Our democratic nature? Reflections on more-than-human agency and connection.

Lakshmi Venugopal: I’d like to start by giving some important context. A lot of these conversations, especially in the West, are about inviting more-than-human voices into democracy or governance practices that are based in the West. But in different parts of the world, democracy with more-than-humans is already practiced, so we are not talking about something new for all humans – it’s something that has returned.

My work sits at the intersection of experiential practice and processes that invite the voice of the more-than-human into modern-day human life. This brings up many questions, the most important of which is ‘who speaks for nonhumans’? ‘Can we communicate with non-humans?’ Which brings the question of what communication itself is. Communication is a two-way process, so if we are to communicate, we need to be able to listen. As modern humans, I think we have lost our capacity to listen to each other, to listen to collectives of humans, and then further to the living, thriving, communicating world that is all around us. We have to develop our capacity for relationality because the moment you start listening, you are building a relationship. Oftentimes when we talk about our connection with the non-human, we think of it as one-on-one communication. But democracy is a collective practice: it cannot be done alone. This relationship is a collective exploration.

I remember a friend asking me, “so does this mean that the koalas have to come to the boardroom? Or do we go sit under the trees?” It’s a question that keeps coming back to me, because when we think about democratic governance, often closed rooms and people in suits come to mind, and it’s a very carefully orchestrated practice. So I invite you to imagine something else. How about under a tree? Can we go sit under a tree and have this communication unfold?

Shrishtee Bajpai: Thanks Lakshmi for setting that context beautifully. My work, along with many of my colleagues, explores democracy in a context where many people have never really experienced what many of us imagine democracy as, because of the systems of oppression and authoritarian governments they have lived in. Talking about democracy becomes even more interesting and challenging when people have not experienced it in their lives, and this led us to explore the question of what democracy really means for different people in different parts of the world.

This led me to Central India, where Indigenous people, Adivasis in Hindi, have been facing mining threats in their sacred forest. When we asked them about their assertion for democracy, I was told by an elder that for them, the rest of nature, this forest that they were trying to protect, was God for them. The leaves, spirits, and animals in the forest were sacred. They had to take a decision on whether to have mining in the forest based on what the forest told them. And this quiet assertion from this elder was a much deeper, wiser, and more life-affirming notion of democracy than the one that is currently prevalent in our world. It brought me to a much broader notion of what democracy really is, outside of a modern Western perspective. What does it really mean to make decisions which are not just human-centred, but encompass the rest of nature? What does living with the land and the forest really mean for people?

What informs the resistance and continued systems of autonomy and self-governance for such communities? A common thread is that our lives have to be embedded in nature. And so, rather than bringing nature into our decisionmaking, we have to embed and reattune, recalibrate our living with nature. It’s not that we are going to go and live in the forest. It’s rewiring ourselves to acknowledge that even in cities nature exists. It’s about really finding our spaces and working on ourselves, working on our institutions, to how this aliveness to the rest of nature can be recognised, and how this interdependence can become part of our institutions and decisionmaking processes – not something artificially that we put in, but something embedded, on an everyday basis.

Rather than bringing nature into our decisionmaking, we have to embed and reattune. It’s not that we are going to go and live in the forest. It’s rewiring ourselves.

These traditional governance systems are place-based; they’re responding to the ecology and the conditions of land, water, mountains, snow and they’re abiding by those laws set by the rest of nature. These systems of governance continue despite the imposition of Western systems. In Spiti – an incredibly gorgeous landscape in Northern India – one community’s decisionmaking process involves consulting the more-than-human world. A few years ago, a really important and sacred peak in their region was completely degraded because of all the tourists going there. Through their local deity – with whom they have a continuous consultation process – the community immediately stopped any trekking on that sacred mountain to protect it from further degradation.

Radical attention, for place-based communities, is alive and very essential. It’s learning about where your food comes from, growing your food, understanding the landscapes, watersheds, and mountainscapes. Seascapes become part of your everyday living, and not something that you do outside or somewhere else. It’s an embodied, interdependent way of living. That intuitive intelligence is what needs to be revived.

I remember a conversation when Lakshmi and I went to Northeast India, where this elder was hesitant to tell us why he thinks nature is angry, that the two of us wouldn’t have the capacity to really understand it. Many times conversations like that have led me into forest walks with elders and community members, which is a different way of knowing the forest and knowing their struggles also. It is about understanding what trees, plants, birds, animals inhabit, and it’s never a rosy relationship. It’s never a completely harmonious relationship, which is again a very – I think – a colonial Western notion. It’s a relationship, sometimes of harmony, sometimes of conflict, sometimes of violence. But it is all this communion that makes a community.

Lakshmi: I just want to draw on something you said there, Shrishtee, that conflict is part of a relationship. A relationship does not end if there’s a conflict. Oftentimes there’s conflict between non-humans and a human community. In India, there are many shared ecologies where there’s human-animal conflict. Most times these stories are represented as if because they’re in conflict, there’s no relationship. That’s a very limited representation. In a shared ecology, humans and animals live and share space on a daily basis. They have encounter after encounter, and sometimes that relationship goes sour. When a relationship goes sour, people are angry, animals are angry. There are consequences. Conflict is part of our lives and relationships, and when we think about our relationship to humans and non-humans, we have to apply the same level of nuance and complexity.

I often use interpersonal work as a doorway into connection with non-humans. Many times we lack the relational capacities to communicate, to be in relationships even with other humans. When we’re stepping into a relationship with the wider life around us, it’s an even bigger ask. So how do we do that intentionally? How do we do that in community? How do we apologise? How do we ask for permission? How do we engage with the tough emotions that come through us in the process?

There is collective wisdom there, and a thread that is deeply rooted and connects all of us, despite our varied contexts.

Shrishtee: I grappled with these questions for a long time. While working with a lot of these communities, I was trying to distill something out of my experience, trying to create some practical to-do list that would solve the world’s problems. I had to undergo a cognitive challenge – to question my own education and way of thinking, which is colonial in many ways because I was given a colonial education. I came to realise that my responsibility was to figure out my role in all this. How to bring various communities together, rather than speaking for them? How to create spaces so that communities have the space, not just in the corridors, but actually at the centre of decisionmaking? How do we recalibrate our governance systems through these principles and ways of being?

We have, through various experiences here in India, facilitated spaces where people can come together and talk about their struggles and systems of governance. We talk about their practices, which differ based on the context that they’re living in, but have strong notions of learning from fish, or from bees, or from mountains, on how to govern. There’s collective wisdom there, and a thread that is deeply rooted and connects all of us, despite our varied contexts.

This is a collective reaffirmation that these ways of being are acknowledged, respected, and they are not alone. There are so many people across the world thinking and doing in similar ways, and what we need is to come together. It is important to show radical solidarity for these peoples and communities, which will also enable us to find ways for democratic institutions to learn from them. Bioregionalism is one example – respecting how nature is contiguous and not cutting across those boundaries and ecological flows.

What we are noticing now is the recognition that Indigenous – and in some places non-Indigenous – communities’ customary systems and processes can enable decisionmaking that is cognisant of the landscapes and ecologies that they inhabit. There is recognition that this has not happened within Western systems of governance. The challenge is then to bridge that gap between the two. Some movements, like rights of nature or earth jurisprudence, are articulating possibilities to give space to many of these territorial rights, self-determination, and autonomy struggles.

My urge in all this is, can we think of democracy and autonomy in much more radical ways? Key learnings from communities across the world show that despite our different contexts, we can learn from these practices. But that needs transformation in our education, our economies, our understanding of life and how we have organised it. So this conversation is also intersectional and cross-sectoral, because we have to weave many threads of our lives together to be able to really talk about what it is to live with nature, in nature. We are as much nature as anything outside of us is, and that realisation requires a rewiring of how we look at ourselves.

We cannot truly talk about rights of nature or more-than-human governance if we are operating in extractive economies.

Lakshmi: A big part of this is emotional work. A lot of the relational work that we do while we are in beautiful settings in nature and connecting to the non-humans around us brings up an overwhelming grief for us humans. I can say that quite confidently – having worked with people from around the globe – it does not matter where you’re from. What you feel may be different, depending on where you’re from, but the grief we carry as humans as a species is quite something. So when I think about deliberative democracy and opening up spaces for what that authentic, real connection and communication could be, I am thinking about spaces that can hold emotions, that can hold stories of the past, the stories that have such a big grip on us. The stories of our times: colonisation, oppression, violence, death. This is the story of our relationship to this earth, and we are not outside of those stories. We are very much part of that story. When we remember, when we get into connection, those stories come alive for us, and it’s a lot to carry for one person – which is why I was talking about the role of the collective and community in this work. We have to hold each other through that.

Reconciliation has to be a part of this picture: reconciliation with humans and earth and reconciliation between humans. The shared histories of all of us are here, and our shared histories with the earth invariably include war, oppression, colonisation. Stepping into connection together brings up tensions that we have to work through. Anne Poelina and colleagues at the Nulungu Research Institute in Western Australia describe a research method, Hearing and Seeing Country, in which they invite people from all cultures to go out into their country and find their place. They talk about the fact that we can all find our ways to go back into communication, and I find that a very powerful invitation.

Shrishtee: One of the challenges we are dealing with is that in the context that we are living in, this conversation is a very minority conversation. How many of us are able to create maybe some spaces, some dent in those institutions or systems of governance? I think very little, and it’s still so much of a struggle. Land dispossession, accumulation, greenwashing continue. Our languages get co-opted and reduced to quick fixes and a reductionist way of operating. Capitalism, neocolonisation, certain old stuck ways of thinking and continued patriarchal systems are the larger challenges and the setting for these conversations. So we are trying to talk about bringing the rest of nature into decisionmaking, and it is so far off from most people’s imagination.

Through our work it has been quite evident that to talk about bringing the rest of nature, or more-than-human, into conversation, we have to highlight the intersectionality of these issues as much as we can. That we cannot truly talk about rights of nature, or more-than-human governance if we are operating in the same extractive economies, or if we are living under authoritarian governments, or we are waging war on communities and people. We can’t talk about it unless we are also talking about these things. They are not separate, but part of the same collective articulation. And so the right people, communities and voices that need to be present in the room become even more important. That’s why who speaks for nature, who speaks for people, and why, is in itself an important question to ask, in the spaces that we inhabit and the spaces we speak in.

Acknowledgements

This article is an edited version of a seminar hosted by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy at the University of Canberra. The full recorded session can be viewed here. Thanks especially to Emanuela Savini and Ferdinand Sanchez at the Centre, and to Lakshmi and Shrishtee for curating the transcript for this piece and the translation.

About the Authors

Lakshmi Venugopal is founder of the Inner Climate Academy, which provides spaces for inner reflection, collaborative research, and facilitated explorations aimed at transforming our relationship with the living Earth. Her facilitation practice centres on deep listening, authenticity, and inclusive co-creation, and her research explores how pre-industrial civilizations’ philosophies might inform biomimetic engagement with our living universe, fostering inter-civilizational dialogues toward eco-cultural transformation of the modern world.

Shrishtee Bajpai is a researcher, writer, and activist working on themes of interspecies justice, earthy governance, and systemic transformations. She is a member of Kalpavriksh, an environmental action group in India and coordinates Vikalp Sangam (Alternatives Confluence) network that researches, documents, networks around systemic alternatives. She is the core team member of Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and part of Emerging Futures: Visionaries Programme of Joseph Rowntree Foundation. She also serves on the executive committee of Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.