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Nature to join FutureEverything

FutureEverything announces a bold move to appoint Nature to its Board, making it the first cultural institution in the UK to do so

As the climate and biodiversity crisis escalates it’s increasingly clear that we need to urgently reframe our relationship with Nature*. This means changing how we make decisions about what we do and how we do it, and widening the conversation beyond each other, to the more-than-human*. The scale of the problem requires radical solutions; changing governance structures – across businesses, culture and communities – is a good place to start.

With almost 30 years experience as a creative think tank at the cutting edge of art and technology, it’s FutureEverything’s business to invent the future; now, we want Nature to reinvent us. So, we are putting Nature on our Board to transform the way we think, work, and grow so that, over time, everything we do reduces ecological degradation and strives towards restoration. FutureEverything is perfectly positioned to play a vital role in offering new narratives, experimental practices, and cultural pathways to enable the change that is urgently required.

FutureEverything is the first cultural institution in the UK to put Nature on the Board, joining a small handful of organisations globally who have made this move. We have been inspired to go on this ground-breaking journey by the growing Rights of Nature movement spearheaded by courageous Indigenous groups, lawyers, and activists especially in countries such as Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil and New Zealand*. FutureEverything will contribute to this movement by tackling the wider cultural questions and imaginative possibilities of what it means to give Nature a say.

What are we going to do?

Nature will be a formal Board director of FutureEverything by Spring 2025 as part of our 30th anniversary.

FutureEverything’s constitution will be amended to include Nature as a company director, affording Nature a say in, and voting rights on, all company matters – from business development, to organisational operations and the artistic programme.

How are we going to do it?

To achieve this, we will design a process that is considered and impactful. Changing our governance model will go hand-in-hand with a new creative direction for our programme in order to address the meaning, tensions and practical implications of putting Nature on the Board.

This is the journey we envisage:

+ We will convene an expert Working Group comprising sector leaders from environmental lawyers, multispecies justice* researchers, artists, technologists, environmentalists, and funding bodies to shape the considerations and process.

+ We will interrogate current models for having Nature on the Board, which will initially include using human proxies to represent Nature. We will constantly develop our knowledge and understanding through listening, noticing and witnessing so that the influence of the More Than Human has more impact.

+ We will devise a model to ‘represent’ Nature on the Board and develop a new format to facilitate multispecies communications across the Board. In conversation with the Working Group and artists we will research the tools, settings, processes and protocols available to facilitate the communications approach.

+ We will establish a set of benchmarking priorities and goals to be achieved as part of our business planning over the next 3-5 years.

During the process we will be guided by key questions and considerations:

+ How can Nature, with its myriad differences, be most effectively and authentically ‘represented’?

+ How do we mitigate anthropocentric or colonial tendencies when exploring multispecies justice?

+ How can we listen to Nature, especially when our lives are not necessarily in tune with it? What tools, processes and protocols are available, and what behavioural changes might this demand?

What does this mean for us?

We anticipate that making Nature a Board member for FutureEverything will transform how we think about our mission and the approach that we take to deliver it. Giving Nature the agency to have an integral influence within our organisation will directly impact on our programming, operations, and how we will share the unique journey that we are embarking on.

Programming

We will allow Nature to shape what we programme and how we deliver it:

1) We will develop a set of Nature-informed principles to guide and inform our creative programme and decision-making going forward, prioritising considerations such as decarbonisation of technologies, use of materials, and environmental justice*.

2) Working with artists, researchers and creatives, we will curate a programme that explores the questions and imaginative possibilities that emerge during the process of bringing Nature onto the Board. Our curatorial pillars will include:

a) Interspecies communications and a critical appraisal of the role of technology in this
b) Eco-social technical systems, from synthetic lifeforms, to permacomputing, and Indigenous technologies
c) Place-based approaches to connecting with Nature in urban and synthetic environments

Operations

We will allow Nature to inform how we operate:

1) Nature will impact directly on to the day-to-day running of FutureEverything and will become integral to our decision-making on all strategic, financial, practical, and ethical matters.

2) We will build on the environmental safeguards that we currently utilise to develop a more radical assessment of how we function as a tech-focused organisation with a view to transitioning from energy intensive technologies to low carbon approaches.

3) We will allow Nature’s presence on our Board to influence and inform a review of our governance protocols to ensure that we are maximising its impact and bring added value at all opportune junctures.

4) We will prioritise and protect Nature’s right to be heard, to vote, to influence.

Sharing the Journey

Bringing Nature onto the Board is an unprecedented journey for FutureEverything; one for which we do not have a roadmap and will require us to regularly check our creative, ethical, and logistical compasses along the way. Making a virtue of our yet undiscovered pathway, we will do our ‘research in the open’ and develop open source resources to support other businesses and not-for-profit organisations to share in our journey and be inspired to let Nature lead the way.

Lucy Rose Sollitt, Creative Director, FutureEverything

“We are approaching the act of putting nature on the Board from a place of robust enquiry. Earlier this year, I had the privilege to spend time with Indigenous Elders and representatives of the Sarayaku, Cofan and Kichwa communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, along with the MOTH project and alumni.

My experiences in the rainforest and the classroom, with Elders, scientists, lawyers and activists helped me to galvanise my ongoing research to articulate, challenge and transform how we all show up in the world – including our approach to organisational governance.

Now more than ever, at the cusp of the ecological crisis, this is the moment to recognise that we need to radically revise our understanding of the world and our place in it. Inviting Nature onto our Boards is a bold step towards this objective, with UK retail brand Faith in Nature having set the precedent for this. Now FutureEverything will take things a step further, exploring not just the practical but also the deep societal implications of putting Nature on the Board.”

Annette Mees, Chair, FutureEverything

“Over its 30 year existence FutureEverything has always looked over the horizon – exploring what might be next – working across art, technology and social change. This has coincided with a growing realisation and recognition of the role of climate change and nature in our collective futures.

FutureEverything has explored this in different arenas; from GROW: Building a Citizens’ Observatory, to Unintended Consequences, to most recently Emotional Biodiversity, currently in development as part of our long-running Stockport Creative Campus.

As Chair of the Board I’m of the opinion that the Board and our style of governance should always be in development to reflect the future-curious nature of the company. By putting Nature on the Board, we want to challenge ourselves through a process that reflects the FutureEverything ethos; we will connect with others across disciplines, research and learn from a wide range of sources, work in a transparent way and share our insights with the wider world.”

Our journey so far...

Since the announcement of our intention to bring Nature onto the Board we’ve been busy reaching out to potential partners and scoping the considerations. A first step in the journey has been to convene a Working Group to help guide us through the process of developing an initial model for ‘representing’ Nature on our Board.

The Working Group comprises a wide range of perspectives, from multispecies and environmental justice to technology, art, urban greening, decolonial practice, Indigenous Knowledge and law. Here’s who has joined us so far: Ariel Clark; Dr. Adi Kunstmann; Brontie Ansel; Prof. Danielle Celermajer; Harun Morrison; Jessica El Mal; Kalpana Arias; Michelle Strauss; Simeon Rose, Anne Hopkins; Sria Chatterjee; Vicky Sword-Daniels; Paola Ricaurte-Quijano

We are working with the group over the autumn to research the considerations, interrogate the definitions and explore possible tools, protocols, settings that could be tested in the initial model. Sessions include addressing questions such as consent, exploring the modalities for attending to Nature and the surrounding ethics, localised definitions of Nature and FutureEverything’s responsibility to critically appraise and reimagine the role of technologies in this.

In early 2025, we’ll be designing an initial model to bring Nature on to the Board, and are delighted to have the support of Lawyers for Nature in devising the legal and practical framework for this. We plan to have the model in place by late Spring 2025. But we know this model is just the beginning; the idea is to continue to iterate it through original research and creative experimentation with artists and an interdisciplinary set of partners and collaborators.

Be part of the journey

We are excited to be embarking on this adventure, and hope you will join us for it.

In particular, we want to develop collaborative relationships with partners – from legal, academia, to funders, cultural and environmental sectors – as part of researching and designing our approach and sharing learning.

We are actively seeking funders and investment to support us on this journey.

Please get in touch – nature@futureeverything.org

Definitions

Much of the vocabulary in this emerging field is yet to be agreed on, and the distinctions being made are often symptomatic of human exceptionalism and categorisations intrinsic to the modern western paradigm.

We will develop and refine our working definitions as part of this journey, in the meantime, here are some of the definitions we are currently working with:

* Nature
The human and more-than-human world. We capitalise the N in “Nature” to acknowledge Nature’s personhood and the interconnectedness between all beings within the Web of Life which is the foundation of Indigenous Knowledge, past and present. For example, the concept of Kawsak Sacha, as articulated here by José Gualinga Montalvo, of the Sarayaku people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. For the Sarayaku, the rainforest is a living being, a “Living Forest”.

* More-than-human
The more-than-human is a term coined by David Abram to “recogni[se] that humans are just one species among many, and that all forms of life have intrinsic value and agency”. Building on Indigenous Knowledge systems, we add plant life, minerals, micro-organisms, soils, water and so on to this definition. We are also open to emergent forms of hybrid synthetic life being considered.

* Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil and New Zealand
Ecuador was the first country in the world to recognise the Rights of Nature in its constitution, in 2008. Rights of Nature cases are being fought in countries all over the world, with relatively large numbers of cases and key precedents emerging in countries such as Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil and New Zealand.

* Multispecies justice
Is an attempt at redefining justice and the legal system in order to give legal rights and recognise the relationships between a far broader and more diverse range of subjects, agents and actors, than currently recognised. Celermajer, Cochrane, et al. unpack the usefulness and problematics of the term as part of this Paper.

* Environmental justice
Environmental justice, is a term coined by Robert Bullard, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha, and Beverly Wright to describe the inequitable distribution of environmental benefits and harms.

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