“My ask of humans is quite large,” says the northern bat to a room of reindeer, wolf lichen, bog, and other beings. “It’s a shift of consciousness, and an understanding that … we are a relation.”
The scene could come from a sci-fi novel imagining a more-than-human uprising. In fact, it’s from a recent “interspecies council” in Oppdal, Norway, in which non-humans – spoken for by humans – convened to discuss the region’s future.
In the 1980s, the environmentalists John Seed and Joanna Macy developed the Council of All Beings: a practice in which humans embody and represent other species in a ceremonial council.
The scientist and “moral imagination” activist Phoebe Tickell was a mentee of Macy’s. Together they imagined integrating the practice into governance structures. This inspired Tickell to develop the interspecies council, which she describes as a “decision-making methodology that expands who has voice and representation in governance beyond humans alone”.
Interspecies councils address a specific issue. Facilitators and ecologists identify multispecies stakeholders, then assign and brief human representatives (chosen randomly or based on expertise). Councils produce an output, like a decision or manifesto, and the process concludes with an impact evaluation. The term “multispecies assembly” is sometimes used more broadly, to encompass artistic variations.
The practice is part of a growing international movement establishing nature rights and governance power. In the UK, 13 councils have recognised river rights since 2023. A nature’s rights bill is building support. A coalition of artists, ecologists, lawyers, scientists, urbanists, fishers, and policymakers is exploring the possibilities of interspecies biodiversity governance around the North Sea. Organisations are increasingly applying “nature-centric governance” techniques such as nature charters and appointing nature to boards.
Interspecies councils are also taking root in policy settings. They have been used to reimagine stewardship around London’s River Roding, and to generate a multispecies response to a governmental consultation on land use. And now they’ve gone international.
Oppdal is a mountain village in central Norway’s Drivdalen valley, between the Dovrefjell and Trollheimen ranges. Beyond the patchwork of valley-floor farmland, wildness reigns. “People live here with their shoulders lower,” says Oppdal’s mayor, Elisabeth Hals.
In winter Oppdal’s population balloons from 5,000 to 30,000 or more. Many visitors retreat to private cabins, or hytter, which symbolise nature connection in the Norwegian psyche and have proliferated, especially since Covid. This spring the municipality is also expected to approve plans for apartments accommodating another 1,000 tourists by 2035 – part of a strategic repositioning of Oppdal as a year-round destination to mitigate against warming winters.
Against a global backdrop of environmental crisis, Oppdal’s transitional moment has created ongoing debate about how to balance economic development with ecological health. Margrete Vognild Blokhus, who facilitates dialogue between stakeholders, says discussions are animated by a shared sense of stewardship, not conflict. Nevertheless, tensions persist over how to allocate land between farming, tourism and conservation.
The architect Katerine Chada is part of Common Ground, a multidisciplinary research project exploring integrated land management in Oppdal. After seeing Tickell talk at the University of Cambridge in 2025, she pitched her colleagues an Oppdal interspecies council.
They were sceptical. Would people engage? “Are we going to go on this weird trip?” Patricia Schneider-Marin, a fellow architect, remembers thinking. But they supported giving nature a voice, and were curious about whether a council could cut through conflict and enable more ecological decisions. They agreed to try.
On the morning of the council, 38 representatives gathered at Bjerkeløkkja conference centre – all local people, all new to this. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed conifer forest and snow-dusted foothills. Chada was there representing a spider. Schneider-Marin was a Norwegian spruce, Vognild Blokhus a purple saxifrage flower. The mayor would arrive later, as a cloudberry.
The day began with a briefing, then icebreakers. When asked whose great grandparents lived in Oppdal, about half the room stood. An invitation to embody their beings elicited the odd squawk, wing flap and lumbering stride.
The council centred around a series of discussions about beings’ needs, challenges and ideas for Oppdal. Ritualistic touches, such as beings bowing in introduction, added ceremony.
A rockfoil flower wished that humans would slow down and listen “to where nature can tolerate more human activity and where it needs space”. “I’m worried there’s too much of me,” said a birch. “I thrive in open spaces, but I can take over.”
“I’ve just been seen as a resource, and not even acknowledged for how much I’ve given this landscape,” lamented the River Driva, voice cracking with emotion. “I hate when humans make me fit in and be smaller than I am.”
“I like him!” exclaimed a fox, pointing at a wader.
Interspecies councils are not primarily about unearthing data. “I work a lot with numbers,” says Schneider-Marin. “We know the numbers.”
Rather, they aim to cultivate interspecies empathy – to help dissolve the illusory human-nature divide. “To take care of nature, we have to know it and feel it and think like it,” says Vognild Blokhus.
Thinking and feeling differently does not mean pretending to know other species’ minds. Speaking for a tree without sight, smell, hearing or taste was “a bit of a brain-twister”, says Schneider-Marin. “But I think that’s a healthy point.”
For Tickell, imperfect representation beats exclusion. “Is it sillier to ask someone to imaginatively inhabit the perspective of a different species for an hour, or to continue running governance systems that have driven a 70% collapse in wildlife populations in 50 years?”
Interacting as non-humans can also disrupt human relationships. The council created an unusually “fantastic atmosphere of listening”, says Chada.
For Schneider-Marin, this helped “people to hear concerns without feeling offended, because they could be like: ‘OK, wait, I’m a species.’”
The hope is that these positive experiences will translate into long-term empathy gains. An evaluation is tracking Oppdal participants’ connectedness to nature and openness to non-human perspectives from before the council to six months after.
Oppdal’s beings drafted principles for human governance which will be published as a manifesto. Human discussions to close the council also generated governance ideas, including a six-monthly interspecies council, and the formation of a höringsgruppe, or hearing group, for listening to Oppdal’s non-humans. Participants will gather in June to discuss implementation.
The core challenge is establishing what Tickell calls “institutional trace”: meaningful decision-making power grounded in robust methodologies, accountable protocols and longitudinal research. She envisions a world where interspecies councils are a requirement “as unremarkable as environmental impact assessments”. Interspecies councils will have failed, she says, if they “become sophisticated greenwashing or window-dressing”.
The future of interspecies councils will unfold in Oppdal and beyond. For Oppdal’s participants, shared scepticism has become a sense that they represent, as Vognild Blokhus puts it, one of the “little seeds that we have to plant to make sure that in the end, maybe, we have a change”.