A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance

Humans ought to learn to be more like velvet mesquite, according to Jonathon Keats, and nurture the life that surrounds us rather than oppress or ignore it. We didn't invent government, and governance is as ancient and as ubiquitous as life on Earth. As we stand at the precipice of anthropogenic environmental collapse—apparently lacking the political wherewithal to do anything about it—we need to discover the governing wisdom of nature.

A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance explores the practical and philosophical dimensions of self-organization in nature as inspiration for future human governance. With this volume, Keats critically examines the lifeways of nonhuman communities from bacterial colonies to dolphin pods, as well as the self-regulating properties of ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole. Keats also describes a methodology for discovering the governing principles of nature, leading readers out into the field to explore the biosphere for themselves.

Written for a general readership and appealing especially to people interested in nature and environmental politics, A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance seeks to reintegrate humans into nature and to facilitate the political and cultural transformations needed to make human activity compatible with all life on Earth.

Jonathon will be in conversation with Clio's founder Timothy Don. Copies of A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance are available for purchase in advance with your ticket.

Jonathon Keats is one of the most provocative artists, writers, and experimental philosophers currently alive. He made his artistic debut in 2000 at Refusalon in San Francisco, where he sat in a chair and thought for twenty-four hours with a female model posing nude in the gallery. His thoughts were sold to patrons as art, at a price determined by dividing their annual income down to the minute. In 2003 he copyrighted his mind, claiming that it was a sculpture that he had created through the act of thinking. 2004 saw him attempting to genetically engineer God in a laboratory in order to determine scientifically where to place God as a species on the phylogenetic tree. He has artistically collaborated with two other species, providing easels to cypress trees in Georgia so that they could paint and choreographing a ballet for honeybees in Chico, California. He has sold arts patrons in Berlin the experience of spending money, designed electronic voting booths based on a nationwide network of ouija boards, and composed music to be performed by a creek. He attempted to counteract the great recession in 2009 by introducing a mirror economy backed by antimatter.

He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design—most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press—and is the author of a weekly online art and design column for Forbes. He has been an artist-in residence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, UC Berkeley's Sagehen Creek Field Station, and the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, a Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an Imaginary Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and a Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment. He is currently a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a research fellow at the Highland Institute, a consulting philosopher at Earth Law Center, a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a Flux Exchange Artist at Flux Projects, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He co-directs the Center for Climate-Adapted Heritage Cuisine and serves as curatorial director of the Museum of Future History.

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