Protocollary Ecological Institutions

* Article: Ecological Institutions → Protocols to Grow Autonomous and Convivial Ecological Actors. Austin Wade-Smith. Regen Foundation, 2024.

URL = https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/tv9z1XXrtqQxDIxE8FygZ_W39NpkQJkVfrtjCtdbzA8

Topic: "autonomous and convivial ecologies". See also, our entry about the Sovereign Nature Initiative.

Contextual Quote

"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?"

- Austin Wade-Smith [1]

Description

"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."

Contents

'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."

Excerpt

Austin Wade-Smith:

"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."

(https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/tv9z1XXrtqQxDIxE8FygZ_W39NpkQJkVfrtjCtdbzA8)