By Leaves We Live: The shift from interdependence to intradependence and the 30 x 30 Biodiversity Challenge on Veterinary Campuses

The nature emergency is a key aspect of the Anthropocene's metacrisis, demanding urgent attention, whilst challenging us to consider what attentional practices are essential if we are to address root causes. A shift towards connectedness is emerging, which seeks to integrate knowledge and wisdom across disciplines. This new science recognises interdependence as an organising principle between the outer world of manifest phenomena and the inner world of lived experience. It further recognises connectedness across peoples, species and the wider more-than-human world. The nature emergency is unsurprisingly interdependent with a global mental health crisis, challenging educational institutions to teach for emotional and ecological literacy. This paper explores reimagining our relationship with campus ecosystems, drawing on interpersonal neurobiology, new materialisms, and awareness-based systems change to examine the onto-epistemological foundations for more-than-human relationality. This framework facilitates the empirical exploration in an accompanying case-study, where experiential workshops focus on three entanglements: a river, a badger sett dug into an old landfill, and our own boundary-making practices. Through these explorations, a sense of relational wholeness emerges, leading to recommendations for outdoor learning, multispecies dialogue, and ecological justice. The work highlights the interconnections between nature and human restoration, revealing epistemic and One Health justice issues crucial for sustainable futures. This necessitates habitat restoration on veterinary campuses, pedagogical reform, and curriculum change. Such reforms must address the damage caused by overly reductive science, the lack of systems thinking and process philosophy, and the absence of nature connection opportunities. This means developing ways of being in the world that reveal a deeper level of interdependence and that can ultimately foster a deeper understanding of intradependence. In so doing we hope to realise the deeper meaning of Patrick Geddes’s mantra; by leaves we live.