‘I’m worried there’s too much of me,’ says a birch: inside the interspecies council giving nature a voice

In a village in Norway, humans representing flora and fauna of all kinds meet to reimagine ‘nature-centric governance’

“My ask of humans is quite large,” says the northern bat to a room of reindeer, wolf lichen, bog, and other beings. “It’s a shift of consciousness, and an understanding that … we are a relation.”

The scene could come from a sci-fi novel imagining a more-than-human uprising. In fact, it’s from a recent “interspecies council” in Oppdal, Norway, in which non-humans – spoken for by humans – convened to discuss the region’s future.