(she/they) (they = otherselves, otherspecies)

Interspecies Interpretor. Speaker for Soil & Ocean. Sumbiocentric designer. 2045.

In 2027 I became a language rewilder for the second zoöp in the world, The New Institute in Rotterdam. Zoöp stands for an organisational form of cooperation between human and nonhuman life that safeguards the interests of all zoë (Greek for ‘life’).

During the anthropocene most of us, humans, forgot about the other life forms with which we shared the planet. Today it’s hard to believe how we considered the soil and the oceans to be an industrial zone rather than the home of fungi, microbiota, worms, plankton, shells, fish and other life forms.

Negative psychoterratic - psyche-earth - emotions such as ecoanxiety and ecoparalysis erupted in people all over the planet. The Anthropocene was increasingly associated with negative Earth emotions such as solastalgia, deep-seated pessimism about the future and feelings of hopelessness and deep depression.

THE SYMBIOCENE

Luckily that perspective changed drastically, out of necessity, after the Great Breakdown and Breakthrough of the late 2020s. This heralded the Symbiocene: a period of interconnectedness, Indigenous knowledge recovery and ‘sumbiocentric’ thinking.

From the wonder of the ‘wood-wide-web’ of the plant world to the menagerie of the human microbiome, the biosciences have gradually assembled enough evidence for us to fully appreciate the centrality of symbiotic co-existence between diverse species as a foundation for life. We - Western Europeans - finally recovered and reconnected with the Indigenous wisdom. This anticolonial project was a systemic and conscious that what has been denigrated and revive that what was destroyed. An effort to revive their way of seeing, being and interacting with our ancient homelands.

THE ZOOP

The zoöp model requires that at least one seat in the board room is reserved for All Life Forms. In 2030 the Netherlands became a sea zoöp, where I applied for the job vacancy Speaker for All Life in the Sea, in order to do justice to the biodiverse and multi-voiced world we inhabit.

This more-than-human language advocates a rich and poetic-ecological vocabulary and grammar rules that express the interdependence of species. An important element of the learning process was the learning language machine (algorithm) that was trained to speak on behalf of the sea, from the phytoplankton to the whales, in our oceans.

FUTURE WORRIES

Today (in 2045) our sense of self doesn’t stop where our skin stops. We were not what we thought we were. We seemed to be a collection of diverse organisms, known as holobionts, vitally united by a shared life, not inherently atomistic, isolated, egocentric individuals.

Today, many of us - both humans and species - are healing through collective lungs. But environmental inequalities are bigger than ever. The gap between rich and poor seems incalculable. As is the gap between (non)-nuclear families.

What could we have done differently in the 2020s to prevent this? It should have been clearer that there could not be any environmental solution without alleviating poverty from the world.