Opinion: Designer worlds, with multiple species

The worlds of nature and humanity are not dichotomies: they inhabit and constitute each other

By Pramod K Nayar

Posthumanism emphasises, as is well established by now, a multispecies state, where the living and the non-living are entangled. It objects to human exceptionalism on two grounds: that humans cannot live without the assistance of bacteria, plants and animals; exceptionalism has caused the humans to position themselves as lord and master over the world. The latter, critical posthumanists see as the causal factor behind the current planetary crisis. This vision has informed multiple fields and more recently, nature park design, conservation projects and even residential housing.

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Transspecies, Posthumanism

Posthumanism argues, especially in its environmentalist avatar, that the worlds of nature and humanity are not dichotomies: they inhabit and constitute each other. This also means that humans have constantly constructed ‘nature’ in particular ways to suit their purpose: whether as Arcadian and Edenic, as utility or, now, as something to be conserved for future generations. It also believes that the placing of humans as the apex species has enabled endless exploitation of the other forms of life on earth.

The Harold Simmons Park in Dallas writes about its agenda: ‘Conservation of nature means the protection of species and ecosystems from harm or extinction’. Its Trinity River Corridor was built with the aim of ‘maintaining and restoring habitats, protecting biological diversity, and preventing water pollution’. It is by design meant to integrate the massive waterway with the public through bike paths and recreational areas. It also accounts for flood season, and the waterways are designed to flood.

 

Humans have constantly constructed ‘nature’ in particular ways to suit their purpose: whether as utility or, now, as something to be conserved for future generations

 

Michael Van Valkenburgh’s design also accounts for different soils, sediments and hydrological features of the Trinity River basin. The Y2Y — Yellowstone to Yukon — conservation initiative, likewise, is meant to integrate the natural world with the human one. Such attempts constitute a posthumanist approach to national parks design although biodiversity experts are still divided over these designer parks and conservation projects.

Transspecies design is a controversial attempt to restore the balance, nature-human. Adrian Parr Zaretsky, philosopher and Dean of the College of Design at Oregon University, defines it as follows:

transpecies design honors biodiversity as a common heritage, one we share with other species. Instead of presenting human experience and flourishing as the goal of design, it takes the inextricable linkages connecting a multiplicity of animals and plants as both the point of departure and the end goal of design.

It demands that anything humans design as parks or reserves must account for the ‘substantive realities of a multiplicity of species and the ecosystems and biomes in which their wellbeing is imbricated’. The Trinity River experiment, therefore, is meant to regenerate older waterways, land forms and species habitats. Variations of climate, animal movement and soil shifts are to be taken into account and the design structured around them, rather than, as has been the case so far, alter them to suit human needs.

Biomes, Transspecies Design

Research shows that 465 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide can be sequestered, and more than 70% of projected extinctions of plants and animals in the world stalled (if not stopped) if we could only restore 30% of the biomes on the planet.

The restoration of biomes, forest, grassland, aquatic, desert and tundra, is a priority for conservationists. In a 2020 multi-authored essay published in Nature, Bernardo BN Strassburg and a large group of conservation scientists from across the world wrote: ‘Ecosystem restoration includes the restoration of converted lands back into healthy ecosystems, as well as the restoration of degraded ecosystems’. But this restoration should be multicriteria based.

They noted that ‘Of 2,870 million hectares of converted lands we identified worldwide, we estimate that 54% were originally forests, 25% grasslands, 14% shrublands, 4% arid lands and 2% wetlands’. They argued with hard data that ‘Wetlands and forests are of the highest relative importance for biodiversity conservation … and the mitigation of climate change, respectively’. In none of these arguments is humanity privileged — and this is the major shift that transspecies efforts and design (including conservation) embodies.

Multispecies Living Spaces?

But for many lay persons, transspecies conservation projects of the magnitude described above is beyond comprehension. But there have been other attempts, literally, closer home.

In Milan, the architect Stefano Boeri inaugurated his building project, Vertical Forest, in 2014. This set of two condos was not an exclusive human dwelling. The two towers — no relation to WTC — look, at first glance, to be a high-rise wall of shrubbery. The description goes:

[it] consists of two towers that are respectively 80 and 112 metres high, housing a total of 800 trees (480 first and second stage trees, 300 smaller ones, 15000 perennials and/or ground covering plants and 5000 shrubs), providing an amount of vegetation equivalent to 30000 square metres of woodland and undergrowth, concentrated on 3000 square metres of urban surface.

Elsewhere in the write-up, it is called ‘a home for trees that also houses humans and birds’. Rather than a finished building of bricks-steel-mortar-glass, it embodies a set of processes: some natural (in the plants) and some man-made. That said, this too is a posthuman vision because the so-called natural material of plants on the surface and within is not natural at all, but managed by human engineering and design efforts. The write-up on Vertical Forest explicitly states that it is an attempt to move beyond the anthropocentric and towards a ‘new biological diversity’.

Vertical Forest is an extension, in fact, of a 2000s experimental project at MIT called Fab Tree Hab by Mitchell Joachim, Javier Arbona and Lara Greden. This was basically a tree-home, or rather a home built around and with trees where tree branches form a part of the house. It also was designed to make use of biowaste as manure for the trees, and thus embodying sustainability in its very materiality.
There are similar attempts in other domains: for example, organic farms modelled and built around the local ecosystem. In bioengineering, Engineered Living Materials (ELMs) are engineered materials prepared from organic matter, and which will then follow a functional path of those materials.

These exciting developments suggest that critical posthumanist thought leans more and more towards the ecological. While initially it was all about man-machine interfaces and cyborgs, the last decade or so has shown several developments that signify an ecological shift within posthumanism. Without addressing (or perhaps addressing only implicitly) the question, ‘what comes after the human?’ critical posthumanism provides an answer: transspecies worlds designed for but not exclusive to the humans.

Transspecies design is how we will, or so the posthumanists believe, heal the world.

 

(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)