More Than Human

Six spreads, and the below to Bone Song's above. The mycelial network and the oldest anarchist in the room; decomposition as bricolage, where nothing is wasted, only waiting; the prose poem; the quiet and the dark; and the line the zine turns on — the work that changes everything is the work no one is watching. It ends on mischief and punk. Diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set, and reflection questions. On the science, it keeps the kinship and drops the overclaim: mycorrhizal symbiosis is well established, and the popular wood-wide-web picture of forests wired together is named as contested, citing Karst, Jones & Hoeksema (Nature Ecology & Evolution 7, 2023).

Multispecies justice and more-than-human governance, read as star stuff. Every being at the table — soil, river, beaver, cuckoo, meadow — is forged from the same stellar matter, so the Council of All Beings is the universe convening with itself, and you cannot rank what you are made of. Carries the ethodiversity thread from No. 8 outward: the cosmos varies not only in what it makes but in how its creatures live. Six spreads of argument, then a hydrofeminist coda — the “service provider” critique and the four dimensions of justice, ethodiversity and ethonormativity after Tarragnat, the role-play method (speaking as the soil and the river), the proxy problem and the Umwelt, and Rights of Nature meeting hydrofeminism at Te Awa Tupua, closing on a coda where the council dissolves into flow. Nine spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

Umwelt as star stuff. Every creature is sealed in its own complete perceptual world — the tick's three signals, the bat's echo, the mantis shrimp's light, the dog's scent-time — and each world is whole, not a partial view of one real world underneath. There is no neutral, default way to sense. The animals do the arguing, so that when minds enter, the point lands as recognition: monotropism is an attention-world, Autistic perception a different and complete sky, not a broken copy of a standard one. And when two worlds meet — human and bat, one mind and another — the gap is mutual: the double empathy problem, arrived at without lecturing. Not one correct channel, but mutual translation. Carries the Umwelt thread from No. 14 inward, from von Uexküll through Tarragnat, Manning, Milton, and Despret. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

Niche construction as star stuff, and the third of a loose trilogy — how we treat other worlds (No. 14), how we sense them (No. 15), and here, how we build them. Organisms don't just adapt to a fixed environment; they remake it — the beaver's dam, the spider's web — and pass the built world on as ecological inheritance. So the neurodiversity turn is plain: don't fix the mind, change the environment (positive niche construction — there is no “normal” brain in a vat). Stimming is worldmaking; minor worlds and niche communities are real, not lesser; and no niche is neutral — the “default” room was built for one kind of mind, so the fix is reconstruction, not accommodation. Grounded in Odling-Smee & Laland, Armstrong, Tarragnat, Manning, Kadodia & Krueger, and Haraway, and rooted in Stimpunks' own glossary. Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

More-than-human neurodiversity, read through star stuff. There is no standard nervous system — not across species, and not within one: the octopus's mind distributed down its arms, the jellyfish's centreless nerve net, the worm's fully mapped 302 neurons. Read neurodiversity literally and it never stopped at the human. Following Ombre Tarragnat's antispeciesist–posthumanist philosophy: there's “no valid reason to be anthropocentric when you talk about neurodiversity,” and ethodiversity — behaviour reclaimed as “a subjective response to a bodymind's situation” — is a fundamentally animal phenomenon. Ethonormativity punishes the ethodivergent (the horse who refuses the rider, the cat who resists petting — abandoned or euthanised). And the core move: neurodivergent people are pathologised by being animalised, so the liberation is to reclaim animality — not bestialisation (the speciesist, neuronormative “less-than-human” split, after Butler 2020) but (hum)animality, kin. Distance is not disconnection: shutting down can be how we keep relation. Every nervous system is the universe wired up to feel itself, no two ever the same. “I would rather be a divergent animal than a typical human.” Eight spreads, six diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set.

Developed after Helen Edgar's essay on the otter cam that runs every Saturday at Solidarity Sesh, where nobody has to watch and that is the part that makes it work. Then past the essay to the papers. Tinker, Bentall & Estes (2008) followed one sea otter population closely enough to tell the individuals apart: where food was scarce it did not converge on one best way to be an otter but fanned out into distinct specialists — snails, clams, urchins, crabs — each with a matched suite of diving behaviours, and each measurably better at its own prey than a generalist. The averaged otter forages nowhere. Hall & Schaller (1964) counted the blows: a mussel took a mean of 35.5, and a range of 6 to 88, so there is no correct number of blows, only yours. Law et al. (2024), across 196 tagged otters, found tool use varies enormously between individuals and that non-users are not behind — they specialise on prey a stone would not help with — while the tool users showed less tooth damage. The accommodation is legible in the skeleton. Also: no blubber, the densest coat measured on any mammal and varying sixfold across one body, a resting metabolism three times what its size predicts from heat leaking out of its own muscle since birth — the calm surface is not the whole cost. They rest in rafts wrapped in kelp, so the holding is done by the forest rather than by anyone's effort; and the kelp is there because the otters are (Estes & Palmisano 1974). Held by what it sustains. Then the fur trade took ninety-nine per cent of them, because they were remarkable, not because they were deficient. Ten spreads, eight diagrams, a “Not:” refusals set of seven that declines cute, inspiring, superpower, rest-to-produce, and the smoothed retellings.

Built with Helen Edgar from her essay Reclaiming Rest: Autistic Burnout, Monotropism, and Resistance, whose inversion is the centre of the zine: rest that fights your attention is not rest, and recovery for monotropic people often means going deeper rather than switching off. Then past the essays to the papers. Kanaya et al. (2020) showed that Hydra vulgaris — a nerve net, no brain, nothing gathering it into a decision-maker — meets the behavioural criteria for sleep: it goes quiescent, it is harder to rouse, and after deprivation it rebounds. Deprive it further and the number of dividing cells drops, so rest is when the building happens rather than a pause in it. It also has no circadian clock: under constant conditions the daily rhythm vanishes and a roughly four-hour cycle remains, returning and returning. Great frigatebirds sleep a mean of 42 minutes a day on the wing against twelve hours ashore (Rattenborg et al. 2016), mostly one hemisphere at a time and while soaring rather than flapping — and a separate study found them aloft up to two months without landing (Weimerskirch et al. 2016), so rest is not the opposite of motion. Hibernating grizzlies and black bears go six months without weight-bearing movement and lose no bone at all, because formation and resorption fall together and stay balanced (McGee-Lawrence et al. 2009) — the bear does not out-work the problem, it turns remodelling down at both ends. Meanwhile the den lowers the energy bill: metabolism to about a quarter of basal with core temperature down only five or six degrees (Tøien et al. 2011). Rest as a property of an arrangement, not a feat of will. Closes on Tricia Hersey and the ledger: a debt that was issued can be refused. Eleven spreads, eight diagrams, and a “Not:” refusals set of seven that declines rest-to-produce, “just relax”, rest-as-project, meltdown-as-rest, and natural-therefore-allowed. Interoception gets its own spread, and this zine explicitly does not call meltdown or shutdown a form of rest.

Jessica Hernandez (Maya Ch’orti’ and Binnizá) records a teaching in her father’s voice in Fresh Banana Leaves (2022): as long as we protect nature, nature will protect us. Read as a contract it is frightening, and to anyone handed belonging on terms it reads as a contract immediately. Her own extension settles it — remove ourselves from nature and nature will not be able to protect us. Able, not willing: not a payment withheld but a relation severed, and a party that cannot reach you has no leverage over you. Barry Lopez arrives at the same relation from outside in A Literature of Place (1997), naming three qualities — paying intimate attention, a storied relationship rather than a solely sensory awareness, and living in some sort of ethical unity — and saying what they are for: “a fundamental human defense against loneliness,” because “the place knows you’re there.” The zine keeps his hedge, and keeps the paragraph before it, where he says the framework describes what Indigenous interpreters showed him — so Hernandez is not an illustration of Lopez, she is the tradition speaking for itself without needing the qualifier. Then the turn that makes it ours: Hari Srinivasan’s Presence Without Belonging (2026) names the three conditions belonging requires — recognition, access, sustainability — and shows Autistic loneliness happening in the middle of social participation. A room denies all three routinely. A place denies none, and Lopez’s “intimate attention” is the thing we get pathologized for. Closes on Hernandez again: her Zapotec has no direct word for conservation, only gapanú (to take care of) and rianda (to heal), and on Seattle’s 2018 straw ban, where boxing the world into systems produced an environmental solution that removed disabled people’s access. Twelve spreads, eight figures, and a refusals set of seven. The colophon carries a correction to our own glossary: Lopez never wrote “reciprocal ethical unity.”

Martuwarra RiverOfLife is the first-listed author of “Recognizing the Martuwarra’s First Law Right to Life as a Living Ancestral Being,” Transnational Environmental Law 9(3), 541–568 (2020) — reported as the first time a river has authored an article in a law journal, with a research profile at Nulungu. The same year, a paper in Challenges by eight Indigenous authors across four continents carried a dagger on its authorship line: “We formally acknowledge Mother Earth as our senior author, with her own presence and voice.” Both are indexed and citable. Neither is a metaphor. The zine follows that bibliographic fact into the law behind it — and audits settler law rather than explaining anybody else’s, because running our usual method on First Law would make physics the validator and Aboriginal Law an instrument. Aunty Mary Graham (Kombumerri) holds that settler law is incomplete: “it is possible, even commonplace, to commit immoral and unethical acts of destruction that are not illegal.” Quoted from her own Parrhesia paper rather than through an intermediary: “I am located therefore I am,” a reflective self is a communal self, and the Land is the law — a Custodial Ethic against a survivalist ethos. Deborah Bird Rose analysed totemism as “a common property institution for long-term ecological management” and “a jurisprudence of responsibility and right”: sanctuaries where nobody hunts, species-specific prohibitions, named parties with authority to forbid. Which sets up the hinge — terra nullius rested on an ecological claim, given “the mark of scientific authority” by Elkin in 1938, that the land was untransformed and therefore unowned; Rhys Jones reversed it in 1969 with fire-stick farming. Zoe Todd (Métis) shows the same move repeating on the climate and names it aer nullius — a blank commons awaiting Euro-Western theory — and the zine turns that on itself, since No. 26 reaches for Deleuze and this site says “more-than-human” constantly. Then the flattering story breaks: Poelina and Perdrisat record increasing ambivalence about legal personhood, because “the River is already an entity” and should not depend on settler law to become one. To celebrate the conferral is to celebrate the gatekeeping. The last spread is a fence. Every other zine here ends in a claim about neurodivergent belonging; this one does not, and says at length why not — quoting Yunkaporta’s own definition of Indigenous and stating plainly that this project does not meet it. Refuses First Law explained, “Indigenous people believe,” ancient wisdom, validation by physics, and any use of the material as metaphor.