#1 Urban Co|Existence

The diverse interactions, correlations, and forms of coexistence among species in urban and forest environments served as the starting point for our field studies. To develop a more dynamic understanding of the relational webs that constitute our surroundings, our inquiry begins in the urban realm, focusing on city trees. As co-inhabitants of urban spaces, trees contribute not only ecologically but also socially to urban life. Yet their role as active participants in the city is often underrecognized, and their needs frequently go unnoticed. This raises a fundamental question: how—if at all—can we begin to comprehend the perspectives of other species?

…being is always becoming, becoming is always becoming-with.1

Becoming-with and with-whom? Research into more-than-human worlds

More-than-human? Non-human? Multispecies?

Within cultural anthropology (and other disciplines such as sociology, architecture and design, legal studies, and many more), the coexistence of species has increasingly moved to the center of research interests. Scholars such as Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster (see quote above) explore entanglements – the intricate interconnections between different forms of life.2 They acknowledge that we, as humans, do not exist or act in isolation. One of the most influential impulses for more-than-human approaches came from the sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour. In his book „We have never been Modern“ (1995) he criticizes the dominant understanding of nature and culture as separate, opposing domains and the resulting tendency to analyze society, nature and technology as separate spheres.3 According to Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (2007), not only humans but also other living beings, objects, and technologies are part of social life and possess agency. Any Action is always the result of interactions between various entities within a relational network.4
Additionally the concept of naturecultures – which can be traced back to Latour, as well as to Donna Haraway – has become an important research paradigm. It enables the description and recognition of „entanglements, fusions, and circulating practices between nature and culture“. At the same time, it breaks with the notion of a universal, culture-independent nature.5 

Expanding our understanding of health to include not only humans but also other species presents a range of challenges: How can we approach multi-species perspectives and recognize alternative ways of knowing? How might we begin to grasp, for instance, the inner life of a plant? And more crucially: how can we establish contact without resorting to anthropomorphism? How do we re-present beings with whom we do not share a language? These are questions that resonate deeply within cultural anthropology. Entering into dialogue, however, might not mean speaking the same language in a literal sense, but rather cultivating the capacity for active listening and forging empathic connections.

inside plants

As an experimental approach to plant perspectives, we met with artist and musician Paul Bießmann. In collaboration with Dominik Zehnder and Jorge Luis Juárez Peña, and as part of the Fraunhofer Institute’s Artist-in-Lab program, Paul initiated the project insideplants. His installation operates at and through the interfaces between humans, technology, and plant. For instance, photosynthetic processes become audible as physiological responses to the tree’s environment. In this artistic exploration, the boundary between human and plant becomes blurred, while the tree’s interior life is brought to the forefront of a sensory experience. So how can we attune our senses to the worlds of plants? The film follows a measurement session with a beech tree in the southern part of the English Garden in Munich.

the tree carers

Trees not only make a fundamental contribution to the urban climate but also play a vital role in the social life and well-being of cities, as emphasized by Anja Ueberschär, an arborist based in Munich. Arborists like Ueberschär and her team are dedicated to maintaining and restoring the health and safety of urban trees. In doing so, they act as mediators within a complex web of relationships between humans, the urban environment, and the trees themselves. Residents, urban planners, and commercial stakeholders each bring distinct expectations, resources, and priorities to the negotiation of urban coexistence. Living alongside trees in the city is multifaceted and often contested. However, our research demonstrates that alternatives to tree removal do exist

the trees of köşk garden

In November 2023, the initiative Köşk Garten Retten launched a campaign to preserve a green oasis in Munich’s Westend district. Their efforts foreground the importance of urban green spaces and trees for the microclimate, for layered forms of well-being, and for fostering social exchange. “A place of rest and relaxation, a place of cultural exchange, an ecosystem grown over decades” now faces erasure through urban redevelopment. This discourse around urban health and quality of life underscores the deep entanglement of ecological and social dimensions. Ultimately, it raises a central question: how can human and nonhuman actors participate in political decision-making processes? Which voices are granted space – and which are truly heard?

#2 Ver|care|te Forests

Forests evoke many associations: longing and refuge, calm and relaxation, adventure and mystery. They inspire literature and art, while also representing strategies of adaptation, evolution, and species diversity. Amid the tensions between care, use, exploitation, and “leaving alone” (rewilding), this section explores shifting perspectives on health. By placing care at the center and expanding it through a more-than-human lens, we ask: do forests, in fact, care for us?

..care is everything that is done (…) to maintain, continue and repair „the world“ so that all (rather than „we“) can live in it as well as possible.6

More-than-human Care as an extended Feminist Perspective

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa draws on a quote by political scientist Joan Tronto.7 In feminist discourse, the concept of care is of central importance – on the one hand, it serves to highlight to the division between productive and reproductive labor, and to expose naturalized, gendered inequalities; on the other, it offers a framework for imagining more equitable structures by recognizing and redistributing responsibilities of care. According to Tronto, care is not limited to personal, individual, or empathetic acts – it also involves the shaping of politic processes, institutions, and social systems. As such, care includes all practices aimed at fostering a more just and caring society, one that enables a life that is ‚as well as possible‘ for all

Without sidelining these foundational feminist perspectives – but instead aligning with their demands and practices – Puig de la Bellacasa expands the ethics of care to include de-anthropocentric perspectives. The question of what it means to live well for all is not approached as a normative or definitive answer and ideal. Instead, it remains an open, speculative practice, continuously negotiated within a field of tension.

Extending care to more-than-human actors does not make care practices any less human – but opens them up to additional perspectives. Starting from a mode of coexistence with non-human actors, such as forests, the interdependencies within these networks become more visible.8
More-than-human care invites us to understand existence not only as an entanglement of being, knowing, acting, affecting, and exchanging with other species, but also acts as a call to care for these entanglements themselves. This de-anthropocentric lens can, in turn, offer more nuanced approaches to socio-ecological conflicts and help incorporate the perspectives of more-than-human actors into decision-making processes.

transition woods

With their organization Transition Woods Niels Ondraschek and Christoph Mandel are dedicated to the creation and preservation of natural forest habitats – spaces where the forest’s own dynamics, the ecosystem, species protection, and its significance for climate protection are placed at the center. Their work highlights the ambivalence between the use and care of forests, raising the important question of how human interventions can be carried out as gently as possible. “First of all, we need a transition of awareness,” Christoph emphasizes. Protecting our forests requires not only practices that sustain their health, but also an expanded understanding of the entanglements at play. Forests are not merely resources, they are vital actors that interact with their environment and actively shape it.

#3 Planetary Health|who cares?

Human interaction with the environment is diverse and far-reaching. The loss of biodiversity, air and environmental pollution, and climate change-related disasters are closely linked to human activity. Our planet is in a state of ecological distress: our planet is not healthy. The concept of the Anthropocene articulates this profound human impact and its consequences, confronting us with the urgent task of taking upon us the responsibility for the traces we leave behind. Can we cultivate care for the planet? And what kind of future do we wish to shape through the choices we make in the present?

The Anthropocene is a planetary phenomenon—but not a uniform one.9

Reflections on the Concept of the Anthropocene

Anna Tsing highlights that the concept of the Anthropocene fosters to a collective awareness of the responsibility humans bear for their actions and their environmental consequences. Yet, the term is far from unproblematic. In response, anthropological and critical debates have introduced complementary concepts such as the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, and – more complex still – the Chthulucene.10 These terms raise the fundamental question: which conceptual frameworks do we adopt to narrate the past, interpret the present, and envision the future?

Rather than treating ‚the human‘ as a universal subject or attributing environmental and social consequences to a singular and undifferentiated anthropogenic species, the Capitalocene and Plantationocene foreground historical and systemic correlations.The Capitalocene, by centering capitalist economies, draws attention to their ecological and social repercussions—crossing planetary boundaries and deepening inequality. The Plantationocene, meanwhile, traces the exploitative logic of plantation agriculture, particularly as it has unfolded through the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and their enduring legacies. Destruction, discipline, oppression, and dispossession emerge as inter- and multispecies experiences that shape and affect the lives of humans, plants, animals and soils alike.11

The interconnections and entanglements of naturecultures also acquire a planetary dimension when considered through the lens of health and care. However, the conditions under which health is stabilized or destabilized are far from uniform; they are shaped by diverse ecological, social, and political factors.

To better understand the complex realities of the Anthropocene, we must – following Anna Tsing – attend to and document specific local events.12 In 2023, the highest global temperatures ever recorded were observed, not only in Germany and Europe, but across the planet. Heat poses a cross-species threat to health. Heat represents a cross-species threat to health. Moreover, the long-term trend of rising climate temperatures and increasingly extreme weather events is becoming ever more apparent. During that summer, in Munich, we witnessed how these developments begin to not only affect but also reshape patterns of social coexistence.

planetary health

For the various groups within the For Future alliance of the climate movement, taking responsibility entails engaging in activism, raising public awareness, and entering into dialogue with political institutions.
Health For Future (H4F), which brings together professionals from the health sector within the alliance, advocates for a healthy planet as the foundation of human health. Through actions, workshops and open spaces for dialog and discussion, H4F draws attention to these entanglements between environmental and human well-being within the framework of planetary health
In Munich, we accompanied the local group and spoke with members about their activism. This exchange also introduced the multispecies approach of our research into the conversation: Can alternative ways of understanding human–non-human relations offer meaningful responses to the current crises? And how productive is a de-anthropocentric perspective in this context?

We – all of us on Terra – live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. […] Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.13

Staying with the trouble

We cannot face the ecological challenges of our time with indifference. What is required is to make use of our ‚response-ability‘: the ability to respond, to take responsibility, to care. In „Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene“ (2016), Donna Haraway calls on us to remain with the complexities of our ecological moment and to consider how multispecies cohabitation might be shaped on a planet capable of sustaining and supporting the diverse needs of its earthlings: to stay with the trouble. Learning to think with others is an ongoing, open-ended process.14 How can we strive toward an as-well-as-possible mode of living – attuned to differing needs – within a more-than-human web of relations? And how can we develop speculative reorientations, without reverting to idealized visions or utopian imaginaries?

Haraway argues that no single term adequately captures the complexities of this epoch. In response, she proposes the Chthulucene as a conceptual lens that resists and challenges dominant frameworks and inherited cultural assumptions. To resist viewing nature as something separate, static, or controllable, the stories of the Chthulucene are situated and multiplied: „Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.“15

Caring – for the planet, for multiple species, and for ourselves – is a complex and often contested process; a process that inevitably includes controversy. Coexistence is continually shaped by unequal power dynamics, divergent needs, conflicting perspectives, and competing demands. Whether it is through artistic practices, activism, emotional engagement, networks, dialogue, fiction, or specialized knowledge: care can take many forms. ‚Taking care‘ may involve recognizing diverse needs, engaging in negotiation – sometimes conflict – assuming responsibility, and advocating for comprehensive, intersectional rights grounded in the spirit of solidarity across interspecies relations and within our multispecies networks .

can mean understanding different needs, negotiating them in antagonistic ways, taking responsibility, and advocating for comprehensive rights in the spirit of solidarity within our multispecies networks. Meaningful change depends on solidaristic alliances; actively, consciously and together: Coexist yourselves!

  1. van Dooren, Thom; Kirskey, Eben; Münster, Ursula (2016). ↩︎
  2. The concept of “entanglements” in a multispecies context was shaped by Donna Haraway. See A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and When Species Meet (2007). ↩︎
  3. Latour (1995). ↩︎
  4. Latour (2007). ↩︎
  5. Gesing, F., Knecht, M., Flitner, M., & Amelang, K. (2019): 7f. ↩︎
  6. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). ↩︎
  7. Original quote: “caring [is to be] viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” Tronto (1993): 103. ↩︎
  8. Puig de la Bellacasa (2017). ↩︎
  9. Tsing, Deger, Saxena, Zhou (2021). ↩︎
  10. See, among others, the reflections by Haraway and Tsing (2019). Also available as a podcast: https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/. ↩︎
  11. Haraway, Tsing (2019): 5f. ↩︎
  12. Anna Tsing et al. (2021) have made a multimodal contribution on this with the Feral Atlas: https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/?cd=true&bdtext=introduction-to-feral-atlas. ↩︎
  13. Haraway (2016): 1. ↩︎
  14. Haraway (2018): 75. ↩︎
  15. Haraway (2018): 48. ↩︎

The complete list of references can be found on our credits page. Creditseite.