Using Umwelt cards to give non-humans a voice
Written by Timo Maran, University of Tartu, Estonia (timo.maran@ut.ee)
Human activities have an enormous impact on other species, yet there is little awareness of how to include nonhumans in our decision-making. The interests of other species are often overlooked in our human practices, policies and planning. Finding ways to include nonhuman perspectives to nature-based solutions has been an important aim of the Coevolvers project. Even if including non-humans is understood as a good idea, it is much more difficult to put it into practice.
Where to start?
How to learn about the interests of specific species?
Which species should be included?
In the beginning of the Coevolvers project, semioticians from the University of Tartu suggested that Umwelt cards could serve as a good method to overcome some of these difficulties. In fact, the idea of Umwelt cards was proposed at the Coevolvers project kick-off meeting in Turku in December 2022. The method is loosely based on Jakob von Uexküll's umwelt concept. Umwelt is understood here as the subjective world of an animal species, consisting of its perceptions and actions, and taking into account its bodily peculiarities and interactions with the environment. The Umwelt cards are the deck of illustrated cards that represent the species common to the given area. This means that a new set of umwelt cards can be created for a new location. It is important to have cards about species belonging to different taxonomic groups - birds, butterflies, amphibians, mammals, snails, and so on. Each card contains simple biological information about the species, such as home or habitat, type and range of movement, circadian and annual activity periods, primary senses, and relationship to humans. The deck would contain eight to ten animals, four cards for each.
The physical card deck does not stand on its own but is used in participatory exercises. Umwelt cards can be used in a variety of settings - in local community meetings, in urban planning workshops, in outdoor education classes. The umwelt cards can be also used for stimulating imagination, as we found out when presenting the method in a multi-species art workshop in Karula National Park in southern Estonia in June 2024. The simplest way to use the cards would be to distribute them to the group of people for perceiving the area from the viewpoint of the given species. Suppose you were given an umwelt card of the slow worm (Anguis fragilis), and then you begin to imagine how the place could be experienced by a legless creature that is active at night, has an excellent sense of smell, hibernates in winter, and can live up to 30 years. I bet it would be quite a different experience from our everyday human understanding.
Many modifications of the umwelt card exercises are possible, such as a proposing a task to find the most favorable location for the given species in the area. Or to identify limits or barriers in the area that the given species is not able to cross. Using the deck of cards with a group of people opens new possibilities. People with similar cards can work in groups to discover and verbalize the interests of animals that they represent, or people with very different species cards can work in pairs to find out how the perspectives of their species differ. The possibilities are endless.
Using umwelt cards can make the task of involving nonhumans in nature-based solutions much more concrete. The diversity of species in the deck represents the diverse views and interests of nonhumans. It is almost like summoning a parliament of non-humans for discussing the human affairs that have impact on them. Although it is not possible to represent the full complexity of ecosystems, the method allows to introduce pluralistic non-human views into discussion. The umwelt cards can also be used for critically examining the existing human practices and habits. In September 2023, the deck was successfully used in a meeting in Tallinn Kadrioru Park for debating human management of urban green areas. Another important issue is the translation of nonhuman voices into human decision-making. For this, it would be good to end each umwelt card session with a group discussion and verbalizing non-human perspectives and gained experiences. We continue to develop the umwelt cards as a participatory method, that hopefully leads to stronger and more inclusive multispecies communities.
Photo: Umwelt cards in Karula multi-species art workshop (author: Jane Remm)