I am Professor of Biodiversity Education at the University of Oulu, and I lead a research group called AniMate. We work in the wide framework of environmental social sciences, mostly through approaches of multispecies ethnographies and a focus on practices of cohabitation between humans and more than human animals in everyday life. In one ongoing project, for example, we study human homes as sites of domestic biodiversity and cohabitation. We ask people who else than other humans they share their homes with and how does it happen.
By tracing the everyday life cohabitation, the negotiations, the conflicts but also the alliances between humans and more-than-human beings (there are many endearing alliances between humans and house spiders, for one), we hope to bring forth new forms of compassionate action. New forms of accountability that are generated in complex co-habitation, rather than prescribed as moral guidelines from outside of our daily lived lives.
Researchers in my group also want to question whether the grand stories of natural sciences, namely that of taxonomy, that has guided us to understand more than human beings through the construct of species, are holding us back. Whether the pervasive need to identify someone else through what species they represent is preventing us from reinventing our relations with more than human life in more respectful and sustainable ways.
To experience ourselves and our surroundings also beyond the idea of species is not necessarily a strangely metaphysical attempt. I am hoping to talk you through it as a question of simple reframing, focusing on relations and connections instead of differences.
What if you defined who counts as your family by including all who eat from the same fridge (this would include any companion animals but also microscopic beings or the kombucha scoby that lives in the jar in your fridge)? What if you defined your kin by thinking about who share and get by with the particular environmental conditions in your neighbourhood (in my case the harsh winters and darkness of the North of Finland)? What if you bonded with all who have garlic breath (I will come back to this at the end of this speech)?
What would it change? What would open up? Would we be able to identify a diversity of intersecting intelligences that might contribute to novel combinations of respectful coexistence?
Relational Ontology
When aiming to reframe or reconsider the parts that other animals play in our human lives, histories and futures, I lean on relational understandings of ontology and epistemology. This is to say that I focus on questions of being and knowing not by focusing on an individual but by mapping connections and relations of that individual to all that is not her.
According to relational ontology entities do not exist in isolation; rather, they emerge through their relations with others – human and non-human alike. This means that any attempt to understand ourselves as humans or the ways of life of other beings, should focus not only on the individual bounded subjects, but also on the material, discursive, ecological, and affective connections and entanglements within which all beings exist and are able to form knowledges.
To highlight this relational approach in my research of human-animal relations, I use the concept or prefix of “multispecies” a lot. I talk about multispecies ethnography, multispecies inquiry, multispecies relations, or multispecies knowledges. As a theoretical concept multispecies does not refer to there simply being individuals of multiple species. It refers to an approach and focus on those relational situations and phenomena in which the lives and interests of many species intersect in entangled ways.
An example: the diversity of animals in my garden is a topic and a phenomenon that entails many species. There are many species present but this is not a multispecies phenomenon. Unlike birdfeeding in my garden, which is a multispecies phenomenon because it entails complex relations and intersecting interests between me, great tits, finches and magpies, as well as squirrels, rats and other rodents, my neighbours and the City environmental health regulations, to name but a few.
In relation to intelligences, multispecies knowledge(s) similarly refers to complex and entangled ways of knowing and an idea of intelligence that cannot be traced back to any individual. The French ethologist Vinciane Despret, in her book What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions, asks us to reconsider the idea that intelligence is a fixed trait to be tested, suggesting instead that animals reveal their capacities in relationships and specific contexts. So rather than asking whether animals are intelligent like us, Despret encourages us to ask how they are intelligent with us, or how we are intelligent because of our shared lives, shifting the focus from ranking minds to cultivating attentiveness to other ways of being and knowing.
The third important thing (in addition to relationality and focus on multispecies entanglements) to know about my approach to studying how we become human with other animals, are stories and storylines. Storylines are considered to be master narratives of phenomena in the world and to produce normative ways of being and acting. As stories are engaging descriptions of past, current and future events, they can be taken to characterise the directions of possible futures and thus to link strongly with certain actions rather than others. Storylines are therefore far from innocent entertainment or simple communication; they are known to be prescriptive: we could think of popular storylines as scripts that we as humans follow more or less subconsciously.
In my research I focus on the ways in which storylines are crafted not only between humans but within multispecies encounters in everyday life. I also explore what kinds of multispecies stories are readily available and whether there are appropriate spaces for us to develop and share alternative storylines. I understand stories as conceptual frameworks within which compassionate action becomes possible.
The philosopher Donna Haraway has in recent times emphasised how there are consequences to the kinds of stories we tell about life. Different ways of making sense of life open up, or close off, different possibilities for the future. These stories also have a direct impact on how we act towards each other – towards other people, other animals, and towards what we consider to be nature. Importantly, also the knowledge and explanations produced by science are stories and storylines that were born at some point in time. And while valuable and established, scientific stories can nevertheless sometimes become rigid and prescriptive: generating knowledge and actions that overshadow other possibilities. The invention of species is one example.
The Species Problem
Modern taxonomy is a classification system dating back to Carl Linnaeus’ works in early and mid-18th century (albeit the more elaborate history of how the modern taxonomical system evolved does not credit Linnaeus as the sole originator). This does not mean that people did not classify things until that. To label, differentiate, categorise and try to understand all life in relation to and comparison with human life has existed probably always as part of the human condition. And we are not the only species that does this either: a selection of other animals also name parts of their worlds systematically, even passing these names forward as cultural heritage.
The Linnaean system has prevailed because it is simple and practical: every species can be given a unique and stable binomial name – a universal identification label referring to a kind of being, rather than to an individual being or a person. The Latin name Vulpes vulpes for the red fox translates quite simply to “fox fox.” The first word (Vulpes) is the genus and the second (vulpes) is the species. This naming convention emphasizes that the red fox is the typical or representative species: essentially, the “standard” fox among foxes.
The common pigeon, or Columba livia, is Latin for a ‘bluish dove’ whereas the rook, or Corvus frugilegus, is Latin for a ‘food-gathering raven’. Naming something is essentially framing the ways in which that something is viewed, engaged with and governed as masses; grouped based on similarities and differences. Naming, as we know, is no innocent business. It is thoroughly political, fraught with conflicting power issues and in the case of humans naming other animals, it is usually thoroughly utilitarian. But it is practical and efficient and as such appealing.
These human-given names tend to become naturalised easily and so the species names fox, pigeon or rook seem to precede the actual animal: as if the names were there first and then the animals were identified whether or not they match the names. And not vice versa.
Take the classic case of the platypus, highlighted by my colleague Otto Latva who is an environmental historian. When the platypus was first found by scientists in eastern Australia at the end of the 18th century the modern taxonomical system had been in place for just a few decades. Platypuses defied existing categories of the animal kingdom fiercely, just by being the kind of beings they are. They were mammals, yet laid eggs. They had bills like ducks but tails like beavers. And so, when platypuses were sent over to Europe by early naturalists – as dead specimens – other scientists suspected an elaborate hoax. People rather believed in a system of classification that they had invented just a half a generation earlier than a real life being they came across in the flesh. A being could not exist, if there was no category for it. It had to be a hoax.
The Linnean classification system established the idea of distinct species also for non-scientists. To the extent that the idea of species and their names is now considered common knowledge to anyone, and we take the idea of species at face value. However, biologists increasingly argue that species are not fixed entities in nature, but conceptual tools imposed by humans to organize biological diversity. This leads to what is termed the “species problem”: ongoing debates about how to define species boundaries, especially as hybridization, cryptic species, and genetic variation blur the lines.
Technological advances such as DNA barcoding, a method that uses short genetic sequences to identify species, has been introduced as a solution to this ambiguity. However, it also complicates matters by revealing unexpected genetic differences within what was thought to be a single species, or similarities across distinct ones – thus multiplying categories rather than resolving them. In this way, DNA barcoding both illuminates and intensifies the species problem, showing that our tools for naming life are deeply entangled with the questions we choose to ask. And the stories that follow.
Modern taxonomy is based on similarities among organisms that reflect as if vertical descent from recent shared ancestors (e.g., bird wings and human arms refer to a common vertebrate ancestor). Another, just as possible way to classify would have been to base taxonomy as if horizontally on similar solutions to environmental conditions and challenges (e.g., to group birds and insects together because they have wings). With the existing system, biologists are able to draw evolutionary tree diagrams that depict how existing organisms are related to one another in a linear, progressive timescale. With the alternative system, diagrams could be made that depict how existing organisms are related to one another in shared time and space: as common world communities. A variety of other, systematic and scientific ways to categorize could have been thought of and did precede the invention of the modern taxonomy.
Our determination to stick to the story of Linnean taxonomy, and to understand other beings through the construct of species, shapes not only how we classify life but also what kinds of relationships and narratives we allow ourselves to perceive and tell, and how they in turn enable our actions.
Had taxonomy evolved differently – perhaps horizontally, grouping organisms by shared ecological strategies rather than ancestry – we might have cultivated a more relational understanding of life. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, used by some scholars in discussions of the species problem, offers a compelling alternative: it relies on recognising organisms through overlapping traits and situated similarities, rather than rigid definitions. Such a shift invites us to imagine classification not as a fixed map of life, but as a dynamic, evolving conversation with the living world.
Back to the case of the platypus, thought to be a hoax because existing systems of classification could not accommodate it. I invite us all to reflect on the existing systems of classification that guide our thinking and perceiving in our respective professions. What are the platypuses we fail to recognize in our daily lives and work?
A Life of “Least Concern”
I will now talk you through three multispecies stories that entail the three things I have highlighted: 1) relational approach to being and knowing, 2) focus on multispecies entanglements where needs and interests intersect and collide, and 3) storylines that challenge simple explanations and maybe signal alternative ways to understand intersecting intelligences as multispecies knowledge-making.
The first story is about a fly, the second about a sea eagle, and the third about a pigeon. They are all situations that I have come across in my volunteer work of running a sanctuary for injured wild birds for fifteen years now.
Two years ago, in the summer, I received four nestling barn swallows in my care. The backstory was that swallows had made a nest on the side of a summerhouse under construction. The people building the summer house found it inconvenient and one day the whole nest had just suddenly “fallen” to the ground, and the adult birds supposedly were nowhere to be found. The nestlings were brought to me by a third party, unwilling to let me know who the summerhouse builders were, so as to protect the humans.
Very late in the first evening I was feeding the nestlings and noticed that one of them had something on its cheek: like a scab. I proceeded to investigate, thinking that it was a wound that I needed to check. The scab fell off, revealing a perfectly round cylinder-shaped hole. On closer inspection, there seemed to be something white moving about in the hole. I took tweezers and managed to pull out a plump white maggot from the bird’s cheek. In my excitement I messaged two colleagues close to midnight, sending them images and videos of the moving maggot, asking what the heck had I just found. I received instant exclamations of excitedness. We were all sourcing literature on barn swallow parasites and I received instructions to place the maggot alive in a small jar with wood shavings. I continued to read up on what I had understood to be bird blowflies and found out that in addition to heads of nestlings, the maggots often also burrow themselves in the wings. I fell asleep around 2am with the maggot in the jar still on my nightstand.
In the morning, I went to inspect the wings of the same nestling and found another maggot. I popped it in the jar with the one from the night before and drove to the university to my colleague Marko Mutanen who is an entomologist. He moved the maggots to a laboratory where he grows insects for research purposes. In his work he specializes in species identification through advanced molecular techniques, including high-throughput DNA sequencing, to explore and resolve evolutionary relationships among organisms. He leads DNA barcoding efforts in Finland and is especially interested in what he calls “dark biodiversity” species that exist without us humans knowing that they exist.
Eventually both maggots entered the pupal stage in the lab and then completed their metamorphosis into flies. I received two microscope photographs from Marko, saying that two beautiful flies had been born: a boy and a girl. In the images the flies were already dead. They were killed right after being born. To make specimens for science and to advance our human knowledge of what species there are.
For a brief while there was further excitement in the air: barn swallows had hardly ever been reported as hosts for this parasitic fly, so there was a chance that this could be an entirely new species. Not yet known to science. The flies’ DNA was sequenced and came back confirmed to be a species already described and known. The excitement faded. The boy and the girl fly are somewhere in the university collections now; the barn swallow nestling grew up and was released.
Understanding life through the construct of species that can be identified, known, and calculated, has led to categorisations of conservation status for each species. While the work of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and its Red List of threatened species is an invaluable and tangible global guide to biodiversity protection, the flip side is that a host of species are listed as being of “least concern”. Categorisation of other beings based on the estimated number of individuals equates common species with least concern. This has direct consequences to individuals whose species are of least concern. Currently in Finland where care of injured wildlife rests completely on the shoulders of volunteers, the small compensations that can be paid for this work apply only to care of endangered species. So, when a pigeon, a crow or a raven needs my care, I will not be eligible for even the tiniest compensation because their lives are of least concern. At the level of their species.
Conservation categories were meant for just that – conservation efforts – but they steer our attitudes and actions towards other beings also beyond conservation. When we base our knowledge of other beings on their species category and their numbers, the species we know to be common and thus of least concern, are also of least interest to us. And stories of them begin to disappear. Where is the space to tell about a life of a fly?
In the ongoing Homings project we collect stories of cohabitation with other species. There are quite a few touching stories of flies that have clearly made an impact on the lives of the people who write to us. One particularly long story about a special fly ended with a simple “I don’t think I have ever told this story to anyone before. Thank you for asking.”
When lives are of least concern based on numbers, they can still be exquisitely unique and valuable when told in connection to the relations and connections they entail. So to know a fly, what would the story sound like beyond the Linnean taxonomical binomial name and the knowledge of its conservation status? And more importantly, where in our societies, cultures and platforms do we have space for telling these stories?
Entangled Stories
This second story is about a white-tailed eagle. In one early summer few years ago, I received a male white-tailed eagle that had flown into a wind turbine blade and the tip of its left wing had come off, amputated neatly into a stump. The eagle could no longer fly properly. It was otherwise healthy and young. The wound on the wing tip had healed well. I did not euthanise immediately, but decided to see how he adjusted to life in the sanctuary. He got used to people well and we started looking for a place for him in a good zoo, perhaps with a female eagle. Zoos seem like difficult places to me. But what would the eagle himself have wanted in that situation? For his life to end, or continue in captivity? Which side is more ethical to err on? His life was completely in my hands and there was no certainty of the right choice.
The cage for a sea eagle needs to be so large, according to regulations, that there are only three zoos worth considering. None of them had space let alone resources to build a new cage. We spent weeks trying to find a place for the eagle. We even looked for a place elsewhere in Europe, without success. The huge bird of prey began to lose his will to live in our small outdoor aviary. So one early autumn morning I took him to the backyard of the city veterinary clinic, where he was euthanised. While still warm, I carried the large bird to the University Zoological Museum, where lice were picked from his feathers and put into small bags to be submitted as specimens to an ongoing study on bird parasites. A local bio-artist then photographed the eagle for 3D modelling, after which the eagle was put in the freezer to wait for taxidermy later on, for university collections and educational purposes. When taxidermied, his bones will be archived for research purposes as well.
Wind energy companies were surprisingly involved in the eagle’s development, looking for a way to take responsibility not only for this eagle, but also for future ones. Despite research into the locations of wind turbines and the patterning or colouring of blades, both of which have greatly reduced bird mortality, sea eagles are still vulnerable to being hit by rotating blades. Their flight pattern and predatory behaviour are such that there is no way to make the blades of the turbines detectable to them. If we want to generate our energy with wind, a number of white-tailed eagles as well as golden eagles will inevitably die.
The last two months of this eagle’s life are an entanglement of connections and relations that intersect global environmental crises, the politics and governance of the ongoing green transition, energy production, land use, predatory behaviour of eagles, structures of care and concern for wildlife, compensations, forms of captivity, veterinary procedures, and finally becoming multiple specimens for science and art. And education. The educational product that will be derived from the body of the eagle is the final taxidermied likeness. It will be portrayed in a glass showcase with a nametag that says, “White-tailed eagle, Haliaeetus albicilla”. All entanglements, relations, connections and complexities stripped off and cut off. The known educational value of the eagle is to be representative of its species visually.
What is the knowledge that is missed when his story is told like this? Where, if anywhere, in our societies, cultures and existing platforms, do we have space for a fuller, more complex story of his life?
The educational researcher is asked: “How should children be raised to make the world a fairer place for all animals?” Such questions suggest that the nature of education is still somewhat poorly understood. Education is not an intervention that can be carried out in isolation from society and culture. No amount of curriculum revisions or educational programmes, no package of materials, no number of taxidermied animals will solve anything if the world in which children and young people grow up does not change at the same pace with them. Or, in fact, hasn’t already changed somewhat in the right direction. There must be space in the world to do otherwise and to know otherwise. Some kind of even fragile structures to choose differently and to act differently. Without these spaces, change will not happen.
The Lure of Knowing
It is soon ten years ago when I received a phone-call late at night from the city harbor. A set of containers were to be loaded onboard a ship but one had a bird’s nest on top of it, with two recently hatched birds in it. As the nest could not be moved to a better location for the mother to find it, the nestlings were brought to me. They turned out to be pigeons. At about a week old, they still needed to be fed, but pigeon nestlings don’t open up their beaks to be fed like other birds do. Pigeon parents secrete a liquid, called crop milk, in their crops and the nestlings suck the milk from the mouths of their parents. We made up a formula of crop ‘milk’ with directions found from the internet and turned a little rubber airbrush pump into a container from which the pigeons could suck the feed.
We lost the other pigeon soon to an unknown cause, but the other one kept growing. We named him Pietari. The feeding became easier once he started pecking food himself. But by the time he was a fledgling and would be set free two things happened: first, the early Northern Finnish winter had turned into an unusually cold one, and second, his tail and wing feathers started to snap in two, having grown too weak in the few weeks we had to feed him with our insufficient human-made formula and feeding pump. Unable to fly because of the broken feathers and having been used to room temperatures we could not set him free in the freezing cold winter. I had failed miserably in my job to rehabilitate and free him. I have since learnt the right recipe for a pigeon crop milk formula and successfully hand reared and released dozens of pigeons.
Pietari, who we first thought was male because he seemed to display to me, begun to lay eggs in a basket we have for woolen hats and mittens. I would see my two children off to school in the morning with their hats and mittens on, all of us listening to Pietari make cooing sounds in the background, watching over her two eggs. We were all fascinated and amused by what we called a family-within-a-family. We began to form habits that were not part of ordinary human nor pigeon life. Whenever I took a shower, I would leave the door ajar. Pietari would soon walk in the bathroom and wash herself with me in the shower. She preferred a shower to still bathing water in a bowl. I have since observed wild pigeons enjoying rain and bathing in heavy rain by lifting their wings as if to wash under their arms.
I once walked along a path in the woods with Pietari sat on my shoulder. She would take off and fly ahead for about 50 meters, land on a branch to wait for me, and when I got closer she’d land back on my shoulder, only to take off, fly ahead and wait for me again. This was our multispecies spatial-temporal way of moving. It was an entirely new rhythm to me and to her, but soon made our very different ways of moving to proceed in sync, as if one blended, hybrid species. As if there weren’t species’ to be blended to begin with. Only two beings creating a way of life as they went.
With the approaching spring we would take her out to fly. Wanting to give her a chance to return to the wild if she chose to. But being a pigeon, famous for their homing skills, she’d always follow us back home. She would learn to differentiate our family members and behave differently towards each of us – and very territorially towards houseguests. She kept returning home through a window left ajar even if she flew free throughout the summer. She would respond to my cooing and calls outside whenever at a hearing distance. She would perch on my shoulder and sleep while I watched late night TV. She was a quirky part of our family: a strange companion with whom we had to invent the habits of our cohabitation because there were no existing storylines of how to share your home with a pigeon. At one year old, she suddenly became ill and died in a matter of days. There was no veterinary expertise available for a pigeon – no professional storylines to accommodate the diagnostics and care of an unconventional companion.
The lives of Pigeons are of least concern in many ways. From a conservation point of view their populations are thriving and there is little concern for their protection. From a cultural point of view, they are often viewed as a nuisance and generally believed to spread diseases and be dirty. Legally the lives of Pigeons are considered as problematic. In Finland and in many other countries bird species in general fall either under the nature conservation act or the hunting act. The species hunted for their meat and the species hunted because of considered as pests are governed by the hunting act. Pigeons belong to the pest category of the hunting act and thus as unprotected can be freely shot outside of their breeding seasons.
Sharing lives and caring for birds beyond established categories is wildly addictive. The knowledge involved develops over time, in collaboration and cohabitation with birds, and the feeling of being able to raise a nestling swan, gosling or pigeon into a healthy adulthood and release back into the wild is unmatched. The connection to nestlings is especially alluring: forming a shared way of communication is easy and magical.
Yet this intimacy also risks slipping into commodification, as our human desire to know – and to know more – pushes us to categorize, identify, and possess. In this pursuit, intelligence becomes a lure: a promise of mastery, of control, of clarity. But what if intelligence isn’t always ethical? What if not knowing, of resisting the urge to define is sometimes in the interest of other beings? Does belonging to dark biodiversity protect a being from humans?
Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblance reminds us that recognition doesn’t necessarily require rigid boundaries. Perhaps the most meaningful relationships with other beings arise not from classification, but from wonder, care, and the willingness to dwell in shared time and space – unconventionally, attentively, and resisting the need to name.
Garlic Breath
In this picture from ten years ago I am sat down writing another keynote speech with a young recovering rook. A moment before taking the picture he was perched on my shoulder. His breath smelled of garlic. And felt warm on my cheek. And I was blissfully confused and happy. As incredible as it sounds, I had not thought that a bird’s breath could have a smell. But of course, it can. My breath matched his as he had eaten the leftovers of our dinner. In that moment, a scent of garlic overruled decades of sedimented thinking about species divides. I wasn’t confused as to what species I belonged to, nor did I confuse Otto as a human being. Those divides simply held no power of presence or explanation to our shared garlic breaths.