“Today it doesn’t matter whether or not I can prove how alive the world is. It doesn’t matter if I can prove an electron is having an experience. What matters is that I can feel stories everywhere. Stories that don’t depend on language… Stories that only occur interstitially, between beings, in the fertile, friction-prickled boundaries between differences.”
–Sophie Strand, The Animate Everything
As the chill of a UK January slows everything down, our team has been reflecting on the many stories being told in this community and beyond.
With the utmost care and respect, Flourishing Diversity spent 2022 ensuring age-old stories and ways of being, alongside newly emerging stories, reached places and spaces unaccustomed to hearing them.
We heard stories from Indigenous elders, academics, and campaigners; from youth activists and local heroes; from artists and musicians; from scientists, students, and educators. We were moved by profound stories of overcoming injustice, banding together with unlikely friends, resisting and refusing harm upon our world, travelling to unfamiliar territories, and challenging the status quo.
When looked at from a birds-eye view, this diverse collection of stories offers a beautiful illustration of the diversity that makes up life on Earth. It invites us to recognise that diversity is a gift from life, ensuring we continue to adapt as ecosystems change around us. They are stories that remind us how to be better humans, prompting us to rekindle and cherish our relationship with Earth and reminding us that we are intimately connected and entangled with nature – that we are nature. They push the limits of intellect and appeal to hearts, drawing us into the experience of oneness with all beings. They show us that it is our responsibility not just to listen, but to be moved and shape-shifted by what we’ve heard.
Nemonte Nenquimo at our Indigenous Listening Session at Meta’s London Offices. Co-hosted with Earthrise and EcoResolution. Photo credit: Issy Rider
In May, we worked with Cree academic Shawn Wilson to amplify stories of accountability and listening to land at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In June, we supported Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo in travelling to Europe to take part in several co-hosted events, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) inter-sessional in Bonn, Germany. There, she brought an Indigenous perspective to an event exploring how future COPs can centre climate justice and work towards a just transition. We also co-hosted a Flourishing Diversity Listening Session with Nemonte, in collaboration with Earthrise and EcoResolution at Meta’s London Offices.
Throughout 2022, we continued our legacy work with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other major allies helping to ensure that the connection between Nature and Culture is not only recognised but made central within the new Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed in December in Montreal at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) COP15. This critical framework now assures that the rights, customs, values, representation and participation of Indigenous peoples and local communities are fully included and accounted for when protecting, restoring and conserving the natural world, creating a precedent to push back the pressures that might otherwise damage their vitality.
Flourishing Diversity co-founder Jessica Sweidan with Cree academic Shawn Wilson. Photo credit: Jessica Sweidan
We’ve continued to host our regular We As Nature community event and podcast, with stories spanning interspecies relations, art as activism, and ecological economics. In addition, we started co-creating a four-part webinar series to bridge the divide between planetary and public health, by bringing together scholars, activists, and storytellers from both fields. We also collaborated with the Natural History Consortium and the Tapestry Institute to welcome Indigenous ecologist Dawn Hill Adams, PhD—an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation— as a speaker at the UK’s largest free celebration of the natural world. You can see the full collection of event recordings and podcasts here.
Audience members at our Listening Session at Meta with Nemonte Nenquimo. Photo credit: Issy Rider
We’ve listened carefully, and we can feel that these diverse stories are arriving right on time to help humanity adapt and co-create a flourishing future. As we continue listening and allowing these messages to seep into our physical and organisational bodies, we are hearing the call to widen our senses and continue the work of muting our human centrism, so that we can expand our abilities to hear and respond.
It is both a joy and a privilege to do this work, and as we embark on 2023, we hope that Flourishing Diversity continues to be a conduit for rich and potent experiences and approaches that help us all strengthen our ability to respond to the multiple environmental, social, and political crises we are facing.
We look forward to connecting and journeying with you in the coming year.
For a flourishing future,
The FD team
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