This essay outlines tangible means by which we may evolve beyond advocacy for the living world into new patterns and processes of agency for non-human kin. How might an expanded understanding of the social enable non-humans to possess their own land titles and contracts, license their own data, compensate their guardians, safeguard their biodiversity, pressure their political delegates, and own their own currency?

This piece follows 4 sections:

A - Theoretical underpinnings of autonomous and convivial ecologies

B - How non-human agency is articulated across different infrastructures and technologies

C - The design of autonomous and convivial ecologies

D - Example implementations.

If readers are new to the topics discussed here we suggest beginning with some of the example implementations outlined in section D.

A - Introduction

The climate crisis presses a fundamental reevaluation of which beings are admitted into our definitions of social life and the institutions underpinning it, revealing that notions of agency and personhood are not prefigured, but actively negotiated through different technologies which constitute and contest who is seen, counted, and included as part of society. Typically, these systems are understood as regulatory infrastructures through which subjects and institutions are upheld and maintained. However, in reciprocal fashion, these systems are also a means by which the more than human world might be recognized as “legitimate” social actors, rather than objects and resources for extraction. The institutional forms of the future must reflect a more whole world, populated by more subjects than human beings, leading to the emergence of novel eco-social assemblages which redefine concepts like rights, ownership, identity, privacy, responsibility, and politics beyond solely the human realm. How might we create institutions which are living with and across diverse forms of life; which is to say, convivial?

We propose a simple framework designed to expand the legibility of the "more than human world" (such as ‘Nature’, Non-Humans, “More-than-Human Ecologies”, etc.) to various anthropogenic infrastructures and technologies, with the aim of increasing the "surface area" through which non-humans directly exert influence on human-made systems. This approach falls within a progressive application of law, economy, information technology, and governance; leveraging anthropogenic forms to fundamentally transform the systems from which they originate towards a more inclusive and just world for all beings. We refer broadly to the resulting entities as Ecological Institutions, and our approach as a kind of progressive formalism. [1]

Our goal is to outline explicit processes by which non-humans,  (meaning individual organisms like trees and primates, populations like packs and flocks, and whole ecosystems like forests, and watersheds) have expanded influence on human society. We do this to catalyze a more inclusive definition of society, where non-humans are not considered solely passive objects nor resources, but rather, are afforded the possibility to be societal actors with the potential for rights analogous to those recognized for humans and corporations, on the basis of relevant attributes and capacities. How might the technologies and infrastructures which configure society express and affirm an expanded notion of kinship?

This project begins from a proposition; that we call agency is oftentimes less a reflection of an organism’s innate capacities or attributes, but rather their ability to be legible to the contexts within which they operate, living or otherwise. Legibility in this sense, is a kind of measure by which a being is able to be recognized, deciphered, or understood within the space, system, or environment in which it acts. Through the concept of ecological institutions and legibility, we explore progressive forms of non-human agency at the intersection of earth-centric law, and emerging technologies of ownership, governance, sensing and verification. Many of these processes are greatly enabled and expanded through the use of decentralized protocols, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

We believe a hybrid approach which leverages the different domains of information, governance, rights, and value strengthens an understanding of non-humans as beings in a “more whole society”, and fosters a transition for the more-than-human world away from solely objects / resources, into agential subjects, and ultimately novel ecological institutions. Using this framework, we conclude by identifying a potential design space of ecological institutions and populate it with example implementations, from more programmatic and autonomous approaches on one end to more socially interdependent and convivial approaches on the other.

Ecological institutions, and the concepts which underwrite them are a potential catalyst for better inclusion of beings beyond the human in social life, and by extension, society as a whole. However, this approach is meant to be a compliment, not a substitute, for the urgent need for humans beings living in the anthropocene, to rebond as kin with the many beings and subjects which populate our living world, and recenter reciprocity and interdependence at the root of social relation. In short, “undual” the social and the ecological.

Patterns of Legibility and Constitution

From Resources → Ecological Subjects

In most modern nation-states, the identity of subjects extends beyond their physical selves, encompassing a myriad of systemic attributes such as rights, legal standing, value, ownership, privacy, and suffrage. These characteristics are not static; rather they are conferred, upheld, and challenged by a network of infrastructures, technologies, and contracts that shape society; the social ecology within which agency is formed. These systems can be understood as constituting the subject. [2]

All organisms integrate the affordances of their surroundings, and are constituted by those relations. In the process of this constitution, the environment itself is transformed by their presence. Ecological sciences teach us about niche construction, where the presence of an organism in the environment inherently alters the features of that environment, in small, but sometimes large ways. Roughly 2.4 billion years ago, the emergence of photosynthetic bacteria fundamentally altered the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and constructed innumerable niches for aerobic organisms to thrive in what is referred to as the Great Oxygenation Event. Our current capital-centric pattern is less generative of life. One might view the climate crisis as systemic niche destruction by forcing our planet to accommodate a singular extractive social and economic paradigm.

Through the notion of ecological institutions we explore how niche construction by non-humans within legal, economic, informatic, and political systems might support a greater diversity of life.

The reciprocal relation of legibility and constitution remains intact. As beings are more recognizable or legible within an environment or system, they increasingly constitute it, forcing it to recognize and accommodate their existence. We both form and are formed by our ecological, social, and technical milieus. This relationship of co-regulation forms a larger system that can be understood as an expanded ecological and social physiology of the subject.

Progressive Formalism

We focus on the mutual relationship of legibility and constitution of the more than human world across 5 primary domains.

• Biophysical systems

• Legal systems

• Economic systems

• Information Technology

• Political systems

These systems typify a spectrum, with the “hard” life sciences on one end and the “soft” social sciences on the other. Plants and animals are typically associated with the former, while human beings and our corporate creations are associated with the latter. We hold that the domain of social life cannot be exclusive to human beings, corporations, and pets, rather we must cultivate our imagination about what a social world not exclusively defined by human beings would look like.

This stance is progressive in the sense that it is an experimental application of social technologies in their current form to an expanded cast of non-human characters. Rather than replacing existing systems, we seek to transform them towards a more just and whole world through their own logic. The second sense of progressive reflects the nested nature of these systems. Patterns of agency in one system, create the possibility for relations in another. For example, legal recognition of personhood for a river or tree creates the potential for that river or tree to possess things like currency or information, because only legal persons have the capacity to own things. We define formalism in this sense, as an adherence to the prescribed forms different social technologies operate through. It is aligned with the belief that in order to be heard, you must speak the language of those who you want to listen [3]. Through what forms and media is agency conferred and maintained?

To date, one of the most successful applications of this broader approach is the “Rights of Nature'' movement. This network of eco-centric lawyers, activists, and scholars work to bestow legal standing to non-human actors in local and international courts of law. By formalizing that non-human entities can have personhood, like corporations do, they create the potential for non-humans to have rights, which can be observed and enforced within different legal systems. Rivers have the right to flow, and trees the right to stand. The result is that the legal system must work in service to the rights of non-humans, not just human individuals and corporations. If corporations are granted legal standing why can’t blue whales, and old growth Douglas Firs? [4] The Rights of Nature movement demonstrates how legibility to the legal system in the form of juridic personhood, forces courts to recognize the existence and rights of non-humans; altering them in the process. The agency of non-humans is expanded through anthropogenic means.

A non-exhaustive list of relevant examples of non-human agency is provided in the Appendix at the end of this essay.

Legal personhood is a powerful vehicle for advancing socio-ecological change. Other legal wrappers such as Unincorporated Associations, and zero-member LLCs [5] are promising structures from which novel ecological institutions might emerge, and there will likely be more in the future. The designations which specify standing for non-human entities vary greatly across international legal systems, as well as within indigenous legal systems. A more thorough examination of non-human agency and legibility within different legal systems is beyond the scope of this paper. For the purposes of this essay however, we use the term “standing” to broadly refer to any legal designation which allows an organism, ecosystem, or bioregion to be legible to the legal system, and entitled to the rights therein.

How might the rights-based approach inherent in the “Rights of Nature” movement be bolstered by a value-based approach from regenerative economics? Might we advocate that not only do non-humans have rights, but they also hold and contribute value to sustain life on earth? Ecological institutions seek to expand the legibility of the more than human world beyond the legal system into economic, informatic and political domains in order to substantiate and enforce nature’s rights through systems of value, data, and governance.

As the case of Unincorporated Associations demonstrates, there are promising opportunities for this approach to grow through conventional systems of economics, information and politics. We believe these efforts can be complimented with the opportunities made possible through decentralized protocols which provide novel means to define identity, ownership, sensing, and governance for non-human entities. In what follows we outline the current potentials such protocols to foster ecological institutions, and explore two typologies for their implementation.

Commons and Decentralized Protocols

Ecological Subjects → Ecological Institutions

Decentralized protocols are systems of rules and standards that enable computers, devices, or individuals to communicate and share information without relying on a central authority or server. They enable distributed ownership of goods, and cooperative decision making around the use of those common resources. Organizations which hold resources, and record the governance related to those resources on the blockchain, are referred to as DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). Unlike cloud computing and conventional data storage which are authoritative and centralized, decentralized protocols uphold consensus between many different actors in a manner which is similar to ecological networks. This makes them well suited for applications of ownership and governance of common resources which are:

• easily accessed

• easily depleted

This includes many planetary systems like the atmosphere, water cycle, and the ozone. In short, commons. As such we feel it is important to consider how decentralized protocols might substantiate and amplify existing efforts for non-human agency.

We identify 4 domains in which decentralized protocols may further enable non-human agency and the creation of ecological institutions.

• Identity

• Ownership

• Sensing / Verification

• Governance

As presented, each creates the novel conditions for the subsequent domain to emerge. An identity on a blockchain, creates the space for an inventory, which may behave according to sensory inputs and / or governance processes.

Identity

Decentralized ledgers like blockchains, allow for the creation of unique addresses in digital space, not reliant upon a central authority. The location and composition of these endpoints is maintained through distributed consensus. This endpoint is a blockchain address, which functions as a unique digital identity for organisms, ecosystems, or larger bioregions. While seemingly trivial in nature, this creates the opportunity for non-humans to have a discrete address in a digital network as well as the opportunity for privacy. Blockchain addresses are updated and maintained by the validators of a particular chain, which are designed to be distributed and thus difficult to co opt, censor, or override by someone seeking to control the network. This approach is in contrast to cloud-based authentication schemes where a for-profit entity owns and maintains all the data required to verify someone or something’s identity.

Ownership

Addresses can be understood as receptacle or stores of information, currency, contracts etc. On chain indentities are forms of inventory. [6] When a non-human with legal standing is coupled with a blockchain address, it creates the possibility for that non-human to own things. This basic pattern greatly expands the design space of non-human ownership. An ecosystem may be a trust, or a fund. It may own its own data or title. How the inventory of an ecological institution is managed can be informed by data gathered via sensing, as well as through governance processes, which integrate said data.

Sensing / Verification

There are countless ways the state or wellbeing of an ecosystem can be observed and monitored. Decentralized protocols may incorporate existing observation systems, either remote or in situ, as well as create novel distributed frameworks for data collection. Distributed measurement, results, and verification (dMRV) is an expanding field which explores incentives in collective behavior to generate information with high integrity despite inherent limitations like working with non-experts, or the potential for results to be biased. Decentralized protocols allow non-human subjects and ecological institutions to not only own their own data, but also execute actions on their inventory based on conditions within their environment. How manual or automatic these processes are is an open space of investigation.

Governance

The inventory of an ecological institution can be governed in diverse ways. Decentralized protocols have stoked a resurgence in applications of community governance both within a “digitally native” context, as well as focused on biophysical common pool resources like aquifers, and fisheries. Much of this work is emerging in the space of DAOs, which explore protocols for the stewardship of common resources and public goods in a manner which is intended to be modular and composable.[7] Our definition of ecological institutions seeks to integrate the potential of digital knowledge commons like open source software governance, with legacies of community resource management like biophysical commons. Governance of ecological institutions emerges at the overlap of these domains, resulting in a kind of decentralized autonomous organism.

The actions an ecological institution could take may be governed by a chosen group of elected guardians and experts or programmatically through data inputs. The integration of dynamic ecological sensing systems with modularized protocols for community governance is an exciting domain of learning and research foregrounded by the emergence of ecological institutions. We seek to leverage the governance potentials of DAOs for the stewardship of the living world in a manner which honors non-human life and agency.

Complexity arises progressively, as frameworks for identity create opportunities for ownership, which in turn create opportunities for governance informed by monitoring and observation systems. In this way ecological institutions can be very simple stores of value and information by a non-human, or highly complex actors entities which reflect historical and contemporary precedents in institutional design. In this context it is very important to honor, learn, and document practices of natural resource management from lineages of folk and traditional ecological knowledge to understand how a new era of ecological institutions can nurture and legitimize non-Western, non-dualist conceptions of human-environmental relation.

B - Loops of Legibility and Constitution Across Medium

The reciprocal relationship between legibility and constitution outlined at the beginning of this piece reflects a common pattern found throughout virtually all systems we might describe as ecological. Relation is never unidirectional, rather always bi-directional and mutual. The logic of uni-directional flow of influence is consistent with the logic of extraction which underpins many of the institutions which compose modern society. To describe the loops of legibility and constitution at play within legal, economic, political systems etc, is to approach them with an ecological perspective, because ecology is not simply our biophysical reality, but an understanding of the mutual nature of relation in general.

In the context of human - environmental interaction, when this relation creates the possibility of greater abundance and diversity of life, we may describe this relation as a form of stewardship. The basis of ecological institutions is to formalize stewardship across different social technologies and infrastructures. This pattern plays out through different media according to different domains. Here we outline what those media might be for different domains, and attempt to plot out different forms of legibility and constitution accordingly.

Biophysical Legibility

Legibility and constitution are perhaps most familiar in the patterns which play out as ecological relations. As noted above, niche construction is the process through which organisms incorporate elements of their environment, and alter it in the process. One might call stewardship or reciprocity, a kind of niche construction where the presence of an organism (or community of organisms) enables the environment to sustain an ever greater degree of life. In short, regeneration.

The world is legible to us through our diverse faculties and practices of sense-perception, through which we make meaning and significance of the world us. In perceiving the living world, and deriving significance from it, we extend our finite and limited perspective, and increasingly constitute the complexities of our habit. The modernist severance of social and ecological life systematically erased many traditions and rites through which the living world is legible to human beings. Traditional ecological knowledge, rituals of common resource management, animism, and disciplines like eco-semiotics demonstrate the wider range of ecological sensitivity humans are capable of in order to act in “right relation” with the living world. We view the ecological institutions as continuation of these kinds of practices at an infrastructural scale.

Legibility between organisms and their environment is a large topic, meriting many further dedicated projects. Within the context of ecological institutions, the focus is on how learning to “read” the environment enables humans to enter more robust regenerative relations. This principle, in effect, plays out now across different media and social technologies.

Legal Legibility

Unlike the expanded field of legibility and constitution in biophysical systems, the legal system is a uniquely human construct with explicit terms of engagement. Courts of law engage with actors who have standing. As outlined before, the success of the rights of nature movement is to expand standing to a wider field of organisms beyond human beings and corporations. In bestowing standing, non-humans are bestowed rights. The legal system works in service to protect those rights. The wrappers through which standing is formalized is diverse and is dependent upon the legal context and jurisdiction.

To be legible to the legal system through personhood, allows non-humans to receive its protection. In the process the legal system is expanded to protect a greater number of subjects, and is challenged to be a steward of the living world.

Economic Legibility

Within the logic of extraction, non-humans, ecosystems, and bioregions are understood as resources or objects to be used up. Their value is most clearly expressed when cut down, dug up, etc. Regenerative economics works to formalize a definition of value which is not predicated upon harvest, but rather that the living world has value in being alive, and keeping us alive. The value comes from the fact that the more-than-human world sustains us, and if protected will continue to. How might we describe the vital ecosystem functions that keep our planet inhabitable as having value? Pollinators bring billions of dollars in “value” to the agricultural industry in the US every year. If they collapse, that expense will enter the balance sheet of farmers as financial overhead. Arguing that life sustaining functions like carbon sequestration, pollination, water filtration have value, creates the potential for basic economic logic to work to protect our planet. Pollution in this sense is a cost which has been externalized to the global public.

To say that non-humans, ecosystems, and bioregions have value, is to leverage an economic system for the protection and regeneration of the planet. To make the more-than-human world legible to economic systems, is to reject the notion that planetary health is an externality to financial calculus, rather the economic system is compelled to be a steward of systems of value outside extraction.

Human-induced climate change will inevitably lead to societies valuing ecosystems for their life-sustaining functions because if we run out of fresh air and water, we will inevitably consider them valuable. Regenerative economics seeks to align value and life-supporting functions without a complete collapse in the earth’s biosphere to instigate it. Ecological institutions can be understood as a coupling of ecocentric law with the field of regenerative economics, leveraging the potential of decentralized protocols as appropriate.

Ecological institutions are an effort for non-humans to own their own value whether that be defined through conventional (resource based) or regenerative means. Deciding how that value is exchanged within the larger economic field is the role of governance. This creates the potential for ecological institutions to operate like funds. These funds could be legally owned by animals, rivers, mountains, or whole bioregions acting as a new category of economic actors with potentially significant impact. To be legible to the economic system through a redefinition of value means that fundamental patterns in the economic system are rewired to be in stewardship to the living world.

Political Legibility

Ecological institutions create the opportunity for governance bodies to be formally tethered to organisms, ecosystems, and bioregions. What to do in a particular context is a question of governance which can be informed by taking input about the state of that particular organism or ecosystem. Should a river sell access rights to a particular enterprise that falls within the watershed? Who is equipped to speak for the river, based on what information? In this sense, governance can be understood as the rituals and protocols through which humans and the environment relate, in short, a system of commoning.

We tend to associate ecosystems as that which is beyond humans, but in general this isn’t true. Forests include the people who live there. The presence of bodies of water, and the flow of rivers is fundamental to the flow of human relation. While the notion of a protocol may seem novel to blockchains, they are nothing new. The practice of commoning is a kind of socio-ecological protocol, where rules around access, timing, monitoring are collectively held and maintained. They are collective protocols of stewardship which resist monopolistic capture and extraction by the few, for the benefit of many; human and non-human alike. We must unlearn the logic that treats non-human organisms, ecosystems, bioregions as objects and resources, and relearn that every non-human entity is a potential protocol of stewardship. This form of political legibility emphasizes the innate potential of governance in human - environmental relations.

Another interpretation of political legibility takes this further by asking how nonhumans might more directly participate in the political process. This applies internally, to how an ecology is stewarded and maintained, as a commons for example, as well as externally as a political actor. Formalizing ecological subjects is an opportunity to extend political representation to non-humans and offers an explicit path through which their voice can be heard, and thus be held accountable to. The political system is invited to be a steward of the living world.

Stewardship

Loops of legibility and constitution take different forms through different systems. By adhering to the established forms different systems can “see”, ecological institutions are a way to make the more than human world impossible to ignore. This formalism compounds; legibility in the legal system for example, creates greater potential for impact in economic and political systems. These loops can be understood as a form of regenerative stewardship across different social technologies and infrastructures. How do these loops of stewardship formalize the basic components through which ecological institutions might emerge? In what follows, we adumbrate two basic typologies of ecological institutions, and give examples for potential implementations.

C - Growing Autonomous and Convivial Ecological Institutions

Loops of stewardship across different systems are the design primitives of ecological institutions. Through them we may explore a wide array of schemas, from simple agents to complex eco-social assemblages. They share a common root which welds a rights-based approach from eco-centric law, with a value-based approach from regenerative economics. Building on this, we sketch out the design space for ways information technology and governance might interact to produce different kinds of ecological institutions relevant to different contexts. On one end of the spectrum we have more autonomous agents and the other more convivial institutions.

It begins in loops of reciprocity

We begin with an essential loop of stewardship between a human actor and the environment. The living world supports and sustains an individual, and by extension a larger population, in fundamental and essential ways as a source of water, food, oxygen. In short, our lifeworld. In reciprocity, we care for and steward the living world, and support its capacity to support us.

Growing Subjects

In formalizing that the more-than-human world has personhood, and thus standing and other rights, we sanctify its inalienable right to exist. Personhood and legal standing creates a kind of stable wrapper which expands the agency of non-humans with the capacity for greater social attributes. Persons, can hold things.

Decentralized Identities

Decentralized protocols allow for the creation of discrete addresses which can be pegged to the non-human entity. They are endpoints to receive, transmit, and store things. The social attributes afforded through personhood have an address through which they can be routed and accessed. The legal and digital identity of the non-human entities are fused.

Both general blockchains as well as application-specific blockchains are relevant for the creation of ecological institutions. Ultimately, the integrity of the decentralized identity is maintained by the nodes / validators of the network. For the purposes of ecological institutions, an application specific blockchain with the explicit purpose of being a ledger of planetary health, means that the validators of the decentralized network are more likely to be purpose aligned. Regen Ledger is a clear example of a blockchain built to support decentralized protocols of planetary health. The address of the ecological institution reflects what blockchain it lives on.

Decentralized Inventories

This proto-ecological institution, this organism of sorts, has a home and an address within legal and digital spaces, and much like its biophysical surroundings, it is afforded the capacity and influence to construct its niche. In this way, personhood and digital identity create a container through which non-humans possess things. A blockchain address functions as this store of digital assets, currency, contracts, deeds etc. It allows a mountain, river, animal to have a treasury that can be populated with more things than just money. The ecosystem could hold fungible value in the form of currency, as well as non-fungible assets like deeds / titles of land tenure, as well as its own data.

Who / what decides how a non-human gives consent for actions to be taken with its resources, on its behalf? Who decides who decides that?

Designing an ecological institution is a practice of governance, both in the sense of who has the power to formalize such an entity in the first place, as well what conditions or decisions prompt actions on an ongoing basis. Within the scope of this piece we focus more on the latter. However, we acknowledge that in order for ecological institutions to be regenerative at their root, the question of who has the power to design and define them is essential to engage. Who decides who decides is a recursive question, and we hold it should always center those who live within a bioregion, an ecology, not outside it, namely indigenous persons as well as local communities with a sustained social and cultural relationship to place. The design of ecological institutions must center the perspectives and insights of communities which are inseparable from an ecosystem or bioregion. Further work is required to explore the ethics of ownership and governance of ecological institutions, which merits a dedicated piece.

Oracles and Ecological State Protocols

Our working definition of agency centers the mutual relation of legibility and constitution between various social technologies and the more-than-human world. While helpful to emphasize the role social technologies play in constituting subjects, institutions, and society, this definition affords little means to explore broader questions of intentionality and the will of non-humans; at least the type of agency that would look like a mountain approving a transaction, a troop of macaque monkeys licensing intellectual property, a forest approving selective harvesting, or a creek compensating cleanup efforts.

A review of the many emerging processes through which the “sentiment” of the more than human world is decoded is beyond the scope of this piece, particularly with regard to non-human semiosis in relation to artificial intelligence. While a compelling area of research, our focus rests on the notion of oracles and ecological state protocols [8], which work to form durable attestations about the current status of an organism, ecosystem, or bioregion through imperfect means. “What is the state of a river?”… rather than “what is the river’s intent?”.

Here we use ecological state protocols, and oracles interchangeably to refer to systems which provide proof about the state of the living world. Like “proof of reforestation”, “proof of surface rehydration”, “proof of waste pickup”, or “proof of regeneration” generally. Oracles and ESPs act as linkages between biophysical and ecological systems and drive the contracts which allow an ecological institution to interface with the world and “do” things. They are the inputs which catalyze exchanges, dispersals, governance, licensing etc, and they can do this through a mixture of statistical and social inputs, like sensor networks and governance processes. We can refer to these controller systems as data and social oracles respectively.

Data oracles are controllers based on condition. Inputs on the state of the living world are periodically tested against a condition. Social oracles are based on decision or consensus, where a designated community of guardians or stewards practice governance which determines the behavior of the ecological institution. These poles create a space for diverse and integrated approaches, where community governance interacts with real time data input in different ways to achieve different ends. In fact a clear application of ecological institutions is to play the role of an oracle for other ecological institutions.

Autonomous Ecological Institutions

A simple example of an ecological institution takes inputs from a data oracle and does a finite set of actions based on whether different conditions are met. Autonomous ecological institutions, as we might call them, represent a kind of sovereign ecological actor whose interaction with legal, economic, or political systems is not reliant upon human governance except for its conception and configuration. Here, inputs from data oracles related to ecological state trigger contracts based on the satisfaction of conditions. They are essentially DAOs pegged to ecological features through legal means which are not reliant upon human governance to operate in an ongoing way. These entities might act like agents, simple and numerous, exerting pressure on legal, economic, and political systems based on environmental conditions. A river might compensate a cooperative of guardians if the ppm of a particular toxin drops below an established threshold. Aquifers might compensate landscape rehydration efforts when their water level rises past a certain threshold. A forest might put a bounty out for a lawsuit to be filed if timber has been poached.

At this far end of the spectrum, autonomous ecological institutions can be thought of as variants of autonomous systems more broadly. As agents, their behavior is the outcome of dynamics created by control systems defined by models which take ecological state as input. Like a self-driving car whose output is not steering wheel turns or breaking, but dispersals of compensation for stewards, or legal actions to protect ecosystems. In effect, autonomous ecological institutions are a kind of self-driving ecology.

Autonomous ecological institutions demonstrate the profound potential resonance between autonomous systems design and ecology. However, a significant limitation to their positive impact, is the fact that social and ecological systems are highly complex. It may be very difficult to reduce a complex set of relations to a limited number of parameters which may be observed and inputted into contracts via oracles and ecological state protocols. An example of this challenge is demonstrated by measuring carbon sequestration. Carbon drawdown potential can be mistaken as an indicator of ecosystem health writ large.  Autonomous ecological institutions point to the complex nature of designing meaningful and appropriate oracles which holistically portray the state of a place and thus enable real and impactful planetary regeneration.

Convivial Ecological Institutions

The notion that an ecosystem could be a sovereign entity with the agency to act within legal, economic, informatic, and political domains is compelling; particularly when viewed from a lens that the dominant pattern of relation between humans beings and the planet is destruction and extraction. However this emphasis runs the risk of missing the point that humans and the environment are fundamentally interdependent and inseparable. The impetus to make the more -than-human world more autonomous and more separate from us risks further expanding the divide between people and the living world which has been the hallmark of modernist thought. As such, engaging ecosystems as autonomous systems must be done with care. Conversely, what might ecological institutions look like which were more actively integrated into ordinary social life? Not so much autonomous from us, but convivial with us.

Convivial ecological institutions describe the myriad of ways human beings might participate in the expanded legibility of the living world. Convivial in this sense, is to be “alive with”. While the potential is truly vast, a simple starting point would be to explore the relationship of social oracles with data oracles. Could data oracle inputs prompt community governance processes, the outcome of which decides how the inventory of an ecological institution is used? People are part of ecosystems, not separate from them. Significant decisions on behalf of a forest should include governance by its guardians, because in one sense, people are part of the forest. In this manner, what is deemed an appropriate or meaningful action for an ecological institution is formed through social consensus. This consensus informs the contracts which drive the behavior of a convivial ecological institution.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from autonomous control systems, convivial ecological institutions might be an evolution of community governed resource management. Their impact is multiplied by the expanded legibility enabled by progressive formalism. Ecological institutions are durable containers which legitimize and bolster emerging patterns of socio-ecological governance across different systems, with the potential to “plug in”, and interface with existing social systems by occupying different roles. Decentralized protocols offer many opportunities to design governance frameworks in a modular and composable way. These social oracles, in collaboration with data oracles, create an enormous space of possibility which might integrate approaches from autonomous control systems, community resource management, and traditional ecological knowledge.

Here, the convivial equivalent to data oracles autonomously triggering compensation might be for a group to practice a retroactive governance contract. Different stewards who have worked to protect and regenerate an ecosystem verify one another’s impact. Funding allocations from the treasury are weighted according to community consensus of each steward's contribution, as a form of participatory verification. Rather than a data input satisfying a condition, a community forms their own internal consensus on contribution, and funding is dispersed accordingly.

While presented as poles, we believe there can be profound resonance between autonomous and convivial approaches. Ecological institutions present containers which allow the space to design what is appropriate for each circumstance.

We conclude with reflections on the context from which this work emerges followed by a series of prototypical implementations of ecological institutions to help ground this work in examples and specificity.

Conclusion

We believe ecological institutions may be an effective vessel through which the animate nature of the living world can be reestablished from within the technologies which compose and coordinate social life. As a kind of infrastructural animism, whose force is multiplied through the technical tissue of society, they present a space which weaves practical implementations with sacred covenants between human beings and the more than human world.

In walking this line, we hope, the notion of ecological institutions is a humble catalyst to unlearn the assumption that social life is composed of self-interested human individuals. In their place, planetary social life might be composed of relational loops between actors and their environments, working to mutually strengthen one anothers’ capacity to support life. Ecological institutions are a practical exploration into what assemblages / institutions might emerge if the basic units of social life were understood to be loops of reciprocity and regeneration, not self-interested individuals.

In this paper, we’ve explored ways that decentralized protocols create explicit opportunities for the expanded agency of non-humans in social life. We believe the eco-technical actors we have outlined illustrate broad ranging potential impact for the betterment of all life on earth. However, while decentralized protocols are powerful frameworks to develop ecological institutions, they are not required. The reciprocal nature of legibility and constitution, works within more conventional economic, informatic, and political processes.

Decentralized protocols create the opportunity for ecosystems to function as more sovereign actors in society. Paradoxically however, the autonomy of non-humans enabled through the notion ecological institutions, in practice, reinforces the point that humans and non-humans are not separate. Rivers and forests are composed of humans too. Ecology includes us, as well as the technologies and infrastructures we conjure. We are interdependent. We are convivial.

In the final section we offer concise example implementations which demonstrate a range of potential applications for ecological institutions, starting from more simple autonomous forms to more complex convivial forms.

D - Implementations

We seek to explore real world applications which occupy a broad spectrum of social, technical, and cultural contexts. Each of the following examples builds upon the prototypical foundation of an ecological institution. Namely, that the organism, ecosystem, or bioregion has some form of legal standing which is coupled with a unique identity and inventory maintained through a decentralized protocol. We refer to them below as an EI (ecological institution). This list is not exhaustive, rather an attempt to populate a broad space of theoretical application with tangible examples. This series of examples typifies more simple autonomous ecological institutions to more complex convivial ecological institutions.

As appropriate, the methodology design of data and social oracles is generally abstracted below for the sake of clarity of demonstration. In reality, oracles which demonstrate clear causality as well as verifiable outcomes are complex and merit thorough assessment and review.

Smart Aquifer

An aquifer in an arid region of the continental West of the United States is an EI. Like many groundwater reserves around the world, its depletion rates far exceed its replenishment rates. A cooperative of volunteer stewards strategically implements surface rehydration efforts by building “leaky dams'' to catalyze the formation of wet meadows and more effectively replenish the aquifer.

A verifiable data source from the USGS logs aquifer water levels for the focused target region of surface rehydration efforts. When proven that rehydration efforts have positively impacted water levels, the cooperative is paid by the aquifer EI.

Proof of rehydration. A change in environmental condition prompts payment to a predefined group of stewards verified to have replenished groundwater.

Political Water Body

The Great Salt Lake is an EI. In the case of drought or overuse, when water levels recede below a threshold, the EI submits a bounty to community guardians to draft, circulate, and sign a petition which requests the city of Salt Lake to enact limitations on water usage for landscaping. Guardians document their contributions and submit the proof of their participation to a funding mechanism within the EI called a retroactive compensation pool. The community of guardians “signs” or verifies one anothers contributions with a score across different attributes of impact. Once a critical number of guardians verify the action has taken place, then the bounty is dispersed from the inventory of the EI to individual guardians proportional to the impact others verified they had.

Proof of legal recourse. An environmental condition prompts a social consensus oracle to verify legal action on lake’s behalf.

Migration Corridor Chaperone

A stretch of road passes through a forest which is an EI that is populated with vernal pools at certain times of the year. These pools are the breeding habitats for newts and other amphibians which call the forest home. The road obstructs the annual migration path of the creatures from their forest habitat to their aquatic breeding grounds, causing significant casualties to the population from roadkill. Each year at breeding season, the EI submits a bounty to compensate volunteers who assist moving migratory animals across the road, or build wildlife corridor bridges / tunnels to aid in the process. Stewards document their impact in assisting migrating animals. A data oracle which verifies mortality and migratory success is combined with a retroactive compensation mechanism, paying stewards individually for their efforts facilitating the migration across a dangerous section.

Proof of migration protection. A periodic bounty is synced to breeding cycles and is dispersed to stewards of a migration corridor based on social consensus of impact corroborated with a data oracle on population numbers.

Ecological Data Trusts

A band of South American cloud forest is an EI and is habitat for a high incidence of endangered plant species considered useful in potential industrial and pharmaceutical applications. A consortium of professional and amateur botanists does periodic assessments on the general location and abundance of critical species within the cloud forest. The assessments are digitally logged and timestamped as a dataset, and issued as a non-fungible asset in the EI’s treasury. Any private entity seeking to know the abundance and variety of a particular critical plant species must pay the EI for access to the dataset. The forest owns its own data. Part of the earnings from the licensure pay the field researchers for their assessment labor.

Proof of species prevalence. EI owns its own data and licenses access to that data at a premium, which supports local data collection stewards.

Sacred Ground

A mountain on an island is a sacred site to the indigenous nation of that island, as well as an important cultural icon to the city which is adjacent to it. The mountain is an EI. The municipality and the indigenous community have agreed on an acceptable number of annual tourist visitors to the site. Tourist pay a fee and schedule access to visit the sacred site. Earnings from those fees go into a fund owned by the EI. The mountain retains earnings from its visitors which are governed by a council of guardians to support ongoing performance of rites to honor the site, as well as educational initiatives to proliferate indigenous language and customs.

EI is a fund governed by an indigenous community and locals to preserve and restore customs in relation to a sacred site.

Image Licenser

A pod of orcas which spend part of the year in the Puget Sound are an EI. Stock photo images of this pod are issued as non-fungible assets in their treasury. Private and commercial use of the photographs requires the purchase of a license which lasts a finite duration of time. Payment for the license, as well as royalties for the image use are paid to the EI’s treasury. Whales are paid for the royalties and use of their images, in a manner analogous to a data trust, but rather than a dataset it is for imagery.

Animals functionally own the IP of their own imagery, and payment to use the imagery goes into a fund owned by the orcas.

Drought-based Parametric Insurance for Farmers

In drought prone regions of East Africa, farmers face high levels of risk exposure based on whether there is sufficient precipitation that year to have a viable yield. Several of the farmers aggregate their parcels and form a cooperative which is an EI. The EI incorporates remote sensing data, wireless sensor networks, as well as ground truthing as a data oracle on the amount of rainfall during growing season on a daily basis. If rainfall levels fall below a threshold, the EI issues insurance contracts to farmers to mitigate their risk of crop failure based on shifting precipitation patterns. The nature of the insurance contracts are parametric based on the data oracle inputs.

Proof of drought. EI issues parametric insurance contracts to farmer cooperatives according to drought risk.

Festival Fund

A river which runs through the downtown of a city in England is an EI. There is an annual festival in the city which celebrates the river and the city’s identity. Town officials allocate budgeting for the festival into the EI each year. Town members can sign up as members of the EI, and prior to the date of the festival, engage in participatory budgeting using governance modules within the EI. Voting power of different members is proportional to the number of years they have participated in the budgeting process, meaning that more elder participants have higher weight than newer participants. The river EI is the fund which pays for the festival which celebrates the life and vitality of the river for the town.

Proof of attendance. EI is a fund which implements participatory governance mechanisms to host an annual festival for a town. The river is the governance body which pays for the party which celebrates the river.

Regenerative HomeOwners Association

A parcel of land is purchased in New England by a community of families and turned into an EI. The parcel is eligible for subdivision, each family taking a plot leaving roughly 1/2 of the original land as a commons. The families pay a monthly fee to the EI, and use it as a governance system to decide how to use their funds to regenerate the land. Funds from the EI are governed to be spent on native plant species, creating an island of native flora in a larger bioregional pollinator corridor initiative. The EI is an evolved example of a homeowners association for a conventional suburb, rather the treasury is owned by the land itself and is governed for the purposes of ecosystem restoration. Taking a step further, the EI might issue biodiversity credits based on a proof of pollination methodology on an open source ecosystem service registry like Regen Network. The sale of pollinator credits further adds value to the EI’s treasury, eventually allowing the land to purchase its own title.

A similar principle could be used for country clubs, artist studio space, and the like.

Proof of pollinators. EI is a treasury and governance framework for a regenerative HOA which issues credits based on a proof of pollinator methodology which over time allows the land to purchase its own title.

Bioregional Fund

A river network in Washington state is the spawning ground for salmon and is an EI. The EI functions like a general purpose bioregional fund, engaging and supporting a community of stewards who protect and maintain the habitat. The EI integrates multiple functions previously outlined, such as being a data trust, image licenser, as well as a compensation mechanism for guardians of spawning habitat. The community of guardians convene regularly to govern dispersal of funds on an as needed basis.

EI is a general purpose fund and governance body to support stewardship of a cultural and ecological keystone species to a bioregion.

Forest Self-Issues Credits

A patch of Amazonian forest in Ecuador is an EI which is governed by a larger council of governing bodies including:

• indigenous leaders

• an ecological monitoring and reporting team

• a local NGO

The focus of the governing body is to prevent further deforestation of the primary forest, as well as protect the population of jaguars in the bioregion which are both a keystone species as well as spiritual totem to the community. The EI issues ecoCredits on an open source registry, playing the role of credit class administrator. It issues credits according to a methodology based on impactful regeneration across different biocultural parameters governed by the council. Sale of the ecoCredits replenishes the forest’s treasury, while the datasets and imagery used to monitor and verify regeneration are stored in the EI’s inventory. The EI owns the payment for the sale of its credits as well as the monitoring and verification reports used to issue credits. Proceeds from credit sales are governed by a subset of the larger council, responsible for funding allocation in adherence with the community’s “life plan”, which is itself governed by a council.The EI licenses the data as well as the photos used to issue credits at an additional cost.

Proof of habitat preservation. The EI acts as a sovereign wealth fund for the forest itself playing a crucial role in the issuance of ecoCredits within a larger regenerative economic schema.

Land Back / Sovereign Ground

The ancestral land of an indigenous nation in Turtle Island is an EI with legal standing, governed by a council of elders. The council governs the composition of an ecoCredit which integrates proof of ancestral biocultural regeneration as well as biodiversity protection and conservation on the land. The ecoCredit is referred to as an “Ancestral Stewardship” credit type, because it integrates ecological and cultural dimensions of stewardship. The definition and issuance of the ecoCredit happens through governance on proposals by elders within the EI. Sale of the ecoCredits adds to a fund owned by the land itself. The EI’s fund receives donations from advocates and participants in Land Back initiatives. The EI is eventually capable of purchasing neighboring land. The neighboring land EI holds its land title contracts in its inventory, legally owning itself.

Proof of ancestral stewardship ecoCredit sales finances rematriation of land which owns itself and is governed by a council of elders.

Appendix

Relevant Precedents in non-Human Agency

1 - Rights of Nature

• Brings legal standing to non-human organisms and ecosystems, so that theoretically their rights can be protected in a court of law.

• Typically operates a local level, however Rights of Nature have been enshrined at a federal level in Ecuador and New Zealand, and India.

• Redefines the legal entity assigned to organisms and ecosystems in courts of law, and in the process makes them recognized as actors within the legal system.

• The legal entity used in Rights of Nature law, depends on the legal system. In the United States 3 potential entities are:

  • Environmental Personhood / Juridic Personhood

  • Unincorporated Association

  • Zero-Member LLC

• Typically a committee of guardians / trustees acts on behalf of the non-human.

2- Pet Trusts

• Trust is established to care for a pet after owner dies or is not capable of caring for an animal.

• Trusts set up in animals name, which are maintained by trustees for the benefit of the pet.

• Relies on trustees to govern and maintain the fund in a manner commensurate with the original intent of the fund.

3- Nature on the Board

• Pioneered by the work of the Earth Law Center, Lawyers for Nature, and others.

• Non-humans have a seat on corporate boards with equal standing as other board members.

• Proxies or trustees speak and vote on behalf of nature in the boardroom.

4- Earth as Shareholder

• Pioneered by work of Patagonia Purpose Trust

• Uses Perpetual Purpose Trusts as a more permanent legal entity to enshrine wellbeing of nature as the permanent purpose of a trust.

• Purpose trust can own voting stock in a company, where trustees vote in alignment with the purpose of the trust.

5- Self Owning Land

• Pioneered by the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights

• Non-Humans do not simple have standing, but also have the power of ownership of deeds, and contracts within limited terms.

  • Land ownership contract is owned by the ecosystem

• To date, primarily implemented in the US and Canada through a legal designation known as an Unincorporated Association.

• Typically a committee of trustees determines behavior of an Unincorporated Association.

6- Autonomous Organizations

• Pioneered in the literature of Shawn Bayern.

• Autonomous Organizations refers to legal and corporate actors which do not have human referrents.

• They may pertain to autonomous algorithms, machines, and robots.

• Typically Autonomous Organizations begin as human-anchored corporate entites which have the option to exit the entity.

  • LLC’s in Vermont and Wyoming make it possible to have an LLC with no human members.

  • This is referred to as a a zero member LLC.

• Algorithms can define the operating agreement of zero-member LLCs, making the legal entity under the control of software.

• Algorithmically controlled operating agreements may dictate any number of actions.

  References

  [1] - Credit to Shawn Bayern for first using this term in the context of Autonomous Organizations.

  [2] - Credit to the Blockscience team for first using the phrase constitutive infrastructure.

  [3] - Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass.

  [4] - Stone, Christopher. Should Trees Have Standing? - Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects

  [5] Refer to “Autonomous Organizations” in Appendix

  [6] - Kreutler, Kei. Inventories, Not Identities.

  [7] - Schneider, Nathan. et al. Modular Politics : Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities.

  [8] - Smith, Austin Wade. Commons Sense - An Introduction to DAOs as Ecological ↔ Digital Linkages.

If this work resonates, consider joining the Regen Network as contributor, project developer, methodology developer, community staking DAO, or an interlocutor on our website, and our discord. Reach out a contact@regen.foundation.

Seeing the Social Life of a Planet

What does it mean to be a social species in an era of mass extinction? Witnessing the vast die off of the living beings we share a planet with invites reflection on what and who gets to participate in our definition of “social life”. Amidst the unraveling of ecological webs critical to planetary stability, there is simultaneously a great multiplication of new kinds of webs, and new forms of social life native to them. These webs, formed in the logic of computer networks and digital exchange appear quick to occupy the physical and cognitive niches once held by our more-than-human kin. We live in an era of a great extinction of certain kinds of webs, and a vast proliferation of other kinds. Despite their apparent divergence, I think understanding the fundamental commonalities in pattern and origin of these different webs is essential in order to invert our current existential crisis into an opportunity for the transformation of planetary social consciousness.

This essay is about how we create and steward visions of our world as commons. It explores technology’s fundamental role to “undual” the relationships between people and the environment, and asks how we bear witness to a world populated with subjects in a manner which might rewire different social technologies to be accountable to a more diverse, populated, and plural world? How do we see ourselves as expressions of the planet, and how do we make these mediated reflections tangible, and actionable?

A central theme to unpack is what I call the challenge of legibility. It is a kind of reciprocal relationship between sight and capture that goes something like this:

Is incorporating the more than human world more actively into the social and technical frameworks which compose our societies a necessary precursor to their further extraction, or is it a means through which we make the economy, law, the internet more vital and living in their own right? How does legibility relate to the regeneration of both human and ecological systems?

Engaging this challenge begins with a kind of social dilemma… an old one at that, about how to organize ourselves in mutual wellbeing to the living world. Reaching past modernism’s purist separation of nature and society, which the previous essay Undualing, sought to dismantle, how have humans sustained a social life based on what we and other living things have in common?

Reinscribing the Social

The real tragedy of the commons is that they have come to signify some innate human behavior to mismanage and overuse shared resources. Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” speaks more accurately to spaces of unfettered access and blind consumption than what theorists and practitioners understand the commons to be today [1]. Over roughly the last fifteen years, this mischaracterization has steadily been unwound thanks to the work of Olinor Ostrom, David Bollier, and a host of other economists and social scientists interested in models of sustained collective ownership operating outside the conventions of markets or state [2] [3]. What are commons?

Broadly speaking, commons are shared spaces and/or resource-relationships prone to social dilemmas of access and replenishment. [4] They are broadly accessible, difficult to exclude, and easily exhausted. Because of this, commons don't fit well into the conventional scheme of public goods nor private property. Before markets and states were the two dominant systems through which resources were coordinated, many social configurations between humans, organisms, and minerals existed. Shared grazing lands, water ways, fisheries, irrigation networks, forests, springs were commons. What happened to them?

One answer might be that the story of the last millennium is one of hegemonic power corralling the planet's resources and vitality through apparatuses of capture, accumulation, and subsequent valorization. None of which would be possible if not legitimized by racist and patriarchal ideology. An addendum to that answer would be that such ideologies support a laziness not well suited to complex social dilemmas, which are by definition hard. Navigating a balance between consumption and regeneration towards mutual aid requires work, too much cognitive load for modern “man” perhaps, and so the blunt and brutish force of enclosure wins.

The physical expression of enclosure are the many fences which criss-cross the Earth’s surface. The so-called enclosure movement’s capture of what was once held in common into new private assets has been a nearly omnipresent driving force of the last millenium [5]. It is theft on a planetary scale, and a great retraction from the patterns of alignment, solidarity, and interdependence which have made humans a social species for quite some time. This is because the commons are not simply shared wealth in resource form, nor are they the empty spaces where politics converge. They are the diverse set of mutually enabling practices and rituals situated in relation to a territory. They are a verb. Thus, one of the casualties of enclosure is not only access to the common pool resources, but the erasure of those practices which coordinate planetary stewardship through alignment and common purpose. The enclosure of the land is simultaneously an eradication of social practices through which we maintain interdependence to the living world and one another. We’ve enclosed our definition of the social to only include human beings. [6]

Intangible Commons of the Mind

After centuries of fences and capture, most of the emerging commons in the late 20th century were less wet and leafy than their predecessors. These commons are more often composed of floating points, pixels, citations, and file formats. Knowledge commons are those information and knowledge resources which are collectively created, owned, and governed by dedicated communities. [7] The internet has made it a lot easier for such communities to find one another and organize. Examples might include commons of intellectual property, disciplinary knowledge, open source software, and data. Although these commons proliferated in the early era of the world wide web and personal computing, their existence well predates the advent of digital computers.

The cyberspace of the early web promised a new kind of territory which had yet to be enclosed. It was open to free exchange of ideas, and far more resistant to barbed wire. [8] Fastforwarding ahead, the internet of today, dominated by FAANG walled gardens and surveillance capitalism, more closely resembles an analogous enclosure of digital commons than it does the utopian ideals of the early web; achieving in a matter of years, what the fencing of the terrestrial commons took centuries to execute.

Hybrid Commons

An important opportunity born through using the commonsing framework is that it allows us to trace behaviors across ecological, social, and technological systems. The binaries of tangible / intangible, physical / virtual, organism / machine give way to higher order patterns framed around extraction or care. The tendency to steward and regenerate vs capture and weaponize manifests across both medium and timescale. The framework of the commons foregrounds the ways in the technical and social life of the biosphere are inseparable. Through this lens, both a patch of forest, and its data have a kind of social life and respond to different kinds of social dilemmas. What does the governance model of open source software like Debian Linux have to say about access management for Nepali agricultural irrigation networks? [9] How are data and knowledge commons bioregionally anchored, and conversely, how do different practices of planetary stewardship formalize different systems of information and knowledge?

Every commons is an integration of knowledge with the bio-physical processes which comprise the living world. Always an overlay, they provide a fruitful means to discuss the interdependence of species, information and governance, because knowledge and our practices of regenerative stewardship are themselves living systems, contiguous with the biological world. From this perspective, what we describe as commons may be another way of saying that a community is at its essence, web-based. Although the term is most readily applied to internet native groups, I’d argue that communities which practice social life in an expanded sense through networks of mutualism, symbiosis and reciprocity are the original web-based communities. MMO guilds, open source developer communities, and these new thorny things called DAOs, are more recent actors in a lineage of web-based communities whose identity is actively formed relationally through networks.

To undual is to reconcile the fact that the social sphere has always been web-based, and thus not exclusively a human affair. In what follows, I’d like to explore how DAOs, a very recent form of web-based community, can be understood as a continuation of the legacy of the commons, and how the hybrid commons of ecological and information systems they support, may be an essential substrate through which informed climate policy, law, economy, and information technology might emerge.

DAOs and Commons

In complement to the work of Elinor Ostrom, the theorist David Bollier argues that commons are composed of three essential attributes. He describes how shared resources are stewarded through shared governance processes guided by a shared set of intentions or purpose. [10] The definition is strikingly simple, yet effective for describing how groups manage common resources, and the dilemmas they engender, across different kinds of webs. I think we should consider DAOs, whose shared purpose stems from a belief of planetary regeneration, as a necessary continuation of commons. In defining regenerative DAOs [11] through commoning, I seek to extend past competing factions of acronyms, which may not withstand the test of time, towards the unifying practices of regeneration and the technologies which support them.

Understanding DAOs as a continuation rather than a disruption of existing kinship and governance models foregrounds the essential role applied symbiosis and interdependence has played in defining our social, and technical systems over the long arc of our evolution. Additionally it places the emphasis on the interaction between community purpose and the technical systems through which they coordinate, rather than a more familiar form of techno-determinism which tends to overemphasize technology’s role in defining culture.

Some of the DLT’s (distributed ledger technologies) like blockchains, which act as the underlying substrate of web3 native communities like DAOs, can be understood as commons. The practices of purpose driven governance and stewardship are the defining element, not the resources themselves. The arrangements of people, minerals, and technologies which coordinate through DLTs need not be defined by the technology, rather the technologies are scaffolded by our shared purpose and ethics. Perhaps one of the greatest contributions that the blockchain and DAO technology can make to the wellbeing of the planet is to enable the effective scaling and distribution of the commons as an alternate option to market-based or government-based solutions at a scale heretofore never achievable. How might hybrid commons like regenerative DAOs be effective in counteracting the trend towards enclosure and extraction?

Witness Commons

It’s hard to see over the fences of enclosure, because they not only deny access, but also curtail vision. Fences are structures which keep things from sight. If one of the central questions around legibility is about what is and isn't visible to the systems that we build, then it stands to reason that perhaps one of the most powerful counterforces to private systems of concealment, are public systems of shared vision.

When value created through the land and sea is captured via private ownership, we can call those places productive or profitable. When the value created through the land, sea, and air is held in common, those places are historically considered empty and underutilized. Making “empty” land profitable has legitimized wholesale theft across classes and species via enclosure and imperialism through the concept of “improvement”. A political economy defined by enclosure and extraction is incentivized to stay blind to the many social lives which occupy the territories of capture, otherwise it must be accountable to systemic dispossession not simply on a moral level, but on an economic level. The economic legitimacy of extraction is predicated on turning an empty world into one which is profitable. Being empty is not a passive thing, rather a great deal of energy and violence goes into emptying a place. The transition from commons to enclosure entails making a world a Terra Nullius, a “no man's land”. [12] The lifeworlds, the social fabrics, the webs of community made invisible, illegible through the economics of capture. To call out theft not only on a moral but economic level, we have to nurture the networked sense organ which sees planetary state and thus makes its value legible without collapsing it into yet another regime of enclosure. This is a fundamental challenge of legibility.

Engaging this challenge begins with bearing witness to the living world we are within. To resist enclosure we must see and attest to a world replete with stories, niches, identities and rituals as anything but empty, or null. To bear witness, is to fundamentally combat the core hypothesis of enclosure which presumes we make productive and profitable what was previously nothing at all, and in so doing counteract willful structural ignorance. How do we vision together, and ultimately how might these visions of a storied world be collectively held and maintained in a manner which enforces action and accountability on behalf of the many social webs which constitute our planet ?

Seeing State

The notion of bringing vision and sensitivity where previously there was none is not a metaphor. It is both an exercise in qualitative impression as well as quantitative measure. It is both a science of the abstract and a science of the concrete. Through myriad observations, impressions, pixels, signals, experiences and readings we create durable representations of our place in the world and our relations within. This requires presence and perspectives from up close, as well as at a distance. Embodied perception at an intimate scale as well as earth observation data at a remote scale work in mutually reinforcing loops to weave a dynamic understanding of place and relationships. These shared visions are knowledge commons, inseparable from the corners of the living world from which they emerge, and as commons they must be stewarded and protected like their living referents because they form the basis of where we see ourselves in the world, and from where our values stem.

Defining the “state” of a place is a way of formulating the present as an accumulation of events from the past. [13] Like the process of bearing witness, ecological state is a testament to the wellbeing of a place, a people, a social fabric. It is a reflection of its extinctions and resurgences, its exposure and patterns of regeneration in a form coherent to prompt action and response. Despite the profound complexity at the heart of ecology and all living systems more broadly, the wellbeing of the planet is not unfathomable. To define and hold the state of the living world, is to make a kind of attestation. Doing so builds an important point of contact within the challenge of legibility. Ecological state is a form of knowing the wellbeing of the living world which is legible and thus actionable within anthropogenic systems like law, economy, policy, information technology, etc. It is an interface through which different worlds can touch, and upon which action can be orchestrated. Rather than a convergent process, the expression of ecological state can be an exploratory process. Let there be a renaissance of interfaces through which the living world exerts pressure on anthropogenic systems.

DAOs could be powerful assemblages of social, ecological, and technical relationships which own and steward the state of a given territory, ecosystem, and bioregion. This is because the protocols, (or perhaps we might call them rituals?), through which communities gather and cohere ecological state requires coordination and governance across diverse domains. This premise is not unfamiliar. Certifications like Organic and Fair trade face similar challenges when they make attestations about the conditions in which a good is grown or produced. The terms are capitalized as proper nouns, because there is a process, through which a claim is made. The methods through which data and experience are structured as information, formalized into situated knowledge, and ultimately made actionable as ecological state should be owned and governed by the inhabitants of a particular territory. Whoever owns or governs these standards controls the point of contact between ecological wellbeing and the different infrastructural and technical regimes which coordinate our lives. This interface becomes a coordination point for all kinds of interactions.

The rituals by which DAOs define and update ecological state are a response to the dilemmas of access and use. These patterns are not unfamiliar to commons rooted in plants, water, and minerals, because ecological states must be owned and governed like the living systems in which they are situated, and to which they refer. Ostrom explicitly states that both informatic and biophysical commons are shared resources prone to social dilemmas. [14] In the case of ecological state protocols, communities govern the means by which they form a coherent understanding of place through diverse and imperfect means. This process of overcoming complex inputs and incentives to create reliable consensus is a variant on a problem sometimes referred to as an oracle problem. DAOs can be a critical means through which communities own and govern oracles of ecological state, in order to orchestrate action, value, policy at a bioregional / territorial level. Making the complex and entangled state of a bioregion legible to political, economic, and informatic systems, without reducing them solely to the logic of any one of those systems, is essential in combating terra nullius. While rituals and protocols to cohere and maintain state may feel like a foreign concept to broader legacies of mutualism and environmental intimacy, the convergence of informatic, social, and ecological processes is in fact the point.

Ecological state protocols are an enacted cultural record of how we exist, flourish, or perish together in a storied world. They are economic, legal, and machine - readable visions of what it means to be a social species in an era of mass extinction. In what follows I’d like to explore how a simple schema of composable and polycentric DAO interactions might help define ecological state for a given territory and in the process create an essential set of interactions to ground value and relationship in an entangled and storied world.

Guilds and Bioregions

The figure above plots two categories of DAOs into a shared space. The horizontal axis is concerned with the physical aspects of commons. Is the space actors occupy overlapping or distant? The vertical axis is concerned with expertise and affinity. Are these systems of knowledge and skill shared or separate? The interaction of these axes creates a space which can be helpful in describing the disposition of different regenerative DAOS with greater nuance. Every initiative is an intermixing of both, but to what degree?

Bioregional DAOs

Bioregional DAOs are commons composed of diverse skills bound through a shared bioregion or territory. They are pegged to a bioregion. Examples of Bioregional DAOs might include:

• First Nations Territories

• Biome Guardian Communities

• Land Trusts

• Native Plant Societies

• Urban Parks Programs

• Watershed Conservation Areas

• Regional and National Environmental Protection Organizations

Guild DAOs

Guild DAOs are commons composed of shared knowledge / expertise which traverse different geographies. They are pegged to shared models of expertise and knowing. Examples of Guild DAOs might include:

• Scientific Peer Review Communities

• Earth Observation Organizations

• Union / Trade Associations

• Birders / Environmental Enthusiasts

• DIY environmental sensor forums

• Open Source Software Communities

• Fundraising / Grant Writing specialist

• Issue / Theme Specific Advocacy Groups

• Climate Justice Storytelling and Media Cooperatives

Bioregional DAOs are communities which form around a region with diverse forms of knowledge. It can be helpful to compare bioregional DAOs to what the political scientist Peter Levine calls, Found Communitarian Commons, because the community which forms is bound by the territory they are from / occupy. [15]  This is to be contrasted with Guild DAOs which can be defined as Made Associational Commons because they act as associations bound by mutual affinity to a craft which the group has created or made. The poles are polemical. Virtually no entity is not already a blend, rather the dynamism occurs in their interplay.

The diagonal axis which forms between Bioregional DAOs and Guild DAOs is one of mutual strengthening where domain specific knowledge and context specific knowledge / resources continuously informs and evolves the process by which we see the world, and tell the stories of its diverse inhabitants. The composable nature of location-based and affinity-based groups highlights the versatility in collaboration made possible between many small groups working together as opposed to larger, more hierarchical entities. Impact can scale, without requiring social webs of trust to grow beyond what’s intuitive and appropriate.

We could imagine, for example, bioregional DAOs committed to guarding the headwaters of a bioregion partnering with earth observation DAOs, digital storytelling DAOs, and regenerative scientists DAOs to form a coherent vision of the state of a watershed. Has the line of deforestation encroached further? Where is toxicity from illegal mining moving downstream? Have keystone species increased? Where has native fish aquaculture proliferated?

Without clear attestations to the pulse of a bioregion, there cannot be informed action to combat its extraction. This pulse must be owned and governed by the territory itself.

Storytelling

Baring witness to the diverse beings and relations which populate a world assumed to be Terra Nullius is an act of resistance. It is an invitation to become reacquainted with what it means to be a social species. Emerging technologies may allow new modes of sensitivity from up close and far away. They may offer new ways to come to consensus and hold shared understanding. However the practice of understanding who we are by attending to the pulse of the world we are within is nothing new. Building technologies to better understand just how deeply entangled we are with everything else is an essential part of what it means to be human. It is a means of creating a coherent shared sense of self. Us! We have been doing this for a long time. Viewed in this light, the growth of regenerative DAOs is yet the latest installment of one of our oldest technologies… storytelling. The processes and patterns through which we bear witness to the state of the planet is storytelling for earthly survival.

Commons Sense emerges from a desire to tell better stories, and honor our traditions of storytelling as a practice of collective memory. This process should be understood as a continuation of a long narrative tradition. One which weaves traditional ecological knowledge, spectral eyes from space, LORA signals, time lapse photography and intergenerational experience into thick weaves which bear witness, and attest to the state of the planet.

Perhaps something which has changed in this narrative tradition is the audience. In building relations between narrative traditions and the broader notion of ecological state, we manifest expressions of place which are legible not only to people, but the legal, informatic, and economic systems we have conjured. We are telling stories of the pulse of the planet to the infrastructures we’ve made with the intention of rewiring them in a new image of what it means to be a social species. This version of social life does not only address humans, but also the whole web of more-than-human relations from which we are inseparable.

In order to undual we must dismantle terra nullius (land of nothing) as a moral and economic ideology, and nurture terra ominus, (land of all things). To do so is to unlearn an immanent trope that there is a living world beyond us, and a dead one which we have created. The latter feeding off the former through various systems of enclosure and capture. In outlining the potential for regenerative DAOs to proliferate commons of forests, signals, aquifers and imagery, I’ve tried to outline a scheme through which we relearn to see ourselves and the systems we build as within the world, as expressions of it. In short… to make them vital. Any rights, value, or policy-based framework towards regeneration must be built on dynamic visions of the health of different bioregions, and our place within them. How do we nurture commons which sense the social life of our planet?

[1] - The Tragedy of the Commons - Garret Hardin

[2] - The Growth of the Commons Paradigm - David Bollier

[3] - Decentralized Commons Governance

[4] - Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions - Elinor Ostrom

[5] - The Theft of the Commons - Eula Biss, The New Yorker

[6] - For a more in depth exploration of the definition and boundaries of the “social” through “Actor Network Theory” refer to “Reassembling the Social” - Bruno Latour

[7] - Knowledge Commons

[8] - From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Fred Turner

[9] - Maintaining the Digital Commons: A Comparison of Debian Linux and Irrigation Canals in Nepal - Atul Pokharel

[10] - Think like a commoner: A short introduction to the life of the commons. - David Bollier

[11] - I use DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) as a broad term to describe digitally native communities which organize and govern shared resources through decentralized ledgers like Blockchains. As such it is general term which aligns with other meaningful projects likes DISCOs.

[12] - Terra Nullius in this sense is closely related to the Doctrine of Discovery.

[13] - In information technology and computer science, a system is described as stateful if it is designed to remember preceding events or user interactions; the remembered information is called the state of the system. Wiki

[14] - Understanding Knowledge as a Commons - Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom

[15] - A Commons Taxonomy - Peter Levine

This series is an initiative by the Regen Foundation to explore salient challenges and opportunities in regenerative economics more broadly, and on the blockchain more specifically. Our goal is to bring capacity to a diverse public to be critically informed about the intersection of climate justice, social justice, and web3. We see this work as an essential prerequisite for communities to own and govern the revolutionary infrastructures which support a systemic transition in our definitions of value away from extraction and towards regeneration.

If this work resonates, consider joining the Regen Network as contributor, project developer, methodology developer, community staking DAO, or an interlocutor on our website, and our discord. Reach out a contact@regen.foundation.

Many individuals living in the modern world have internalized a contradiction about the relationship between the living world (”Nature”) and the economy (money). It goes like this:

Societal economic wealth is independent from planetary ecological health. Prosperity emerges more or less autonomously between these worlds, and thus we can treat them separately.

Well into the planet’s 6th mass extinction, most individuals see this severance for what it is, wrong. Further, many recognize how the policies, infrastructures, and ideologies which maintain such a separation ultimately perpetuate the complex intersection of social and ecological issues we refer to as the climate crisis.

We need to formulate a notion of prosperity which does not rely on a dualism of ecology and economy. What might we call that which stands outside this opposition?

Regeneration, as a philosophy and broader practice of systemic interrelation, offers a conspicuous path out. Long held as a core tenet of land stewardship and commonsing, the notion of regeneration has gained significant interest in the recent past among economic and decentralized finance circles. This movement, as well as the arguments of this piece, braid many lineages together, most notably the basic tenents of ecological economics. [1] Regenerative finance, or ReFi as many call is an attempt to reformulate our essential notions of value in order to leverage economic and market-based processes to heal a damaged planet. [2]

We need to be talking about whether this is possible at all. If it is, we don’t have many chances to get this right. Although the opportunities ReFi presents are exciting, it is also over-ripe to amplify and repeat existing harms. How do we avoid growing and building from a state of amnesia? This series, is a humble attempt to tether emerging behaviors and technologies within systems of knowledge and practice which are millennia old. In the process we hope to cultivate public literacy on what’s at stake to ensure that the proposed ways out of the trap we’ve set for ourselves are actually in fact … regenerative.

What are we talking about when we talk about regeneration?

Let’s start with how the Regen Economics Whitepaper defines it:

“Actions that increase the capacity, viability, and vitality of both the agent and system being acted within or upon.“

Framed in relation to humans and the planet, regeneration are those actions and processes which bring both human and the world which sustains us into greater capacity and vitality, in a reciprocal fashion.

Regeneration posits that individual / communal well being emerges through environmental stewardship. It is the opposite of extraction. Inasmuch as legacies of land management are reflected in our lexicon, it is telling that American english has a limited vocabulary for such a behavior. “Cocapacitate”, isn’t a word but incapacitate is. The analogous terms at hand stem largely from important work in feminist and decolonial thinking. Here are three.

Donna Haraway’s definition of sympoeisis.

Sympoeisis - a simple word; it means “making-with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. [3]

It closely resonates with the belief of reciprocity outlined by Robin Wall Kimmerer when describing the diverse practices of gratitude and kinship of the first nations of Turtle Island (North America).

“Reciprocity—returning the gift—is not just good manners; it is how the biophysical world works. Balance in ecological systems arises from negative feedback loops, from cycles of giving and taking. Reciprocity among parts of the living Earth produces equilibrium, in which life as we know it can flourish.” [4]

As well as notions of care work, as typified in Matters of Care, Maria Puig Bellacasa’s evolution of Bruno Latour’s “Matters of Concern”.

“Matters of Care - contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world.” [5]

These definitions emerge through narrative and practice. The above authors situate their stories closely to different patterns of co-dependence and symbiosis between human beings, and “Nature”, (what I refer to as the “living world”). Spanning pollinators, soil microbes, and Douglas Firs, regeneration is co-authored between humans and the numerous lifeworlds we are embedded within.

This interrelation makes sense at a base level. We intuitively understand that to live on earth is always a double action. The separation of social and planetary prosperity is counterintuitive to our lived experience. Common sense tells us that deterioration in the health of “land”, is simultaneously a depreciation in its value, but we often struggle to acknowledge the inverse…that the remediation of damaged earth is a profound source of value. Where our current paradigm of neo-colonial extraction exacerbates the rift between Society and Nature, regeneration closes it. In fact it nullifies the distinction in the first place.

Undualing

Regeneration is a practice of undualing. Undualing isn’t really a word, I made it up to emphasize that the separation between ourselves and the world which sustains us has never existed. The dualism of Society and Nature is in turn, also the separation of economy from ecology. This is the creation myth upon which Modernism is built. [6] We’ve embedded it into the policies, infrastructures, and algorithms which run much of contemporary life. The separation of ecology and economy is synonymous with extraction inasmuch as the world beyond the human is considered a resource to be managed. Our default conflation of economic wealth with ecological extraction fundamentally drives the climate crisis ; and is a manifestation of the incredible narrowness of our definitions of wellbeing. Rather than a world co-created by a multitude of players, locations, and timelines, the dualism at the heart of modernity is a retreat from a diverse set of “worlding” practices to one universal world, centralized across time and space.

In contrast, undualing is the invitation to thicken the cast of characters which create value and sustain planetary livelihood. It is the practice of reanimating lifeworlds against forces of singularization. It resists the collapsing of many to the few.  How might we nurture this pluralism in the infrastructures, organizations, and technologies we build? Through what scales and systems does regeneration offer a way out?

A start might be to develop and organize systems of value at a meso-scale, one which tethers the individual to planetary and upstream to downstream. A scale whose boundaries are already defined by the living world: the bioregion. Regeneration is a bioregional endeavor and in order to undual ecology and economy, our definitions of prosperity must be re-scoped.

Before unpacking bioregionalism as a model of regeneration further, let’s visit two acute consequences of the existing dualist paradigm and the challenges they present to anyone pursuing viable regenerative alternatives; being on time and being exceptional.

Being On Time

The climate crisis is a crisis of temporality. [7] It is the result of flattening a vast diversity of organismic and geological timelines into a single metronomic march defined by humans and our markets.  In binding a myriad of life histories to anthropocentric time, we have accelerated biospheric collapse. Glacial time approaches market time, as they melt at a speed approaching financial quarters not millenia. According to the logic of our current paradigm, they’re melting right on time.

The standardization of time supports the emergence of global supply chains which smooth heterogeneous and disjoint ecosystems into a frictionless, one-dimensional space . Logistics overwrites place-based practices to no longer be defined by location and proximity, but by their proximity to global flows of goods and services.

It’s unrealistic and counter-productive to dismiss the notion of global trade writ large. Rather, the work is to problematize the monopolization of time and the dislocation of space, and ask how might “more-than-human” temporalities exist at all? How does regeneration create and sustain value through a multitude of timelines?

Being Exceptional

In separating ecological and economic prosperity we’ve created the conditions for a fundamental asymmetry to grow. Our current neoliberal extractivist model places overwhelming importance on economic wealth over ecological health, the latter commonly seen as an obstacle to the former. Asserting the importance of planetary health is typically at odds to incentives of wealth accumulation. By and large, wealth accumulation is structurally incentivized while ecological health is protected only through personal appeal.  We’ve externalized the drive for profit into our algorithms and policies, and internalized the drive for ecological health as a matter of personal morality.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, measures taken to redress this imbalance by foregrounding the agency, and sovereignty of “Nature” over socio-economic wellbeing often perpetuate the false dualism between ourselves and the environment. Any action which asserts the supremacy of either the economy or planetary ecology over the other fundamentally risks perpetuating the logic of exceptionalism. Local economies are part of ecosystemic health. We cannot address the fallout of global biodiversity without addressing global poverty, and we can’t address global poverty without addressing global biodiversity collapse. In failing to embody and practice regenerative principles, a significant portion of the work of Western environmentalism and conservation, as well as markets for carbon capture and offsets, strengthen and perpetuate the schism driving mass extinction. [8]

In a similar fashion, projects based on the sovereignty of nature, and notions of ecological self-stewardship, bring about extremely important technologies and points of philosophical exploration, but inasmuch as viable human interrelation is removed from the equation, an opportunity for a more compelling and rich investigation is missed. We must resist the novelty to consider economies and ecologies as autonomous systems.

At this point it is uncontroversial to say that: economic wealth may not emerge without ecological health. However, how far along the path are we for the inverse to also be true? In our current state of crisis and collapse, can we separate ecological vitality from our social and economic vitality? Are we fundamentally linked in a state of interdependence in order to avert the greatest challenge we have ever known? In this stage of the climate crisis, are human beings a keystone species for a planet in imbalance? [9] What does playing that role look like?

Being Bioregional

To resist the dissonance I’ve outlined this far is not to argue for a “return” to some state of primitivism. Bioregionalism is not a “return” to a more essential form of social life or State of Nature.  Rather it is the assertion that the spatial and temporal boundaries for our regenerative paradigm already exist. They emerge from the land itself in the form of watersheds, soil series, and wind currents. People typically understand what is east, what is west of them, but know very little about what is upstream and what is downstream of them.

Undualling, at the heart of regeneration is the fertile ground to grow sovereign bioregional regenerative economies, which must navigate the water which flows downstream, and be accountable to them. Regenerative economies cycle value as they cycle energy and nutrients. They are defined by the “sheds'' of energy, nutrients, life, and activity which constitute a bioregion.

Watersheds are helpful metaphors in thinking through regenerative bioregional economies.  Upstream and downstream are distinct but inseparable.  Economic flow is not simply goods and services moving downstream, but increasingly  essential ecosystem functions like carbon sequestration, soil fertility, pollination, and clean water. The unidirectional flow of value evolves into a cycle where the source is replenished by the mouth, in a manner similar to the water cycle… a valueshed. What would it mean if we considered the carbon capture by trees, and the crop pollination by bees as utilities with value like water lines and energy grids?

Regenerative economies do not offset, they pay the actual value of the services a whole ecology brings. Paying for the labor and services the living world brings is a manner of insetting… of completing the cycle within naturally occurring boundaries in an ongoing way. This model of regenerative land management is similar to the principles of commonsing. It is both a redefinition of how value is created, and the many directions it flows. Regeneration in this sense, is a measure of how diverse forms of wellbeing can be mutually sustained.

If our goal is to create tenable formulations of prosperity for a future at all, we must actively unlearn the embedded contradictions which violate our basic common sense, and reestablish on an ethical and technical level, that to practice regeneration and reciprocity is what makes us human in the first place. How we practice needs to be as diverse as the persons practicing it. At the base, we must work towards a transformation of consciousness not only of moral value, but economic value as well. Advancing climate justice as a matter of altruism alone is not sufficient. How does the economy reflect our ethics?

The proliferation of bioregional regenerative economies meets resistance not only through the inertia of the status quo and the elite interests which maintain it, but also in some of the poignant assumptions upon which it is built. I’ll conclude by outlining two challenges inherent to the project of regenerative finance, setting the stage to explore how some of the processes of web3, namely blockchains and DAO’s, might be relevant. These challenges are the basis for the next two essays of this series. Undualing, is a means of preparing ground.

Commons Sense →The Challenge of Legibility

The markets which drive our current economy are by and large blind. By and large, they are not programmed to sense the state and contours of the living world outside profit and shareholder returns. In order to rewrite our basic formulas of value, we need to see  how ecosystem services and fuctions support our life on earth and bring value to our economy. We need a Cambrian explosion in our economic paradigm brought by new capacities to see the state of the living world. A regenerative paradigm predicated on undualing cannot exist without the sensing organs capable of describing ecological state, wellbeing and degrees of risk. The ideology of extractivism has left these systems, practices, and infrastructures grossly underdeveloped and under-recognized.

Commons Sense, the next essay in this series, explores how we sense the world, and how different forms of ecological knowledge production like wireless sensor networks, traditional ecological knowledge, and oral-traditions are created, held, and shared as commons. How do we gather information, weave stories, and create situated knowledge about the state of the earth in order to articulate its value? We’ll explore how eccentric assemblages of people, animals, satellites, minerals, and algorithms could form hybrid commons which attest to, and bear witness to the state of our planet. I argue these cyber-physical commons are another way of saying DAOs, and we’ll explore the basic mechanics of ReFi in web3 from this perspective. How do we keep integrity in the translation of our knowledge of the living world across medium and context in order to see like a planet?

Market in the Temple →The Challenge of Equivalence

To see, means to incorporate that which previously never had a line item. If the wellbeing of the living world is not on the docket, then it is presumed to be worthless. In creating and internalizing forms of value which have historically been an externality and thus unaddressable, have we financialized “Nature”? Did neoliberalism already do that… and what about web3? Is that even a helpful formulation?

Market in the Temple explores the practical and theoretical paradoxes in undualing ecology and economy. If these worlds are not meant to touch, then wholesale theft of the living world can continue unabated, with only spiritual and moral appeals to stop it. If we accept the urgency of undualing, we are left with a profound challenge of equivalence. What’s the value of the pollinator population in the Hudson River Valley? What’s the value of the services provided by an aquifer? How much do we stand to lose if there is a systemic collapse in the biosphere? Isn’t that like being divided by zero? How we build the capacity to engage in the complexity and delicacy of these topics is a reflection of our ability to steer the evolution of regenerative finance. Undualing produces great potential for risk. Is it worth it and how do we know?

[1] - For an introduction to the work of ecological economics more broadly I suggest the work of Robert Costanza, Spencer Beebe, E.F. Schumacher

[2] - For an introduction to the field of Regenerative Finance (ReFi) I recommend Gregory Landua’s interview on the Ownership Economy.

[3] - Harraway, Donna. Staying With the Trouble, Chapter 3

[4] - Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Returning the Gift.

[5] - María Puig de la Bellacasa. Matters of Care

[6] - Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern

[7] - Bratton, Benjamin. On Anthropolysis. In Bratton’s language, the anthropocene is a project to bind planetary time to social time.

[8] - Gilio-Whitaker, Dina. (Not So) Strange Bedfellows from As Long as Grass Grows

[9] - My first exposure to the notion of human beings’ role as a planetary keystone species in resolving the climate crisis was from the keystone speech by Gregory Landua at ReFi Summit, Seattle 2022.

[10] - Paul Jackobson, Andrew. Prioritizing Land for Conservation Purposes in East Maui, Hawai’i

[11] - K.P. Acharya. Twenty-four years of community forestry in Nepal

I often go by AWS as I have the choice about how I am addressed. It’s a reflection of how I identify, or put another way, what my orientation is. I identify as non-binary. The pronouns most often used to refer to people with this orientation is they/them, and I myself prefer the pronouns they/them. I identify as a they not only because it creates a space where once there was only a spectrum, identifying as neither masc nor fem, but also because I identify as a multitude. As someone who from an early age actively cultivated diverse and intimate relationships with “nature” ,or what I refer to as the living world, I feel proficient in being entangled, inseparable, and a part of the world. I find it comforting that I am an ecosystem, a fleeting, highly differentiated community of cells, minerals, organisms, and energy. “They” fits my orientation, and it's a pleasant quark of the language that the term which blurs a dualism invites in a multitude.

The practice of creating spaces from lines, of expressing one-self as many-selves, is a kind of dimensional expansion of life. For me it is an essential form of being queer, or more aptly… queering. It's better suited as a verb, than a static descriptor. For me, queering is the act of being unaddressable to apparatuses which are defined by the dimensional reduction of life.

Being a multitude feels great. It thickens the care and attention I bring to the diverse subjects which constitute my day, my room, my life. It invites thinking in relation, not only to living things, but how the food, furniture, hardware and software through which I live my life are an active part of me. I'm curious where I am supposed to end and the technology I “use” begins. It isn’t a matter of extension, because that presupposes there is a discrete, essential version of myself which moves outwards into the world. We’ve always been environments.

Being confused with Amazon Web Service invited me to reflect on my orientation to technology. In particular, how I have actively tried to remove Amazon from my life. I do this primarily by building and running my own internet infrastructure rather than relying on the cloud infrastructure Amazon Web Services provides. I do this in an effort to cultivate a more embodied relationship with the content I create and serve online. It’s a way of feeling my presence on the internet as an active part of my ecology.

As a practice of queering, I’m curious how my laptop, my websites, my servers are a part of me, and I like to play with the ways they render me to other people on the internet. The infrastructure which serves me to the world should be an active participant in my multitude. It’s not the “me” solely wrapped in skin, but numerous versions of self the internet seems to grow. Is that me, or something that points at me? One of the great things the internet has done is that it has made everyone a multitude or sorts. Avatars, Alt accounts, usernames… a different self in each platform’s feudal colony.

To build a server is to create your own endpoint on the web. It's an invitation to let the world in. By building my own tech stack I can create the terms of engagement. How might the technology morph under new pressures and constraints. Do I, and by extension my website, need to be available everywhere at all times? How do I identify as a service?

For me, being queer means incorporating the systems which make me addressable online as an active part of my personhood. Understood not as solely inert infrastructure, but as actors in an ecology of self… when, how, and where I serve are conditions in the medium of being online, and of being a person at all. In doing so, I unplug myself from the placeless, scaleless “cloud” of Amazon Web Service, and into AWS; the me composed of moist clouds, capricious breeze, eclipses and seasons. To visit a website could be an opportunity to ebb and flow with the tides. I call this approach of re-entangling technology into the diverse networks of the living world feral computing, and servers which are freed from the farm, feral servers.

https://twitter.com/_newcubes_/status/1499408371971149828?s=20

The project of feral computing began in the early pandemic. Like many others, it was an opportunity to reflect on my habits of living with a new kind of focus and curiosity. I owned a solar panel and at that time, I ran a small computer off of it. I decided to extrapolate that idea to all my technical devices and only charge my laptop and phone off my solar battery. When the battery ran off, it was time to log off. The consequence of this simple change in mechanic was significant for me. I began counting tabs, adjusting screen brightness, only keeping conversations active if they felt significant. Running technology off of conditional energy created a dialogue between me and the sun where there was once a unidirectional model of consumption. I felt like I actually held my phone for the first time, and considered its power a matter of respect.

I think that respect emerged because for the first time my technology was not solely defined by being in service to me. There was more at play now as the hardware, my work habits, and the sun became linked together in a kind of correspondence. In order to make the limited amperage last longer, I increasingly worked on the small computer connected to the PV panel. It allowed me to work into the night and gave me more room to explore in my now highly constrained tech stack. This ultra-light computer, which eventually became my server, felt special… sacred even because it sustained itself from the sun. I increasingly felt it to be a member of the family, and part of my ecology, like the butterflies that nest in the pollinator garden next to the solar panel. The relationship which formed asked me to consider what I would enter into the computer, what would I ask it to compute. My server began as a diary, as a log of reflections, a practice of exploring my many orientations. This writing is the substrate of my online self, the soil through which my websites and online work bloomed.

I found the constraints grounding, and they didn't stop at the power source. I installed a weather station, also powered by the panel, and began controlling simple functions of the computer based on environmental data measured right at the server sight, aka my home. What if I could only access certain images at high tide, shut off file access on the solstice, or queue applications when the wind blew north. In parsing the ecology of my own identity, I built an API of myself, which coordinates my lives online. It’s the basis of feral.earth.

The term server is a contraction of what we think all technology should do... serve us. It’s a crystallization of a long legacy of subjugation and domination hard-coded into much of the technical infrastructure which coordinates modern life. I think the expressive and transformative potential of computing has been met with a poverty of imagination to see it as anything more than the latest installment in a long legacy of domestication. Whether it be through animal or machine, domestication has been one of the primary forms through which patriarchal capitalism touches the earth. At the risk of being cynical, I think this polemic is helpful. The compression of all things to their essential utility creates an intriguing continuity between machine and organism. Being domesticated or feral applies not only to living beings, but our inventions as well. It’s worth noting that the space between the two, that of pets, also implicates organisms and technology. Pet technology, like Tamagotchis, are actually a radical departure from our dominant conception of tech, and helped paved the way for the wilder feral variants I am espousing today.

Domesticated Tech → Pet Tech → Feral Tech

History makes clear that domestication is ultimately a two way street. It becomes increasingly difficult to identify what is in service to what. The paradox of technology being defined as service provision, is that it becomes increasingly impossible to determine who is in charge. Parodied in films like Modern Times, this paradigm fully matures in the era of platform capitalism where it turns out that what we once considered to be “users” are in fact the products of surveillance capitalism. My identity, my orientation, my preferences serve advertisers. The luddites were not rejecting looms, rather the labor systems which justified turning people into machines in conformance with the logic of capital accumulation.

It’s a contradiction in terms perhaps, being both feral and something which serves. In this tension we can begin to more meaningfully discuss how we interlace the diverse networks we make and are composed of. In fact, the relationship I am after may be better described as “hosting”. Hosting is a process of incorporating. Describing the manner in which my feral server and I reciprocally host one another invites a relationship with technology based on intimacy and mutual-constitution, traversing scale and temporalities. Between the individual and the masses there are body area networks, local area networks, bioregional area networks… milliseconds, hours, and eons. How do we compute at the scale of a body, the scale of a bioregion?

I'm not advocating for all tech to go feral. I recognize the benefit, and fully appreciate there are times when we just need to know the fastest route to get to the hospital. This polemic is really an invitation to see our relationship with technology in any other way, than that which makes the world “easier” to us. How can we create technology which doesn’t only make the world easier, but bigger, more awesome, more expressive. The alternative is to be lulled into somnambulance through a false sense of security that the world is no longer wild.

Part of being a human is the need to build something we believe is new, and through that process we fathom the latent complexity and grace of what was already there. Feral computing asks how technology can be a vector towards animism; of learning how to locate ourselves within a big world, and in the process getting more entangled in it. I liken it to a process of wayfinding, of building the means to synthesize the many constellations and currents of life in order to understand one’s many orientations. The world always already was an internet. See you online.

(This essay is a garden with two gates. The first is the direct access via the URL above. The second is an aleatoric switch through feral.earth. In choosing a more durable or capricious path of entry, I hope that you may choose your own adventure in engaging with the work.)