Creating justice with nature: A democratic reimagining
On Wednesday 18 June 2025, the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI) hosted Reimagining Democracy: How Diverse Knowledges Are Creating More-than-Human Justice, a public panel discussion exploring what it means to live in and redesign our institutions to create right relationships the more-than-human world.
The event was nested within a week-long Multispecies Justice Symposium curated by Professor Danielle Celermajer, Professor David Schlosberg, and Dr Blanche Verlie - the second of its kind, following the first iteration convened by SEI in June 2019. The symposium brought together a multidisciplinary community of scholars, practitioners, and creatives from across the globe, whose work continues to define the field of multispecies justice (MSJ). MSJ is a verdant field of scholarship and practice that challenges anthropocentric norms and envisions more expansive models of justice and governance capable of supporting plant, animal, ecosystem, and all earthly flourishing.
Positioned at the midpoint of the symposium, the panel acted as a kind of navigation point - a shared conversation aimed at exploring possible directions, bringing together different areas of knowledge and experience, that both draw on longstanding Indigenous practices of Earthly care, and that are developing new approaches to justice and democracy. As SEI Deputy Director Professor Danielle Celermajer explained in her opening remarks, this process of finding new paths involves reimagining political processes so that both humans and the more-than-human world truly have a voice in decisions that affect them.
The panel included four speakers whose work exemplifies this radical, hopeful, and creative endeavour:
- Patricia Gualinga, Indigenous and Earth rights advocate and former foreign affairs leader of the Kichwa People of Sarayaku, a community in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
- Dr Nardi Simpson, Yuwaalaraay musician, author, researcher, and composer.
- Paul Powlesland, environmental lawyer, rights of Nature advocate, and co-founder of (UK).
- Shrishtee Bajpai, researcher and activist with Indian environmental action group Kalpavriksh, and member of the networking alliance, .
Resistance — Return — Responsibility — Reciprocity — Repair
Emerging through the panelists’ stories were five interwoven themes - resistance, return, responsibility, reciprocity, and repair - each offering a compass point for navigating more-than-human justice in practice. These themes vividly came to life in Patricia Gualinga’s account of the Sarayaku people’s resistance to fossil fuel extraction in their ancestral territories in the Ecuadorian Amazon. She described their mobilisation around the concept of the Living Forest, which recognises that the rainforest is alive, conscious, and therefore eligible to hold rights. Their struggle, she explained, is animated not merely by local concerns or by some naïve anti-development agenda — it is connected to something larger, deeper, and inherently sacred. It reflects an urgent desire to keep in existence and protect the profound and reciprocal relationship that the Sarayaku have with Nature.
Similar themes surfaced in Dr Nardi Simpson’s account of her creative practice. She described singing on Country as an act of honouring and repaying the land: a form of interspecies collaboration capable of catalysing ecological renewal. In one account, Nardi described a group performance involving seven other Indigenous Australian women, each wearing cloaks crafted from possum pelts. Afterwards, one of her fellow performers shared a surprising sighting of a possum in her local area – a once abundant animal species that had vanished along with the loss of water in the region, as Nardi observed. As she put it, speaking of the relational power of song:
Sing to the land, and the land — that thing that allows you to sing, allows you to draw breath — sings back tenfold.
Paul Powlesland reflected on his positionality as an English lawyer, acknowledging the unique role of colonialism and the ‘polluting ideology’ of British common law doctrine in relegating the natural world to the status of ownable, tradeable, exploitable property. He noted that non-Indigenous peoples must take responsibility for reconfiguring our systems and institutions in line with MSJ principles, alongside Indigenous communities whose leadership in this space has been pivotal and continuous. Referring to his role as self-appointed guardian of the River Roding in East London, where he lives on a houseboat, he also stressed that each of us can perform, in our daily lives, the acts of care, receptivity, and guardianship that we believe ecosystems are owed. This “acting as if” more-than-human beings matter can move us from imagining to actuating new realities.
Shrishtee Bajpai spoke of the need to wind back the ways we relate to land, waters and territory, including as part of a broader, decolonial, global political and economic transformation. She described the struggles of peasant communities in East India, where mining companies have descended and offered compensation in the form of jobs in exchange for the sale of their traditional lands. For these communities, such offers, she explained, are not merely undesirable and unattractive but represent an impossible transaction. These communities view themselves as having no authority to relinquish the land: they are its temporary custodians, not its owners, and the forest itself is the source of all binding law and authority. She pointed out that many times, protecting land is really about protecting ways of life that still exist, despite the challenges and pressures from a fast-growing capitalist economy, and that these ways of life follow the basic rules of Nature.
Walking the Path
In closing, the panelists considered the emotional and psychological challenges of pursuing right relations with Nature — a path marked, at times, as much by precarity and grief as by optimism. Their words offered guidance and encouragement:
- Patricia Gualinga: “What is most important is the conviction of being on the right path.”
- Shrishtee Bajpai: “[The activists I have worked with have taught me that] celebration is as important as the struggle.”
- Paul Powlesland: “Acting ‘as if’ means that you are doing more than imagining.”
- Nardi Simpson: “Receiving and giving [the gift of song] can be a means of orienting yourself in the world.”
This panel was not just a conversation; it was a call to action, a reminder that diverse knowledges and concrete practices can guide us (and are guiding us) toward more-than-human justice. It invited us to listen deeply, act responsibly, and imagine boldly. In doing so, it offered a pathfinder for reimagining democracy to incorporate all beings of the Earth community.
Written by Libby Newton, PhD candidate in law and Postgraduate Network Coordinator at the Sydney Environment Institute. This panel event, Reimagining Democracy: How Diverse Knowledges Are Creating More-than-Human Justice, is a part of SEI’s Climate Justice Series.
Header image: Josie Weiss on Unsplash
For researchers, policymakers, and citizens alike, the panel offered not only a vision of what more-than-human justice might look like, but also clear starting points for action — in institutions, communities, and everyday life.