In their cross-cutting exploration of transdisciplinary practice, Butt and Dimitrijevic propose a radical ecology of collaboration, arguing that sustainability research must itself become sustainable—not through methodological consensus or epistemic closure, but via adaptive co-creation, where the disciplines involved learn to mutate through contact with more-than-human realities; the authors draw on case studies from artistic residencies, climate art projects, and eco-philosophical exchanges to illustrate how multispecies relationality and non-extractive methodologies foster new capacities for knowing, sensing, and intervening in ecological crises; central to their framework is the rejection of siloed expertise in favour of epistemic symbiosis, where knowledge is grown like a garden, not manufactured like a product; the meadow becomes a key metaphor—not as object of study but as methodological template: diverse, decentralised, resilient, and open to cross-pollination; practices such as slow observation, embodied immersion, speculative storytelling, and site-specific interventions become tools for generating what they call “sustainable modes of thinking” that refuse to separate knowledge from place, affect, or ethics; crucially, they point to the risks of instrumentalising art within science, calling instead for a politics of mutual transformation, where both artistic and scientific practices are destabilised and reoriented through their encounter; this is not interdisciplinarity as synthesis, but as transductive process—a term drawn from Simondon and Guattari to signal that transformation must occur at the level of ontological operations, not merely cognitive exchange; their conclusion is clear: if sustainability is to matter, it must become a shared terrain of becoming, not a domain to be managed. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2022.2136630
