Micro Forests in Space Habitats: Ecological Practices, Perception, and Interconnectedness in Bio Architecture and Extraterrestrial Environments

Sustainable space exploration necessitates a paradigm shift from anthropocentric models toward a more-than-human perspective, recognizing non-human organisms like flora, fungi, and bacteria as critical participants not only in human health in space but in environmental transformation. This paper examines micro forests as case studies for ecological interventions in space habitats, drawing on Jakob von Uexküll’s (1926) concept of umwelt—the perceptual world unique to each organism—as well as a history of plants aboard the ISS (Häuplik-Meusberger and Paterson, 2014) to imagine the myriad ways humans in symbiosis with other organisms will design and iterate extraterrestrial regenerative environments. By incorporating multispecies perception, this study aligns with David Abram’s (1996) phenomenological exploration of interspecies interconnectedness and Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky’s (1926) thesis on life as a geological force, contributing to discussions about scalable bio-engineering solutions, from space habitats to cultivated space landscapes.