Ecological Implications: From Conservation to Relationship

When the Standing Rock Sioux protested the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, they framed it as protecting the Missouri River—not as resource, but as relative. "Mni Wiconi": Water is Life. Not metaphorically. The river is ancestor, kin, person.

Mainstream environmental discourse struggled to process this. Isn't it enough to say the pipeline threatens water quality, endangers ecosystems, violates treaties? Why bring in the "spiritual" language of rivers-as-persons?

Because the ontology changes everything about how you relate.

If the river is a resource, you manage it—balance competing uses, regulate extraction, maintain water quality within acceptable parameters. The river exists for human benefit, and ethics means using it responsibly.

If the river is a person, you're in relationship. The river has standing, not because it serves you, but because it's someone whose coherence matters intrinsically. Harm to the river isn't just damage to a resource. It's harm to a relative.

This is the ecological implication of neo-animism: moving from conservation (protecting resources) to relationship (engaging with persons). Not as feel-good metaphor, but as ontological shift with practical consequences.

Series: Neo-Animism | Part: 8 of 10

The Limits of Conservation

Modern environmentalism has achieved remarkable things: protected wilderness, reduced pollution, created regulatory frameworks, raised awareness. The conservation paradigm—treating nature as valuable, worthy of protection—represents profound progress over pure extraction.

But conservation still operates within the nature/culture divide. Nature is "out there"—separate from humans, pristine when untouched, degraded by human presence. The human role is to manage from outside: set boundaries, enforce regulations, minimize impact.

This creates persistent problems:

The Fortress Conservation Problem: Protecting wilderness means displacing indigenous peoples who've lived in "pristine" landscapes for millennia. Conservation sometimes enacts colonial violence, removing humans to preserve "nature" in a form that never historically existed without human participation.

The Resource Frame: Even enlightened conservation treats nature as resources to be sustained: timber, water, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, ecosystem services. The framing is still instrumental—nature matters because it provides value.

The Management Paradox: The more we "manage" ecosystems, the more we disrupt the self-organizing intelligence that maintains their coherence. Forests regulated by human plans lose the adaptive flexibility that emerges from distributed ecosystem intelligence.

The Missing Relationship: Conservation creates legal protection but not reciprocal obligation. You preserve wilderness by keeping humans out, not by maintaining ongoing relationship, exchange, and mutual shaping.

These aren't arguments against conservation. They're recognition that conservation alone is insufficient. We need frameworks that don't position humans as outside managers but as participants in multi-species communities.

What Relationship Looks Like

Indigenous environmental practices offer working examples of relationship-based engagement:

The Honorable Harvest (Robin Wall Kimmerer's formulation): Never take the first, never take the last, take only what you need, use everything you take, give something in return, sustain the ones who sustain you. This isn't conservation (limiting extraction). It's reciprocity—maintaining relationship through balanced exchange.

Burning for Renewal: Many indigenous peoples use fire to manage landscapes—not despite ecological knowledge but because of it. Controlled burns reduce fuel loads, promote diversity, support species that depend on fire regimes. The land isn't left "pristine." It's actively engaged, with humans as one species among many shaping collective coherence.

Seasonal Rounds: Moving with animal migrations, harvesting what's abundant when it's abundant, letting depleted areas rest. Not managing from outside, but participating in seasonal rhythms—the human niche integrated with broader ecosystem patterns.

First Salmon Ceremonies: When the first salmon returns, coastal peoples honor it ceremonially before harvesting. This isn't primitive superstition. It's ritual that encodes reciprocity—you take, but you also give (honor, attention, gratitude), maintaining relationship that structures future interactions.

These practices work ecologically (many landscapes sustained for thousands of years) and ontologically (they enact relationship rather than management). The land isn't resource. It's kin—different kinds of beings in ongoing relationship, mutually shaping each other's coherence.

Modern conservation often dismisses these as "traditional ecological knowledge"—useful local information to be extracted and incorporated into scientific management. But that misses the point. The knowledge depends on the relationship. You learn what the land needs by engaging it as someone, not studying it as something.

Legal Personhood for Nature

New Zealand's Whanganui River (2017) and Te Urewera forest (2014) have legal personhood. Ecuador's constitution (2008) grants rights to Pacha Mama (Mother Earth). India's Ganges and Yamuna rivers briefly had legal standing (2017, later reversed). Colombia, Bangladesh, and other nations are exploring similar frameworks.

This isn't symbolic gesture. It's ontological implementation in legal systems:

Standing in Court: Rivers can sue polluters. Forests can contest development. Someone has to represent them (appointed guardians), but their interests have legal force, not just as environmental values but as rights of persons.

Shift in Burden of Proof: Instead of "prove this harms the environment enough to stop it," the question becomes "does this violate the river's rights?" The river's coherence and wellbeing are presumed to matter, not conditionally valuable if they serve humans.

Relational Obligation: Legal personhood formalizes relationship. The river isn't just protected (passive). The human community has obligations to maintain the river's health, honor its standing, consult its interests (through representatives who know it best).

Critics worry about absurdity: If rivers are persons, why not rocks? If forests have rights, can you cut any trees? Doesn't this open infinite regress?

But relational personhood answers these objections. Not everything is a person. Personhood emerges from relationship. The Whanganui River is a person because the iwi (Māori people) have maintained relationship with it for centuries—naming it, honoring it, depending on it, being shaped by it. Random rocks aren't persons because there's no established relational context.

And yes, you can still cut trees, harvest salmon, use water—but within relational constraint. You can't just take. You have to ask (through appropriate practices), give something back (restoration, care, gratitude), maintain the relationship rather than degrade it.

Legal personhood doesn't solve all conflicts. But it shifts the frame from resource management (how much can we extract?) to relational ethics (how do we maintain healthy relationship?).

Regenerative Agriculture as Relational Practice

Industrial agriculture treats soil as substrate—a medium for growing crops, to be amended with fertilizers when depleted, protected with pesticides, optimized for yield.

Regenerative agriculture treats soil as living community—billions of organisms (bacteria, fungi, nematodes, insects) maintaining collective coherence that enables plant growth. The farmer's role isn't controlling the system but participating in it.

Practices include:

No-till farming: Preserving soil structure and underground networks rather than disrupting them annually

Cover crops: Maintaining living roots year-round to feed soil organisms

Diverse polycultures: Working with ecological relationships rather than monocultures requiring external inputs

Integrating animals: Closing nutrient cycles through managed grazing

These aren't just "sustainable." They're relationally engaged. The farmer learns the land's needs by paying attention to what thrives, what struggles, what patterns emerge. The knowledge is local, embodied, relational—not abstracted into universal principles but specific to this soil, this climate, this community of organisms.

Joel Salatin (Polyface Farm) describes his role as "orchestra conductor" rather than "factory manager"—coordinating multiple species and processes that maintain their own intelligence rather than controlling inputs and outputs mechanically.

This is ecosystem intelligence recognized and engaged. The mycorrhizal networks, the soil microbiome, the plant-insect-bird relationships—these are thinking systems. Regenerative practice works with their intelligence rather than overriding it.

The yield isn't always maximum (though often it's competitive). But the system's coherence increases—soil gets healthier, biodiversity increases, resilience to drought and pests improves. You're not extracting from a resource. You're participating in a community that sustains you as you sustain it.

Rewilding as Returning Agency

Rewilding movements aim to restore ecosystems by reintroducing keystone species (wolves, beavers, bison) and reducing human management. The goal: let ecological agency return, let systems self-organize rather than being controlled.

The classic example: Wolves returned to Yellowstone (1995) triggered trophic cascades. Elk behavior changed (avoiding areas where predation risk is high), vegetation recovered (willows, aspens), riverbanks stabilized, beavers returned, bird populations shifted. The wolves didn't just add a predator—they restored ecosystem coherence by reintroducing a structuring force.

This is recognizing that ecosystems have their own intelligence. Human management tried to optimize for specific outcomes (maximize elk populations, prevent forest fires). But ecosystems are complex adaptive systems that maintain coherence through feedback loops, not linear control. Remove wolves → elk overgraze → vegetation collapses → rivers erode → beaver habitat disappears → cascading failures.

Rewilding says: humans aren't smart enough to manage this complexity top-down. Better to restore the agents (wolves, fire, floods) and let the system find its own coherence.

This is relationship-based ecology: trusting ecosystem intelligence, reducing human control, accepting that "wilderness" isn't empty land but land participating in its own self-organization.

Critics worry rewilding romanticizes pre-human nature. But many ecosystems developed with human participation (indigenous fire management, selective harvesting). The point isn't removing humans—it's removing domination, replacing control with participation.

True rewilding might mean: humans as one species among many, contributing to ecosystem coherence rather than managing it.

The Rights of Nature Movement

Beyond individual rivers or forests gaining personhood, the Rights of Nature movement proposes fundamental shift: ecosystems have rights—to exist, flourish, regenerate—independent of human utility.

This challenges Western legal tradition, which treats nature as property (owned by humans) or commons (regulated by states). Rights of Nature says: ecosystems are subjects, not objects. They have standing because they maintain coherence, not because they serve human needs.

Implementation varies:

Constitutional Rights (Ecuador): Pacha Mama has right to integral respect, restoration, regeneration. Anyone can enforce these rights on nature's behalf. Development must prove it won't violate these rights.

Local Ordinances (United States): Some municipalities have passed laws recognizing ecosystem rights—challenging state and federal frameworks that treat nature as property.

International Tribunals: The International Rights of Nature Tribunal (unofficial, moral authority only) hears cases of "ecocide"—massive ecological destruction treated as crime against Earth.

The movement faces legal challenges (conflicts with existing property law) and practical questions (who speaks for ecosystems? how to adjudicate conflicts?). But it represents ontological expansion in law: recognizing non-human coherence systems as deserving protection based on their own integrity, not instrumental value.

This is relational personhood scaled to ecosystems: rivers, forests, wetlands become legal persons through being engaged as such in legal and political practice.

The Coherence Geometry of Ecological Ethics

How does this connect to coherence geometry?

Ecosystems maintain coherence through:

• Feedback loops that self-correct (predator-prey dynamics, nutrient cycling)
• Diversity providing redundancy and resilience
• Network structure distributing functions across multiple agents
• Adaptive capacity responding to perturbations

This is M = C/T—meaning equals coherence over time. Ecosystems generate "meaning" (what matters, what's valuable) by maintaining organized patterns despite disturbance.

Human intervention that enhances coherence (restoring keystone species, protecting network connections, maintaining diversity) is generative. Intervention that degrades coherence (fragmenting habitats, simplifying into monocultures, disrupting feedback loops) is destructive.

The ethical question becomes: Does this action increase or decrease ecosystem coherence?

Not: "Is this sustainable?" (narrow, focused on specific resources)

Not: "Does this maximize human benefit?" (instrumental)

But: "Does this support the system's capacity to maintain integrated organization?"

This reframes environmental ethics:

• Clearcut logging: Destroys coherence (severs mycorrhizal networks, eliminates diverse age-structure, triggers erosion cascades)
• Selective harvesting with regeneration: Maintains coherence (preserves network infrastructure, maintains age diversity, mimics natural disturbance)
• Dam removal: Often increases coherence (restores river dynamics, enables fish migration, reconnects floodplains)
• Introducing invasive species: Usually degrades coherence (disrupts existing relationships, simplifies ecosystems, reduces adaptive capacity)

Not all cases are clear. But the framework shifts focus from "resource management" to "coherence participation"—asking whether human actions contribute to or degrade the intelligence of systems we're embedded in.

What This Demands From Us

Moving from conservation to relationship isn't comfortable. It requires:

Humility: Recognizing ecosystem intelligence exceeds our capacity to manage top-down. We're participants, not controllers.

Reciprocity: If we take from the land, we must give back—not just resource inputs but attention, care, restraint, honoring.

Listening: Learning what ecosystems need by paying attention to how they respond, not imposing what we think they should be.

Constraint: Accepting that some places, some beings, some processes should remain outside human use—not because we choose to protect them, but because relationship demands respect for autonomy.

Redistribution: Many indigenous peoples maintain relationship with land that has been stolen, commodified, or "protected" in ways that exclude them. Justice requires returning land and decision-making power to those who never stopped relating.

This isn't anti-human. It's recognizing that human flourishing depends on ecological flourishing—not just because we need resources, but because we're embedded in coherence systems larger than ourselves. When we damage ecosystems, we damage the relational fields that constitute us.

The next article examines the geometric basis for all this: why coherence, not consciousness, becomes the criterion for recognizing intelligence and extending personhood.

Then we'll synthesize: what neo-animism teaches about the populated cosmos, the distribution of meaning across scales and substrates, and the geometry of expanded recognition.

From conservation to relationship.

From managing nature to participating in communities that include rivers, forests, mycorrhizal networks, and the more-than-human intelligence that has maintained this planet's coherence for billions of years.

This is Part 8 of the Neo-Animism series, exploring the ontological turn and expanded personhood through coherence geometry.

Previous: AI Animism: Do Language Models Deserve Relational Consideration?
Next: Coherence Beyond the Human: Personhood as Coherence Property

Further Reading

• Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
• Whyte, Kyle Powys. "Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Survival of Ethics." Environment and Planning E 1.1-2 (2018): 224-242.
• Stone, Christopher D. "Should Trees Have Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment." Oxford University Press, 2010.
• O'Donnell, Erin L. and Julia Talbot-Jones. "Creating Legal Rights for Rivers: Lessons from Australia, New Zealand, and India." Ecology and Society 23.1 (2018).
• Salatin, Joel. You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and Succeed in a Farming Enterprise. Polyface, 1998.
• Monbiot, George. Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
• Ripple, William J. et al. "Trophic Cascades in Yellowstone." Biological Conservation 102.3 (2001): 227-234.
• Cullinan, Cormac. Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice. Chelsea Green, 2011.