By Leaves We Live: Entanglements with the 30 × 30 Biodiversity Challenge on Veterinary Campuses

Abstract

Addressing the nature emergency on veterinary campuses will challenge us to embrace the 30 × 30 Biodiversity Challenge and explore the life-giving processes that sustain life in our bio-regional home areas. In this case study, a group of transdisciplinary collaborators explore three entanglements that profoundly represent this key aspect of the metacrisis of the Anthropocene, doing so through a series of experiential workshops. By focusing on specific entangled features of the Easter Bush campus, at the University of Edinburgh, we are able to explore boundary making practices and to develop some sense of the relational whole and our place in the whole. The features that called for our attention included the river flowing through the campus and a local badger sett, dug into the refuse tip that past generations of humans have created beside the river. This work allows a series of recommendations about outdoor learning for eco-literacy, multispecies dialogue and justice to be proposed. The inter- and intra-connections between nature restoration and human restoration uncovered through this work, highlight that there are One Health justice issues here that we would do well to pay attention to in seeking to nurture more sustainable futures. This has implications for habitat restoration on veterinary campuses, for pedagogical practice and curriculum reform. Such reforms will need to recognise the damage caused by reductive science, the absence of systems thinking and process philosophy in teaching and the failure to promote spaces and opportunities for nature connection and outdoor learning. Information © The Authors 202