By Leaves We Live: The shift from interdependence to intradependence and the 30 × 30 biodiversity challenge on veterinary campuses

Abstract

Abstract The nature emergency is a key aspect of the Anthropocene’s meta-crisis, demanding urgent attention, while challenging us to consider what attentional practices are essential if we are to address root causes. A shift towards connectedness is emerging, which seeks to integrate knowledge and wisdom across disciplines. This new science recognises interdependence as an organising principle between the outer world of manifest phenomena and the inner world of lived experience. It further recognises connectedness across peoples, species and the wider more-than-human world. The nature emergency is unsurprisingly interdependent with a global mental health crisis, challenging educational institutions to teach for emotional and ecological literacy. This paper explores reimagining our relationship with campus ecosystems, drawing on interpersonal neurobiology, new materialisms and awareness-based system change to examine the onto-epistemological foundations for more-than-human relationality. This framework facilitates the empirical exploration in an accompanying case-study, where experiential workshops focus on three entanglements: a river, a badger sett dug into an old landfill and our own boundary-making practices. Through these explorations, a sense of relational wholeness emerges, leading to recommendations for outdoor learning, multispecies dialogue and ecological justice. The work highlights the interconnections between nature and human restoration, revealing epistemic and One Health justice issues crucial for sustainable futures. This necessitates habitat restoration on veterinary campuses, pedagogical reform and curriculum change. Such reforms must address the damage caused by overly reductive science, the lack of systems thinking and process philosophy, and the absence of nature connection opportunities. This means developing ways of being in the world that reveal a deeper level of interdependence and that can ultimately foster a deeper understanding of intradependence. In so doing, we hope to realise the deeper meaning of Patrick Geddes’ mantra; by leaves we live. One Health impact statement The nature emergency is one of several crises affecting the health and wellbeing of humans, other-than-human-animals and the environment in myriad ways, reflecting the complex entanglements and interdependencies that characterise the planetary ecosystem. On veterinary campuses, future generations of students are being prepared for this uncertain future, and yet they are currently offered limited opportunities to encounter the biodiversity crisis and experience the deep relational interdependencies that characterise the nature emergency, including species extinction, habitat loss and pollution. This paper and the supporting One Health case-study explore both conceptually and empirically how veterinary campuses can embrace the biodiversity challenge and explore how campuses and their communities are entangled with the mental health crisis affecting global society and the veterinary profession. To achieve these aims, an inter- and transdisciplinary community of inquiry was established, spanning art and ecology, animal welfare science, environmental science, outdoor education, nature connection, veterinary professional skills and educational and sustainability science. This community was able to partner with the more-than-human collaborators, including a river, badgers, trees, leaves, gall wasps and other members of the campus community to explore and make sense of a series of encounters and entanglements. These practices sought to promote genuine meeting and dialogue leading to transformative insights that were captured through a range of outputs and translated into recommendations for teaching and learning on veterinary campuses.