A useful framework for considering the needs of the “more-than-human world” when designing human-made systems is “ecological empathy,” the focus of Lauren Lambert, founder of Future Now, a sustainability consulting firm. Her research on the topic, Ecological empathy: Relational theory and practice, was published in the journal Ecosystems and People in late 2024, when she was at Arizona State University, and she joins Mongabay’s podcast to detail the concept and its potential for reconnecting humans with nature for mutual benefit.

“Ecological empathy as I define it [is] essentially a framework of practice for how to use empathy as a guide to connect to the more-than-human world, and integrate our interdependence and relationships with the more-than-human world in everyday thinking, everyday practice, and specifically in the places where we work,” she says.

Previous guests on the podcast have advocated for a similar approach, such as Carl Safina, who argued for overhauling how humans raise and farm seafood by highlighting the lack of empathy for the human impacts on marine environments, and the detrimental impacts this has on society at large.

Lambert’s framework and real-world applications are not without precedent: wildlife crossings on roads are just one example of using ecological empathy to design human infrastructure that understands and takes the needs of others into consideration. Previous podcast guest Ben Goldfarb discussed this with us after the release of his award-winning book Crossings, which documents what he calls “road ecology.”

While Lambert does not pretend to have invented the concepts central to ecological empathy, she is perhaps the first person to effectively coin the term for a Western audience and lay down a road map of six subcomponents for applying it. She is clear that these have been present in Indigenous societies since time immemorial.

“If you were using, say, an Indigenous worldview of almost any sort, you would be [practicing ecological empathy] pretty inherently. And so, in some ways, this is just like a bit of a road map to say, ‘OK, here’s this thing that you need in Western worldviews.'”

Read the full article about ecological empathy by Mike DiGirolamo and Rachel Donald at Mongabay.