Giving a voice to Nature An Interview with Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Director of the Zoönomic Institute

Over the years, different movements have emerged to address environmental challenges and seek more sustainable solutions. One of the most innovative of these initiatives is the creation of Zoöps. The guiding idea of a Zoöp is: what if all forms of life could actively participate in the decision-making process of organizations and have their own voice? To make this possible, the Zoönomic Institute developed the role of the Speaker for the Living, someone who speaks on behalf of the ecosystems of which an organization is part. In this way, everything from plants to insects can have a voice. In other words, a Zoöp is an organization that has committed to Zoöperation, a cooperation of all forms of zoë (the Greek word for “life”), including human and non-human life. By becoming a Zoöp, an organization partners with a Speaker for the Living, a person whose duty is to advocate for the interests of other-than-human life within the organization’s decision-making process. One of the strengths of the Zoöp model is its adaptability to different types of organizations. It could be a school or a company. Coached by its Speaker for the Living, each Zoöp develops a regenerative plan tailored to its specific situation and needs. In this process, the Zoöps, the Zoönomic Institute and the Zoönomic Foundation work together to support the implementation and development of the model. To better understand how Zoöps work, we spoke with Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, who works at the Nieuwe Instituut and is the Director of the Zoönomic Institute.

How did everything start and what made you realize that a new approach to sustainability was needed to tackle the current climate crisis?

K: “So, I work at the Nieuwe Instituut, Museum for Design, Architecture and Digital Culture. In the context of design, there's always talk about change. Design is always for change to improve something or to make some kind of impact somewhere. This claim to impact is often quite distant from what actually happens. The only thing that comes through is the designs that get a market and find enough financial traction to remain in existence, which also means they meet the conditions of the market. This also limits their capacity to actually change the basic structure of the system.

In 2018, I read the IPCC report, one of the head UN science reports on the state of the climate and state of biodiversity. Of course, I already knew that everything was going really bad, but somehow that's when I began to really feel it. I felt we had to stop just talking about it and instead make some fundamental changes. In 2018, I also heard of Rights of Nature for the first time. The Whanganui River in New Zealand was the first river that became a legal identity. And there I saw for the first time something fundamentally shifting, or at least the opening for a more fundamental shift in the way our economy, legal system and technology hold each other in place and resist systemic change. I felt that a gap was beginning to open, where a new set of voices could join the table and change things.

So, the question that started everything was, can we do something with Rights of Nature in the context of the Netherlands? It was obvious from reading the IPCC report that sustainability frameworks were not cutting it. We're going downhill at an increasingly rapid speed. I had already noticed that the narrative of sustainability has internal inconsistencies. Like considering net zero as the best possible outcome, a net zero by 2050. Net zero assumes that the best impact you can have is no impact, where in fact the best impact you can have is a positive impact and not just the absence of a negative one. There seems to be in the framework of sustainability the assumption that the best we can do is to isolate our economic activity from the surrounding ecosystems, whereas the best possible option is to structure the economy in a way that actually contributes to the health of ecosystems. 

The best possible option is to structure the economy in a way that actually contributes to the health of ecosystems 

We need to find a way to contribute to the health of ecosystems, which means that you need to understand yourself as participant. You have to engage, you are connected, which also really puts in question the idea of nature as something humans don't belong to. The idea that we must engage with the living world rather than step out of it came from Rights of Nature. We really have to treat the rights of all living beings equally, and not only their rights, but also their interests. We are part of the same reality. Humans don't have interests that isolate them from the rest of life. We need clean water, clean air, healthy soil, good food and places to live. This is the same for all life.”

You were inspired by the Rights of Nature movement. What led you to create this new organizational model, rather than advocate for Nature’s legal rights?

K: “I did a series of workshops at the Institute in 2018 focusing on this question: can we do something with Rights of Nature in the Netherlands? And one of our first conclusions was maybe we can, but if we really want to change the law, this is a 20-year or at least 10-year process. You have to get enough mandate, build a whole political movement, go through Parliament, then the Senate and organize amendments. Looking at the current state of our government, it was not very likely that there would be a lot of supporters of this idea. It looked like an extremely long process, and I felt we had to do something immediately. In that first workshop the focus shifted from implementing new laws to figuring out how we could work with what's already there and implement a situation in which the interests of all life are accepted and treated as legitimate. So rather than working with a justice framework, we turned our eye to figuring out how we could make an organizational model. Something that allows several parties to work together and treat the interests of all life as equally important as their own.”

Klaas tells me that the initial Zoöp model was a general idea for a cooperative. In their first workshop, lawyers were not directly involved. However, as they further developed the model, they started working with legal experts to make it as flexible, easy to implement and effective as possible in practice. The broader philosophy of considering human beings as participants of ecosystems is also reflected in the way the Zoönomic Institute conducts the baseline assessment of newly established Zoöps. This assessment covers economic, social, ecological and legal relations of the Zoöp, taking into consideration the way its human and other-than-human participants interact. 

K: “Everything participates in ecosystems. Ecosystems are not just the interactions of non-humans among each other. Humans are parts, buildings are parts, cars are parts, technologies are also parts of it. They all play ecological roles.”

The first established Zoöp was the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam in 2022, but since then, the model has been adopted by organizations across both the Netherlands and abroad. In Amsterdam, there are currently five Zoöps: Mediamatic, Amstelpark, De Ceuvel, Waag Futurelab and Ground for Wellbeing.

Were there any challenges in implementing the Zoöp model in Amsterdam?

K: “Every Zoöp has its own challenges. For example, Amstelpark faces a challenge in the sense that the people collaborating with the Zoöp are changing all the time. This happens in big organizations, like a municipality. So that means new people are continuously joining and they don’t share the whole history of decision making. This makes it harder to develop a shared practice. The challenge is not resistance to the idea, but its implementation in practice in this case.”

Can you give us an example of a time when a Speaker for the Living had a significant impact?

K: “For instance, De Ceuvel started as a kind of circular initiative. They were not that focused on regeneration, but on circular economy, on being efficient and reusing resources. They were interested in minimizing negative impact but not maximizing positive impact. In this context, they were also developing a practice of phytoremediation, which is cleaning soil with the aid of plants like their willow trees and flax nettles. Burning nettles help remove fossil fuel residues and heavy metals from the soil. By now, they have halved the pollution of certain contaminated areas, restoring them to acceptable levels. It is quite effective, very cheap, and contributes to ecological health. The idea of not only cleaning but also contributing to ecological health came later. The first thing the Speaker for the Living pointed out was: ‘You've been asking these trees to do the dirty work for you for the past 10 years.’ The trees were now considered subjects, not just as their free laborers that cleaned the soil for the humans. 

So, what could they do to thank these generous willows that basically gave up quality of life to clean the soil for humans? They developed a beautiful practice with the designer Marte Mei. They need to harvest these trees every year because if you let them rot on the soil, the heavy metals go back in the soil. So, they burned the new harvest of the trees but kept a couple of seedlings. The ashes of the trees contain a lot of heavy metals, which can be used to color clay through glazing. So, they collected clay from the canal, baked it and used the ashes of these trees to glaze these clay pots. They sold them with seedlings of the trees that gave their life to clean the soil. They basically thanked the trees and helped them reproduce by selling the seedlings, while still getting rid of the heavy metals that were in the soil.”

What are your goals or projects for the future?

K: “We want to have more Zoöps, but this is going really well. Right now, we are at full capacity so that's great. I would really love to see a primary school as a Zoöp. We now have a higher educational school in Breda and a secondary school in The Hague. And I think a primary school would be interesting and important to have. We would like to see Zoöps in a lot of different sectors, with all their different practices treated from a Zoöp perspective, so that they can contribute to each other in the most effective way. A dream Zoöp would be a cemetery, especially a natural cemetery, as that would beautifully tell the story of humans being part of ecosystems.”

As part of its upcoming projects, the Zoönomic Institute, through the programme Zoöp Connections, will host an artist residency at seven Zoöps in collaboration with EUNIC and DutchCulture. The residency will also take place in Amsterdam, where Mediamatic and De Ceuvel will collaborate with the Ukrainian Institute. For more information on the Zoönomic Institute and its projects, you can visit their website: www.zoop.earth/en.