Written by Austin Wade Smith, Executive Director of the Regen Foundation, in collaboration with the Earth Law Center and the Regen Network Development PBC. All illustrations credit of the author.

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This essay outlines tangible means through which non-human organisms and ecosystems may not only have intrinsic rights , but further, the capacity to own their own currency, possess their own land titles and contracts, license their own data, compensate their guardians, safeguard their biodiversity, pressure their political delegates, etc.

Imagine if a sacred mountain was also a fund used to teach and preserve ceremonial rites, or a river directly compensated stewards for their cleanup efforts along its banks, or a pod of whales received royalties for the use of their imagery.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

• 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.