Problems and Purpose

Nature Perspectives is a conversational engagement method that enables people to interact with evidence-informed, first-person representations of non-human beings through artificial intelligence. The method uses dialogue as a way of fostering engagement with the lived perspectives of animals, plants, and ecosystems. It was developed in response to a perceived limitation in conventional conservation communication. According to its founder, environmental engagement has often relied on communicating scientific facts while giving comparatively less attention to the emotional and relational dimensions that motivate care for the natural world. During research into emerging technologies for conservation, advances in large language models suggested that conversation itself could become a new medium through which people relate to nature rather than simply learn about it. Nature Perspectives describes dialogue as "a natural, powerful way for humans to learn, far more engaging and memorable than passive content ", arguing that conversation can shift people from learning about nature to learning from and with nature. The primary purpose of the method is to foster empathy, curiosity, and connection with the natural world through dialogue. As stated by the organisation, its central research question is: "How can dialogue with nature foster empathy, inspire care, and drive real-world conservation action?" The method aims to create scientifically grounded conversational representations that encourage perspective-taking and deeper engagement with ecological relationships. According to the founder, the experience is intended to resemble an interactive documentary more than a fictional role-playing exercise, with conversations grounded in ecological evidence.

Origins and Development

Nature Perspectives was founded by wildlife biologist Gal Zanir following his work on emerging technologies for conservation while studying Conservation Leadership at the University of Cambridge and later working with WWF International. While exploring early large language models, Zanir observed that sustained dialogue could generate unexpectedly strong feelings of personal connection. This prompted the question of whether conversational AI could similarly enable people to develop meaningful relationships with the natural world. The first conversational protocol was developed shortly afterwards to ground a language model in the perspective of a natural entity.

The organisation identifies several intellectual influences on the development of the method. Nature Perspectives states that it is guided by theories of agency and representation, drawing inspiration from Bruno Latour and Hanna Pitkin in seeking ways for nature to be actively represented rather than symbolically acknowledged. It also cites Donella Meadows' work on systems thinking, particularly the idea that durable social change often emerges through shifts in underlying worldviews. Together, these influences inform the use of dialogue as a means of reshaping how people perceive and relate to the natural world.

Since its initial prototype, Nature Perspectives has developed into an organisation working with cultural, conservation, and research partners. It is led by co-founders Gal Zanir (Chief Executive Officer) and Abhik Palit (Head of Research and Partnerships), whose background includes community-based conservation and cross-sector collaboration. It also has a group of advisors that include academics and practitioners from conservation, technology, and innovation fields.

They have been primarily focused on growing public engagement, educational experiences, and research into human–nature relationships. According to the founder, future development may extend the method towards applications that support structured decision-making by enabling conversations with multiple species perspectives around particular environmental questions. At the time of writing, these policy-oriented applications remain future ambitions.

Participant Recruitment and Selection

Nature Perspectives has been used in partnership with cultural and environmental organisations, including museums, botanic gardens, natural history collections, and nature reserves. In these settings, participation is generally open to visitors, who voluntarily engage with it as part of their visit. Depending on the context, participants may have a conversation with a natural entity associated with the institution, such as a museum specimen, or with a natural entity encountered in the surrounding environment.

Institutional partners are chosen by Nature Perspectives. According to the founder, this curated partnership model enables close collaboration in designing each deployment and provides oversight of how the method is implemented before wider public release. Nature Perspectives is also developing a direct-to-public application intended to allow individuals to access the application independently. According to the founder, the application will enable users to photograph a natural entity in their surroundings and initiate a conversation with it. At the time of writing, this application had not yet been publicly launched.

The non-human entity is chosen according to the aims of each project. Institutional partners help select it and provide the ecological knowledge needed to represent it. Nature Perspectives takes a broad view of what can be represented: according to its founder, any natural entity can become part of a conversation if enough scientific or ecological knowledge is available. So far, the organisation has represented animals, plants, a river, an ecosystem, a rock and even a particle of light. The method therefore enables dialogue with many kinds of natural entities, rather than only particular species or living organisms.

How it Works: Process, Interaction, and Decision-Making

Nature Perspectives can be experienced in two ways. In museums, botanical gardens and similar settings, participants scan a QR code linked to a specimen or other natural entity. Through a planned public app, users will instead photograph a natural entity in their surroundings. The system will then identify it and create a conversation around that individual.

For each deployment, Nature Perspectives constructs what it calls a digital mind for the represented natural entity. According to the founder, this digital mind is built from a curated body of scientific knowledge together with contextual information and, where available, data relating to the life history of a particular individual. In institutional deployments, partner organisations contribute information about individual specimens or local ecological contexts to inform this process. While the organisation does not disclose its complete data sources or protocols, it describes the digital mind as representing the scientifically probable life history of the individual being portrayed.

A central design principle is individuality. Rather than generating a generic representation of a species, Nature Perspectives seeks to construct distinct personas for individual beings. According to the founder, two conversational representations of the same species, for example, two ladybirds, would differ according to factors such as geography, season, observable environmental conditions, and other contextual information available about that individual. These factors are incorporated through a proprietary protocol developed by the organisation to construct each digital mind.

Participants then engage in open-ended conversations with the digital mind. Conversations are directed by participants' questions and interests. According to the founder, the interface is designed to adapt to the participant's age and level of knowledge, while institutional deployments may also be customised to the objectives and context of partner organisations. Nature Perspectives additionally describes the platform as multilingual, culturally responsive, and designed to encourage engagement with the surrounding environment rather than prolonged screen use.

Nature Perspectives also describes a set of internal design and ethical guidelines that shape how digital minds are developed. According to the founder, these include efforts to avoid anthropocentric, utilitarian, or stereotypical portrayals of species and instead ground representations in available ecological knowledge. For example, personas are intentionally steered away from conventional cultural assumptions about particular species to create space for alternative ways of understanding them.

The organisation further reports that each persona is built around what it calls an emotional arc, including elements such as desires and fears, in order to support the experience of interacting with a distinct individual rather than a generic chatbot. However, these emotional representations are intentionally differentiated from human emotional experience. According to the founder, the aim is not to suggest that non-human beings experience emotions in the same way as humans, but to provide a bridge that supports empathy while acknowledging that their forms of experience may differ.

Where ecological knowledge remains uncertain or scientifically contested, Nature Perspectives states that this uncertainty is communicated explicitly within the conversation rather than presented as settled fact. According to the founder, digital minds indicate when behaviours or ecological characteristics remain the subject of scientific debate instead of asserting a single authoritative account.

Where participants consent to research use, anonymised conversations are analysed to understand patterns of engagement and to iteratively refine the method. According to the founder, the organisation examines how different conversational prompts relate to empathy, curiosity, and learning, with these findings informing subsequent development of the digital minds and conversational design.

Influence, Outcomes, and Effects

Nature Perspectives reports several ongoing research programmes examining how conversational engagement with non-human perspectives influences human attitudes, learning, and relationships with nature.

The organisation captures and analyses conversation transcripts (anonymised) to study outcomes across several dimensions it has named directly: empathy development (what kinds of stories or interactions deepen empathy for other life forms), sentiment tracking (how the emotional tone of a conversation — awe, joy, concern — shapes what people absorb and do afterward), progressive learning (what people learn about ecosystems and interdependence through dialogue), and curiosity drivers (which prompts open up further inquiry, and how curiosity relates to empathy and behaviour change).

The organisation explains that this work is informed by psychological research on first-person perspectives and perspective-taking, which suggests that imagining another being's experience can strengthen empathy across difference. As an illustrative example, the founder described a student research project at the University of Cambridge in which participants conversed with a conversational representation of a cockroach. According to the founder, participants reportedly shifted from initial feelings of fear or disgust towards greater curiosity about the animal, which the organisation presents as consistent with existing findings on perspective-taking and empathy.

Beyond informing individual studies, Nature Perspectives states that these data are being used to develop a broader research infrastructure. This includes a database of anonymised human–nature conversations intended to support research in the social, behavioural, and conservation sciences, a research platform through which external researchers can investigate human–nature relationships, and impact measurement tools combining textual analysis with behavioural data to examine changes in what participants think, feel, and do for nature. According to the organisation, insights from these analyses are also used to iteratively refine conversational models and adapt future interactions.

Alongside its research activities, Nature Perspectives has published visitor testimonials describing increased attentiveness to specimens and species that participants might otherwise have overlooked, greater comfort asking questions through the conversational interface, and a stronger sense of connection with the represented natural entity.

At the time of writing, publicly available documentation primarily describes ongoing research programmes, visitor feedback, and methodological development rather than completed evaluations demonstrating long-term behavioural or conservation outcomes.

Analysis and Lessons Learned

Nature Perspectives expands more-than-human participation by using artificial intelligence to mediate one-to-one conversations between participants and evidence-informed representations of natural entities. Representation is constructed through conversational storytelling grounded in scientific and contextual knowledge. This represents a different conception of representation from that found in many democratic innovations. Rather than primarily seeking to represent non-human interests within collective decision-making processes, the method uses representation to support perspective-taking, learning, and empathy through individual dialogue. Scientific accuracy remains central to the construction of each digital mind, but representation is also designed to create an emotionally and narratively meaningful encounter that encourages participants to relate differently to the natural world. Current applications focus on public engagement and research rather than collective decision-making. Although the organisation has identified future governance applications as a possible direction for development, documented implementations currently position the method as a means of cultivating relationships with the more-than-human world rather than directly incorporating non-human perspectives into formal decision-making processes.

See Also

Confluence of European Water Bodies — a recurring transnational initiative in which humans represent rivers, seas, lagoons, glaciers, and other water bodies, exploring alternative approaches to water governance and more-than-human representation.

Interspecies Council — a deliberative method in which participants embody non-human perspectives and speak on behalf of other species or ecological systems.

River Dôn Living Stewardship Agreement — a civil society-led initiative that brings human and more-than-human actors into relational mapping and stewardship processes around the River Dôn in South Yorkshire.

Zoöp (Zoöperation) — a governance and learning method that formally embeds more-than-human interests in organisational decision-making through a Speaker for the Living and a recurring ecological learning cycle.

References

Nature Perspectives website: natureperspectives.earth

Interview with Gal Zanir (Co-Founder and CEO, Nature Perspectives), conducted by Claudia Fernandez De Cordoba Farini, 2026.

External Links

The Guardian, "AI gives voice to dead animals in Cambridge exhibition" (2024): https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/14/ai-gives-voice-to-dead-animals-in-cambridge-exhibition

The Times, "Dodos are back from the dead and ready to answer your questions": https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/dodos-are-back-from-the-dead-and-ready-to-answer-your-questions-5kzsnl7z5

BBC News coverage: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd6qly230j4o

Notes

Acknowledgements

The entry is part of the more-than-human democratic innovations collection. It was developed through the research project Mapping emerging practices of nonhuman representation and participation led by Lucy J. Parry and Hans Asenbaum at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, Claudia de Cordoba Fernandez Farini of Living Imaginaries and Graham Smith at the University of Westminster. The project is funded by Participedia and the Centre for Animals and Social Justice.