The Council of
All Beings

Carl Sagan said it plainly: the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, forged in stars that died before the Earth was born. But the same is true of the soil under the city, the water in the river, the beaver and the cuckoo and the meadow. Every being at the table is star stuff.

The Council of All Beings is a ritual from deep ecology, developed by Joanna Macy and John Seed: for an afternoon, humans set down the human mask and speak on behalf of another being — a mountain, a wolf, a river. Read cosmically, it isn't make-believe. It's the universe convening with itself, in all the forms it has learned to take.

And that reframes everything downstream. You cannot rank what you are made of. Kinship here is not a metaphor — it's an inventory of shared atoms.

Biodiversity counts the kinds of life. But a subtler variety is nested inside it: not just what lives, but how it lives. Ombre Tarragnat calls this ethodiversity — the variety of "ways of being and behaving" across all animals — extending a term coined in ecology by Adolfo Cordero-Rivera. The migratory route, the dialect of a birdsong, the nocturnal life, the whole existential style of a creature.

Its shadow is ethonormativity: the unwritten rule about which behaviours are allowed to count as acceptable. The horse who refuses the rider, the cat who won't be petted — abandoned, or worse, for departing from the expected script. A grid laid over a field that was already full of variation.

So justice has to protect more than a list of species. It has to protect their ways of being. Star stuff varies in matter — and in manner. The council seats not just the beaver, but the beaver's way of being a beaver.

A borrowed voice carries a real hazard: speaking for a being can slide into speaking over it. A human voicing the river is, honestly, a human guess — shaped by human wants.

Philosophical ethology offers a discipline for it. Vinciane Despret asks that we pose the questions that matter to the animal, not only to us; Jakob von Uexküll called each creature's lived world its Umwelt — the meadow a tick senses is not the meadow you see. The task is to enter that world, as far as you can, before you presume to represent it. Listen long. Represent second.