This session calls for discussion about the philosophical and historical crossroads where we chose to build our advances on assumptions that have turned out to lead to a dead-end. Through highlighting the role of axiomatic choices in the past, the aim is to assess the underpinnings of our current systems and start envisioning alternative axioms onto which we can ground more sustainable futures.
We call for e.g. post-structuralist articles exploring the roots of our current predicament or envisioning alternative pasts, presents or futures. For example, how would the economy look like if humans had been viewed as something other than Homo Economicus in the 19th century? How would our society look like if instead of utilitarianism, we had chosen virtue ethics? We welcome papers not only outlining the need for transformation but going deeper into reflecting the fundamental building blocks of both our current unsustainable systems and possible sustainable ones.
We know the types of human actions that cause biodiversity loss – and other accompanying environmental and social problems. The problem is that the said actions constitute the normal way of life for the global middle class, resulting from the development and evolution of our current economic system. Said system in turn is underpinned by philosophical choices, assumptions and worldviews – axioms – prevalent among the colonialist and imperialist upper classes of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Seeking solutions within the extant system, oriented by the same axioms that have guided the development of the problematic economic system and current normal is futile – fire does not put out fire. Instead, we need to identify the problematic axioms, question their validity, envision better alternatives, and seek to ground our solutions onto more solid foundations.
The axioms we need to address pertain to our view of humans (both as species and as in respect to other species), our take on the nature of social reality, our perception of time, our normative ethical framework and our choice of logic. The prevalent axioms posit that 1) humans are guided by rationality to seek self-utility while at the top of the hierarchy of species, 2) evolution and other natural law like biological and physical aspects, not the constructionist and narrative reflexivity, drive the development of societies, 3) time is linear and progress a predetermined phenomenon, 4) consequentialism trumps deontology, virtue ethics and other possible normative ethical frameworks, and 5) solving a problem requires breaking it into smaller components instead of viewing it as embedded in larger systems, analytic logic is superior to synthetic logic.
Each of these axioms has been criticized individually – especially the naïve realism coloured ontology of economics and the strawman of “Homo Economicus”. However, less effort has been extended to viewing the set as a whole or envisioning alternatives. Through inviting discussion of the set of axioms identified to have played a role in the development of the current economic juggernaut this presentation contributes to the quest of imagining societies where living normally would protect and cherish life in all its forms.
How to cite: Unkila, M.: Towards better axioms, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-322, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-322, 2026.
In exploring the labyrinthine nature of life and being, writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that nothing is quite as it seems. As living beings, we inhabit worlds and materialities that often go unacknowledged — realms that resist the rationalist frameworks and modernist ideologies to which we are expected to conform. Recent ethnographic research (2022–2024) in southern and eastern Africa reveals deeply embodied, affective, and transmaterial human-ocean relations—indicating that a sensory ethics and openness to transmateriality may offer new, globally relevant philosophies toward more inclusive climate action. Ethnographic data collected in South Africa and Kenya illuminate the sensory and transmaterial dimensions of coastal life – suggesting that at least, for southern Africa, climate action and biodiversity protection should involve less body distant, textualized approaches to ocean management and environmental care. The discussion engages theoretical perspectives from Feminist Political Ecology, sensory ethics, and Black Planetary Studies to foreground the multidimensionality of environmental care in Africa. The human-ocean relations described are affective, physiological, and spiritual, showing that intimate, embodied knowledges of nature, seasonal attunement, and affective labour are central to practices of coastal resilience. In responding the theme of 'axioms of dead-ends and new possibilities', this paper proposes the undoing of colonialism as philosophy in Africa to pursue new forms of oceanic kinship and place-making that entangle human and more-than-human life in ways that challenge anthropocentric and masculinist epistemologies. The author argues that there are new, more hopeful possibilities for humanity in decolonial, futurist feminist futures of living 'with' nature, rather than managing it. The discussion presented engages with both sensory ethnography as well as more textualized responses to mitigating climate change, indicating the discursive power of the latter and the marginalisation of the sensory aspects of coastal existence. A key argument is that a democracy of the senses would allow for more body close, and thereby decolonial approaches to the critical issue of global climate change.
How to cite: Boswell, R.: Tides of Care: Engaging a Sensory Ethics and Transmateriality in Avenues for Global Climate Action., World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-3, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-3, 2026.
The objective of this talk is to present the findings of a four-year study conducted with transhumant Andean communities in the Huemules de Niblinto - Laguna Laja Biological Corridor in northern Patagonia, Chile. The research has focused on documenting the material culture of the herders and the biocultural routes from the disciplines of design and social sciences, as a device for ancestral knowledge that links collective memory traced from science, or as pointed out by Melgarejo et al. (2023, #), processes of cosmo/science and inter/scientific practices in dialogue, thus their conceptions of nature and its interrelationships.
The research has developed an archival and narrative inventory that has been divided into three areas of knowledge: the cosmos (orientation through the stars and geological elements); the route (herbalism, GIS, KMZ); and matter (properties acquired by artisanal materials through laboratory test results), in an exercise to systematize the interdependence between the human and non-human environment in a rugged mountain context that provides solutions to contemporary problems such as generational change or the mitigation of the human footprint in mountain environments, highlighting the role of transhumant communities as witnesses to change.
The proposal includes the presentation of methodological tools used and adapted to the context, which have the value of being replicable when engaging in transdisciplinary dialogue with local knowledge as a means of reconnecting with nature, projecting the co-creation of fair and biodiverse futures from the perspective of the heritage of communities rooted in the landscape; To paraphrase Ingold (2012), this is an attentive way of being in the world and thus also of responding to it, recovering the relational dimension of knowledge and understanding that artifacts and routes are not just things or traces, but living networks that safeguard local indigenous knowledge for the regeneration and protection of mountain ecosystems.
Transhumance, Bioculturality, Interrelationality, Ancestral Science
How to cite: Sepulveda, A.: The artifact and the route: transhumant technologies for imagining futures, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-6, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-6, 2026.
Meaningful living and working are increasingly important for modern people. Alongside this search for meaning, many find themselves anxious, even desperate, not only about their own futures but also about the fate of our planet. These existential concerns are intensified by ecological and moral states of emergency, manifested in biodiversity loss, climate change, overconsumption, ideological and societal polarization (IPBES; Planetary Boundaries; JMS 2026). This presentation focuses on the logotheoretic concept of ‘meaning fulfilment’ as an alternative view for understanding motivation and human behavior, and thereby implementing transformative change. Logotheory is a meta-psychology combining being human and meaningful existence (Frankl 1953; 2010; 2021). It is developed by Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), who is regarded as the pioneer of the scholarly meaning research (King & Hicks 2021; Steger 2019). As an existential approach building on early phenomenologists’ value-realism, logotheory regards the human ‘will to meaning’ as the motivational impetus of a mature adult and ‘meaning fulfilment’ as the final goal of human life (DuBois 1993; Frankl 2010). However, Frankl does not specify what ‘meaning fulfilment’ consists of, but the information is scattered throughout his writings. Based on a hermeneutic in-depth reading of Frankl’s works, this presentation introduces a process of ‘meaning fulfilment’ and proposes it as a meta-level motivational basis for meaningful action needed amidst today’s ecological crisis and societal polarization. Further, from the logotheory perspective, values and value-apprehension represent undertheorized areas in contemporary research on meaningfulness (Salo 2025). This includes the domain of ‘meaningful work’, which has recently discovered Frankl’s ideas and where further research based on his ideas is called for (Bailey et al. 2019). By proposing that ‘meaning fulfilment’ consists of five steps – the demand, orientation, discovering, commitment, and action; or conceptually: ‘identifying the question’, ‘will to meaning’, ‘meaning-discovering’, ‘taking responsibility’, and ‘value-realization’ – this presentation advances theorizing of motivation and human conduct based on the ‘will to meaning’, and application of ‘meaning fulfilment’ in the contexts of meaningful work and sustainability transformation. Since transformative change has not been explored from the motivational perspective of logotheory, it offers a foundation for novel and mainstream-challenging ideas for implementing the change.
How to cite: Salo, M.: Meaning Fulfilment – An Existential Approach to Transformative Change, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-477, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-477, 2026.
From the perspective of rhetorical materialism and Indigenous social theory, the future is not a predetermined horizon towards which societies naturally move, but an ongoing process of material, relational, and rhetorical world-making. This presentation examines how ecological futures—made up of diverse human and more-than-human relationships—in New Mexico are actively produced through the intertwined forces of contamination and dispossession, particularly through the infrastructures and logics of the nuclear industry. More than a remnant of the past, New Mexico’s nuclear landscape continues to organize the terms under which ecological harm, risk, and responsibility are imagined and governed in the present. Nuclear infrastructure function as futurity projects that normalize sacrifice zones, frame contamination as manageable, and authorize technocratic control over land, time, and bodies, while disproportionately burdening Indigenous and rural communities.
Drawing on rhetorical materialism, this analysis foregrounds how these futures are not only discursively justified but materially enforced through extraction, waste storage, and long-term exposure. From an Indigenous theoretical perspective, such practices reflect an ongoing structure of settler colonialism that severs relationships between land, community, and intergenerational responsibility. Yet these imposed futures are neither singular nor total. Across New Mexico, Indigenous and land-based communities are actively refusing nuclear colonial logics and constructing alternative futurities grounded in relational accountability, land-based governance, and everyday practices of care, survival, and organizing.
Situating New Mexico within broader planetary discourses of climate change and global governance, this presentation argues that nuclear colonialism is not a regional exception but a localized expression of world-systemic environmental power. I interrogate what kinds of futures our current systems are structured to desire—futures stabilized through technocratic, managerial, and extractive relationships to ecologies—and how such desires constrain what becomes imaginable as climate action. Rather than advancing a singular green horizon, this analysis asks how we might invest in and activate multiple, relational futures for biodiversity and ecosystems. Positioning nuclear futurity and Indigenous futurity in direct tension, this research argues that desirable futures for biodiversity and people do not emerge through prediction or management alone, but through ongoing struggles to invest in, enact, and defend alternative ecological relations to place.
How to cite: Oxford, H.: Desiring Plural Futures: Rhetorical Perspectives on Imagining, Activating, and Making More-Than-Human Life, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-872, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-872, 2026.
