ZOOPS: HUMAN / NON-HUMAN GOVERNANCE

AUDIO IN THE VOICE OF KLASS KUITENBROUWER, AS TOLD TO GABRIELLA GÓMEZ-MONT. WITH TEXT INTRO FROM THE HEUTE NIEUWE INSTITUUTE OF THE NETHERLANDS

(the scale of the planet)

1 Zoönomic Mother Foundation (ZMF)
2 Zoöps: coöperations between human organisations and local zoönomic foundations.
3 Local zoönomic foundations, each acting on behalf of a local collective body of nonhumans.
4 Human organisations (companies, schools, public institutions, et cetera), some of which have entered zoöps.
5 Flock of zoönomic instruments in use by a particular zoöp, indicating the zoönomic development of a zoöp.
6 Zoönomic instruments, developed, maintained and calibrated by the ZMF.
7 Economic transactions between human organisations, between zoöps and human organisations and between zoöps.
8 Zoönomic exchange between zoöps.
9 Knowledge sharing among zoöps and the ZMF, organised and facilitated by the ZMF.

Introducing Zoöps

The first zoöps are being established this year as a new model of human and non-human cooperation. Zoöp initiator and custodian Klaas Kuitenbrouwer explains.

Photo: Patricia de Ruijter, mediakaal.nl.

What is a zoöp?

A combination of the words co-op (cooperation) and zoë (Greek for ‘life’), zoöp is the name for a new type of cooperative legal entity in which humans and multispecies ecological communities are partners. The zoöp doesn’t grant rights, but is more of a procedure that organises collaboration between humans and non-humans in shared communities. The project therefore strengthens the position of non-humans within human societies, engendering ecological regeneration and growth that is resistant to extractivist dynamics.

Why zoöp?

The zoöp concept is the result of a public research trajectory by Het Nieuwe Instituut. Beginning with the Terraforming Earth workshops in 2018, we researched ways to make the world habitable again for human and non-human life, while acknowledging that this new beginning would inevitably have to start within the capitalist system. We explored legal, technological, and narrative modes of world-building, looking at ways in which certain non-Western cultures work with a very different relationship between human and non-human. We studied how New Zealand granted legal personhood to a river, a mountain and a forest, and how that was organised, and whether some of that logic could be adapted and reformulated for the context of the Netherlands.

During Neuhaus, a temporary academy for more-than-human knowledge in 2019, we organised a second series of collaborative research sessions with ecologists, legal experts, artists and designers to hammer out the aims, organisational format, legal dimensions and categories of necessary knowledge that would support what was by then labelled a ‘zoöp’. The concept then found its current form in September 2019.

How does it work?

Zoöps largely function in economic frameworks in the same way as their constituting human organisations – their products, services or yields can be sold to customers, which can also be zoöps. Next to the concept of economy, the project introduces zoönomy, referring to the quality and density of ecological relations inside and among multispecies communities. Zoöps are therefore part of the economic framework, but have an important added aim – to keep on developing their zoönomy. In a way, they create a zone within their organisation – but outside the economy, so economic logic is lifted. Every year, zoöps set their zoönomic ambitions based on their starting conditions and keep track of their development with a range of instruments that give insight into the changes in the quality of living in the zoöp’s multispecies community. By doing this, zoöps also contribute to increased biodiversity, growth in biomass and cleaner air and water, among other things.

In the coming months we’re researching a design for new zoönomic instruments in the online research project Exploratorium, organised in the context of the Dutch contribution to the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

How do you become a zoöp?

Very different organisations can become zoöps, as long as they have agency over a certain volume of biosphere or a piece of land – a forest or park, lake or pond, coastal waters, and so on. When a hotel, school, sports club, business resort, energy company, farm or other organisation wants to turn into a zoöp, it has to set up a foundation under the zoöp charter. This states that the foundation represents the interests of the ecological community on the organisation’s piece of Earth. We’ve also been organising zoönomic futures training to allow people to gain experience and get a feel for the attitudes required for representing non-human life. Of course, humans on the board of a zoönomic foundation need to have an ecological and philosophical affinity, as well as some strategic insight for managing it. The zoönomic mother board can also help with finding the right people.

A zoöp formally comes into being after an organisation establishes cooperation with the local zoönomic foundation, which has voting rights on strategic and policy decisions regarding the zoöp’s economic as well as zoönomic affairs. In 2020, the first set of very diverse proto-zoöps will be established in the Netherlands – a farm, two ‘food forests’, a hotel, a cultural organisation and a university college. These will have the first practical day-to-day experience of what it takes to run a zoöp, making their own economic decisions consistent with zoönomic considerations.

What difference can zoöps make?

Zoöps can make a difference in all manner of ways. A primary school or sports club in a European city may, over the course of a few years, successfully increase soil life, plant life, insect populations, possibly bird populations, and even grow some crops in the borders of their playing fields if they want to. A university in Arizona with a large dedicated human community may successfully generate an oasis in the desert. An energy company building wind farms in the North Sea may regenerate huge areas of marine ecosystems by supporting the growth of mussel and oyster banks, seaweed species, and so on.

In some places, the work of zoöps may come down to mostly conservating and protecting an existing multispecies community. In other places, they may generate entirely new multispecies communities in which species meet for the first time and engage in food webs that did not exist before.

How might zoöps develop in the longer term?

As the legal systems of different countries are not identical, the zoöp format has to be translated between jurisdictions, which is why the first set of zoöps will all be in the Netherlands. In the longer term, the aim is to have zoöps in different countries in Europe and the rest of the world. Next to the numbers of zoöps increasing, they can also grow in the size of their individual territories. However, the most interesting way for zoöps to grow is for other adjacent organisations to join them, forming ever-growing ecological communities through the same zoönomic foundations and developing a practice in the service of their shared quality of life.

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer is a head researcher at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. After studying history and developing an art practice, he worked at the intersections of culture, technology and ecology since the late 1990s. At Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, he is currently developing the zoöp project, a legal format for collaboration between humans and collective bodies of nonhumans. A consistent element in his work is the intersection of different knowledge practices: technological, artistic, legal, scientific, and nonhuman. He has been teaching media and other theory at the Rietveld Academy since 2002.