Collective care for ourselves and others – without individualism and anthropocentrism – is the basis of the multispecies health we conceive. Far from being a naïve abstraction of a world without suffering, this care is about taking the interests of others seriously, engaging in conflicts to try to solve them as fairly as possible and cultivating our empathy for other living beings. While species is a category of biological taxonomy, it also denotes and connotes a set of entities with something in common. There can be biological species, but also species of beings, knowledge, relationships and existences. Therefore, multispecies collectives are not limited to living beings, much less to animals. The composition of a given multispecies collective is always circumstantial and linked to a point of view. The health of multispecies collectives understood in this way is located on the colonial-capitalist peripheries of modernity. What this health seeks is not the inclusion of the peripheries in the colonial centre; on the contrary, it seeks to make them so peripheral that they are beyond the reach of the pathological marginalisation operated by that centre. It’s about public and collective health, based on good living (buen vivir), which doesn’t want to prematurely and anthropocentrically close off the composition of the public and the collective.

The MUHE Network, formerly the OHP Network (One Health of Peripheries), works to decolonise and promote multispecies health. Click here to read more about the name change and multispecies health.