Kasturi Pathak

Addressing the polycrisis, the compounding, interlocking crises of health, economic disparity, and environmental degradation first identified by Edgar Morin and later carried into wider circulation by several works, may require governance and design frameworks that extend consideration beyond the human. This working paper proposes that such frameworks take seriously a premise more commonly found in philosophy than in policy: that birds, animals, plants, stones, soil, water, fire, metals, materials, and other non-humans may possess forms of inner life - intention, aspiration, and agency of their own. This claim builds upon precedent in academic literature; Jane Bennett's concept of "vibrant matter" attributes comparable quasi-agency to edibles, metals, and storms alike, and provides a theoretical grounding for this positionality. Where comprehensive redesign of human socio-economic, political, cultural and knowledge systems proves impracticable given the scale and inertia of existing systems, this working paper ties together the need to effectively respond to the polycrisis to re/evaluating the inherent aspirations of individuals, reimagining the nature of “viable” livelihoods, and facilitating better exposure of individuals, particularly children within education systems, to the concepts of interconnectedness, consciousness and oneness. This approach advocates a slow-cooked transformation of systems rather than a revolution, and although modest, may still be consequential with the scale of adoption, and the investment of financial and non-financial resources. Contemporary economic, socio-political, cultural and knowledge systems have been built upon historically contingent assumptions about human needs, aspirations, capabilities, and resources, and upon a relatively narrow account of how humans relate to non-human, animate and inanimate, entities. Certain communities and civilisations have sustained the embedding ethics, empathy, and reciprocity into education, governance, and everyday practice practices, whether by explicit design or inherited habit. However, most twenty-first-century urban systems, by contrast, appear to have lost this orientation. Nonetheless, it may be observed that some capacity for this understanding persists across most individuals, institutions, and communities, however latent. The rationale for this proposed transformation is multifold. First, it is institutional: resolving the wicked problems of the present era may depend in part on governance models that extend representation beyond the human, such as the Rights of Nature movement. Second, it is individual: Research on aspirations, well-being and life satisfaction consistently locates fulfilment less in material accumulation than in states of connection, purpose, and meaning, suggesting that this reorientation may serve personal flourishing as directly as it serves collective survival. The work proposes that modern livelihoods be better aligned with these re-examined metrics. Additionally, this paper examines whether structured exposure to nature, the awareness of consciousness, to the interdependence of micro- and macrocosmic scale, and renewed attention to bodily and natural systems constitutes an effective, if currently underutilised, mechanism for behavioural change and evolving societal decision-making. Building on the latter approach, the paper suggests the adoption of such measures, which may be effective in responding to the polycrisis from individual, institutional and governance standpoints.

Kasturi Pathak is a systems and business designer by education. She is a certified Telepathic Nature and Animal Communicator, a professional and personal advocate of holistic sustainability, and practises design and systems thinking in the corporate sustainability space. She believes in the interdisciplinary collaboration of corporate strategy, behavioural science, public policy, consciousness studies, telepathic communication and more-than-human designing in approaching the polycrisis.