The construction was supposed to be routine. The land was purchased, the blueprints drawn. But the moment the first machine moved, frogs began to emerge from the earth. Thousands. The site flooded with their calls, their bodies forming an unintentional blockade.
Work halted. Conservationists argued the site was a habitat. The state considered compensation for delays. The developers said there was no dispute here, only an interruption. But the frogs did not know they had interrupted anything at all. They were simply present. And their presence was enough to bring everything to a stop.
– Based on actual cases in the Western Ghats where endangered amphibians, including the purple frog (Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis), have been found at construction sites, leading to legal battles over habitat destruction and delays in infrastructure projects.
Is the unexpected presence of other species enough to get us to start acknowledging our coexistence with them? Can or should we rethink development? Using such case studies, at our recent multispecies canvases with Agami, we spent time thinking through more of such questions and potential answers in Bangalore and Kolkata. Read on to know more…
At Socratus, we have been exploring the idea of multispecies co-existence for over a year and have explored it via field research in Bhitarkanika National Park in Odisha, via media interactions in Kolkata around the issue of free-ranging dogs and our recently concluded Shaktiville studio, which ran for six weeks last year. To know more about how we have been thinking and building our work in this domain, read the Messenger series here. The TLDR:
Nothing makes sense except in light of the planet
Yes, but how do we make it happen in practice? We thought our work on climate citizenship comes closest to multispecies coexistence, so we asked ourselves: “How do we expand our work on citizenship to include non-human species?” Law offers a tangible entry point to begin this exploration, and that’s the primary reason we were delighted when Agami approached us to co-design a multispecies canvas with them, exploring facets of this very question and what it means in the Indian context.
Different researchers and practitioners around the world are exploring the idea of more than human rights, multispecies justice, including India, where a group of ecologists, anthropologists, geographers, etc, came together to form the Co-existence Consortium. Indian courts have also awarded personhood to rivers like the Ganga and Yamuna (which was later stayed by the Supreme court) and most recently established a “Right Against Adverse Effects of Climate Change” under the Rights of Life and Equality which have not been free of criticism as well, with development trumping over environment concerns in many cases. Home to diverse flora and fauna, a large portion of the human population and several indigenous communities that have their own ways of co-existing with biodiversity and unique ecosystems of our land (such as the residents of Niyamgiri who won the landmark case to stop mining on their scared hill), there’s a need to rethink and unpack these global ideas in the Indian context. Therefore, with Agami, we are going on a multicity journey to explore the question, “Given our multispecies existence, how do we redesign our systems to ensure justice for all?”
Glimpses of the Bangalore Canvas
Last month, we hosted two of these canvases, in Bangalore and Kolkata, to kick off our exploration. In Bangalore, Agami and Socratus jointly curated the participants to include ecologists, law professionals from different backgrounds including environment law, mediators, artists, academics, educators, media professionals and social entrepreneurs whereas for the Kolkata canvas we collaborated with Siddharth Agarwal from Veditum India Foundation to curate people with similar profiles from West Bengal and Shillong, to ensure diversity of experience and perspectives in the room.
Glimpses from the Kolkata Canvas
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The Order of Proceedings
As participants entered the room, they were greeted with a Newspaper headlines wall where we included some real and some fictional headlines to intrigue them and get their creative juices flowing. Designed as half-day engagements, both discussions were split into broadly two parts, excluding introductions and reflections/feedback. The first part involved facilitated group-wise discussions using case studies like the one shared above, where the participants were encouraged to dive deeper into aspects of harm, conflict, dispute, agency, justice, in each case and how our perception of them could change when looking through a multispecies lens. This design allowed for free-flowing conversations among participants while grounding them in the larger question of what reimagining our legal and governance systems might look like. They were nudged at the end of this discussion to articulate the musings, questions and confusion that came up and they were sitting with. This was important because designing and thinking of paradigm shifts often leaves people unsettled and restless. We as hosts need to acknowledge this and hold space for participants to share them, as individuals, across groups. These were pinned on cardboard boxes in Bangalore and on the windows and doors at the Kolkata venue, and participants engaged with them during the tea break. Some of the questions that came up across the two canvases include -
Can the crocodile be the steward for a river?
Who gets to represent the needs/rights of ecosystems? Should it be indigenous communities who already view ecosystems with a different worldview, having their own agency?
Do animals have their own laws? Where do we increase our own accountability? Aren’t we imposing our laws on them?
Do current laws protect and nurture? Or “serve” humankind?
How do we balance/negotiate preservation and the desire for growth (development)?
When does an encroachment become a settlement?
How visible does a life form have to be to be considered?
How do we truly define harm? Who will assess the harm?
There were significant overlaps between the two canvases, and we plan to use these questions to build a repository and as guiding lights as we begin to think of a framework for new, reimagined legal systems and beyond.
Following the break, the participants were introduced to the Climate Recipes project, which is co-curated by Srinivas Mangipudi and Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, and has documented quite a few multispecies co-existence recipes across different editions. They were given templates to “cook up” their own recipes in either context of the case studies they discussed or in response to some of the questions they were sitting with or came across in the display during the break. A simple one-line recipe, followed by a sketch/artwork and short explanation, allowed people to step out of the purely cerebral mindspace, which dominated the first session, to a more creative and meditative space when developing their ideas. Participants were free to work in groups or individually to enable both personal and collective reflection. These were pinned behind the questions on the cardboard boxes in Bangalore, allowing for the creation of an in-situ exhibition like our work with SWISP lab, University of Melbourne, last year. Some recipes that came out of the sessions are shared below. All the recipes from Bangalore and Kolkata can be accessed here and here, respectively.
Some Multispecies recipes from participants across the two cities
During our debrief after the Bangalore canvas, we realized that many of these recipes spoke to foundational values or principles of the system we want to imagine and co-design with all the participants. Therefore, we narrowed down the prompt when it came to the Kolkata canvas to enable participants to specifically think of these values.
After the recipes had been created, each participant shared their recipe and their reasons behind it with the larger group. This sharing exercise allowed for a collective closure and a few laughs and praises around the sketches. As organizers, we also started to notice overlaps in recipes across the two canvases, which reinforced our belief that more curated discussions like these are one of the first steps needed to build a collective imagination of a new paradigm of multispecies co-existence in the ongoing Anthropocene.
Agami and Socratus plan to continue to take this format across different cities over this year and compile this work with participants and others in our networks. If you’re interested in joining this caravan, write to us and get involved!
Conclusion
This exploration with Agami is one of the ways we are building on our multispecies portfolio of work. Borrowing from ecology, ethnographical methods, speculative design, place-based thinking, and now law, we are developing our understanding of planetarity - what does it really mean to be a citizen of a planet, transcending our human-centered perspective while simultaneously acknowledging our entanglement within planetary systems. Over the next year, we see this work come together and feed into the larger question of our survival and flourishing as a species in a time of unprecedented environmental, economic and political turmoil. There are no easy answers, and we are prepared to sit with the messiness and discomfort of it all.
As shared in our last Messenger, Socratus believes in a multi-collaboration approach in responding to the wicked problems of our times. We work with diverse partners to facilitate the solutioning of immediate, tangible issues, such as the problem areas identified in Villgro’s pilot study or more intangible, nascent ideas, such as the reimagination of systems from a multispecies lens, like with Agami. Engaging in such a wide spectrum of spatial design and facilitation keeps us on our toes but also sharpens our ability to think across domains, methods and sectors, allowing for continuous learning and growth.
We will be back next week with a different kind of spatial design we have executed, so stay tuned.
