Posted 15 Aug
Lisa Bailey 
On January 16, 2024, MOD. opened a new kind of polling agency. Instead of gauging the political opinion of humans, the agency sought to evaluate the attitude of trees.
Under the guidance of experimental philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats, the agency evaluates changes in stress level by monitoring changes in canopy cover. (Under greater stress, a tree grows fewer leaves.) The agency also registers changes in local law. At the agency’s headquarters at MOD, the public is invited to find correlations between shifts in the arboreal landscape and alterations to the legal landscape. These correlations can provide policy guidance or influence how people vote in the next election.
In the following essay, originally published in Beyond Broken, Keats explains his motivations for founding the polling agency. He also provides broader context, arguing for the need to include nature in the body politic.
Titled The Assembly of Trees, the polling agency is an exhibit in the form of a thought experiment. Although the initial conditions have been carefully stated, the implications are for everyone to determine.
By Jonathon Keats
From the chambers of Parliament to the United Nations General Assembly, the human species holds absolute power, depriving all other beings of political agency. During our tenure, fleeting in terms of geological time, our policies have caused climate change and mass-extinction. From an environmental perspective, our decisions have been catastrophic to most life forms including humans.
Our inability to govern wisely is only one reason to question the political status quo. Equally problematic is the legitimacy of our rule. Humans comprise a small minority of the global population, and we’re less than one percent of the planetary biomass. In comparison, nonhuman species are ubiquitous.
Collectively, nonhumans are optimally positioned to observe planetary conditions since they live in all biomes including many places people can scarcely access. Evolution has provided them with diverse ways in which to sense, and make sense of, subtle changes in their environment. They’re deeply informed, and they have much to tell us.
They are also arguably more adept than humans at making decisions and reaching consensus. Many human political systems are overwhelmed by corruption and gridlock. Few have attempted to seriously address these shortcomings, and attempts have been enfeebled by failings of the human imagination. Ecosystems are not prone to government shutdowns. They do not succumb to coups d’etat. They are responsive and resilient. They manage risk with grace.
Nonhuman beings may not only be able to tell us about the planet but also inform us about decision-making processes.
The total disenfranchisement of nonhuman species is indefensible for both ethical and practical reasons. For governance to be democratic and for policies to be adequately informed, nonhuman species need to be represented in the body politic. Nonhuman beings need to become participants in planetary governance alongside us. In order for that to happen, we need to envision possible futures and decide which will contribute most effectively to planetary wellbeing. Then we need to enact them.
All lifeforms are self-organising. Self-organisation manifests internally in terms of biological functions, and externally in terms of interactions with habitat and other beings. From intracellular activity to multispecies symbioses, self-organisation is a form of governance that predates human governments.
For example, cell structure is regulated by genes, and cellular behavior is modulated by chemical signaling. The results can be remarkably complex and nuanced. The organisation of bacterial colonies can change on a macroscopic scale based on the exchange of information between individual cells, each sensing its immediate environment and excreting chemicals that influence its neighbors. This quorum sensing can result in the collective decision to form a pathogenic biofilm at an opportune moment.
Engineers routinely look to biology as a basis for technology. They take inspiration from birds and molluscs to design aeroplanes and surgical cements. Might political systems and decision-making processes likewise be designed biomimetically? Might these organisational technologies be inspired by self-organising principles of nonhuman species and living systems?
Through biomimicry, nonhuman entities would be represented in the decision-making process by becoming inherent to the process at a fundamental procedural level. The government would reflect their interests because it would literally emulate them. The biomimetic system might additionally facilitate direct input from nonhuman organisms or ecosystems since the decision-making procedures would be familiar. Governmental operations would be systemically compatible with their natural routines for collective self-organisation.
Deeply conserved systems have the added advantage of representing the lifeways of multiple life forms. They’re broadly agreed upon and have proven efficacy in myriad environmental conditions. For instance, there is a long-term planetary consensus on the efficacy of chemical signaling and genetics. If there weren’t, life as we know it would have gone extinct long before we were present to observe it.
Drawing on the ubiquity of genes, laws might be construed as the genotype of a government, and their enforcement might be construed as the phenotype. By taking inspiration from genetics, governments could benefit from many of the qualities that make genetics so effective in a biological context, such as the ability of a species to adapt effectively to changing external circumstances.
Introducing a mutation rate into legal code, and compelling the legislature to periodically select the next generation of laws from a population of mutants, might make the law more resilient. Allowing legal code to mutate differently in different municipalities – or to be epigenetically expressed differently in different neighborhoods based on local conditions – might make it more fit. Sexual recombination of legal mutations might add some of the advantages of natural selection.
Alternatively, governance might emulate living systems. For example, decision-making could emulate quorum sensing. Instead of organising citizens in discrete precincts, and legislating by majority rule of elected representatives, the body politic might be emergent. Policies might instantiate the consensus reached through negotiation between neighbors. The geographic reach of a law might expand organically until conflicting policies are met. The conflict could be resolved by delegations representing the contrasting positions. Jurisdictions would be fluid, and specific to each policy, reflecting a localised response to the local environment. A law would apply only to the relevant region.
One benefit to political biomimicry, beyond the advantage of biocompatibility of human governance with nonhuman lifeways, is that it would encourage deeper connection between people and their nonhuman kin. Observation of ways in which other species live is a foundation for respect. It’s humbling to learn that we have much to learn from a bacterium.
Crucially this knowledge transfer might not only be technical, but could also be metaphorically enriching. Imagine bodies of law undergoing a process of succession akin to forests, where the simple behaviors of pioneer species lead to greater complexity and resilience in a climax community. Complex legislation might likewise emerge from the interaction of simple rules. Legislative succession need not be mandated, but might be useful in increasing the probability of solving problems.
As with technological biomimicry, governmental biomimicry must be selective. Aeroplanes are physically inspired by birds in terms of lift and thrust but not in terms of flapping. A biomimetic system may also be a hybrid that has no natural analogue. Many jets now have vertical wingtip extensions to reduce drag. The extensions are not found in the avian class. They are inspired by the dorsal fins of sharks.
Signaling is ubiquitous in living systems. Signals transmitted by organisms in response to environmental stimuli facilitate collective self-organisation within and between species in a shared biome. For instance, the leaves of many plants secrete volatile stress hormones when attacked by insects. When these chemicals are sensed by other plants’ leaves, they respond by producing toxins in anticipation of infestation.
Humans have mastered communication like no other species. From the marketplace to the voting booth to the internet, humans have myriad powerful technologies to enable self-organisation. The technologies are so powerful that humans are able to dominate planetary systems. The communication is so encompassing that meaningful signals from nonhuman species are routinely ignored or interrupted. Especially in a political context, humans receive input only from their own kind, resulting in an untenably narrow form of democracy. Might political systems be reconfigured to receive input from all species?
One way for nonhuman beings to participate in the legislative process would be by referendum. Each referendum would model the anticipated outcome of the proposed legislation. The response of a test population of indicator species or ecological surrogates would be compared to a control population by measurement of a quantifiable reaction such as secretion of stress hormones.
Alternatively, species could review laws following implementation. A measured increase in stress would invalidate the law, provided that a causal link could be established.
Similar ideas could be implemented in a representative form of democracy, in which humans would represent nonhuman interests. Nonhumans could participate in electoral processes through measurement of stress response to campaigning by human candidates, each of whom would make campaign promises by previewing the anticipated impact of policies they advocate in ways that nonhuman species could experience directly.
Given the unreliability of campaign promises, this approach could be balanced with retrospective review of the legislature as a whole through measurement of differences in aggregate environmental stress level over the course of time legislators are in office. A decrease in aggregate stress would count as a vote for the majority party. An increase would count as a no confidence vote or as a vote for minority candidates.
The most effective way to integrate nonhuman perspectives into the body politic is to make it participatory. Human decisions on an individual and collective level seldom integrate available environmental information, let alone the experiences of other life forms enduring anthropogenic pressures. This insensitivity leads even well-meaning humans to make ill-informed choices and to fall out of sync with the seasonal cycles of the environment.
With a little education, people could become a lot more sensitive. Wellbeing can be observed in myriad ways. Stress affects the phenological stages and behavioral patterns of many species, influencing their interactions and providing an indirect indication of the internal state of individuals and populations. For instance, earlier seasonal flowering is an indication of higher environmental stress in many plants, and the complexity of birdsong is negatively correlated with stress in sparrows.
By surveying these signals, humans could integrate them into their own voting patterns. As planetary citizens, people could become more-than-human.
This vision is not revolutionary, but rather recollects lifeways lived since time immemorial, recognising that people were a part of nature before modernity alienated us from natural systems. This alienation is a delusion. As long as we live on Earth, we will be integral to the biosphere.
For most of the 3.7 billion year span since life first arose, the biosphere has sustained planetary homeostasis over extended periods, sometimes spanning millennia or more. A stable climate provides habitable conditions for myriad species that contribute to the homeostasis through myriad feedback loops.
For instance, all life forms contribute to the carbon cycle through consumption of resources and production of waste. The flow of carbon modulates global climate conditions, affecting all life.
The biosphere is a form of symbiosis operating on a planetary scale. Although composed of countless rivalries between constituent species, the biosphere can be understood to instantiate a planetary state of consensus – a common law of nature – because homeostasis is achieved and sustained through constant input from all life on Earth. All life is collectively represented in biogeochemical cycles, which are the ultimate mechanism of collective deliberation. As a product of homeostasis, planetary wellbeing is self-affirming.
Biomimicry of nonhuman self-organisation and stress monitoring of nonhuman beings are two approaches to integrating political systems into the biosphere by integrating the biosphere into political decisions. They might even be combined by organising government biomimetically to facilitate direct participation by nonhumans. For instance, a parliamentary vote by quorum sensing could take stress input from all species.
But the ultimate referendum on any political decision or system is planetary homeostasis itself. As a matter of fairness and to ensure the wellbeing of all, governments must be held accountable to Gaia. The biosphere is the body politic.
Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer whose conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of a weekly online arts column for Forbes. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, a visiting scholar at San José State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai and the SETI Institute. A monograph about his work at the intersection of philosophy and art, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag.