We’re used to treating animals, plants, and microbes as scenery—background to the human drama. Multispecies thinking flips the script. What if culture isn’t solely human, but a choreography among beings whose lives entangle ours: dogs and databases, mangroves and migrants, bees and broadband?
“Multispecies” names a shift across anthropology, philosophy, and environmental humanities that expands who counts as a participant in social life. Instead of studying humans about nature, scholars attend to how humans live with other species—how mushrooms shape economies (Anna Tsing), how dogs co-author social worlds (Donna Haraway), how forests think (Eduardo Kohn). The point is not to sentimentalize animals but to track relationships—predation, care, cohabitation, parasitism, symbiosis—that make society possible.
Theory Snapshot
Three ideas anchor multispecies approaches:
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Relational ontology. Beings are not isolated units but knots of relations. Haraway calls for sympoiesis—making-with—reminding us there are no self-made species, only co-produced ecologies. Your body is a federation of human and microbial cells; your mood may be partly a gut diplomacy.
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Distributed agency. Agency is not a human monopoly. Mosquitoes steer housing policies; feral pigs redraw rural economies; viruses write travel bans. Recognizing nonhuman agency reframes ethics: responsibility becomes a negotiation among actors with different tempos and capacities.
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More-than-human politics. If other species help produce our worlds, how might law, design, and infrastructure honor them? From rivers granted legal personhood to bee-friendly zoning, “multispecies justice” asks institutions to account for lives that don’t vote but do matter.
Case in Point
Consider the city sidewalk. What looks like neutral infrastructure is a multispecies corridor: plane trees filter particulates; pigeons learn train schedules; mycelial networks under tree pits traffic nutrients; delivery scooters alter rat foraging patterns; air-conditioner runoff becomes a micro-habitat for mosquitoes that, in turn, shape public-health budgets. A human-only account of “urban life” misses the quiet negotiations that make the street breathable, walkable, risky.
Or take a supply chain staple: the shrimp. Farmed in converted mangroves, shrimp thrive thanks to antibiotics that then alter bacterial communities, fueling resistant strains that cycle back into human clinics. Labor regimes, export quotas, and coastal ecologies are braided together by a crustacean with market charisma. Multispecies analysis doesn’t excuse exploitation; it clarifies how extraction travels through bodies, waters, and economies.
Methods, Not Mascots
Multispecies is a way of paying attention. It tunes methods—ethnography, design research, policy analysis—to follow cross-species effects. That might mean interviewing farmers and testing soil; mapping a data center’s water footprint alongside server logs; reading folklore next to wildlife-camera footage. Crucially, it resists the easy mascot: the charismatic whale that obscures the krill, or the lab mouse that stands in for rodents whose ecosystems we’ve redesigned with trash.
There’s danger in romantic inclusion. Not every entanglement is harmonious; many are violent. Colonization reorganized ecologies with cattle and cane; global shipping ferries invasive species in ballast water; pet industries breed affection and abandonment at scale. Multispecies thinking is sharpest when it keeps these asymmetries visible, asking who benefits, who bears the risk, and whose life gets backgrounded for convenience.
Why It Matters
Climate crisis, pandemics, and biodiversity loss are not side quests; they’re the plot. A multispecies lens helps institutions pivot from damage control to design: cooling cities by funding tree–fungus alliances, regulating antibiotics across human and aquaculture medicine, designing buildings as habitats not just boxes. It also reshapes culture: literature about drought that includes cattle, pipelines, and cloud seeding; cuisine that treats fermentation as collaboration, not magic.
Multispecies Considered
To think multispecies is to practice humility without paralysis. It doesn’t dethrone the human so much as decenter the fantasy of human independence. We remain responsible—and more so—because our actions articulate with many lives. The task isn’t to speak for other beings, but to design worlds where speaking with becomes possible: slower lights for migrating birds, quieter oceans for whales, less antibiotic panic for shrimp and for us. Culture, it turns out, was never a solo act.
