EP 141 The Politics of Nature with Jonathon Keats

Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer, and experimental philosopher, and his work uses imagination to question some of our most basic assumptions about how the world works. His new book, “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” looks beyond human societies for new ways of thinking about politics, drawing lessons from bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and entire ecosystems. At the heart of the book is a simple idea: humans didn’t invent governance. Living things have been organizing, cooperating, competing, and adapting to one another for billions of years, and Jonathon argues that we might have something to learn from them. He asks us to reconsider what intelligence looks like, who—or what—we're willing to learn from, and ultimately, what our place is within the natural world. In “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” Jonathon takes that idea and asks what it might actually mean for the way we govern ourselves. Bacteria become models for collective decision-making, lichens offer lessons about cooperation and conflict, and other species challenge our assumptions about hierarchy, resilience, and even democracy. Jonathon calls this approach “political biomimicry”—looking to the strategies that have evolved throughout nature and considering how they might inspire new approaches to human politics. It's an imaginative way of thinking about some very real problems, and one that asks us to reconsider whether humans should always be the only ones setting the terms. Photo courtesy of The Berggruen Institute