to strict guidelines and quality assurance, with participants chosen via sortition from the area affected. The Interspecies Council gives the human beings a chance to grow their interspecies empathy. Following an Interspecies Council, the group’s verdict is fed back into the Interspecies Alphabet for final decision by non-human beings.

THE 2038 DORSET INTERSPECIES COUNCIL

Perhaps you remember how, in 2038, how CatGPT🐱 identified that a proposed new oyster and mussel farm off the coast of Dorset could negatively impact the local ecosystem for sea and land life, potentially disrupting human fishing routes and crustacean habitats. The Dorset Interspecies Council met over the course of six months. There was huge national attention on the Council, as one of the earliest, and knottiest Bioregional Interspecies Councils. Who could forget hearing from the oysters and mussels themselves via AI during the Council? They had pretty strong views about local water quality, and the level of filtration they could provide!

The co-designed solutions were elegant - local government granted a significant re-training budget for those in the Dorset fishing industry to re-train as bivalve farmers (a more regenerative harvesting method than fishing), and the farms were spread over a much wider geographical area to allow better balance for the crustacean habitats!

THE RIVER RODING DISPUTE OF 2043

We find ourselves in 2043, and a series of issues have been flagged by CatGPT🐱 and taken to the local, Interspecies Council level. You have been invited to attend this one-day workshop, attended by policymakers, ecologists, River Roding locals, activists and community members, to make a series of recommendations to the governance body…

Thanks to Phil Tovey for the input and comments.

A few weeks ago, Moral Imaginations hosted an Interspecies Council* with a specific aim: to craft a more-than-human response to the UK government’s draft Land Use Framework. Together with collaborators Feedback and wyrd futures, they gathered a group of participants across England’s land, food and systems change sectors to take them through a process of shedding their human identities and adopting a more-than-human identity to collectively imagine, deliberate and formulate responses to the framework.

Over 30 species gathered in council to share about their dreams and concerns around present and future land use in England, prompted by the release of this draft framework; a national plan that outlines how land should be managed to meet multiple goals at once, such as restoring biodiversity, reaching net zero emissions, producing food, building homes and infrastructure, and supporting public health and wellbeing.

Why the Interspecies Council?

We wanted to explore the perspectives of other species in relation to land use and nature recovery, to shape a collective response to the consultation, and to demonstrate the necessity of more-than-human governance and participatory tools in decision-making to benefit all of England’s species and ecosystems. Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) is calling for a response to their framework from its stakeholders… but they are not including the 70,000 species and beings that make up England’s biodiverse community. So far, they have only looked to human perspectives in this call for responses.

We had a wide range of beings and species present, chosen by an ecologist to represent a wide range across England: from the Mayfly that only lives one day to the River on which it depends which has been flowing since ancient times. Some domesticated species acknowledged their co-dependence and appreciation for humans, such as the Bramley Apple Tree and Wheatfield, while the Chicken, Pig and Cow wanted to be able to play freely and not be seen as ‘livestock’ or mere resources for human consumption.

We noticed strong currents of interspecies solidarity: Bluebell, Hawthorn and Barn Owl wanted their magic and mystery to be revered like it used to be. Glowworm, Beetle and Bat expressed their needs to protect the dark. Lichen, deer, curlew and butterfly shared worries in regard to their population decline or collapse.

Many beings expressed confusion and frustration at the disrespectful and destructive behaviours and impacts of human activity. Many voices also talked about the capacity of regeneration (the Soil), revitalising traditions (the Swift), remembering the co-evolution of all life (the Fungi and Moss), calling in abundance and appreciating diversity (the Red Grouse).

The group spent the afternoon working through specific questions related to the Land Use Consultation, which will be collated into a formal response to Defra’s consultation. Over the next few weeks, our team will be finalising the response to Defra’s consultation, drawing on the collective intelligence of the more-than-human perspectives that were expressed during the day.

The practice of the Interspecies Council bridges a transformative shift in perception in participants with a real-world application in being involved in a participatory governance process. Many of the participants reported feeling deeply moved, others talked about how it left them feeling a sense of interconnectedness with nature and the more-than-human world, and a strengthened desire to act on behalf of it.

In a time when traditional responses to the climate crisis seem to have failed, Moral Imaginations and partners are exploring approaches that tackle the deeper drivers of the climate crisis: worldview, mindset, values and imaginations.

Looking forward to sharing more as the weeks unfold about this experiment in more-than-human governance!

*The Interspecies Council is a methodology created as part of the Moral Imaginations body of work to introduce more-than-human ontologies and perspectives into decision-making and policy-making. The aim of the Interspecies Council is to bring the voice of nature and non-human beings into organisational decision-making, governance mechanisms and policy development, bringing awareness and respect to the Life and sentience of our natural world; highlighting their very real presence in issues that directly concern them. Find out more on Moral Imaginations website: https://www.moralimaginations.com/interspecies-council

Join us, together with collaborators Feedback and wyrd futures to create a more-than-human response to Defra’s Land Use Consultation. It’s a rare and meaningful opportunity to contribute to shaping land policy in a way that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all life.

Through deep listening and radical imagination, we will co-create a response to this consultation—challenging the separation of humans and nature by ensuring that nature is not just a resource but a recognised participant in governance.

We are calling for 25 bold, open-hearted participants—land stewards, citizen scientists, farmers, systems thinkers, community members, activists, and artists—ready to help ensure the more-than-human world is heard in policy decisions.

Come and take part in an Interspecies Council, an innovative governance practice we are starting to bring to different audiences, and soon train people to host! It’s a method to bring the voices of non-human beings into decision-making, and you can read more here: www.moralimaginations.com/interspeciescouncil

📅 Are you able to join us at Paper Garden, Canada Water, London to take part in this imaginative and important response?

🔗 Register your interest by 23rd March: https://buff.ly/vyV0haK
We will select a group of participants and confirm by 26th March.

Let’s reimagine governance—with and for all life.

In October 2023, Patrick Andrews (the Barefoot Lawyer) — who is a friend and collaborator of Moral Imaginations — invited us to his first retreat exploring the cultivation of wildness in ourselves and in our organisations. Phoebe co-hosted this gathering by leading the group in exploring our radical interconnection with all life using a process inspired by an Interspecies Council in the woods. This is a short taster of more-than-human connection. Nine of us gathered amongst the woods for this two day retreat that made space for deep listening, reflection, insight, imagination and connection. It was an opportunity for kindred spirits to gather together, to acknowledge our own inner wildness, share stories and embrace time in nature around the campfire.

Dream Wood

The expertise of those that gathered ranged from law, education, finance, management, all of whom were already on this journey of social and environmental work. The first day explored what we could learn from nature, immersing ourselves in the woods and the natural abundant systems that operate within it. We were invited to take time for quiet contemplation as we walked silently through the woodland and in time allowed ourselves to share thoughts that came to us organically. Thich Naht Hahn’s words on interconnection were shared as we stood amongst trees in the warm sunshine; from that we explored our thoughts and what this brought up in each of us. Space was given for us to take time alone in the woods, after which we reconvened for lunch and open discussion on our own work and experiences.

Learning from nature to guide organisational purpose and governance

With Patrick’s guidance, we explored the concept of an organisation’s purpose and the conflicting nature of the role of a CEO/company manager and the interlinking ebb and flow of an organisation’s stakeholders. Company boundaries were drawn and the potential impact of shareholders’ grasp on it and the subsequent effect they can have on its purpose were imagined and discussed. Hypothetical ideas were explored around the potential systems and processes within organisations and what could be learnt from nature to cultivate an egalitarian organisation where all parties, including nature, are considered and nurtured.

Holding this work amongst the trees had a profound impact on one’s thoughts and ideas, ensuring the consideration for the more-than-human world was ever present. This ignited a true need for the consideration of nature within decision making, acknowledging the need for it to have a voice and a seat at every table as decisions are made. The group explored the idea of organisations appointing a steward for Nature. This steward would collaborate and hold to account senior management. A system of individual and mutual responsibility and obligation were explored alongside the consideration of the distribution and balance of power. Patrick’s session certainly opened up new viewpoints and allowed us to explore alternative approaches to business and to traditional systems.

Inviting more-than-human perspectives and empathy into governance and organisations

Around the woodland campfire that afternoon, Phoebe led us through an exploration into our own connection with nature. With Phoebe’s guidance we were asked to consider nature and connect with it by opening up our human consciousness and inviting in the web of life, be that wildlife, flora, fauna, river, mountain; an element of the natural world.

Once our more-than-human selves were found, we were encouraged to explore the space in our new roles, connecting with the woodland space, adjusting to how this environment felt through the eyes of our more-than-human selves. Then we gathered as a group around the fire to hold Hazel Hills first Interspecies Council. Amongst us were cow, wasp, mycelium, tick, mountain, crocodile, duck, fox and deer. Together there were discussions of what humans have done to this earth and what they need to realise and do to make change.

This exercise of moral imagining — stretching our minds eye to our more-than-human selves allowed us to connect deeply with the natural world, creating many different perspectives, sharing our experiences and findings. And shifting our human viewpoints to those with much less power in the face of our planet’s fate. This enabled us to consider our own individual actions and impacts on nature as well as the worldwide responsibilities of the human race to protect nature and the environment. Ultimately, giving nature a platform and a voice pushing us to make change for all.

From the Interspecies Council, themes arose. We implored the human race to seriously consider the consequences of their actions. We asked them to let go of their hold on the world, giving back to the earth. We requested the development and understanding of the interconnections between all of the natural world and humans, encouraging integration and for humans to recognise our need to work in symbiosis. Many spoke of hope and our belief that the human race still has the power to make the changes that are needed, provided they can let go of systems that do not serve them or us. That they can accept the cyclical nature of life and death, of give and take and their role within the earth's cycles. There was discussion around the many opportunities for humans to reconnect and live amongst and with nature rather than rejecting and neglecting us. We asked for their respect, for them to reconnect with us and for us, letting go of excess and ego. Instead acting with compassion and humility.

This experience was an inspiring one that allowed all of the opportunity to explore new perspectives and share new imaginings. I myself left the wood feeling inspired and empowered to build a better future both for myself and for all beings.

— Written by Eloise Clarke

If you are interested in hosting an Interspecies Council at your event or organisation, please get in touch at phoebe@moralimaginations.com.

Campfire at the centre of the Interspecies Council

This roundtable sits in our nature pillar, which includes expanding the circle of concern to include non-human beings and features of nature, in rights (through “Rights of Nature”), governance and imagination.

Moral Imaginations is a third horizon, complexity-informed design lab, pioneering new practice, shifting mindsets and creating demonstrators to inspire change. We blend research and action, theory and design, and our mission is to serve as a lighthouse for practice, tools and thinking that aims to tackle the deeper drivers of the polycrisis. As part of our approach to complexity, we practice ‘imagination activism’, stretching the Overton Window of what is deemed possible, and translate philosophy and theory into practical frameworks, tools and interventions. Imagination is itself a form of activism, but we go one step further to bridge it into the practical.

Our approach is guided by science, philosophy and facts, as well as moral and ethical frameworks such as the Three Pillars which guide a shift in ethics, ontology and epistemology — to considering all living things (nature), future generations (human and non-human) and ancestors as sources of knowledge, wisdom and having a legitimate claim for consideration and care. This requires an expansion of embodied empathy and perception — something we refer to as “Moral Imagination”.

Caption: At the Design Museum: Kicking off the roundtable with an introduction to more-than-human genaeology

We divided the session into two halves. The first half focused on more-than-human design, led by James Peplow Powell who started with a presentation about the history and genealogy of more-than-human design, with examples of speculative design projects conducted as part of his residency at the Design Museum. The second half focused on more-than-human policy making, led by Phoebe Tickell of Moral Imaginations, who presented on more-than-human political representation and policy making, focusing on the Interspecies Council. Additionally, Phil Tovey spoke about the experience of being a participant in an Interspecies Council hosted on the River Roding with representatives from local river groups, the local councils bordering the river, Thames 21, the local Catchment Partnership, and the UK government.

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.

The Rights of Nature

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’. César Rodriguez-Garavito (ed.), More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narative for earthly Flourishing, 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.

The long history of more-than-human design

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?

Caption: A pigeon enjoying a bathe in the afternoon sun in the courtyard of the Design Museum

Policy: Biodiversity Net Gain

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.

Representation: The Interspecies Council

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. Partnering with Moral Imaginations, a pioneering organisation dedicated to tackling the climate crisis through reimagining the world and a practice they call “Moral Imagination”, they adopted their governance practice of an ‘Interspecies Council’, inspired by indigenous forms of governance and designed to introduce more-than-human ontologies into decision making. The Interspecies Council was created in 2021 and adapts the Work That Reconnects’ Council of All Beings to a decision making format, introducing additional stages: a research and information sharing phase, a preparation phase to inhabit a non-human character, a deliberation phase in council, a phase to prepare recommendations, and a final stage where a shared document is created. It had been tested before in workshops in 2021 and 2022, but this was the first time it was tried in a setting attended by policy makers and civil servants.

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.’

Caption: Delegate cards from the River Roding Interspecies Council

Some principles of more-than-human governance

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’.

With gratitude to the eight roundtable participants:

Rachel Fisher, Deputy Director, Land Use Policy, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)

Philip Tovey, Head of Futures, Defra Chief Scientist Office

Justin McGuirk, Director of Future Observatory and the FO Journal

Maan Barua, Research Lead in urban ecologies, University of Cambridge; author of Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology

Calvin Po, Strategic Design and Research, Dark Matter Labs

James Peplow Powell, Co-founder, Feral Partnerships design collective

Ioana Man , Design Lead, Faber Futures

Cher Potter, curatorial director of Future Observatory and editor of the Future Observatory Journal

Caption: Phil Tovey and Cher Potter standing outside the Design Museum bright and early at 8am as we meet to prepare for the roundtable

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Phoebe Tickell is a British-Hungarian imagination activist inspiring people to see that a beautiful world is possible. Rather than getting paralysed by the crisis, shutting down, and moving into a shame and blame game, we need to live up to our human values, bringing together the capacity to act by using inspiration and moral ambition.

Phoebe describes herself as a scientist as she started her career in biology as a researcher and in microbial engineering. When Phoebe found that science did not give the solutions needed for the scales of challenges we face, and when the techno-utopian narrative frustrated her, she changed paths and became a social entrepreneur. 

— We already have all the technology and research we need to solve the problems we face, she says.

After working with complex systems and systems thinking, with education, governments, and a community funder, as well as within the food, farming, and regenerative agriculture industry, where she applied distributed governance, network design, and community building, she found that there was a common thing was missing.

— People cannot imagine how things can be different, they are blocked from believing another way is possible, she says.

Founded the organisation Moral Imaginations

This is why she started working with and founded the organisation Moral Imaginations, a design and practice lab for experiential collective imagination in 2020. Phoebe Tickell now works to convince people that another future and society is possible, based on a regenerative idea, expanding on care, kindness, and reciprocity.

— I aim to seed, catalyse and coordinate projects that re-write our current story, she says.

Phoebe Tickell is herself very influenced by indigenous and Buddhist thinking and principles. When traveling to the US for the first time when she was 19 years old, she happened to pick up the book “I Buried My Heart in Wounded Knee”, which chronicles the genocide and colonisation involved in the foundation of the United States, and was shocked. 

— Why didn’t we learn about colonisation in school and the extermination of the Indigenous people who lived in reciprocity? They respected enoughness and lived in a symbiotic relationship with nature, but they were punished, she says and continues:

— We have so much to learn about regenerative principles, from ancient and wise cultures. How to use social design, that is guided by longevity and learn how to take care of the whole. 

“Buddhism is a helpful guide on how to live”

After graduating from university, Phoebe took 6 months off to travel around Southeast Asia. She stayed in ashrams, living simply, and came across Buddhism. Phoebe believes Buddhism is a helpful guide on how to live. With its humble and wise stance, it focuses on how to cultivate presence and interconnection and is based on meditation and practice. 

Now Phoebe Tickell is working as an 'imagination activist, a term she coined to describe a new and at the same time ancient kind of activism. Whereas traditional activists fight the current system, the oppressive power, the imagination activist is a complement, imagining the new.

— Activists ring the alarm and call out to people who have done wrong. Protecting and resisting harm. Using guilt and shame and calling for responsibility. Imagination activists inspire people to see that a beautiful world is possible. By cultivating faith and taking action we can create that future", says Phoebe Tickell.

Moral Imagination allows us to stretch empathy

Rather than getting paralysed by the crisis in society and shutting down and moving into a shame and blame game, we need to live up to our human values. Not focusing on the crisis but bringing together the capacity to act by using inspiration and moral ambition. 

— Moral Imagination allows you to stretch empathy. Imagination can be used for imagining and being the other person with no privileges, Phoebe says.

Inspires and helps organisations to see the extent of the crisis

Phoebe Tickell runs workshops, gives talks, and creates tools to enable communities to work with moral imagination and to create ambassadors. She has also worked with several large organisations to build their ‘moral imagination infrastructure’. She uses different methods and tools such as role-play exercises, the Exploring Different Compass, with which people can explore different topics and perspectives, group exercises, and personal reflections. She’s now working to create spaces for collective capacity building for civil society, but also inspiring and helping organisations and communities to see the extent of the crisis. 

— I work with people within organisations and government. I also work with corporates. Giving people the facts, the brain food, and the knowledge to spur action, she says.

— I let them understand the current crisis and the responsibility they have by being direct and not being scared of being uncomfortable. Some of that is about the urgency and moral imperative to change. Some are about helping the organisation to realise that they can have a different role. They can respond in different ways. Corporations have huge platforms. If they can be courageous and bold, they can have a huge influence on a sector and a whole branch. They should not wait for other organisations to be first, we need collective leadership; Phoebe Tickell continues.

Phoebe has worked with IKEA, London Marathon, AXA, and other corporations.  At IKEA, she did an intervention to bring a module on moral imagination into a recurring leadership training hosted by the organisation. 

— I contributed with a talk, and we did an immersive future envisioning exercise, a storytelling from the future: How can IKEA change by 2050? The commitment they are making is very encouraging, she says.

Together with Inner Development Goals, Naturskyddsföreningen, Lund University and other key partners, Phoebe is now involved in creating a network for Imagination Activists in Sweden.

Keynote speaker at a Conference in Northern Sweden

On 23 October Phoebe Tickell is the keynote speaker at the conference “Innovative Solutions for an Including Working Life” (Innovativa lösningar för ett inkluderande arbetsliv) in Luleå, Sweden. She will give a talk on and guide a session called Moral Imagination for Radical Societal Shifts. The conference is part of the Competence Centre for Social Innovation, which offers support to ongoing projects funded by the European Social Fund Plus in Sweden.

— As a National Knowledge Platform and a Competence Centre for Social Innovation in the European Social Fund, Forum for Social Innovation Sweden sees the ability to envision social change as central to social innovation processes. It is important to create new and alternative visions of the future that can guide social change, says Anna Tengqvist, national and international coordinator at FfSIS.

— As an imagination activist, Phoebe Tickell will take us on a journey to imagining what an alternative future could look like beyond today’s established order. It is about imagining our future society if we are allowed to think freely. We need to challenge limiting norms and beliefs in ourselves and the rest of society, says Lotta Orban, project manager for the conference, and at FfSIS.

When in Luleå Phoebe is looking forward to talking to and meeting a group of people envisioning the future from a different culture, who are passionate about care and compassion, and to share activism.

Phoebe Tickell’s piece of advice on how to practice and nurture moral imagination:

• It starts with yourself! Go beyond the rational and cultivate a Buddhist presence and awareness. If you want to be a potent activist you have to be present and able to show up different in the present moment – that is how you create the future. 

• Take care of the inner state, be joyful, passionate, and creative. 

• Actively ask yourself what the future you are really longing for looks like, not just focusing on how to fix the problems. Envisioning the future will help create solutions in ways you may not have imagined!

• Don’t fill your time with distractions. Spend time with family, in nature, and rest. 

• Give time and space for reflection. 

• Get out of the echo chamber. Create a widening of perspectives, rewilded and diversified. 

• Ask yourself what nature would say, if nature had a voice. Similarly, ask yourself what future generations would say, if they had a perspective on your decisions in the current moment.

• Tell stories from the future as if you already come from that future. Help people really believe that such a future is possible! 

Read more:

Read more about the Competence Centre for Social Innovation in the Social Fund. 
Read more about Phoebe Tickell.
Read more about Moral Imagination.

These are the words I shared with the audience of change agents at ChangeNOW two months ago.

The role of an imagination activist is to build the longing for a different kind of future. It’s to build the sensation that this is possible, that it’s real. As Eve Ensler once said, the role of a normal activist is someone who cannot help but fight for something. That person is not usually motivated by a need for power or money or fame, but in fact is driven slightly mad by some injustice, some cruelty, some unfairness, so much so that he or she is compelled by some internal moral engine to act to make it better.

The role of an imagination activist is to remind you what it is you are fighting for, what it is you believe in, what is it that is driving you to make the changes, to do the work of creating a more just, beautiful and flourishing future every day. Imagination activists create more activists in the world. They connect them back to the longing for a future in line with their values.

In March, I joined 35,000 people at the ChangeNOW conference in Paris, to deliver a message on their stage on being an imagination activist. In order to change the world, we need to escape the ways of thinking that are perpetuating the mess we currently find ourselves in. The system is self-perpetuating, and so seeing differently takes work, it is a form of resistance, and it's a form of activism.

Ursula K. Le Guin, a fantastic sci fi author, an absolute heroine of mine, said ‘any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. And that resistance and change starts in art, and often in the art of words’, in storytelling. We need to keep the dream alive that things can be different, that we have the solutions we need - you can find them all around the world at the edges, and equitable, human, life-centric ways are not impossible, but they require choosing, and protecting.

One of the mantras of being an imagination activist is: "We think that we have resource problems, but in fact we have imagination problems". We think that the problems we face are technological, we think that we need facts, that it’s a lack of resources or a lack of knowledge or intelligence. I promise you that if we closed the doors on this stage and we said nobody here is going home until we fix these problems, we would fix them. We have all the intelligence, all the ideas and talent we need.

Thank you very much for having me #ChangeNOW, and to all those who made this session brilliant and inspiring: Maëlle Bousquié Gaspard Plantevin Martina Catherine Buchal Marion Chaygneaud-Dupuy Olivier Maurel Amandine Roche

The Interspecies Council is coming to Hackney, London!

In the not-so-distant future, an Interspecies Council is called in Hackney, London, faced with a critical challenge. People are called to queer their identities with the more-than-human, to bring the voice of nature into the process of deliberation to decide what should be done. Will you be one of them?

Never heard of an Interspecies Council? Created in 2022, this deliberative practice and artform brings the voice of Nature into the room of decision making. It is a new form of ecological, multispecies governance that brings embodiment, imagination and play into decision making.

The participatory and semi-improvisational role-play brings alive our inherent connection to Nature, and allows the more-than-human viewpoint to join the deliberative process and decision making. It has been trialled in organisations, local councils, communities, and even the UK government.

To read more about the Interspecies Council hosted with the UK government last year, have a look at this article.

We look forward to having you with us at the Garden of Tomorrow Festival on Saturday June 15th, 10:00-11:30 at The Last Days Shoreditch (entry via House of Hackney, St Michael’s Clergy House, Mark Street, EC2A 4ER). The closest tube stations are: Old Street, London Liverpool Street.

Book your place and use our discount code for newsletter subscribers PARTNER20 at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-garden-of-tomorrow-festival-we-are-nature-tickets-905929177557?aff=oddtdtcreator

The Garden of Tomorrow is a collective of positive disruptors, activists, artists and organisations. Presented by @houseofhackney, this festival of ideas is a coming together of passionate advocates for the regeneration of Nature for the quality of life of all future generations.

We are joined at the festival by fantastic people and organisations from the space: Atmos, Colèchi, Hard Art Collective, EarthPercent, Earthed, Earth Law Center, Elvis & Kresse, Faith In Nature, Lawyers for Nature, Nowadays On Earth, Purpose Disruptors, Right to Roam, Satish Kumar, Schumacher College, The Great Imagining, WaterBear Network, House of Hackney and the musician and songwriter Sam Lee.

We look forward to seeing you there!

#InterspeciesCouncil #MoralImaginations #GardenOfTomorrow #WeareNature #imagination #enterimagination #imaginationiseverything #artivism  #decisionmaking #goodgovernance #morethanhuman #voiceofnature #rightsofnature #restorenature #restorenaturenow #London

An Imagination Evening at The Treehouse!

That's the kind of invite I’d like to receive...

Tomorrow evening I'm in London hosting an evening of imagination at a space called the Treehouse together with the Lindon Gallery. The arrival is at 6pm to start at 6.30pm... Join us for an evening of Imagination Activism to change the way we see the world and create new possibilities and action.

There will be drinks, talking, an imagination exercise and a Q&A.

It's free, and open to all! Come join us!

Last week, Moral Imaginations teamed up with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, to host a 2 hour workshop named: Reimagining the Good Life: How can we find joy within planetary boundaries? In the workshop, we centred on two questions:

🌍 What if we could live in a way that served not only us but also future generations and the more-than-human world?

🌿 What if our joy is actually entangled with the joy of others, past, present and future?

The workshop sold out a week before it happened (for those who didn’t get a place, please watch this space for more open and public workshops soon!) and we had a wonderful session bringing alive and dreaming up images of futures that people, future generations and nature are longing for.

Below, Anu Paajanen, who works at Sitra in the sustainability team and was the person to reach out to us after she came across our work and concept of Imagination Activism, writes about the concept, and brings it alive with the metaphor of a building a new ship towards a different kind of future:

“One of my favourite concepts I’ve come across in the past year is imagination activism. An imagination activist is someone powered by imagination and the vision and tools to make the world better for everyone. Often we think of activism as fighting and trying to stop what’s going horribly wrong in the world. It can feel like being on a ship that we can see is both falling apart and on course towards an iceberg, and rallying people to fix the gaping holes and convince the people in power to change course. 

The work of an imagination activist on the other hand is to ask: what else could the world be? What do I want for every child being born in the world today, and those born 200 or 1000 years from now? What do I want for all other creatures? What would be beautiful and how can I start building that?

Imagination activism is about building new vessels, and looking for new ground so that we can all leave this terrible sinking ship. The ship is fundamentally broken, it cannot be saved. It’s built on colonialism and extraction and exploitation of almost all of us, some more than others. This is its essence. Good riddance ship.

Of course, fighting against existing cruelties is also necessary. It is about preserving life so that we can rescue as many people (and species) as possible. But the ship can’t sail indefinitely and without the dreamers building the new land, we will all drown. 

In my daily life I think of imagination activism as the work of building pockets of the future I want to live in: it can be a short moment in my day, an action I take, a way I show up… these are ways of practising the world I want to live in. We can’t wait for a different world to start to emerge to start living in it. I believe it goes the other way around. So leave the ship in all the ways you can. Stop giving it your money, energy, talents, and dreams. There’s something else waiting for us.”

The Sheila McKechnie Foundation was started in 2004 following the death of Sheila McKechnie, a well-established campaigner who fought for important initiatives such as the Financial Services Authority, the Food Standards Agency and the Freedom of Information Act.

SMK define campaigning as any activity designed to create social change, whether to policy, law, attitudes, or behaviours. A campaign could be aimed at righting a wrong, protecting an asset, upholding a right, or holding a body to account. In some ways such activity shouldn’t be necessary in society, and yet all our most important rights and societal protections started in a campaign, and the collective sense of how things could and should be better.

The SMK National Campaigner Awards have been running for the last 4 years, and span different areas of campaigning: the Best Use of Law, Community Campaign, Amplifying Voices, Young Campaigners, Best Coalition or Collaboration, the David & Goliath Award, and Best Consumer Campaign. There have been some amazing campaigns and campaigners nominated in the past years, and you can take a look at the nominees and winners from 2023 here.

This year, Sheila McKechnie Foundation has partnered with University of the Arts London (UAL) to create a new category this year, the Creative Change-maker Award. And it’s for this award that Moral Imaginations has been nominated. It recognises the importance and power of creative and narrative interventions to create social change.

We are honoured to be shortlisted for this 2-year project, which brought together a diversity of partners across the spectrum to blur the boundaries between the probable and possible, unleash dreaming, imagining, and different ways of thinking into the council, and experiment with new ways of doing things that put the importance of the community, future generations, and nature first.

Last year, the Awards talked about the importance of nourishing hope in the darkest hour, and harnessing creativity and different ways of campaigning to unleash energy, connection and solidarity. Moral Imaginations and Camden are listed alongside the brilliant projects Woodhill, a film and theatre project raising awareness of prison suicide, Mothers Rise Up, a group of mothers campaigning for climate change, and LIVE + BREATHE, the campaign for clean air.

Our campaign ran from 2021-2023 where we worked with Camden Council over 24 months to introduce and integrate moral imagination into the council's ways of working. This spanned work internally and with residents, leadership, organisational processes and policy. Today, 32 Imagination Activists live on and serve as ambassadors for the moral imagination in Camden, supporting the rest of the organisation and Borough to shift relationships to each other, the natural world and the future, putting fearless ambition, creative thinking and long-term outlooks at the centre of the council in order to act differently.

Each year, SMK celebrates the best campaigns and campaigners – whether working locally or nationally, and from individuals and community groups to people working in large organisations. Their interest is in finding those who have made change happen – most effectively, creatively and courageously. We’re extremely grateful to be shortlisted and receive this recognition of our work, and want to thank all those who were involved in making it happen.

You can read more about the Awards and our nomination here: https://smk.org.uk/awards_nominations/camden-imagines/

“What is moral imagination and how might we use it to create a thriving life that honours the planetary boundaries? Join imagination activist and Founder of Moral Imaginations Phoebe Tickell on May 8th to build the longing for alternative futures and explore the good life from new, sustainable perspectives.”

Sign up here

What if we could live in a way that served not only us but also future generations and the more-than-human world?

What if our joy is actually entangled with the joy of others, past, present and future?

Join us for this free-to-join open workshop from 8am - 9:30am GMT next Wednesday 8th May to dream into what the world could and should look like, if we put Life at the centre of everything we do.

Moral Imaginations will be hosting the workshop, open to all, in partnership with our friends at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.

More information here:

By April, us Finns have already consumed our fair share of renewable natural resources for 2024. It is clear that our lifestyles require some bold changes. But why does it seem so hard? In the words of systems thinker and imagination activist Phoebe Tickell, maybe what we lack is not information or knowledge – but imagination.

Phoebe Tickell is the founder of the organisation Moral Imaginations. She and her team believe that the vast majority of our challenges are not resource problems, but imagination problems, and that imagination is a muscle that can be flexed to change the way we see – and act. Moral imagination is the capacity to believe that things can, and must, be different.

Join us to learn, imagine and connect with others in this online workshop facilitated by Phoebe. A short presentation and a guided imagination exercise will help us shift our perceptions and move from dreams to action.

See you there!

How can I join?

This online event is hosted on Teams on Wednesday May 8th at 8.00-9.30am. You can sign up using the link below and you will be sent the joining link via email.

Sign up here

Schedule:

8.00

Welcome

Orientation

Anu Paajanen, Sitra

8.05

How to be an Imagination Activist

Phoebe Tickell, Moral Imaginations

Imagination exercise

Group conversation

Collective summing up

9.20

Closing

Sari Laine, Sitra

9:30

End

Hope to see you there!

Love,

If you would like to learn about the practical philosophy and experience a workshop Moral Imagination in person, in a deep dive masterclass, you are invited to come along to this workshop happening in Stockholm, Sweden in May 2024.

Strengthen your moral courage, your clear-eyed commitment and an understanding of the scale of the crises we face, and the role you can play. Come and learn what it means to you to be an Imagination Activist and start building the commitment and skills towards that. And meet others and build community with people who are committed to a life-centric, flourishing future.

Are you longing for another system, other than capitalism, leaning on eternal GDP growth? Where life is equally precious and human and non-human species and our planet thrive in co-existence?

This May, the Inner Development Goals Hubs and Networks invite you to reshape your inner world during a special day with Phoebe Tickell.

Get ready to reimagine your relationship with yourself, each other, the planet, and the future with a Deep-Dive workshop on Moral Imagination.

What is Moral Imagination?

Moral Imaginations is an imagination-based pedagogy to shift worldviews and deeply held narratives, connect to pre-existing intrinsic values, expand identity and foster connectedness. Imagination is used to confront and disrupt deeply held beliefs about what is possible, how change happens, and the role we can play in shifting paradigms.

Phoebe’s approach centres on the belief that all meaningful and moral forms of action begin in imagination, attention and perception, and these are muscles that can be expanded, trained and channelled towards the good of the whole.

Participants are guided through exercises that unleash creativity, expand thinking, and help them ‘see through the eyes’ of past ancestors, future generations, and an expanded present-day community, including the more-than-human world. Their approach centres on the belief that all meaningful and moral forms of action begin in imagination, attention and perception, and these are muscles that can be expanded, trained and channelled towards the good of the whole.

The methodology offers awareness-based, ontological techniques, as well as practical tools to translate this imagination into action. Moral Imaginations has been used to train ‘Imagination Activists’ in governments, corporations and non-profits with the aim of quickening the transition to a life-centric society.

Learning outcomes

• Unlock the Power of Imagination
  Dive deep into the concept of moral imagination, discovering how creativity and empathy can be harnessed to envision new ethical possibilities. Explore the intersection of ethics and imagination and learn how to think beyond conventional boundaries.

• Question Deeply Held Assumptions
  Explore the concepts of paradigms, worldviews and ‘deep’ narratives, and explore assumptions usually held for granted about our world, the future, the unimaginable, the impossible.

• Three Pillars Framework
  Bring the perspective of nature, ancestors and the future generations into your projects using moral imagination to create the conditions for regenerative action.

• Practical Tools for Ethical Decision-Making
  Acquire practical skills to apply moral imagination in your everyday life and decision-making processes. Learn to create the conditions for moral imagination to thrive.

Practical details

This exclusive Deep Dive will take place at the Fotografiska museum in Stockholm as well as online, on May 14 2024, 09:00-12:30 CET.

The price includes lunch and coffee / tea / snacks. 

The event will be recorded and available for ticket holders only.

The proceeds from this event will go towards the development of the IDG Hubs and Networks community. The price excludes 25% VAT.

If you really want to join this workshop, but can't afford it, please send an email to pontus@innerdevelopmentgoals.org and we will find a way to help you.

What is expected of participants;

• Be there and be present for the entire time

• Be prepared to practise - this is not a classroom session of passive listening to a lecture

Join us for this half day together in Stockholm in person, or online, to meet others, practice, and imagine together.

Secure your place here: https://idg.confetti.events/phoebe-tickell/

The vast majority of our challenges are not resource problems, but imagination problems. What if our perception and imagination is a muscle that can be flexed to change the way we see, think and act?

Let’s gather in Stockholm on May 14th, to work out our muscle and co-imagine a different kind of future. Organised by the Inner Development Goals and facilitated by Phoebe and Moral Imaginations.

Excited to be have the Earth as my Client this afternoon - I will be speaking to a group of lawyers at ClientEarth about Moral Imagination and Imagination Activism to help make the kind of changes this century needs. Here is the blurb that went out to their lawyers ahead of the talk:

"Phoebe Tickell is a renegade scientist, systems thinker and social entrepreneur. She is the founder of the organisation Moral Imaginations and creator of an approach called Imagination Activism: a new kind of activism powered by imagination to create new possibilities and new forms of action. She believes that the vast majority of our challenges are not resource problems, but imagination problems, and that imagination is a muscle that can be flexed to change the way we see – and act. Moral Imaginations trains public, private and community organisations to solve place-based problems, unleash energy and systemic change. Their flagship project Camden Imagines trained 32 Camden Council officers to become ‘ambassadors of imagination’ and spread imagination across the Borough.

Here is how she invites you in: “The 21st century demands a rehaul in how we see the world, decide what is important and design everything from our organisations to our supply chains to our cities and infrastructures. We will need to grow greater courage and what Phoebe calls 'Moral Imagination' to do the unthinkable, and seemingly impossible, and chart paths into unfamiliar (but not 'new') territories.

Imagination Activism is a radical and rigorous approach to practice and strengthen shifts in perception, move from dreams to action, to create positive change and chart bold, ambitious futures. It's a new kind of activism powered by imagination to see the world differently and the skills to turn bold vision into action. Rather than fighting the old, it orientates to the new. At the heart of Imagination Activism is Moral Imagination - the ability to look at things as if they could - and should - be otherwise. By changing the way we see the world, we can create new possibilities and new actions that serve all people, the planet, and the coming future generations.”

Looking forward to stoking #MoralImagination and #LegalImagination together!