First, a bit of background.1 DRSs are an established policy lever for governments to increase the recycling rates of specified containers (like plastic bottles, glass bottles, and aluminium cans). The systems for these containers’ collection typically operating on the polluter-pays principle, the containers themselves see an additional refundable deposit that consumers receive upon their return. In my home country of Germany, this comes in the form of a coupon that can be spent at the supermarket of return, or redeemed for cash. The success of DRSs is well-evidenced. Again in Germany, PET plastic bottles have a 98% collection rate. Why throw a piece of plastic worth up to €0.25 away? This rate, when a bottle does not have a Pfand, hits a ceiling of 31%. And whether the containers — glass, plastic, or metal — are reused, refilled, or recycled (and there is plenty to say about the intrinsic flaws of plastic recycling), the key strength of any DRS is the optionality it offers in material use for an economy. Instead of material ending up in landfill or in an incinerator, we have the option to choose how to most efficaciously (re)use it.

The ongoing translation of DRSs’ efficacy into the UK legislative landscape is thereby welcome. The UK Government is looking to introduce a DRS focussing on plastic and metal single-use drinks containers — notably excluding glass — in October 2027. This is in collaboration with the Scottish and Northern Irish devolved administrations. Wales is in the process of developing its own DRS including glass after withdrawing from UK-wide efforts in 2024. But it will similarly be launching in October 2027.2 Importantly, Wales’s lone efforts were greenlit by the current UK Government — which, through the post-Brexit IMA, holds what is essentially a veto over any devolved policy that may impact on cross-nation trade. Given the labelling and pricing disparities involved in any DRS, that greenlight was a necessity for Wales to move forward.

And it was a greenlight that Scotland did not receive in its previous attempts to launch a DRS. First passing the Deposit and Return Scheme for Scotland Regulations in 2020, the Scottish Parliament and Government had hoped for a DRS including plastics, metals, and glass to launch by July 2022. These plans hit a snag, so subsequently passed regulations delayed the scheme’s launch date to August 2023. Then came the UK Government’s IMA exclusion in May 2023. The then-Secretary of State for Scotland Alister Jack authorised the scheme’s progression, but only under the condition that glass would be excluded from its scope. This proved controversial, especially given the significant emissions involved in virgin glass bottle production, and deadening. The winds in Scotland’s DRS sails dropped to zero, with investments in processing and logistics systems including glass made by non-profit and private sector partners — Circularity Scotland Ltd, the arm’s-length body set up to manage the scheme, and Biffa, the appointed sole logistics provider for the scheme, in particular — coming to naught.3 Circularity Scotland Ltd went into administration, and so Scotland’s DRS timeline extended once again.

Scotland’s DRS was unduly controversial amongst some parties, individuals, and lobby groups, but the politicking machinations behind this process are not worth delving into here.4 The purpose of this overview is to provide some cursory context for an Environmental Information Regulation (EIR) request I submitted to Scottish Ministers in January of last year. This request related to the legal advice that Scottish Ministers received in relation to the risk of IMA intervention by the UK Government. This is the request in full:

‘I would like a copy of the following information:

• Any verbal minuted legal advice Scottish Ministers received on the implementation of a Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) in Scotland between May 2021 and September 2023;

• Any written legal advice Scottish Ministers received on the implementation of a DRS in Scotland between May 2021 and September 2023;

In particular, I am looking for any verbal minuted or written legal advice on the potential clash of a Scottish DRS with the Internal Market Act, and the risk of UK government intervention. This advice can take the form of actionable recommendations, an assessment of existing legislation and case law, or any other relevant form.’5

Importantly — and many of you may be aware of this — legal advice is not covered by EIR (or FOI) requests. An exception outlined in Regulation 10(4)(e) of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 excludes internal communications that breach legal professional privilege. The only way around this is to meet a seriously-hard-to-meet public interest test. So this, after having taken counsel from the venerable Dr. Ben Christman at the Environmental Rights Centre for Scotland (ERCS), is what I attempted to do. My request for an internal review, the next step of the EIR disclosure process, was submitted the following April as follows:

‘I would like to appeal on the basis that public interest overrides legal professional privilege in this case, as per Decision 048/2022 by the Scottish Information Commissioner. Specifically, the publication of this advice is in the public interest because:

1. The implementation of Scotland’s DRS was delayed by intervention from the UK Government via the Internal Market Act (IMA). Ministers, in receiving legal advice, should or would have been made aware of the risks of this intervention. Three scenarios thus arise:

   1. If Ministers had been made aware that there was significant risk, this should be known to the public as Ministers proceeded regardless: it is in the public interest for our leaders to make policy decisions on evidenced bases, not on ideological constitutional bases that contravene express legal advice and set up clashes between the UK Government and devolved administrations.

   2. If Ministers had been made aware that there was minimal risk, this should be known to the public as that legal advice was likely imprecise and misleading: it is in the public interest for our leaders to receive accurate legal advice as it enables them to make more informed decisions with better outcomes for the public.

   3. If Ministers had not sought legal advice in the first place: disclosure thereof is in the public interest as our leaders should seek or have legal advice made available to them on policy decisions with constitutional ramifications. If this is not the case, those policy decisions would be unsound.6

   4. To encapsulate the above three scenarios, it is clearly in the public interest to enhance scrutiny of Ministers’ decision-making processes and thereby improve accountability and democratic participation. Those processes are inextricably linked with any legal advice that Ministers might have received on this matter.

2. The delay of Scotland’s DRS has resulted in legal action by Biffa against the Scottish Government, seeking compensation of £166,200,000 for loss of investment, management costs, and profits as the scheme’s planned logistics partner.

   1. It is in the public interest for Ministers to receive proper legal advice if there is a risk of litigation, particularly if that litigation involves compensation claims. It is therefore in the public interest to ascertain whether the legal advice received by Ministers in this case was proper, briefing them on the implications of the IMA and on the likelihood of UK Government intervention, to prevent future losses to the taxpayer. Effective oversight of potential expenditure of public funds due to improper legal advice is clearly in the public interest.

3. The delay of Scotland’s DRS was and is fundamentally a constitutional issue, given its interface with the IMA. The release of the requested information would significantly enhance public debate as a result, as per Paragraph 41 of Decision 048/2022. Ministers’ accountability is actively harmed by the information’s non-release.

   1. In addition to this, the DRS is a clear example of the IMA’s conflict with prior devolution settlements. It gets to the core of Scotland’s constitutional settlement with Westminster, and taps into ongoing public debate on Scottish devolution and the nation’s integration in the UK post-departure from the EU. Release of the legal advice given to Ministers pertaining to the DRS and by extension pertaining to the IMA’s impacts would, naturally, contribute greatly to this debate.

   2. It is also clearly in the environmental public interest for a DRS scheme to be introduced. At a time of climatic and ecological crises, the introduction of waste management systems like a DRS would mitigate against throwaway culture, encourage recycling, incentivise reuse, and contribute toward the Scottish Government’s goal of achieving a circular economy. Any delay in the implementation of a DRS delays necessary environmental action, thereby contravening the public interest. The disclosure of legal advice that may have hinted at or prevented that delay in the first place would have prevented additional environmental harm, given that the DRS is now slated for introduction in 2027 (a number of years later than originally planned). It is thereby in the public interest for that legal advice to be published, contributing to the discussion of how constitutional barriers limit Holyrood’s environmental action.

To pre-empt one previously cited reason for non-disclosure of legal advice: that of disclosure leading to future advice being more circumspect or not sought in the first place.7 This is not the case in this instance. If anything, the details of this case may reveal that legal advice should be more circumspect, or that legal advice should be sought more frequently and vigorously, to prevent downstream litigation.’

The legal risks I discussed in my appeal were well-established. The Scottish Government had been warned of liability exposure brought about by IMA uncertainties on a number of occasions over the years (for public reporting on this, see here and here). They have now, though, been settled. The legal action taken by Biffa against Scottish Ministers on negligent misrepresentation and duty of care was dismissed in its entirety by the Court of Session in January of this year, with their case centring a May 2022 letter written by Lorna Slater MSP — the Minister whose brief included the circular economy at the time — to their CEO Michael Topham. In it, Slater underlined the Scottish Government’s continued support for DRS and faith in it going forward. Biffa and Topham took this as an assurance on which they continued to invest in logistics capacity. Lord Sandison, the judge overseeing the case, didn’t take this line of argument too kindly — calling the communication little more than a ‘comfort letter’ and an expression of a political rather than legal commitment. Hence his ruling. At the same time, the extent of the Scottish Government’s and Slater’s confidence was — in my view — undue. From the ruling:

‘Ms Slater attempted to downplay the importance of the IMA exclusion, claiming that she had known since 2021 that an exclusion would be required, that steps were being taken as early as 2021 to seek one, and that she had no reason to doubt that the requisite exclusion would be granted. She thought it could be done fairly straightforwardly. There was no material change in that belief until 2023, when Lord [Alister] Jack became involved.’8

‘Her [Slater’s] official Charles Holmes had drafted a letter for Lockton [an insurance broker] dated 6 May 2022. It reinforced the commitment of the defenders to the delivery of the scheme by 16 August 2023 and sought to clarify CSL’s [Circularity Scotland Ltd] role. It did not mention the IMA, VAT or labelling issues. These were issues which the defenders considered could be worked through. There was no reason to expect that an IMA exclusion would not be granted, as it had been in relation to single-use plastics.9 The UK Government was well-disposed to deposit return schemes as a matter of generality and the exclusion would tidy up the legalities around divergences, including in relation to the inclusion or exclusion of glass, to make sure the various schemes would be interoperable.’10

This hints at a confidence kiboshed by the blunt force of the IMA — blunt force that has resulted in a four-year-delay-expressed trauma to get a Scottish DRS across the line. Unfortunately, an analysis of what led to that confidence in the form of information I had sought via an EIR request was not forthcoming. My later appeal to the Scottish Information Commissioner — the next step on the EIR (and FOI) journey — on the same grounds and the below clarifications was rejected. The additional queries from the Commissioner are below; my responses in italics:

‘I note that in your request for review of 15 April 2025, you gave detailed arguments in support of your view that disclosure of the information is in the public interest and that you wish to reply on those.

Firstly, I would be grateful if you could clarify your argument at section 3B of your request for review (15 April 2025). Was your intention to make one or two separate points here? That is,

(a) are you arguing that there is a public interest in legal advice (if any exists) around the delay to the DRS and the consequent environmental impacts/failure to meet targets,

AND

(b) also arguing that there is public interest in scrutiny of the constitutional barriers to environmental action.

Or was your intention to make one argument on the constitutional barriers to the Scottish Parliament’s environmental actions?

Your reading is correct. My intention here was to make two separate points.

If you would like to add anything else to your public interest submissions, please take this opportunity to do so.

A fourth point, elaborating on 1, 2, and 3A.

4. There is a clear divergence between the pathways taken by Scotland and Wales’s DRSs. Wales’s recent decision to exit a UK-wide scheme, and launch one in parallel that includes glass, has yet to face an intervention from the UK Government via the IMA. Whether the reason for this is political or technical, the legal advice Scottish Ministers received in the noted time period in all likelihood influenced the Scottish Government’s strategy of implementing their DRS. Given the current relative success of Wales’s efforts, the integrity of advice received by Scottish Ministers may be in question. It is thereby in the public interest for this legal advice to be published — to learn from past errors, hold government to account, and potentially allow for the eventual inclusion of glass in Scotland’s DRS; the latter being an unalloyed environmental good.’

The Commissioner’s Decision Notice laid out their public interest test weighting clearly, and it can be found in full on their Decisions Database [the uploaded, publicly available, Decision Notice is due to be published shortly — I will hyperlink it here when available]. Most interestingly, apart from rejection, is that the legal advice received in verbal form only occurred in Cabinet meetings — the minutes of which are classified. Because of their being classified, my initial EIR request did not actually result in these minutes being uncovered. My appeal induced Scottish Ministers to conduct a more thorough search, through which they located two documents that fell within the scope of my request. That means, by proxy, that there were only two instances of minuted verbal legal advice on a fundamental constitutional and environmental issue between May 2021 and September 2023. Somewhat of a paucity.

That said, I include one excerpt from Scottish Ministers’ response to the Commissioner — contained in the Decision Notice — below:

‘The Authority [Scottish Ministers] noted that all government decision-making and policy was underpinned by the rule of law and was often informed by complex and nuanced legal advice which evolved throughout the development of the policy and it rarely fell squarely into one of two categories; “significant risk” of [sic] “minimal risk”. The Authority argued that the fact that a legal risk materialised, does not show that it ignored legal advice or that the legal advice was wrong.’11

This is a point I do not disagree on, but its nuance is unfortunately lost in the sphere of public debate. And that is because this issue — considering DRS as a symptom rather than as an aggravator in itself — demonstrates the simple complexity and intersection of devolved relations and environmental priorities today.

The evidence is crystal-clear on DRSs’ efficacy, so much so that little should stand in the way of their implementation and inclusion of glass. This is particularly given that a significant chunk of their economic benefits stem from glass’ inclusion — rising from £3.6bn to £5.9bn in Scotland (albeit with a near-corresponding processing and management cost) — and given that well-designed inclusion has been consistently proven to work in any state or country that adopts it. At the same time, though, pursuit of DRSs as an environmental good has too often been conflated with the pursuit or kiboshing of DRSs as constitutional performance. Ministers in Westminster and Ministers at Holyrood duking it out on their then-Twitter feeds didn’t help anyone — and nor do disagreements on these matters today. The environment cannot be treated as a political, or constitutional, football.

All roads lead back to the IMA.12 With a number of environmental policy interventions like DRSs overlapping with its remit, the Act’s inherently blunt, unilateral, and indiscriminate nature helps no one.13 The previous UK Government was wrong to issue an IMA exclusion which excluded glass, with a different approach — demonstrated by the current UK Government permitting Wales to go forward with its own scheme that includes glass — being possible.14 This different approach, though, underpinned by a weighing of environmental, public health, and economic impacts in IMA considerations, is hardly durable. Its basis being in the voluntarist post-Brexit Common Frameworks — an effort to align legislative and regulatory efforts across the UK’s four nations — is flimsy; as long as the veto powers contained in the IMA remain, Downing Street occupants of any persuasion can chop and change a multitude of environmental policy at will.15 As Emeritus Professor Colin Reid sardonically wrote back in 2024:

‘The scope for devolved administrations to implement their own policy choices effectively seems to be as restricted as critics of the act feared.’

And so — legal advice or not — the limitations of our current system of environmental governance are abundantly clear. The constitutional and legislative frameworks that exist today are designed for the political expediency of the UK Government’s Cabinet, and the political expediencies of devolved governments, more than they are for environmental good. Our environmental governance systems are less reflective of a thoughtful, systemic, approach to managing spatially diffuse challenges than they are of a helter-skelter response to political needs (or rather demands) at any one time — like the need to create a post-Brexit governance architecture for the UK’s internal market; and the need to delineate environmental decision- and policy-making by preexisting national boundaries.

This helter-skelter response is hardly unique to the UK. Environmental and constitutional political structures are, by their very definition, an amalgam of statute-expressed responses to the political demands of any one time. While thoughtfulness can and has been imbued therein, those structures’ spatiotemporal impotence — as I have labelled it previously — is fundamental to their spatiotemporal restrictions and delimitations; fundamental to their binding to their bounded political origins rather than their unbounded environmental purposes. In the UK, the DRS debacle is but one symptom thereof. Think of future instances of spatial political overlap; say, national and food security. National security — a matter reserved to the UK Government — is inherently, and self-admittedly, intertwined with food security. What might transpire if and when a devolved government’s agricultural policy is deemed inadequate, or if the UK Government’s own then-inadequate agricultural policy is imposed on devolved governments on national security grounds? In an age of permacrises where we are repeatedly hitting the ceiling of governance-al suitability, such a scenario feels less than remote.

If you appreciate the effort that goes into EIR and FOI requests of this kind, please consider donating to ERCS. Without the counsel provided by Dr. Ben Christman, their Legal Director, my albeit-failed efforts to obtain the legal advice Scottish Ministers received would have been short(er)-lived. ERCS does fantastic work, including campaigning on sewage and bathing waters in the run-up to this year’s Holyrood election, and the recent launching of its own law firm. Find the link to donate here.

Rivers — or river thought — have been experiencing something of a renaissance in recent years. Books like Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? and Monica Feria-Tinta’s A Barrister for the Earth have questioned our relationship with and treatment of what each considers our hydrological kin, while the rights of rivers movement has spread globally. Entering public consciousness through the battle to secure legal personhood for the Whanganui River via a system of Māori guardianship in New Zealand in 2017, equivalent local efforts have been taking off around the world — whether in India, Bangladesh, or Britain.

It is high time, then, for the horizons of river thought to be expanded. The late James Scott’s In Praise of Floods and Ellen Wohl’s Following the Bend are worthy additions to the shelf. Both compellingly grapple with the terrifying sense of temporal and spatial impotence we implicitly embody today — despite our short planetary presence reigning terror over our riverine kin and all those who rely thereon. Both, too, grapple with concepts of spatiotemporal (im)permanence — the slippery ever-moving quality of rivers and waterways. While Scott characteristically and ruthlessly dissects the political economy of his subject at hand — focussing on the Ayeyarwady River in present-day Myanmar — Wohl’s Following the Bend is a discursive, accessible, textbook for those wanting to wrap their heads around the hydrology, geology, and ecology of those we subject to our whims.

In Praise of Floods, its research and writing interrupted by a renewed crackdown by Myanmar’s military regime, was part-written by Burmese colleagues and collaborators of Scott’s — who carried out the extensive ethnographic fieldwork that underpins much of the book. Yet Scott’s unflinching analytic-polemical style is present throughout. Framing the book as an eco-biography, as a biography of the Ayeyarwady’s spatial inclinations, varied interactions with its human and non-human inhabitants and dependents, and now its slow death, Scott intended for himself and us to think in ‘river time’. This involves accepting the false sense of spatial constancy rivers hold in our imaginations; our complex and now reduced relationship with flooding; and the profound ways we have manipulated their flows and paths in what he terms the ‘thick Anthropocene’ — relative to its ‘thin’ (pre-1700) agriculture-centric cousin.

At the same time, it involves accepting the long legacy of our destructive relations with the rivers we rely upon and call home. The advent of fixed-field agriculture, in Scott’s view, presaged the present day. The millennia-long clearing of forests and subsequent disruption of hydrology and silt flows, alongside the redirection of water to irrigate cropland, represent an ‘embryo’ of humankind’s impacts on ‘the riverine landscape and watersheds’ today. In this, he draws on the work of numerous scholars, including Mark Elvin’s studies of the Yellow River and the political economy of its flow. In his discussion of flood pulses — seasonal behaviour in which rivers fill their floodplains, triggering complex biotic exchanges — Scott displays his characteristic tendency of making that which he is discussing seem like the centre, or rather the explanation, of everything, expressed most famously in his 1998 book Seeing Like a State.

Scott’s Burmese colleagues, meanwhile, focus on ethnographic descriptions of the human relationships with the Ayeyarwady River. Nats, a form of spirit unique to Burma who, while once human, ‘became revered spirits’ after their deaths due to ‘their life experiences and the locales where they lived’, are foregrounded; as are stories of changing fishing, mining, and agricultural practices that have drastically altered the river’s fortunes over the past five decades. Scott even writes an entire chapter from the perspective of non-human co-inhabitants of the Ayeyarwady. In this, he succeeds, magnificently. It frees him to make compelling and from-those-perspectives self-evident arguments. The words of the Ayeyarwady river dolphin, speaking on behalf of all those who spoke — whether snow carp, white ginger (a type of lily), oriental darters (cormorant-like tropical water birds), or the Burmese roofed turtle — are worth quoting in full:

‘We nonhumans who have spoken demand our full rights as citizens of the watershed. We recognise that you too are riverine citizens; you desire clean water and a reliable and abundant harvest of fish as part of your subsistence. But both are in jeopardy because of what you and others of your species have been doing. What we have here is a world-historic land and water grab in which a single species has seized an entire landscape from its indigenous inhabitants and unilaterally colonised it. We are abject colonial subjects just like indigenous peoples whose land was appropriated by imperial expansion. We are, in much the same way, the subjects of a quasi-universal settler colonialism. As comparative newcomers in evolutionary terms, you declared the territory aqua nullius and terra nullius — water and land belonging to no one and therefore open to your claim of exclusive sovereignty over all forms of life.’

In Praise of Floods is, in fact, just that — a praise of the ecological-hydrological wonders that floods bring; that rivers bring; of all that rivers embody. It is an explicitly (eco-)political work. Scott summarily diagnoses humanity’s ills as iatrogenic — a medical term describing an illness ‘caused by previous treatment’ or by an illness contracted while receiving treatment for a previous illness, like an infection caught while in hospital. Scott reminds us that roughly 70% of hospitalisations in the United States ‘are the direct or indirect result of prior treatment’ — that treatment typically being chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or surgery. He then compares this with the ways we have managed (and continue to manage) and relate to rivers:

‘In the attempt to prevent virtually all floods, weirs, levees, and dikes are erected to confine the river to its channel. Depending on the extent of prior deforestation, erosion, and drainage, sediment is likely to accumulate on the riverbed, often raising its level above that of the surrounding floodplain. These barriers do indeed make floods less frequent by providing more space for the river to swell at high water before it overtops the levees and dikes. When, however, levees and dikes fail, the flow they unleash is likely to be far more destructive. The aim of preventing all floods comes at the cost of laying the groundwork for more catastrophic floods.’

And this, Scott asserts, is the result of a ‘political lock-in’ — the ‘imperative of holding productive [pre-existing] populations in place and defending them against floods’ that only exist due to prior “flood” management. His solution to this lock-in, and to our broader ecological calamity, is ‘soft-path responses’ — a form of intellectual modesty that, rather than bulldozing and concreting through ecological-hydrological realities, entails working around them.

This is an understandably soft solution to an impenetrably hard problem. One can hardly, or fairly, expect a single answer to our calamity. Despite this, Scott is clear that the status quo is indisputably bankrupt: early state formation, to him, with the concentrated sedentary agricultural activities it entailed, is inextricably linked with the subsequent never-ending hard management of the natural world and its waterways; with its endless focus on the optimisation, and subsequent simplification, of the natural world, of our food systems, livestock, arable crops, and horticulture. Agriculture, and Scott here quotes Timothy Weiskel, ‘depends on ecocide’. And that ecocide is a forebear of our now capitalist craze to limitlessly and unilaterally extract value from our natural systems.

While this is a slight simplification of his argument (Scott does not directly link early state formation with today’s capitalist exploits) the emphasis on sedentarist agriculture being a prerequisite of such exploitation is false. Sedentary, nomadic, or otherwise, human communities have for millennia degraded or lived in supposed harmony with the natural world to a diversity of extents. Claiming otherwise feels like a forced — albeit intuitively attractive — transplantation of his arguments from Seeing Like a State. The concurrent claim that ‘[w]hereas the hunter-gatherer adapts to the complex rhythms of the natural world to subsist, the early state strives to subdue this movement and complexity — to create a state-serving habitat’ is simply wrong. States are hardly exclusive to sedentarism. Scott could have cited the recent work of David Wengrow and David Graeber, for one, or referenced literature from my own academic specialism — the ecological-exploitation-fuelled, far-from-sedentarist early modern Native American Great Plains.

That aside, the book is a historically astute and rhetorically sound Praise. As is Ellen Wohl’s Following the Bend, the diagnoses (and prescriptions) of which are, in the words of Scott, softer. Describing the devastation Scott outlines with colour, Wohl dryly, characteristically — and, it should be said, aptly — begins the book by stating that ‘human legacies are difficult to escape’ when studying and reading rivers and the landscapes around them. Following the Bend follows the length, breadth, and height of rivers, surveying their multifarious sources — whether monsoon- or groundwater-fed — their multifarious shapes and sizes, and their multifarious functionings. Importantly, Wohl’s narrative emphasises ecology’s, hydrology’s, and geology’s spatiotemporal pre-eminence. It emphasises the intrinsic lack of spatial permanence that the interplay between those three, and particularly the interplay between the latter two, entails — and the ever-changing boundaries that result. And it emphasises the dichotomy between our subordination to this pre-eminence and our relatively recent escape therefrom.

Following the Bend, more than anything, simultaneously charts the process of knowledge discovery — of our collective learning of how rivers form, function, and die — and the innumerable uncertainties, or knowledge gaps, that remain. This takes place across fourteen chapters, covering basic hydrological concepts like Hadley circulation — the global circulation of air and thereby moisture between the tropics and the poles — alongside the industrial, chemical, and transport-fuelled contamination of waterways over the past three centuries. Coming across some of these concepts for the first time and, in some instances, being reminded of them brought me back to school science lessons, saddened that I had ever forgotten and chosen not to actively pursue theories that underpin our understanding of how the physical world operates.

This feeling was present throughout the book. Wohl’s discussion of stomata (the breathing elements of photosynthesising flora) and how their response to nightfall increases river flows due to decreased uptake of groundwater was fascinating; as was how the use of isotropic composition — essentially individual water isotopes’ weight — can track water flows across continents, whether transported by rivers, snow, or rain. Her discussion, too, of the minutiae of river ecosystems is entrancing: few will have likely heard of larval aquatic insects that spin spiderweb-like nets to filter food, inhabiting the space just above a river’s biofilm.

Wohl’s grasp of the historical record only adds to this. The Euroamerican settlement of North America, referred to as the ‘Great Drying’, is examined — whether that be the draining of wetlands, the redirection and straightening of rivers and waterways, the construction of canals, or the systematic abstraction of river-water and groundwater for agriculture. Linking it to the present-day extermination of the Colorado River, now no longer flowing into the Gulf of California, Wohl reflects on the endangered statuses of landforms — the idea that specific geologies are in danger of extinction due to indirect human influences, like water abstraction and rising sea levels. Linking this to the recent downgrading of wetland protections by the US Supreme Court, Wohl highlights the gulf — or canyon — between arcane legal language, the imperative to protect rivers and waterways, and the out-of-date rules protecting against over-abstraction. Water quotas for the Colorado River, for example, are based on old averages and projections of water flow, by-default resulting in overuse. Another is the (in)ability of existing legal frameworks to respond to the sheer scale of toxic mining-related pollution — with just shy of 500,000km of river channels affected worldwide.

Interspersed with stories of her fieldwork, Following the Bend is a testament to Wohl’s depth of knowledge and public communication thereof. She, on numerous occasions, makes clear what she wants her readers to take away from her writings: first, that the study of rivers is ultimately the study of energy — how rivers move, shape, and are shaped by landscapes and their inhabitants over time; second, that resilience matters, and that through our simplification of hydrology rivers’ resilience has suffered — and made us more vulnerable to both water shortages and floods; and third, that our perception of rivers and waterways — what they should look like and how they should function — is blinkered. That blinkering is based on a mix of false aesthetic conceptions of tidiness, like those popularised by eighteenth-century English landscape architect Lancelot Brown, and the indirect effects of exterminating up to 400 million river-engineering beavers in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Wohl does attempt to provide an antidote to the problems she highlights. The need for river restoration, for one, is discussed in places, including in the context of logjams’ use in the UK and the Room for the River programme in the Netherlands for flood mitigation. Wohl also discusses less direct interventions, drawing inspiration from the rights of nature movement’s successes in New Zealand and Ecuador. But this discussion is less plentiful than expected, nor does it contain the same level of zeal that Scott exhibits in his critiques of dominant sociopolitical paradigms. When surveying the effects of industrial and agricultural contamination of rivers, for example, Wohl somewhat fatalistically concludes that ‘pollution, it seems, … will always [be] … with us’. Perhaps it’s unfair to expect Scott-like zeal, though, given the different purpose of Wohl’s book. Yet Wohl’s concluding remarks — encouraging what she calls a river ethic, being the emphasis of preserving ‘the integrity of a river ecosystem’ rather than its isolated elements — are as soft as Scott’s.

Both authors’ conclusions, resting on similar diagnoses of pervasive human influences, feel somewhat unsatisfactory — disproportionally modest given the scale of the challenge at hand. In the case of Scott, specifically, his rhetorical ambition is not met by the corresponding empiricism as in his previous books. Given, though, that In Praise of Floods is his last book, and given my own ideological inclinations, I cannot help but align myself with his conclusions — aided in understanding by Following the Bend. Both, then, are worthy and pertinent reads.

When a book’s central premise is the answer to a specific question — indeed, its title — one may expect a specific answer. Is a River Alive? According to one of Robert Macfarlane’s sons, nine at the time of being asked: ‘Well, duh’. According to Macfarlane and the cast of campaigners, naturalists, jurists, musicians, and ecosystems that make up his latest work, the answer is similarly affirmative and expresses a similar inherence.

It is also explicated in more than a single sentence. Spread across four main chapters, Is a River Alive? answers itself by tracking Macfarlane’s journeys across three landscapes: Ecuador’s Los Cedros cloud forest; the waterways, creeks, rivers, and Jalasthambams (hydrological testaments to military victories) of Tamil Nadu and Chennai; and the incomprehensibly vast river-vein-interspersed topography of Nitassinan, in the northeastern corner of Canada. Rather than dwelling on these landscapes in isolation, they — and the rivers they hold — are instead examined through the eyes of the characters Macfarlane visits, gets to know, and explores alongside.

These characters, or rather co-journeyers, are varied and colourful. The reclusion of Josef DeCoux, a long-time and now sadly late protector of Los Cedros, is accompanied by the beautiful, incisive, infatuation mycologist Giuliana Furci has for fungi. The calm, radiant, activist-educator-naturalist Yuvan Aves, whose life mission is to spellbind and rejuvenate the waterways of Tamil Nadu, is followed by the seemingly Edward Abbey-inspired Hayduke-esque bear-like Ilya Klana, an inveterate explorer and fisherman who laterally traversed Canada by kayak, alone, in his early twenties.

Each of the places Macfarlane visits was chosen deliberately: they are test cases, living labs, of the rights of nature movement — of the recognising of the natural world, and rivers in particular, as legal rights-bearers; reflections of the harm centuries of legally instituted separation between us and them has caused. Los Cedros, and the Río Los Cedros, protected from mining and resource exploitation by the constitutionally guaranteed right for the natural world to flourish; Chennai chosen for the three heavily polluted rivers — the Adyar, Kosathalaiyar, and Cooum — it sits atop of and is thereby deeply interrelated with (and perhaps inspired by similar yet less successful efforts to grant personhood to the Rivers Ganges and Yamuna); and Nitassinan, the home of the indigenous Innu people, for their efforts to grant the Mutehekau Shipu legal personhood amid continued threats of its extensive damming by the utility firm Hydro-Québec.

A number of themes — key to answering itself — inhabit this book. Death, for one, is central. The alive properties of rivers are contrasted with stories of grief, grief experienced by Macfarlane’s co-journeyers. The death of Giuliana’s father, having taken place weeks before their trip to Los Cedros, is counteracted by the life-giving and hope-inspiring quality of the forest and its waterways. The abusive childhood that Yuvan contended with, as well as the premature death of his younger sister, were similarly allayed by his connection with and love for the non-human. And Wayne Chambliss, a friend of Macfarlane’s who accompanied him on their descent of the Mutehekau Shipu, reckoned with the death of his close friend, Paul; healed through the purging renewal of that very descent.

The life-giving force and corresponding aliveness of rivers is thereby — whether intentionally or not — presented as self-evident. This links to another of the book’s themes: a sense of relationality, of feeling — of being ‘constitutionally in the midst’.1 Rather than justifying the aliveness of rivers through comprehensive legal, political, and ecological theory, the book instead dwells on individual self-realisation — on the importance of lived experience and the judgements we derive therefrom. The stories of indigenous peoples and their ontologies feature front-and-centre, particularly those of the Kichwa-speaking communities in Ecuador and the Innu in Canada. As do the guttural reasonings of César Rodríguez-Garavito in his musings on the Los Cedros and rights of nature more broadly; and the plain-speaking matter-of-factness of river guides Raphaël St-Onge and Danny Peled.

This self-realisational approach — Is a River Alive? feeling like a record of the affirmations of Macfarlane’s own prior self-realisations — has its strengths. It brings one emotionally on-side. Yet this is equally one of the book’s primary weaknesses. Its initial equating of the aliveness of rivers with the rights of nature is imprecise. Aliveness ≠ rights, and the rights of rivers ≠ the rights of nature. Macfarlane’s discussion of Christopher Stone’s work (whose seminal Should Trees Have Standing? substantially influenced the movement), the legal scholarship of Jacinta Ruru and the Māori-Kiwi recognition of the Whanganui River’s legal personhood, and the various legal recognitions that indigenous North American communities have granted their non-human counterparts does not develop into a broader — nor deeper — analysis of the rights of nature; the approach’s strengths, shortfalls, and peculiarities. A missed opportunity on the nature of power and its interrelation with the law is a case in point. Is a River Alive? dwells on the influence of malign actors: rapacious mining prospectors in Ecuador like Cornerstone Capital Resources; the map-based disappearance of the Ennore Creek wetland in Chennai by industrially aligned civil servants in 1996 to bypass development-preventing environmental designations; and the literal thirst for and exercising of power that Hydro-Québec exhibits in its beaver-like compulsive dam-building tendencies. Macfarlane could have further examined the use of law as a vehicle of power by these and other actors, whether to guarantee rivers’ legal protection through personhood or to advance their development-induced destruction. This is particularly relevant given the recent referendum-rejected attempt by Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa to strip the Constitution of its rights of nature provisions.

This is not to say that Macfarlane discusses the rights of nature uncritically. Through the creative use of co-journeyers’ dialogue, he explores the framework’s weaknesses in places. In conversation with César, for example, he grapples with the idea of guardianship and representation through Stanisław Lem’s ‘Solaris Problem’ — the idea that a living entity cannot be mechanistically reduced, understood, and thereby have their wishes represented by another (human) actor.2 In later conversation with Wayne, this representational problem is further discussed: instead of ‘who speaks for the river?’ — ‘what does the river say?’ And the difficulties of ‘construct[ing] a politics or law’ out of the realisation of aliveness is equally acknowledged. Satisfying answers, though, are not forthcoming.3

Macfarlane could have additionally improved his historical diagnosis of the despoliation of rivers and waterways. He credits a decline in animacy, which in the UK was purged by Henry VIII’s imposed forcible departure from idolatry. The spiritual strength of springs and the rivers they formed turned, in the words of Isaac Newton, into ‘inanimate brute matter’, and later into Martin Heidegger’s Bestand — ‘a calculable coherence’ bound by the strict ‘logics of objectification and extraction’.4 With that decline in animacy and idolatry came a corresponding decline in grammatical animacy, with Macfarlane drawing from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s framing of this concept. His personification of rivers is a natural extension thereof, and he cites an example of the Idu Mishmi’s linguistic derivation from waterbodies in northern India: ‘dár’, for example, means ‘to give birth’. It also means ‘to increase as a river does after rain’.5 A planned dam on the nearby Dibang River, then, would kill their language. In Macfarlane’s own words, ‘words make worlds’.6 And the rights of nature — and the rights of rivers — movements to him equate at their ‘best to be a kind of legal grammar of animacy’.7

This history is an abridged version of reality. Despiritualisation and the end of relationality doubtless played a role in the human disregard for the natural world — yet the related link made to the present British predicament vis-à-vis sewage is inaccurate, revealing a primary argument against the rights of nature and rights of rivers in the first place. Rather than ecological decline being symptomatic of a lack of relationality or legal personhood, some argue that it can be seen as a simple regulatory failure: one of insufficient regulatory volume and enforcement. Macfarlane’s historical retellings also fail to refer to the numerous human communities, indigenous and otherwise, whose animism did not prevent their exploitation of non-human counterparts. With a book as prospectively influential as Is a River Alive?, one would hope that its nuance would reflect its potential impact on rhetoric. Macfarlane’s bibliography definitely displays this nuance, so it is a shame that it wasn’t carried over into the main text.

Yet this is a work of literature, not of legal scholarship, nor of history. Its strengths lie elsewhere. Macfarlane’s call for an ontological revolution does not need a roadmap, because that is not the purpose of this book. He instead justifies the need for that revolution in the first place, and that need is clear. What Is a River Alive? does best is inspire hope. In the words of Raju, one of Yuvan’s fellow activists: ‘To change a landscape for the better you must first have the ability to dream — to dream a good dream’.8 The strictures that prevent us from dreaming, in the paraphrased later words of Wayne, can be best cut down by enlivened rivers. A river ‘can cut a fucking mountain in half, a mountain made of the oldest hardest rocks on the planet. Are you telling me that it can’t also damage [and erode the] ideological structures’ that hold us back today?9 At a time of coming climatic and ecological instability, that instability — to echo Wayne’s sentiment — may well induce, or force, that very damage and erosion.

If you’re in need of a little hope — and a vicarious retelling of the hydro-ecological journeys of the as-ever enveloping Macfarlane — pick up a copy of Is a River Alive? I’m glad I did.

Setting the Scene

Stuck in a seemingly intrinsic morass of climatic-ecological despondency, those who care — or rather those who care to take notice, and then reach the natural and only conclusion to care — are searching desperately for a way out: a way out of an inescapable horizon precluding our imaginative, and thereby actual, capacities. Existing governance systems, whether economic, political, or legal, have failed to arrest, and in fact have undoubtedly directly caused, our calamity — and the acceleration thereof.

The evidence of this calamity is not worth repeating. One should not have to be informed for the n^th time that we are entering and are in fact already inhabiting a period of unprecedented climatic-ecological instability; inhabiting a period of time wherein carbon is being released into the atmosphere up to two orders of magnitude faster than during the End-Permian extinction 252 million years ago; inhabiting a period of time wherein one species can at supposedly conscious will choose to — or not to — eliminate taxa en masse, and arbitrarily bring individual species back into being.1

Choosing not to use degrees of warming or percentages of land cover and biomass in evidencing our calamity is deliberate. Doing otherwise implicitly and unintentionally suggests that some level of warming and some level of biodiversity loss is acceptable. It is not and should never be about what level of morass is acceptable; it must instead be about what systems of governance lead to those levels being agreed upon in the first place — about distancing ourselves from the idea that tinkering managerial interventions presently suffice.

This framing is fortunately, in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, aged. Scholars, practitioners, and communities have for centuries cultivated systems of governance that seek to offer alternatives to the status quo. Legal and political alternatives, in particular, have proven alluring. Whether expressed by an ecological democracy that seeks to integrate non-human voices through systems of guardianship or representation, legal assignation of rights that seeks to guarantee specific bounded conditions of wellbeing for all ecological actors, or (comparatively) basic provisions of ecocide that punish individual human actors and organisations for outsize climatic-ecological harm, real-world applications are aplenty. This is particularly the case for the latter.

Environmental crimes, whether mismanagement of waste, pollution of waterways, or the murder of non-human actors, are readily criminalised the world over — the limiting factor for efficacy often being a lack of resourcing, poor enforcement, and corresponding corruption. Taking the assignations of rights as the assignations of legal protection more generally, species — in the UK by, say, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and in the US by the Endangered Species Act 1973 — are readily safeguarded too. But taking rights as they are, rights, and linking these with what or where rights almost universally stem from — representation — examples are few and far between. Totems of the rights of nature movement — which, eponymously, advocates for the granting of rights to natural non-human actors — include Ecuador’s constitutional enshrining of rights to existence, flourishing, and reparation to constituents of the natural world in 2008 and the granting of representational rights to the Whanganui River in New Zealand in 2017. Both cases involved — in fact relied upon and were driven by — indigenous communities’ epistemological framings that incorporate the natural world into their systems of governance and, linkedly, their decision-making.

Yet these were ultimately, and remain, human interventions. They involved and involve the physically arbitrary imposition of anthropocentric legal rights; integration into unecological organisational superstructures that arbitrate decision-making between human and now non-human actors. And they are thus entirely the consequence of human polities agreeing to grant and continuously re-grant rights of participation to non-human polities — although non-human actors would hardly conceive of themselves that way.2 For legal remedies to our morass, to the catastrophe we find ourselves in and have caused, to have any sense of efficacy, then, they must be simultaneously political, and preferably unboundedly democratic.

This binding — this duality — of the political and legal inherently relates to the pooling of sovereignty. Taking systems of (democratic) political governance as systems of aggregated sovereignty — as systems that pool individual actors’ sovereignties — the eco-democratic deficit of our present political conceptions and relations becomes clear. We inhabit, or rather have constructed and consciously maintain, a system of tyranny: an arbitrary superimposing system of planetary decision-making that systematically excludes all but one species from those decision-making processes — a system wherein sovereignty stems from one actor.3

Yet while that system’s maintenance is conscious, its construction may have been less so. Sovereignty, while denoting a belief in the legitimacy of a system of political — typically state-led — governance, similarly denotes how that legitimacy comes about: through a monopoly on violence.4 To hold legitimacy suggests the violent denial of other legitimacies — of other claims to legitimacy. To hold legitimacy equally suggests that individual violences — individual monopolies on violence held by human actors, whether enfranchised or not — sufficiently pool to enable an aggregate monopoly on violence.5

We now understand and for some time have understood the effects of humanity’s unilaterally ‘legitimate’ political systems. Those systems are of course hardly homogenous. While all are unilateral, and all exclusively wield an eco-Weberian monopoly on violence over those non-humans they do not integrate, the practice of that unilateralism and the level of violence wielded is not equal. Epistemologies and ontologies between the human communities that each monopolise violence differ — but it remains true that, fundamentally, all systems of legal-political governance made up by human actors alone, or by an analogous supermajority, embody an inescapable eco-democratic deficit that precludes an escape from the morass the biosphere is encapsulated by.

It is this fundamental truth which occupies scholars of the rights of nature and ecological governance aplenty. Many — as Craig Kauffman and Pamela Martin describe in their The Politics of Rights of Nature — view legal systems and their political underpinnings as Newtonian, or ‘Western’; they subsequently view some indigenous communities’ integration of the natural world into those Newtonian-Western-derived systems as ‘foreign’, as unnatural. It is, too, indigenous communities who themselves view these attempts this way — as attempts to, in the words of rights of nature scholar César Rodríguez-Garavito, translate ‘the more fundamental notion that everything is alive’ into Western legal traditions.6 Whether or not legal-political systems can encapsulate the — now in the words of Kauffman and Martin — ‘complex, nested, living ecosystems whose parts are all interconnected in ways that humans do not fully comprehend’, present legal-political arrangements are ‘based on a paradigm that is out of sync with the laws governing the natural world’. Alternative paradigms, though — including those that legally-politically integrate non-humanity — are hard to come by. Those that Kauffman and Martin discuss in Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, and India, including by assessing their pathways to implementation, success, and lack thereof, fundamentally rest within the out-of-sync paradigm. It is human monopolisation of violence through the rampant use of spatiotemporally compressing technologies — of these technologies’ unapologetic development and use to serve our species’ and only our species’ ends — that precludes legal-political systems that would spell a paradigm shift. Currently tested alternatives are in any case a mirage, a fiction resulting from humanity’s needs to arbitrate and decision-make its spatiotemporal dominance.

The alternative floated by Martha Nussbaum in her Justice for Animals forefronts the understandable absurdity of direct democratic-political integration of non-humanity. Democratic-political integration, to Nussbaum, does not entail the enfranchisement of non-human voices into our voting systems; it instead entails the radical enfranchisement of non-human voices into the decision-making that our voting systems inform. She, simply put, advocates for a non-human prerogative — a sudo command — that rejigs our source code’s operation in non-human interests. That operation, in her view, is one that doesn’t typically fit into rights of nature narratives: it focusses more on the ability of all individual beings to thrive, whether for the purposes of nature restoration and conservation or for the purposes of revolutionising our food systems. To her, it is less about the rights of nature or the rights of a specific species and more about the rights of individual beings — stemming from the recognition of their (sadly not obvious to some) ability to suffer and corresponding right to flourish. Regardless of the operation’s prescriptions, though, Nussbaum’s view is essentially one of proxy representation; one that is the result of belief and faith in a liberal tradition that seeks to minimise harm. It is, according to the Berggruen Institute’s Jonathan Blake, a simultaneous rejection of liberalism’s anthropocentrism and an embrace, or ‘product’, of the liberal tradition.

Sharon Krause, in her Eco-Emancipation, goes in a similar direction as Nussbaum first does. Political and thereby legal inclusion, to her, does not equate to ‘asking cows and rainforests to vote or run for office’, but instead reserving a ‘distinctive [considered] place’ into a new ‘regime of rights’ administered by human actors. This regime of rights is to, or rather would, emphasise nondomination — the nondomination of non-humanity by humanity. Krause is pragmatic about the form that nondomination would take, acknowledging that ‘to live … is inevitably to consume, transform, and destroy’. ‘Life’, Krause rightly points out, ‘entails violence’. Yet life does not have to entail a monopoly thereon and unilateral deployment thereof. Securing a ‘comfortable life’ for humankind should not and does not need to be synonymous with ecocide. It is instead ‘a necessary condition of existence, one that holds for all living things’. This brings me back to one of my central arguments in Ecological Arbitration and the Universal Mind: the fact that life entails violence does not mean that a linear path can be drawn between the kinds and extents of ecological violence carried out by human communities throughout history to the fanatical imposition of violence orders of magnitude greater imposed today. It also, neatly, raises a related point — one equally raised by Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 commentary on social emancipation while confined in a Birmingham (Alabama, of course) jail:

‘Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but … we know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.’

With this in mind, Karen Bakker offers a narrowed vision in her Gaia’s Web. Combining the strands of Krause and King Jr., she advocates for the en masse listening ‘to our nonhuman kin’ via a digital web of sensors approximating the needs and desires of that very non-human kin at any moment — whether through remote satellite imagery or specific, individualised, bodily monitoring. Not all listening is created equal, though. Bakker herself admits that what she puts forth is instead a kind of hearing — a listening that presumes neither good nor bad faith. Whether that hearing or listening results in corresponding action is separate to the kind of Gaia-encompassing digital web she proposes.

None of these proffered solutions, then, are able to address humanity’s historically contingent yet now undoubted and seemingly inviolable monopoly on violence. In fact, proffered solutions — both those discussed here and others — accept that monopoly as an unchanging physical fact, and attempt to build epistemological, organisational, or techno-delusional solutions therearound. Our inability to surrender or redistribute the violence we hold precludes the construction of a true ecological democracy.

Yet, as Krause rightly made clear in her Eco-Emancipation, a certain degree of violence is necessary — in fact natural.7 Reducing the extent of that violence by constructing systems and institutions which limit its reach or imposition in the first instance is thereby a worthy goal, and a valuable first step. And so the thought of integrating the voices of those we impose ourselves on follows, whether through political or juridical means.8

What proceeds is a historical analogy thereof; an attempt to, partly through narrative, illustrate the disarming nature of (representative) rights of nature and the ineffective route it embodies. As ever, I strawman, heavily. Rights of nature is a broad church, encompassing simple declarations of consideration of non-human interests at the local level to legislative and even constitutional efforts at national and international levels. There is, too, a big difference between juridical and political integration, yet I treat both (relatively) equally here. My aim in doing this is fairly simple: to fully break the notion — not that others have not made attempts to do so — that non-human interests can be adequately integrated into human decision-making systems; and that any attempts to do so without first reducing our monopoly on violence are worthwhile.9 That notion, in the legal-political world of the 1760s and 1770s Anglo-Atlantic, equates to the idea of virtual representation.10

Virtual Representation

It would be an understatement to say that the eastern seaboard of North America was in a time of flux in the second half of the eighteenth century. Beset by the equivalent of Great Power rivalries today — with the Iroquois Confederacy and western settler-colonial forces like France, Britain, and Spain each competing for land and resources — (geo)political stability was a fiction. In the mid-1760s, arguably the first truly global war — world war — had passed. The Seven Years’ War stretched across continents, with France, Britain, and each of their allied forces warring in Europe whilst simultaneously battling over colonies or to-be-colonies in the Americas, the Indian subcontinent, and Southeast Asia. This warring required, necessitated, the involvement of those living in each colony being fought over — whether settlers, the colonised, or, indeed, the enslaved.11

That involvement carried with it indebtedness, both identitarian and fiscal. The Seven Years’ War proved costly — half of the British Government’s budget was used up by interest payments on the newly bloated debt alone. In the Thirteen Colonies, recovery of these fiscal costs came in the form of taxation. Recovery of identitarian costs — or rather the repayment of loyalty — came in the form of the Proclamation Line of 1763, which delimited the boundaries of the Colonies and thereby guaranteed the territories of native allies in the war — the Iroquois and Cherokee in particular.12

While the Proclamation Line proved controversial for land prospectors in the Colonies — the Founding Fathers of the United States amongst them — it was taxation that drew real (or simply more) ire. Attempts to argue for and later enforce the Stamp Act, a Westminster-derived piece of legislation that essentially taxed official documentary exchanges to render them valid (through the eponymous use of a stamp), are an example thereof.13 The Act set off over a decade of disagreement and unrest, with it (in hindsight) acting as a key justificatory pillar for American independence. Taking taxation as a natural extension of violence — of the monopoly on violence and the ability for the holders of that monopoly to wantonly use it to exact tribute — it was those who were taxed’s lack of legal-political stake in the decision-making that authorised this violence that incurred ire.

Discussing the Stamp Act in 1765 (the year of its passing), Eton-educated Maryland resident Daniel Dulany put his opposition simply:

‘It is an essential principle of the English constitution, that the subject shall not be taxed without his consent, which hath not been introduced by any particular law, but necessarily results from the nature of that mixed government; for, without it, the order of democracy could not exist.’

And countering justifications for this lack of consent and lack of representation, Dulany wrote: ‘as the representation is not actual, it is virtual, … it doth not exist at all’. The idea of virtual representation, here, is that proffered by a number of members of Parliament to counter that which Dulany argued against. Virtual representation, in the words of its key proponent George Grenville — the Prime Minister between 1763 and 1765 and the key instigator of the Stamp Act — was the idea that:

‘The Parliament of Great Britain virtually represents the whole Kingdom … [with all colonies] subject to the dominion of the mother country, whether they are a colony of the freest or the most absolute government.’

It was the idea that those with essentially zero knowledge of those that they governed, separated by entire oceans and continents, could equitably and justly make decisions on their behalf.14 It was implicitly, too, the idea that what was good for the supposed mother country — for the violent monopolist — was good for its ‘children’. Fantastically attempting to cite examples of virtual representation, contemporaries like Grenville referenced West Country cider makers facing the equivalent of an alcohol duty — itself experiencing vociferous opposition and a repeal three years after its passing — and the East India Company, famously a bastion of representative democracy, being unable to vote. It is, as Dulany — considered a small-c conservative at the time — pointed out, ridiculous:

‘[T]his argument, which is all that their invention hath been able to supply, is totally defective; for, it consists of facts not true, and of conclusions inadmissible. … the notion of a virtual representation of the colonies must fail, which, in truth, is a mere cob web [sic], spread to catch the unwary, and entangle the weak.’

Many MPs agreed. Henry Conway, a General and member of the Privy Council, orated in the same year as Dulany and Grenville:

‘They can’t be serious, when they insist even on their being virtually Represented: Will any Man in this House get up and say, he is one of the Representatives of the Colonies, when, so far from being an Object of their Choice, the most sensible Man in the Colonies scarce knows such a Gentleman exists.’

Speaking in 1766, William Pitt, the Prime Minister from that year until 1768, went further. He called it ‘the most contemptible idea that ever entered into the head of a man’. To him, it did not ‘deserve serious refutation’. And while opposition to the impositions of the British Parliament was multi-faceted — and, it is worth noting, not necessarily widespread in its early days — the core disagreement rested on a now much-repeated and well-known dictum: ‘no taxation without representation’.15 Benjamin Franklin, acting as the emissary of the Colonies’ interests in the 1760s and 1770s, claimed that:

‘I know that whenever taxation has occurred in conversation where I have been present, it has appeared to be the opinion of every one that we could not be taxed by a Parliament wherein we were not represented … [and that a] tax is forced from the people without their consent if not laid by their own representatives.’

Maurice Moore, a colonial jurist, in 1765 concluded that the idea of virtual representation was ultimately reflective of ‘a defect in the Constitution of England’. This defect was that of inherent exclusion. And it remains so — the system that imposed tyranny on colonial subjects continues to impose tyranny on non-human subjects. The system that arbitrarily imposed violence to exact tribute from colonial subjects continues to arbitrarily impose violence to exact tribute from non-human subjects. The proposition that a Parliament full of detached elites could represent those whom they subject an ocean or continent away is outlandish; as is the proposition that any agglomeration of any people could represent and act for — or in the interests of — non-human beings. The claim of inherent ecological interconnection and interreliance between human and non-human beings, while true to some extent, is interrupted by the blatant, wanton, and far-from-inevitable violence that human beings exact on fellow non-humans — in fact, exact on each other.16 And the connected claim of potential guardianship, of being able to act on behalf of a species other than one’s own or an ecosystem as a whole, is little more than a ‘polite fiction’.17 The legal-political — constitutional — defect experienced then is one we experience now. Our eco-constitutional fabric is broken.

Virtual representation was never an intellectually coherent idea. Yet it was put forward for the simple reason that offering real representation — offering a real division in the monopoly on violence Parliament arbitrated through political means — would have by definition ended that very monopoly (or rather, fundamentally altered those which it was imposed on). It would have brought into Parliament voices that intrinsically disagreed with the Government’s positions; that would have eventually outnumbered Britain-representing MPs. And so in this way, we only ever argue for virtual representation when we argue for the integration of non-human voices into human decision-making systems; when we argue for the rights of nature. Real representation would entail the destruction of our own system — of our eco-colonial, extractive, expectations.

And there is a deep irony in the fact that even real representation for the Thirteen Colonies in the 1760s would have entailed anything but. It would have entailed an integration of landed, wealthy, white, male voices from one region of the world into a Parliament filled with landed, wealthy, white, male voices from its region of the world.18 This Parliament would have continued to make arbitrary, violent, decisions for those who were landless, far from wealthy, of any shade other than white, and women. While this is an imperfect analogy and while we are far from this reality today, our legal and political systems remain inequitable, dominated by a select few interests who (increasingly) wield disproportionate influence. Any form of real non-human representation would encounter irreal human representation at the first hurdle.

Natural Rights

James Otis was one of the most prolific and renowned critics of his contemporary status quo. His contempt for the idea of virtual representation and for that idea’s proponents is not worth citing — it is self-evident in one of the more radical ideals he put forth: that of natural rights. A renowned Harvard-educated lawyer, Otis drew from John Locke’s 1689 Second Treatise of Government to argue that British colonial subjects in the Thirteen Colonies — through their lack of representation in Parliament — were having their basic, fundamental, natural rights contravened upon.19 Those rights — ‘life, liberty, and property’ — which Locke posited individuals were ‘naturally endowed with’ arose through or were derived from the ‘state of nature’. Doubtless inspired by his experiences growing up in a slave-owning family, Otis in a 1764 pamphlet claimed that:

‘in state of nature [sic] no man can take my property from me without my consent: if he does, he deprives me of my liberty and makes me a slave. If such a proceeding is a breach of the law of nature, no law of society can make it just. The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not represented appears to me to be depriving them of one of their most essential rights as freemen, and if continued seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right.’

To Otis, ‘if a man is not his own assessor in person or by deputy, his liberty is gone or lays entirely at the mercy of others’. He may as well be describing the tyranny we impose on non-human subjects today. Otis, too, critiqued the very idea of parliamentary authority — particularly how it arises, how it is and can be (re)created, and how it can preside over those it does not accept the individual sovereignty of:

‘If on this memorable and very happy event the three kingdoms and the dominions fell back into a state of nature, it will be asked “Whether every man and woman were not then equal? If so, had not every one of them a natural and equitable right to be consulted in the choice of a new King or in the formation of a new original compact or government if any new form had been made? Might not the nation at that time have rightfully changed the monarchy into a republic or any form that might seem best? Could any change from a state of nature take place without universal consent, at least without the consent of the majority of the individuals?’

Universal consent. How can a system formed without universal consent continue to justifiably exist and continue to justly impose its decisions? Consent must be continuous. ‘Is it not a first principle of the original compact that all who are bound should bind themselves? Will not common sense without much learning or study dictate obvious answers to all the above questions?’20

Were Otis ecologically inclined, he could well today be arguing for a renewed compact that reflects the rights of all planetary constituents — he could well be arguing for the rights of nature, for the natural world’s inclusion in our literal or figurative parliaments. The current doctrine of governance, to him, could be — just as the doctrine of British parliamentary sovereignty was in the 1760s and 1770s — ‘a piece of metaphysical jargon and systematical nonsense’.

Yet a rejuvenated natur-ated doctrine would conflict with the folly that such a system of governance would entail: the folly of virtual representation; the folly that rights can be asserted without their corresponding and requisite enforcement through violence — or a monopoly thereon. The rights that Otis asserted were, literally, violently disregarded. Their assertion — or their collective assertion by Otis’s contemporaries — resulted in nearly a decade of war; two violences, the British and the “American”, competing for legitimacy, demonstrating (or at least attempting to demonstrate) their supposed monopoly.21 There is no competition today. The human monopoly on violence is absolute. This monopoly daily, hourly, second-ly contravenes upon the natural rights of all those who are not represented therein; who do not participate in our exclusionary, unilateral, system of legal-political-economic governance.

And this exclusionary system contravenes upon all beings’ natural rights, upon the state of nature it is based. The system’s — our — monopoly on violence is an aberration. It is not inherent to our existence. As Sharon Krause rightly argued, any kind of emancipatory framework would accept this. Our basic needs as defined by our extra-exploitative behaviour today are far from basic. And as I argued in Ecological Arbitration and the Universal Mind, the epistemological, organisational, and technological underpinnings of that behaviour did not have to end up the way they (for the moment) have. Otis expressed this differently:

‘Government is founded immediately on the necessities of human nature and ultimately on the will of God, the author of nature, who has not left it to men in general to choose whether they will be members of society or not, but at the hazard of their senses if not of their lives.’

In our case, it is the author of nature’s will — the natural world in itself, thereby nature’s will — that is unreflected in our system of governance. This system’s self-centred predilection for its only proponent is bizarre. An Otis of today would likely argue that government should be founded exclusively on the necessities of nature — its constituents being human or otherwise; where, the Otis of 1764 argued, the right to representation and inclusion in a system of overriding authority ‘seems to have placed them originally’. Locke’s conception of the state of nature was such that it guaranteed rights to (in practice, a select group of) humankind. A more accurate conception of the state of nature would consider the rights to domination we claim as incompatible therewith — as incentivising that state’s very destruction. It would, more than anything, consider that any supposed natural rights we claim would be matched by equal rights for other, non-human, actors.

Tying Things Together

I have thus far presented two strands. First, I contended that rights of nature as a solution to the morass we find ourselves in is a red herring. Whether implemented in a political or juridical form, and to whatever “extent” it may be implemented to, its base presumption of virtually representing and acting on behalf of non-human beings is ill-fated. Second, I contended that natural rights as conceived in the American revolutionary years should be recycled for the ecological revolution we so dearly need today. By doing this I essentially concurred with rights of nature scholars and practitioners, and revealed an inherent contradiction in my overall argument.

At the same time, the natural rights that James Otis vociferously propounded in the 1760s were only backed up by the violence the Colonies later mustered against the monopolist — the British coloniser. The monopoly on violence in today’s case, in our case, though, falls entirely in our hands. Our eco-colonial subjects are thereby left helpless.22

While many of my critiques against the concept of the rights of nature are contained in the prequel to this essay, it is worth raising two in full here. First, any implementation, whether political or legal, would not signal a departure from the status quo — it would simply rearrange the logic of a superimposing decision-making structure that arbitrates between different human, non-human, and non-sentient material actors that currently works towards only human ends. Its ability to consider other ends is hamstrung by the fact that those other ends are unable to assert their needs. Second, rights of nature is partly easy to advocate for because — at its fullest extent — it is an irreality. Any abstract concept has the potential to prove revolutionary, precisely because abstract concepts are abstract; irreal. The reason I present a line of argument against the rights of nature despite aligning myself with its advocates’ ideals is because I believe, in practice, that however currently implemented — whether in Spain, New Zealand, or Ecuador — or prospectively implemented it acts and will act as a justificatory consultative framework for our system of inherently human-dominated resource arbitration; a system underpinned by our inherent monopoly on violence. By consuming rhetorical oxygen, rights of nature discourse embodies an alluring, elusive, fiction.

Proponents would here point to the diversity of rights of nature discourse and practices — diversity that I explicitly put aside early in this essay. I will here acknowledge that diversity. Yes, rights of nature can take a constitutional pathway. Yes, it can take a legislatively guaranteed guardianship-aligned pathway. Yes, it can take a path of legal personhood for defined ecological entities. And yes, it can take the path of a local council voting protective provisions for its local river through; or simply hosting an Interspecies Council-type workshop. But the emergent properties a widespread and attemptively coherent implementation of rights of nature may embody are unknown. All that is known is that whatever decisions those altered systems may reach will continue to be dominated by human voices. Arguing at a small scale and arguing at a systemic, large, scale are two fundamentally different things.23 That is not to say that the status quo is any better. But the solutions the status quo offers — hard, direct, enforcement of environmental limits — are simple (and proven). And not deceptively so. The monopoly on violence we do hold can be used for good, and quickly.

But that counter-argument is well-trodden, and not necessarily one I wish to dissect here. I would like to instead acknowledge the limits of the historical analogy I made: the purpose of the comparison is to remove ourselves from present contexts. Arguing against what would today be deemed virtual representation would be brushed aside — legal-political rights of nature approaches are inherently virtually representative. Yet citing removed historical and historic argument on that representation’s validity is likelier to legitimise debate. Another limit is the admittedly false dichotomy I have set up. To be clear: it is not an either or. It is not an all-out cows-running-for-office, as Martha Nussbaum put it, or subjugatory human-imposed ecological totalitarianism. There is room for a middle path, but that path requires a practical and rhetorical temperance — an eco-realpolitik — that I have sought to justify the need for in this essay.

So I have backed myself into a rhetorical corner. I disagree with those I agree with and agree with those I disagree with. My critique lands entirely on our unwillingness to reckon with our inviolable monopoly on violence and its inextricable consequences on the human systems that we, humans, use to govern the world — the planet. So to conclude, I want to — within reason and without false hope — question this inviolability; to question this stubborn intransigence.

The unilateralism that I have claimed our monopoly on violence expresses is false. Yes, we can essentially eliminate any non-human being and the biome(s) they inhabit at will; as can we alter the biogeochemical makeup of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans. But that exhibits a unilateralism and monopoly present over only short time horizons. A monopoly on violence can only exist if those without monopolies do — if those that violence is both imposed on and fed by exist. Monopolists are not lonely elements inhabiting a vacuum. They remain interdependent, and if they kill all those they depend on they themselves will die. And while our interdependence may not substantively bare its teeth now or even in the next few decades, it is the meta-monopolist on violence — the aggregate planetary monopoly that we have disrupted — that will reign supreme in the end.

This meta-monopolist’s violence transcends any form we hold and can ourselves impose today. The energy the planet will-lessly, indiscriminately, and arbitrarily forces on its inhabitants exceeds by orders of magnitude the nuclear capacities we can wield. That energy is, by its non-sentient nature, patient too. Whether tectonic or climatic, it acts wantonly and without a remorseful(/less) guiding framework. It is in this sense secure — contrasting with the insecure, determinately indeterminate nature of our violence; that insecurity stemming from short-termist, narrow, and unknowledgeable inclinations that do little for our and others’ long-term wellbeing. The durability of our own monopoly is thereby fragile, subject to the exigencies of our internal deliberations.

Yet until our supremacy is demonstrably superseded by the meta-monopolist’s, the need to arbitrate our spatiotemporal dominance through the organisational structures we take as givens — whether legal, political, or economic — will predominate. And that need may well preclude the ecological revolution non-humanity requires yet cannot itself pursue. Monopolies on violence are never voluntarily ceded when that cession entails a collapse in the monopolist’s stature and wellbeing. A slight decline may be acceptable; but a collapse, perhaps not. A revolution, though, can be relative. It may not need to be borne from revolutionaries — it may instead be birthed by those the figurative revolutionaries oppose: the pre-counter-revolutionaries; namely, us. Through our own failure, we may well create the groundwork for an ecological revolution: for a spatiotemporal clearance of monopolies on violence that stands to rebalance the ecologies that make up the planet — that make up the Earth.

Just Earth comes at a particularly unjust and unearthly time. Mounting inequalities and crystallising environmental crises characterise the present day, and this forms the basis of Tony Juniper’s two-fold argument. First, the crises we face are caused and worsened by the inequalities that pervade our societies, and to adequately address these crises, those very inequalities must be overcome. Second, the crises we face disproportionately affect those least responsible for their arisal — and this needs to be acted upon as a matter of justice.

Juniper’s argument, spread across 12 chapters, is big: it draws on a wide range of scholarship, conversations with topical experts, and his own extensive experience in the world of environmental policy at BirdLife International, Friends of the Earth, and Natural England. He touches on the origins of industrialisation, modern efforts — in the form of international climate treaties — to avert the crises we face, and the multifarious consequences of socioeconomic inequalities. The recounting of his exhaustion-induced collapse at negotiations for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is accompanied by the sobering reminder of the deeply human consequences of climatic collapse: whether compromised livelihoods for smallholder farmers or communities’ displacement as a result of sea level rise.

The diverse forms of inequality, too, are examined: between geographies, genders, races, and generations, to name a few; and expressed both in wealth and income disparities and in gaps in educational opportunities. The discriminatory impacts of pollution are discussed in the contexts of Friends of the Earth’s Factory Watch in the UK — an early open-source pollution monitoring platform — and local communities’ efforts to combat timber extraction in Borneo.

Criticisms of iniquitous resource consumption, obsessions with uncritical economic growth (measured, importantly, by GDP) and the ‘false’, destructive, choice of cheap food and energy follow. Juniper emphasises the need to reconnect with the natural world, to challenge the narratives of consumerism and the status derived therefrom, and to provide compensation for those affected by the climate crisis. He also emphasises the need for the transition to a juster, earthlier, future to be just that — just: to take account of the impacts that the transition will have, whether in the form of resource extraction or otherwise.

Juniper spoils us with both a set of actionable recommendations and an overarching vision, the latter being that of ‘thrivalism’: of emphasising wellbeing over material wealth, of emphasising societal satisfaction over inanimate economic growth. This vision and its underlying arguments, though, require some mitigation.

Its historical allusions, linking contemporary socioeconomic inequalities to the early exploits of empire, are deeply teleological. The painting of colonialism and industrialisation as a singular, conjoined, process proves problematic too. Its contingent nature would have been worth exploring — causally linking a series of events in one century with a series of events in another should always come with a pinch of salt.

This teleological logic additionally applies to Juniper’s referencing of indigenous communities’ ecological wisdom. This appears throughout the book but is emphasised in its last chapter, falsely dichotomises ‘western’ and ‘indigenous’ cultures, and unduly monolithises the latter. This monolithisation disregards the innate diversity among and between indigenous peoples: their epistemologies vary immensely, and this, as explored by Shepherd Krech III and other scholars in the North American context, can serve to in fact emphasise their agency — either to exploit or not exploit the natural world. These rhetorical mitigations are particularly important as Juniper’s vision of ‘thrivalism’ partly depends on an epistemological revolution that taps into supposed indigenous wisdom.

Juniper’s critique of GDP as a measure of economic wellbeing could have used further analysis as well. This is particularly given his emphasis on the contrast between growth and (in)equality — efforts to reduce inequality can have a more positive effect on growth as the fiscal multiplier of redistributive government spending is stronger. Discussion of how recent growth has been more loosely correlated with carbon emissions, too, would have been a welcome addition.

These points, however, do not fault Just Earth’s broader argument. The book makes a convincing case for the inextricable relationship between our socioeconomic conditions and our climatic and ecological outcomes. Juniper infuses a typically scientific debate with genuine, heartfelt, humanity — more an economic-historical treatise than a product of environmental activism, it is a real call to arms.

Proselytising boosters of AI and AGI often speak in civilisational terms. If we don’t maximally pursue the development of artificial intelligence, so claim American boosters, China will. And if we don’t maximally pursue the development of artificial intelligence, so claim Chinese boosters, America will. With civilisational victory comes civilisational expansion; the spread of the values these (supposed) intelligences embody. With loss comes subsumption; the death of the values these (supposed) intelligences oppose.

This framing bears a remarkable resemblance to the Great Divergence: the study of the technological and institutional bifurcation between primarily western nations — like the United Kingdom — and China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The technological, fiscal, and military might of the latter was superseded by the former’s industrialising prowess — culminating in a series of humiliating defeats that figuratively and literally pieced the Chinese empire apart.

Reasonings for the Great Divergence are manifold, typically the preserve of economic historians like Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson — who jointly won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences last year in recognition of their research highlighting the importance of social institutions in economies’ developmental trajectories. The conclusions of Mark Elvin, an environmental historian who specialised in the history of China, pointed elsewhere: to the idea of technological lock-in.

Technological lock-in is a multivalent concept. Its applications stretch from QWERTY — the almost-universal layout of Latin-script keyboards — to the internal combustion engine; concerning itself with how the initial shape technological adoption takes predetermines and often constricts later innovation. In the Elvinian sense, technological lock-in has a greater relation to power and politics than it does to technology in itself. Elvin’s reasoning for the Great Divergence placed emphasis on post-Song and mid-Qing dynasty resource-intensive hydrological management systems.1

These systems, partly centring on Hangzhou Bay — which sits between Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Ningbo on the eastern coast of China — allocated and concentrated massive amounts of capital and labour to create and subsequently maintain hydrological infrastructure projects. This infrastructure altered the region’s — and empire’s — waterways to such an extent that new lifeways developed therearound. A network of constructed dams, dykes, and seawalls allowed for the conversion of more land to higher-yielding agriculture, as well as a more efficient water-based transport system. Both of these factors resulted in urban areas’ later expansion, too.

Crucially, the prosperity that this network enabled predetermined its continued maintenance. Expanded agricultural production and its accompanying developments legitimised political power — it was consequently the role of the politically powerful to ensure that converted land continued to be protected; to remain converted. Hydrological systems were thereby self-justifying. Regional and imperial prosperity depended thereon, so the capital and labour required for maintenance naturally followed.

This resulted in Elvinian technological lock-in: the resources required to maintain economic prosperity and political legitimacy were bound up, shut away from alternative (often technological) interventions that may have avoided the Divergence that later came. Investments in hydrological infrastructure, say, precluded greater investment in the Chinese empire’s naval fleet, or in the empire’s exploitation of coal resources. The opportunity cost was immense. Worse, it is not as if all potentialities were on the cards at all times — it is that other potentialities were not conceived of given the default direction capital and labour took. There was no reason to innovate. There was in fact a disincentive to innovate, as any rerouting of resources would undermine politico-economic power bases.

Pre-Technological Lock-In

AI boosters would likely point to Elvin’s thesis as a lesson to learn from; as a reason to accelerate the adoption and development of AI and AGI respectively. This is misguided. One could just as easily conclude that AI boosters are today’s hydrological engineers, and the leaders of big tech — as well as the leaders of nations and regions that seek to win this supposed race we are observing — those who draw power from the systems they themselves set out.2 The current rush of capital into data centre development, the funnelling of VC cash into AI-centred startups, and the outsize role AI-centric investment is playing in US (and global) economic growth should arouse our suspicions — when boosters draw their legitimacy and power from the continued success of whatever it is they boost, they will by-default exaggerate to get their way.

This comparison has some rough edges. In the first instance, the difference between lock-in and the definite bubble we are at present experiencing has to be set out: bubbles don’t typically relate to the power of progenitors. They instead relate almost entirely to their financial wellbeing; to their wealth. Progenitors boost precisely because it is in their financial interest to do so. The bubbles of times past — whether Dot-com of this millennium, South Sea of the eighteenth century, or the tulip mania of the seventeenth — did not usually exhibit the potentially transformative hold artificial intelligence could have over knowledge, productive capacities, and the outputs of entire economies. Further to this, today’s progenitors are not advocating for the maintenance of a fixed technological state. They are instead advocating for a pre-technological state; for a specific (continually upward) trajectory.

Yet this pre-technological lock-in still observes characteristics of an actual technological lock-in: the inextricability of resource allocation and power; the (inefficient) concentration of capital and labour; and the opportunity cost, or rather the path dependency, of the technological future being envisioned. The $3tn being pumped into data centre infrastructure, and the hundreds of billions more that will relatedly be deployed to guarantee those data centres’ electricity supplies, is a fathomably unfathomable amount of capital that is not being allocated elsewhere. The ~$800bn needed annually until 2030 to electrify the world’s grid systems, for one, is hardly being met: a third of this, as of the end of last year, is all that’s flowing.

To put that into perspective, $1.6tn of the $3tn being pumped into data centres by 2028 consists of GPU purchases — primarily from Nvidia — alone. If those purchases were redirected into grid electrification, targets would be met overnight. And that is not considering the hundreds of billions of VC dollars being funnelled into AI startups with increasingly detached valuations that rest on their eventual incestuous acquisition by big tech — who are themselves reinforcing each others’ lofty valuations by getting overly cosy with one another. Those dollars could and should instead be directed towards the hard work being done in decarbonisation and nature recovery; missions that are likely to deliver more consistent and stable planetary returns, and foster a climatic-ecological humanity-wide path-dependent divergence away from a less-than-stable climato- and bio-sphere.3

Consequences

Rather than the need for power dictating technology, as it did in hydrological post-Song China, the need for technology is now dictating power. The desire to come out on top, both within the tech industry and between states and supposed civilisations, is dictating the relentless allocation of capital to potentially fruitless ends. In this sense, the pursuit of AI and AGI can be seen as a resource-intensive cementing of control, promising to bestow the ‘victor’ with imaginably unimaginable power.4

This may come at a cost. Much like China’s emphasis on hydrological infrastructure paid dividends in its early construction — partly enabling its relative dominance until the dawn of industrialisation — AI may well prove initially, or at some point, at least a little valuable. Its use cases are clear; its revolutionary potential, less so.5 Yet by obsessive-compulsively pursuing a singular technology and opportunity-costingly part-forgoing alternative investments, humanity as a whole as well as its individual states and ‘civilisations’ could be setting themselves up for an impoverished path-dependent future. And most importantly — whether that future is impoverished or not — we are further building up and consecrating systems of power that embed the interests of technology and its progenitors.

That power will in all likelihood be heightened as artificial intelligence embeds itself in military processes. Whether applied in coordinated, autonomous, drone-based conflict or in direct cyberwarfare, the potential to fall behind adversaries — or rather the fear of falling behind adversaries — is acute. Fear will drive adoption — and drive the non-adoption of other alternative technologies; or military pathways that avoid direct confrontation.

We are, though, reassuringly pre- a technological lock-in. Elvin’s diagnosis does not yet apply to the continued (mis)allocation of capital in our economies to maintain the status quo — rather, to attempt to build it. We can still avoid true lock-in. One can envision what this might look like. Trillions spent on GPUs that depreciate by a third a year and require continual renewal and replacement. If the widespread deployment of AI and AI-derived technologies was to come about, and if it were to (part-)replace human labour, a future wherein entire economies become virtual vassals of GPU developers and manufacturers is possible — beholden to the likes of Nvidia and AMD. What might eventually be trillions per year spent on renewal and replacement alone would suck capital away from other, more noble, and perhaps higher-yielding alternatives. Instead of dams, dykes, and levees locking us in, it might well be CUDA.

That is an unhappy future, and one hopes that the current cycle of technological investment turns out to be more of a bubble than a lock-in. If the latter, our developmental trajectory — and our very wellbeing — may be unduly and degradingly affected. Regardless, what is equally worrying is the lock-in of time, attention, and rhetoric we presently see — and are perhaps ourselves guilty of. The current cycle of capital allocation is matched by a corresponding intellectual allocation; the spending of our finite intellectual energy investing in and discussing the development of artificial intelligence. We are speaking less about other potentialities; other matters that may matter more than those we are presently obsessing over. When facing existential challenges other than those which AI-doomers propound, the oxygen-, energy-, and capital-hungry requirements of our current technological arc may prove dangerous.

This essay began as a follow-up to my previous piece — The Enshittification of Nature and the Limits of State Intervention — on the limits of existing nature finance paradigms. It turned into a dissertation-length set of musings that discuss the rights of nature movement, the supposed need for ecological democracy, and the issues economic approaches exhibit when attempting to arrest present climatic-ecological crises. It is filled with footnoted qualifications and mitigations — partly representative of my inner dialogue — and manages to link Trotskyite and Hayekian thought with humanity’s management of ecological systems.

The essay is split into four chapters, each of which can be read individually and one at a time (although I would encourage reading them in sequence). They are as follows:

1. The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis

2. Legal (and Democratic) Arbitration

3. Economic Arbitration and the Universal Mind

4. An Ecological Subsidiarity?

Do enjoy, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below or by popping me an email.

The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis1

The history of humanity is a history of ecological domination: the domination of non-humanity, of non-humans. The ecosystems we have inhabited and continue to inhabit have been morphed — manipulated — beyond recognition, shaped to cater to human needs and desires. We have razed forests, ploughed grasslands, emptied and acidified oceans; we have eutrophied water bodies, polluted the air, and forcibly displaced — if not exterminated — countless species through direct exploitation and habitat destruction. This history is universal, differing only in extents. Palaeolithic communities exterminated megafauna through concerted hunting campaigns; Han dynasty China deforested upland forests to such a degree that subsequent eroded silt flows formed the land Shanghai sits on today; and early modern indigenous communities in northeastern North America — and, in fact, across the continent — participated in a fur and hide trade that decimated fur- and hide-bearing non-human species.2 This pattern is visible no matter what human community is examined in whatever period of time it may be examined in — expressing a spatiotemporal dominance that has allowed, and continues to allow, humanity to alter its environs at will.

The source of this dominance fills volumes. Scholars have attempted to locate ecological relations that expressed otherwise — departed from for whatever reasons the subjects of that study may have had. These attempts embody a (fruitless) Edenic approach, searching for a supposed baseline human-non-human harmony: when and where was that apple picked from its tree, and who or what was the snake that convinced Adam and Eve’s derivations to do so? The snake, here, embodies epistemological, organisational, and technological changes.

Epistemological reasonings for spatiotemporal dominance focus on shifts in how human communities thought about their relationship(s) with non-human beings and the natural world.3 These reasonings typically argue that a shift in relational thinking — one wherein human communities see themselves as a part of a greater, fragile, whole that needs to be, at least to a certain extent, both selfishly and selflessly preserved — to mechanistic and dualistic thinking — wherein ecosystems and their constituent non-human beings are seen as entirely separate and purely as ends to human needs, and nothing more — brought us to where we are today.4 Traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is often cited as a set of epistemologies we departed from; Cartesian dualism and Judaeo-Christian monotheism as epistemologies we transitioned to, amongst others.

Organisational reasonings supplement these, supposing that the ways human communities organised themselves, the ways in which they allocated resources, and the ways in which they made decisions resulted in their historic domination of the non-human world. Organisational reasonings narrow epistemological equivalents — placing emphasis on their practical implementation.5 A mechanistic way of thought that reduces the natural world into atomistic parts that serve discrete purposes for human communities, for example, could be and in fact was translated into economic models that took that thinking as their basis. Systems that focussed on the accumulation of capital, and the maximally — numerically — efficient distribution of resources, were informed thereby; non-human actors viewed as own-able entities to be endlessly exploited, their agency stripped in entirety. Equally, legal systems, taken as reflections of our social norms and cultural values, emerged and morphed, placing pre-eminence on the needs and desires of the singular human over the ecological whole. And political systems, particularly representative political systems, led to the prioritisation of their human constituents’ interests — the historical exclusion of specific human interests being anthropocentrically demonstrative of this fact.

Technological reasonings fit into both epistemological and organisational frameworks, usually succeeding the former and preceding the latter.6 The discovery, creation, adoption, and use of technologies, so the logic goes, was informed by epistemological shifts (or often mere historical accidents) that subsequently reshaped human communities’ relationships with space and time. Technologies are ultimately spatiotemporal compressors, allowing human communities to impose their wills over greater swathes of space in less time than they were previously able to — particularly relative to their non-human counterparts. The technologies in question varied: compressors can be as simple and primitive as spears or bows and arrows, which increased hunting efficacy. They can also be as complex as the carriers of people and information today, encompassing physical and digital infrastructure. They can, too, seem inherent: the use of language, particularly in written form, bridges time and therethrough allows for accumulated learning. Whatever the technologies in question might be, human communities’ abilities to impose themselves grew; the ways they organised themselves, then, adapted accordingly — expressive of the need to manage their expanded reach.7

Whether the creation and adoption of technologies that alter our relationship with the natural world is inevitable — this being itself much-debated, with some arguing that their development and use are phenotypical expressions — the fact of the matter is that this very relationship has been deeply altered, irrevocably.8 Obsessing over precise points of departure — and calling for the reversion thereto — is not necessarily constructive. Instead, we should obsess over the (continuous) symptoms of departure. We should obsess over the ways human spatiotemporal dominance is managed; how our expanded ability to choose or not choose to make particular decisions that impact fellow beings is arbitrated. Without invoking the clichéd metaphor — because it would be undue to refer to humanity’s spatiotemporal penchant as a disease — it is easier to treat and target symptoms when their cause is unresolved.

Ecological systems arbitrate decision-making and resource allocation simply. They play discrete actors against one another; competing, cooperating, often melding into one or two (or more); selfishly interrelating for their own benefit, to perpetuate — knowingly or unknowingly — their genetic substance. Each actor is, relatively speaking, bounded — their spatiotemporal influence correlated, in the short-term, with the bounds of their body. To be clear, these bounds are hardly absolute. Think of beavers and their dams, termites and their mounds, or dolphins and their use of tools. I am not attempting to promote a unitary view of biology, yet actors’ interconnection and interdependency should not be mistaken for a complete lack of discreteness.9

Ecological and planetary history is dictated by this sometimes orderly, sometimes chaotic, never-quite-predictable system of arbitration. Simple phenomena like carrying capacity are classic examples, with actors competing for resources across space over time. If one is able to impose themselves over greater space in lesser time, they may access more resources — to their and their progeny’s benefit. That is not to say that these systems operate in equilibrium — far from it. But the rules those disequilibria abide by are ecologically fixed; the equilibrium in question is dynamic.

This is a flexible model. It is not hard and fast; nor is it drawn from any specific theory of ecology. It is instead a description (or definition) of ecology itself, of how ecological actors interact and interrelate. Exceptions are most obviously temporal: species’ bounds change as they evolve, and as they recursively niche-construct the environments they inhabit. Species’ influence, too, is not necessarily correlated with their individual reach — one only has to refer to perhaps the most positively consequential event for aerobic life in this planet’s history: cyanobacteria’s collective oxygenation of the Earth’s atmosphere.

This model illustrates humanity’s superseding of ecological systems with its own; the replacement of ecological communicational systems — wherein actors’ wants and needs are allocated according to the uninterested hand of evolution and species’ preferences are expressed purely by their ability to impose them — with human communicational systems; wherein each element, each actor, is willessly assigned representational values according to human wants and needs.10 And those representational values, mirroring the human organisational systems they derive from, are legal, political, and economic.11

Those values, here, equate to the weight actors are assigned.12 These weights are influenced by all sorts: the utility, whether practical or aesthetic, that actors serve; actors’ abilities to communicate (in the literal sense) their preferences, or have their preferences be interpretable in the first instance; and the power actors embody — their direct influence over human affairs.13 The corresponding value actors are assigned in organisational systems can include particular statutory or fundamental legal rights, say, or a literal dollar value when economically allocative decisions are made.

By emphasising communication between actors, and how actors’ differing preferences are arbitrated, we can begin re-altering — or rather de-altering — our relationship with the natural world. We should focus on how we communicate rather than what we communicate; not on the content of that which we shout at non-human beings, but on the fact that we shout at them in the first place (and what enables us to do so). By doing this, we can realise that our shouting is both unproductive — harming our relationship with the natural world, and thereby ourselves — and far from inevitable. Our vocal range is not permanently set to its present maximum volume; it just so happens to have found itself where it is today through the contingent discovery, creation, adoption, and use of particular technologies. Just as we have raised our volume, we can lower it.

Before going on, I thought it would be useful to visualise the communicational breakdown I have outlined above. In the below diagram, each permeable circle is representative of an ecosystem actor. Circles interrelate and overlap, being simultaneously dependent on and independent of one another. No permanent order exists — imagine each circle vibrating continuously, bouncing off the walls of the universal set much like we bounce off the walls of the planet we inhabit. Despite this, each actor, each circle, is identifiable in a particular instance; they and their bounds are relatively discrete — aligning with their ability to impose.

In this second diagram, the bounds of two human communities have been identified. Secondary circles around these communities have been added to illustrate their expanded ability to impose themselves on fellow non-human beings, following the adoption of particular technologies over any one period of time. These secondary circles or additional bounds are not hard, much like the bounds that they supersede. They are permeable and in flux. They overlap the literal and figurative ecological space taken up by other ecosystem actors — and it is this space that humanity’s organisational-communicational systems attempt to manage, having supplanted their ecological predecessor. And it is this management that presupposes poor ecological outcomes.14

Countless critiques have framed our present position in this way. The form and function of extractive, capitalist, statist, or planned economic systems have been assigned blame for the climatic and ecological crises we are experiencing today; as have the form and function of present legal systems, or those of representative or totalitarian political systems. Alternative organisational arrangements to these have been floated. In my previous essay on these matters I looked at two such economic — natural capital-geared statist and private actor-driven — alternatives. I will now look at alternative legal and democratic arrangements, as well as economic arrangements in a broader sense. I focus on rights of nature approaches, ecorepresentationalism, and a variety of economic frameworks, with the aim less to critique these approaches in isolation — although I definitely engage therein — and more to use these critiques to make a larger argument about the ways human organisational frameworks are imposed on the ecologies we inhabit and live alongside. I will set out why proposed reforms to existing human organisational-communicational systems are intrinsically unable to arrest the continued degradation of Earth’s biosphere. My intention is to focus on the mechanics of human organisational-communicational systems, and how these mechanics’ incongruity with their ecological counterparts makes them an ill-suited set of solutions. My interventions serve as a springboard to marry the thinking of the seemingly incongruous Leon Trotsky, Friedrich Hayek, and James Scott — applying the idea of the universal mind in an ecological context.15

Legal (and Democratic) Arbitration

Legal systems exist to moderate — arbitrate — relationships; they exist to lay down a set of ground rules that actors the systems encompass must abide by; and lay down a subsequent set of ground rules that allow for conflict resolution should those rules be ignored.16 They, then, essentially act as a communicative system between human individuals and organisations. For non-human actors, they assign representational value in two ways: by granting specific legal protections that must be considered when public and private decisions on resource use and allocation are made; and by giving actors legal standing in themselves, however conceived. The former statutory route — think of the Endangered Species Act in the United States or the Habitats Directive in the EU — has had mixed success (look at the state of the natural world today).17 The latter route has subsequently received more attention in recent years, with some proponents arguing that environmental wrongs are attributable to the wronged’s lack of legal standing.18 Viewed this way, climatic and ecological collapse is partly a legislative failure — the refusal to integrate and thereby listen to non-human needs in our decision-making structures. Decisions to, say, hunt blue whales, were and are the result of their not having particular legal rights — a direct result of their not having democratic rights to ensure these. Equally, decisions to dam river deltas or raze forests to the ground were and are the result of these ecosystems not having legal standing of any kind, nor a chance to make the case for this. Our backdrop is thereby one of ecological tyranny.

The logic, then, follows that if non-human constituents of the planet we inhabit would gain representation, and would by extension gain rights to life and non-harassment, the polycrisis we face would disappear — or at the very least peter out. Such is the thinking of the rights of nature movement, a subset of earth jurisprudence, framing the issue as one of both a basic moral cause and as a recognition of other species’ ecosystemic utility. This is typically expressed by the idea of legal personhood — considering the natural world’s actors as legal persons with the same rights as other juridical persons.19

Proponents point to a number of successful examples, the most famous among these being the TEK-informed Ecuadorian Constitution. Its articles, 71 to 74 in particular, clearly outline not just the rights of ecosystems and their constituent species to protection against harm, but the rights these ecosystems and their constituent species have to restoration following historical harm. Human communities, too, are granted a clear right to a healthy and healthful environment. These provisions have repeatedly shown teeth. The most recent example of this was a case concerning the country’s national mining company, Enami EP. Prospective copper and gold mines in Los Cedros — a protected cloud forest in the north-west of the country — were ruled to be violating the constitutional rights of the forest and its inhabitants. The mines’ permits were withdrawn after local communities took the case to the Supreme Court.

Other examples that rest on indigenous relational understandings of the natural world exist too. The Māori and the Kiwi government granted the Whanganui River personhood in 2017, with the Māori having regarded them as a common ancestor to be protected. The Yurok of present-day California replicated this in 2019, granting the Klamath River — recently undammed and now free-flowing — legal personhood in their tribal courts. The Ojibwe White Earth Nation of present-day Minnesota echoed another aspect that same year: the rights of human beings to a healthful environment. Wild rice, or manoomin, deserved legal protection to ensure the continued wellbeing of the Nation’s descendants.

Legal systems are inseparable from their political antecedents. They draw their legitimacy therefrom, relying on attestations of sovereignty to ground-truth their judgements. The exclusion of all but one of the biosphere’s constituents undermines that ground-truthing from the outset. The need for an ecorepresentational law, as described by Jonathon Keats at the Earth Law Centre, is thereby . Non-human actors necessitate standing in the political structures that influence the legislative outcomes which affect them.20

Whether democratic or otherwise, non-human worlds are as political as ours. Female African buffalo, for example, have been recorded standing and staring in particular directions and sitting back down for (seemingly) no apparent reason. This is in fact an expression of a voting mechanism that dictates herd movements — once a majority of buffalo stand up and gaze in the same direction, it becomes their direction of travel. Similar behaviour is exhibited by herds of red deer — they typically only move after Rule XXII of the US Senate is met: more than 60% of adults must stand up in agreement.21 Flora and fungi also exhibit democratic tendencies, famously collaborating and distributing resources via mycorrhizal networks that equitably redistribute resources according to need — a kind of congress of trees. Autocratic expressions in the non-human world exist too. Chimpanzees’ sometime-reliance on brute force bypasses the coalition-building ballot box, while spotted hyenas’ elevation to rule is determined by lineage — a quasi-monarchy of sorts. Examples of integration between human and non-human political worlds, though, are limited, precisely because it is difficult for non-human actors to communicate their preferences in the human-expected form, and because their integration would be presupposed by a willing direct loss of control by humans themselves (more on this later).

Partly because of this, it is illusory to think that rights of nature as a model can address the sheer ecological poverty of the present day — remedying it and bringing us into some utopian nirvana of coexistence and harmony. Seen this way, the approach has some fatal flaws; flaws that are particularly fatal if the desired end goal of the approach’s implementation(s) is that of restoring not just ecological intactness, but function and dynamism too. These fall into two categories: fundamental concerns relating to its logic; and more practical concerns relating to its application. Let’s address the approach’s practical concerns first.22

Presently, different human actors with differing resources bend the law to their will, able to afford better representation and take proactive legal action in their favour. There is inbuilt inequality, although this can at times be partly mitigated when legal aid schemes are well-resourced. The lack of representation non-human actors would and do receive in legal systems imbued with rights of nature would mirror that seen in purely human legal systems. Whether it be in civil or criminal cases, those with more cash afford themselves greater privilege. It is hard to imagine a system wherein resources would be actively and at scale reallocated to those — non-humans — with a greater need that we can hardly relate to in the first instance.23

Litigative knowledge gaps are a major difficulty too. These are twofold: the first is the lack of evidence to pursue civil or criminal cases; the second, relatedly, is the lack of knowledge that cases can be pursued in the first place: whether actors who are the victims of uncivil or criminal behaviour know, and can communicate, that what has been done to them can be remedied in court — or whether someone (a human) can know of those happenings and pursue remedies on their behalf. Our understanding of relational ecology, wherein we fully comprehend and can model the interactions between varied ecosystem actors, is limited. Given legal systems are essentially formal processes that arbitrate between human actors (relying on the knowledge of how those human actors make and weigh decisions) translating the limited understanding we have of non-human actors into these systems is unwise.24

The integration of non-human interests into human legal systems is, too, entirely dependent on our willingness to surrender control — to gift, to grant, rights to those who cannot otherwise fight for them. This is given the fact that legal systems are derived from their political equivalents — the assignation of rights is dependent on those being assigned rights’ ability to participate politically. A reformed legal system that would, then, give non-human beings rights without their ability to substantively comment thereon is inherently flawed — we would be assigning rights to the mute. And a reformed legal and political system that would grant non-human beings respective rights and representation would involve a ceding of sovereignty and control that is hard to envision. Sovereignty (typically) arises from a monopoly on violence — which, in this case, humanity would maintain through its spatiotemporal dominance. That ceding, then, would have to be the result of a benevolence that is continuously and vociferously maintained.25

Even considering a surrender of sovereignty, the necessary direct communication of non-human constituents’ interests is essentially impossible. Our knowledge of ecosystems and the actors they consist of is deeply limited — we’ve hardly catalogued all species on earth, hardly understood all their functions, and are hardly able to calculate their respective needs and desires. Advancements in technology that would allow us to listen to non-human counterparts — like current artificial intelligence-fuelled projects that look to decode sperm whales’ language — may well part-solve this.26 But they ignore the fact that even those we can and do communicate with face systematic discrimination and destruction: look to any human-on-human genocide in history for evidence thereof, including those taking place in the hyper-communicative world we live in today. They also ignore the fact that human-non-human communication may take place in bad faith — what is to stop justifiable vengeance for past wrongs being taken by non-humans through deceptive means?

Another practical weakness that alludes to the fundamental challenges integrating the natural world into our legal systems pose is the weighing of ecosystem actors’ interests against each other — not just the weighing of their interests against ours. Weighing human against non-human demands is relatively simple: don’t raze the forest to the ground, or don’t blast that bit of seabed.27 Doing so would be a clear violation of non-human interests — essentially an act of ecological genocide; ecocide. But what about the interests of an orca pod, or an individual orca, against a seal’s? How would a legal system decide whether hunting is justified?28 Enforcement is another question, but the integration of what are essentially value judgements — moral frameworks — complicates matters greatly. Zooming in on these kinds of micro-incidences is useful. Take dredging, for example, an act that is clearly egregious. How does this compare with the hand-diving for scallops? What about mass mechanised deforestation relative to the cutting down of a single tree by an individual wishing to extend their existing home, or redesign their garden? Ecocentric thinking is inherently fluid and context-dependent, but integrating it concretely into the law means that this fluidity has to disappear: statute books tend not to be vague.

And whether reliant on statute books or on the setting of context-dependent principle-derived precedent by individual or panels of judges, the same problems remain. However vaguely defined — this could take the form of a right to life without undue harassment; or a right to existence in the first instance — judges would have to weigh those rights against others’. The human right to shelter, say, might conflict with an oak’s right to existence; or the human right to adequate food could conflict with an ecosystem’s right to exist on soon-to-be converted arable land. It takes time and deep knowledge to weigh these rights against one other — knowledge that judges and even trained ecologists do not have (given the value judgement involved) and time that the biosphere does not hold (given the acute crises it is in). Precedents take decades and centuries to settle; not months or years. The lack of specificity proffered by the use of fundamental rights is thereby a major barrier to their successful implementation.

Judgements that would arbitrate actors’ competing interests thereby have to consider and somehow measure, at all times, the public — or rather the planetary — interest. A greater interest of any kind always contravenes on lesser interests of other kinds; the interests of a landowner to garden peacefully may be challenged by the interests of the public to build a train line through that very garden; the interests of a river or a forest to exist unobtruded may be challenged by the interests of a parallel river or forest to expand, or the interests of a nearby human community to build a school in their vicinity.

This leads us to another key weakness. Legal systems are static, and enforce staticity.29 Their function is to maintain a particular state and a particular set of rules — they hardly allow for or enable the dynamism present in natural systems. Giving a river rights, for example, is hard to square with the needs of that river to move in future: if its wiggling and turning results in the contravention of other actors’ interests, how would a legal system deal with those? A tree, say, that would have its root system drowned by that river’s movement would rather not have it move.30 This gets to the core mismatch between legality and ecology — ecological systems presume no total oversight, nor the possibility of total knowledge: they rely on different actors having different interests and squaring those interests off against each other in bounded space and time — the sum of those interactions resulting in ecosystems’ ebbs, flows, and shifts.31 Legal systems’ staticity becomes particularly acute when large exogenous shocks, be they climatic or cosmic, come along. Their disruption leads to the total rearranging of constituent actors’ makeup, but legal systems’ predisposition to preserve the status quo — in that they exist to preserve participant actors’ interests — means that the reconstruction of ecosystems and habitats would not follow existing contexts — the now non-existent, previous, context would be forced. Given legal systems’ dynamism is partly fed by political — and in this case democratic — sources, it is difficult to imagine one where constituents that make up those sources would willingly permit a change in circumstances that would detrimentally impact them; unless violently overthrown by new or newly-empowered constituents.32

Economic Arbitration and the Universal Mind

Much like legal systems, economic systems seek to manage the spatiotemporal dominance that humanity exhibits. Much like legal systems, economic systems seek to regulate interactions between different actors through a set of predefined rules, or assumptions. And much like legal systems, economic systems superimpose preferential human-human communication on the non-human world.

These comparisons stand no matter what economic school informs its namesake system. The dichotomous approach taken in my previous essay on enshittification and state intervention is an example thereof. State-centric organisation relies upon centralised knowledge to function; the ability to estimate, if maximal efficiency is the goal, the value judgement-free wants and needs of the system’s constituents — whether companies, public bodies, or individuals. Distributed private actor-centric organisation that places a greater emphasis on decentralised knowledge doesn’t necessarily augur better outcomes — decentralised knowledge faces the bottleneck of being less able to adequately calculate the externalities that transactions, or communications, between individual actors involve, and the system as a whole is unable to incorporate the individual knowledges held by non-human participants (or rather subjects).

Even alternative systems of economic governance — whether ecological or otherwise — fall victim to the same problem. No system can, and this applies to legal equivalents too, track, calculate, and equitably cater to the wants and needs of the disparate actors it encompasses. (Human) systems, by default, rely on their being a superimposition — prioritising the needs of some over the needs of others.

Economic systems, at their core, seek to universally manage their constituents. They seek to manage the resources that form their basic factors of production, land and capital in particular. They seek to assign ecologically arbitrary values on those factors that enable their efficacious use. Whether those values are assigned by a central economic actor or by the playing off of diffuse (differently placed) actors, an overriding organisational imperative applies — and an overriding exclusion of non-human actors, considered either as animately or inanimately valued material, exists.

It is this exclusion which tends to be the focus of natural capital boosters and grandees alike. It is too often forgotten that assigning a value — one assigned either by the state through regulatory reform, or willingly-so by private actors to, say, bolster the integrity of their supply chains — fundamentally dehumanises, or rather essentialises, living, biotic, beings. Their value, beyond being representative of an imposed construct — and we as humanity have a poor history of imposing human financial-value constructs (refer to our long history of slavery here) — will be optimised, relentlessly.33 I have already discussed this at length elsewhere, so I won’t needlessly repeat myself. It should regardless be noted, though, that we have an inherent inclination to exploit rather than respect a value. Once numericised, actors are taken advantage of (for better or for worse), the actual or potential non-numerical value they once held purged.34 Actors, in this sense, are not actants; they are nominal instrumentalised actors, directed around the stage rather than being granted the agency to do so of their own accord.

If one envisions an overlapping of systems, much like we have in the human domain today, of legal, political, and economic structures, the necessary dynamics that would underpin these alternative forms of organisational communication are clear. If actors held only legal and no political and economic representational value, they would quickly lose it. To guarantee legal representational value, one must hold political representational value; and to guarantee political representational value, one must hold the economic representational value — the power — to ensure and maintain it. But to ensure one is granted economic representational value — given this granting is at the discretion of the spatiotemporally-dominant actor — one must hold political representational value; and to hold political representational value, one must first hold legal representational value. These chains of reasoning are not ironclad, but the point I am trying to get across is simple and worth repeating: for non-human integration into human organisational-communicational systems to be viable, human sovereignty must be willingly and continuously ceded. Human spatiotemporal dominance requires utilising that dominance charitably.

I have argued previously that this charitability is hard to envision on the scale necessary to arrest ecological decline. But if it was a possibility, charitability would be needed on all three fronts. It is not sufficient to grant only economic representational value, or only legal or political representational value. It is an all or nothing.35 Economic value alone presupposes abuse — one only has to imagine the horrors of a world where actors (and human individuals) are represented thereby.36 Legal or political value alone presupposes a snubbing — a disregard reflective of their lack of unwritten power.

Whatever the combination of superimpositions may be, all align with the concept of the universal mind; the idea of the total management of the earth’s biosphere through complete and constant knowledge of its constituent parts and mechanics.37 This alignment is a physical fact — humanity’s spatiotemporal dominance presupposes the development of organisational frameworks that imperfectly attempt to manage that dominated time and space, and the actors that interact therein. Whether or not those organisational frameworks intend to manage time and space to the extent they do, or whether they intend to embody universal minds, our spatiotemporal dominance presupposes their defaulting thereto.

Total management is an impossibility. Leon Trotsky realised as much in 1932, writing after his banishment from the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. Describing the universal economic mind in the context of a planned economy and the dynamics of a free market, he wrote:

‘If a universal mind existed … that could register simultaneously all the processes of nature and society, that could measure the dynamics of their motion, that could forecast the results of their inter-reactions — such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy. But, in reality, the bureaucracy errs frightfully in its estimate of its spiritual resources. … even the most correct combination of all these elements will allow only a most imperfect framework of a plan, not more.

The innumerable living participants in the economy, state and private, collective and individual, must serve notice of their needs and of their relative strength not only through the statistical determinations of plan commissions but by the direct pressure of supply and demand. The plan is checked and, to a considerable degree, realised through the market. The regulation of the market itself must depend upon the tendencies that are brought out through its mechanism. The blueprints produced by the departments must demonstrate their economic efficacy through commercial calculation.’38

Trotsky was writing a critique of excessively-centrally-planned economies, but transposed onto the historical context of human-non-human relations and the imposition of any economic system and the imposition of legal and political systems on our biosphere as a whole, this critique still stands — and is in fact strengthened. The legal, political, and economic communications of ‘living participants’ cannot, as I have discussed, be represented — nor can those communications be assumed by central bodies. Any attempt to do the latter results in an ‘imperfect framework’; an uncertain framework the uncertainty of which multiplies, and thereby worsens, through its continuous application. Any attempt to do the former — and this is where I disagree with Trotsky’s seeming acceptance (at that time) of lesser-planned economies when transplanted into an ecological context — results in individual misrepresentations that similarly multiply and come crashing down.

Trotsky’s description ironically aligns with Friedrich Hayek’s diagnosis of the same problem; that of inter-actor communication — or what he called the local knowledge problem:

‘Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganised knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active cooperation. We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances. To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody’s skill which could be better utilised, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques. And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.’39

I encourage you to re-read that passage with an ecological eye. The specific knowledge any particular economic actor might hold in any one instance, or in any one ‘fleeting moment’, is much the same as that which any ecosystem actor may hold at any one time — and be capable of imposing. And the knowledge economic actors each build up over time — whether through ‘theoretical training’ or in their ‘occupation’ — is much the same as that which ecosystem actors are bestowed by virtue of their genetic code and through their lived experience. Hayek, specifically, was arguing against the idea of a Central Pricing Board, a theoretical economic arbitrator that partly sets goods’ prices and allocates investment and capital. The Board, here, is whatever human organisational framework is imposed upon non-humanity. Hayek goes on:

‘One reason why economists are increasingly apt to forget about the constant small changes which make up the whole economic picture is probably their growing preoccupation with statistical aggregates, which show a very much greater stability than the movements of the detail. The comparative stability of the aggregates cannot, however, be accounted for — as the statisticians occasionally seem to be inclined to do — by the “law of large numbers” or the mutual compensation of random changes. The number of elements with which we have to deal is not large enough for such accidental forces to produce stability.’40

Were Hayek ecologically-inclined, he would here be critiquing economic communicational systems specifically; targeting both totalising statist approaches that seek to integrate and act upon all knowledge simultaneously — or unintentionally effect as much — and distributed approaches that impose a central operating system; a set of artificially programmed rules for actors to abide by. Universal mind-ism — the converse of the local knowledge problem — pervades the way humanity manages, relates to, and seeks to re-relate to the natural world. To lean into James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia, it is as if the planetary body, made up of disparate limbs, organs, and microbiota, was run by a single synapse (framing humanity’s interpretive capacity as even lobe-worthy would be a stretch). Replacing that synapse with another, or even adding a few more to it, cannot and will not restore full bodily function.

This is a somewhat imperfect metaphor, given that I have essentially been arguing that each disparate body part acts and should be able to act according to their own mind. Regardless, as soon as those individual minds become subsumed by a greater mind, by the universal mind, the system breaks down. James Scott describes this problem in a human-epistemological sense in his Seeing Like a State. His equivalent of Hayek’s local knowledge is metis — the product of the ‘fleeting moments’ and years of ‘theoretical training’ that make up the practical knowledge embodied by individual actors and communities. Shaped by its respective contexts, it stands in contrast to what Scott called ‘epistemic’ knowledge — a set of formalised and less-flexible knowledge typically derived from and associated with the scientific method, alongside formal educational instruction. This ‘epistemic’ knowledge is centralised and standardised, an ocean away from the individualised, respondent, context dependency of metis.

This process of centralisation, standardisation, and the correspondent totalitarian impulses that accompany a claim (or series of claims) to truth can be neatly mapped onto ecology; onto the millennia-long ongoing process of human-induced ecological subsumption. Our imposition of rigid organisational frameworks — whatever epistemic bases they may have — by design disregards and marginalises individual ecosystem actors’ basic ecological operation, and their own individual claims to truth; their own metises. The agential breakdown Scott outlined — whether in Germanic silviculture, the simplifying urbanity of cities like Brasília, or the collectivisation of Soviet agriculture — intimately aligns with the climatic-ecological breakdown we are experiencing today.41

An Ecological Subsidiarity?

I have outlined a deeply impractical diagnosis, drawing from — but by no means doing justice to — the nuances of environmental-historical contingency. The natural extension of my conclusion-less argument is that the climatic and ecological crises we face are unarrestable — that they may well be part and parcel of the human condition. This is not what I want to get across, not least because the latter assertion is wrong. Instead, my intention is to simply expose the nature of human spatiotemporal dominance, and how that dominance has stripped ecosystems and their constituents of the agency to self-determine ecological outcomes. To arrest the crises we are all experiencing and will continue to experience, the restoration of this agency must be focussed on.

I am also arguing for a form of rhetorical temperance. Equally damning diagnoses are often made, with magical solutions thereto following in quick succession. Whether those solutions align with rights of nature or ecological economics, I feel that their potential weaknesses are not aired in public discourse enough — that is not to say that they should not be tested and pursued in absolute; just that they should be communicated ingenuously.42 I do not feel it to be appropriate to present solutions for the sake of it. My preference is to piece apart the problems they should address, and subsequently outline the shape solutions may take.

And the shape in question is that of ecological subsidiarity.43 Subsidiarity as a concept is well-established, referring to the idea that the responsibility and agency for addressing specific problems should be delegated to the lowest management level (best-)equipped to address them — typically expressing itself in a distributed form of governance like the European Union. Matters like international trade are managed at the highest level, by the European Commission. Matters like the collection of one’s bins are managed at the lowest level, by municipalities. Related matters like waste management are dictated at the highest level but implemented nationally, to be enforced through national legislative efforts.44 Our biosphere — by amalgamating and distributing local ecological knowledge in accordance with ecosystem actors’ wants and needs — operates in an unconsciously subsidiary manner.

A grasslands environment, say, is maintained by the interrelation of grazers like bison or buffalo; shortgrasses and longgrasses that enrich the soil to differing degrees; fungi that distribute nutrients between flora; the rains which bring literal and figurative hydration; and the sun, which acts as the source of all energy. Bison’s hooves aerate compacted earth whilst their selective grazing prevents any single grass species from achieving dominance. Prairie dogs alter landscapes through their extensive burrow systems, creating microhabitats that collect moisture and provide shelter for smaller creatures. Predators like wolves and coyotes regulate herbivore populations, their hunting patterns shaping the movement and behaviour of prey species across the grassland mosaic. Fire, too, sweeps across grasslands periodically, clearing accumulated thatch and returning nutrients to the soil whilst stimulating new growth. Each actor, then, operates according to their own individual knowledge and the environments they recursively interact with.45

In the oceans, phytoplankton bloom in response to upwelling currents that bring nutrients from the deep, their photosynthesis forming the foundation of marine food chains whilst simultaneously producing much of the oxygen we breathe. Krill swarm in massive aggregations, following these phytoplankton blooms and in turn attracting cetaceans whose migrations span entire ocean basins. Deep-sea hydrothermal vents create oases of life in the abyssal darkness, their chemosynthetic bacteria converting sulphur compounds into energy and supporting communities of tube worms, crabs, and fish. Ocean currents act as massive conveyor belts, redistributing heat from tropical to polar regions whilst carrying larvae, nutrients, and dissolved gases across continents. And coral reefs serve as underwater cities, their calcium carbonate structures built over millennia providing habitat for countless species whilst protecting coastlines from erosive forces. Actors in this way fill their own niches, spatiotemporally bounded in the immediate; a bounding we have taken advantage of through our escape therefrom.

If it sounds like I am describing — or rather defining — ecology, it is because I am. Ecology is by its very nature subsidiary, and subsidiarity is by its very nature ecological. Ecological subsidiarity is in a sense, then, a sort of needless, verbose, repetition — a repetition we must bear in mind when attempting to arrest the crises we face.

What does ecological subsidiarity look like in practice? It is hard to say.46 It likely involves some yielding of our spatiotemporal dominance — a yielding of that which allows us to excessively impose. Whether this entails an epistemological-ontological revolution that justifies the prerequisite selflessness therefor, recognising the mismatch between our physical ability to impose and our mental ability to perceive that imposition, or a forced climatically-imposed retreat, is equally hard to say. But without fundamental reform, or without revolution, non-humanity may be forced into (new) systems whose inherently incongruous spatiotemporal scales will continue to predetermine, and potentially worsen, poor climatic-ecological outcomes.

This forms the shape of, not the prescription for, a solution. Being realistic about one’s metrics of success, here, matters — should the ultimate aim be a deep ecological purge of human influence or a human-inclined legally-politically-economically-enforced balance? Whatever it may be, reversing the full extent of environmental-historical decline is a false expectation from the outset, as this decline maps our increased spatiotemporal dominance.

Whether getting a few increments along that dotted yellow line or following it in entirety is the aim, one must be rhetorically honest. Falling into the Edenic trap of identifying a single source of crisis and subsequently deciding that a single solution or set of solutions may bring us back to that point is not constructive. Nor, though, is a hopeful, overly-optimistic incrementalism that may not take us very far; or that optimism’s cousin: the boosting of half-baked solutions that come laden with impracticalities and malincentives.

Regardless, one can conclude that our present organisational-communicational arrangement is suboptimal. One can conclude — and agree — that our unilateral, deafening, and constant shouting is unkind and counterproductive. And one can also acknowledge that the extent of our spatiotemporal dominance, the enlarged (or inflamed?) size of our vocal chords, is problematic.

Or, perhaps, it is our using a megaphone that has led us to where we are today. Whatever the contents of the wavelengths travelling through that megaphone may be, they are unduly amplified, their amplitude unduly increased. It is high time to listen, to place to one side that megaphone; not to silence ourselves, and if it is in fact our vocal chords and not a megaphone that bestow upon us our ability to shout, not to rip out our vocal chords. We are needlessly in conflict with the natural world. Much like in a disagreement between two human actors, our shouting at the collective of non-human actors does both them and us little good — it simply degrades our relationship further; breaking down any semblance of trust and goodwill that may have existed — and could ever exist. And given the emitter of the sound can deafen themselves just as much as the receiver, perhaps we should quieten down instead of covering our ears.

Imagine promising ecclesiastical figures of yesteryear constant access to congregations’ attentions; access as consistent as it is constant, with adults spending an average of four and a half hours online every day. Now imagine the promise that a good chunk of this is spent consulting a central source of information, knowledge, and wisdom on matters of spiritual, relational, and practical consequence. You would be promising ecclesiastical nirvana. And you would be promising the present day.

Google has over five billion users, holding a 90% share of the search market worldwide. More than 16 billion searches are carried out every day, an increasing number of which are answered by a mix of AI Overviews or the newly-released AI Mode — large language model-powered tools that serve results without users having to visit individual sites. The shift towards the latter is exemplified by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the fastest-growing consumer app in history that now counts almost 700 million weekly users and processes a billion queries a day. It has fundamentally reshaped our relationship with information and knowledge, matched by Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and Meta’s Llama, amongst others. A rather successful crusade, then.

These tools are more consulted than the Bible, Quran, Bhagavad Gita, Pāli Canon, and Torah combined. Importantly, they are consulted for the same reasons as those texts are — readers are looking and hoping for resolute answers to their questions, their yearnings, and their desires. They are placing faith in the source of those answers; faith in its good faith, in its wisdom, and in its integrity.2 While trust in the firms behind these tools is mixed, a full four-fifths of people around the world are anticipating their daily use — with younger demographics taking a particular shine to them. Chatbots have turned into therapists and close confidantes — portable confessionals — with an all-seeing eye that provides terrifying personalisation and the illusion of transcendent knowledge.

Whether they like it or not — and they surely do, given their zealous self-congratulatory antics — the leaders of big tech firms have been elevated to ecclesiastical status. They are not, in fact, the purveyors of the ever-present and all-pervading techbroism, but rather of reality itself. And that is without considering their hold over algorithms that mould our information feeds; altering election results, driving individuals to suicide, or, as they prefer it, upgrading users’ spending habits on advertised products. Devices of mere manipulated enjoyment have been consciously turned into devices of authority; instead of places to turn to express ourselves, they are dictating, quite literally, how we do that very expressing. The motivations behind this, importantly, are impure — they are driven not solely by a claim to truth, but by a mix of financial-political incentives that alter their actions and intentions.3 Big tech, then, is increasingly displaying a Foucaltian relationship between power and knowledge.

Call its leaders the Archbishops of AI — led by the slipperingly-sycophantic Archbishop Altman. Leading the charge to an eventual Papacy, Altman is challenged by the Archbishops Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Musk. In each of their dioceses, they preach and proselytise about the simultaneous promises and dangers of that which they force upon us, and faith-basedly lure investment to fund their massive buildout of churches and cathedrals (and data centres).

They are, though, just Archbishops. While their influence is doubtless significant, their aspiration for the Papacy is hindered by their elevation to Cardinalhood. It is, in this instance, states who fill the Sistine Chapel. States are the ones standing in the way — the ones that choose the next Pope; the Pope that can in turn elevate Archbishops to Cardinals and pave the way for their eventual Papacy (in an invariably brutal Conclave).4 This is where this metaphor breaks down, but the point stands. Big tech’s near-religious hold on our daily lives is contingent on states’ submission thereto. It is contingent on their claiming continued powerlessness, their deferring to those below that promise supposed rejuvenation.5

And to redirect the metaphor — it was states who once dismantled the stranglehold religious bodies held as sources of authority.6 It was states who severed connections with the Church; who demanded religious freedom; who limited religious control over legal systems; who removed literal and figurative crosses from the classroom; and who defined sovereignty as arising from the people, not God.7 It can thus be, and only be, states who prevent theocratic capture of another kind — that by big tech.

It is in this context that the rise of big tech — and the rise of LLM-crazed AI — should be considered: in the context of state and constituent capture. Each must realise the power they hold to stop, or rather redirect, this process; realise their simultaneous vulnerability and agency to demand and decree otherwise. States in particular must articulate a positive alternative vision, one that invites a concomitant degree of attraction to that which it is competing against. They mustn’t be convinced nor misled by narratives of accelerationism — welcoming the Archbishops into the Sistine Chapel to prevent a threat those very Archbishops embody and control. States and individuals alike must fight, and defeat, this attempted hostile takeover.

Whilst having considered this beforehand, what hit me at the zoo, of all places, was the sheer overemphasis on private finance as a solution to the ecological challenges we face today. This is hardly new, with scholars — and even the World Bank — having highlighted it aplenty. I was, naturally, self-selecting; attending an event explicitly discussing the (supposedly crucial) role private finance has to play in nature conservation and restoration. But I felt this overemphasis had been replicated at previous events and conferences I’ve attended — and replicated in recent policy movements. At Rewilding Futures in January of this year, a two-day conference which took place in Cambridge, the few explicitly finance-focussed discussions tended towards private finance: with an emphasis on philanthropy, charismatic carbon, BNG, and the ever-nascent — never quite ascendant — biodiversity credit market. The UK Government recently, too, launched a consultation on expanding the role of private finance in nature recovery; perhaps a reflection of its recent second-guessing of ELMS-centred subsidy regimes — although oddly misaligned with its earlier second-guessing of BNG.

In conversation with a representative of Finance Earth, the incongruence between the need for expanded finance for nature recovery and the mass state-sponsored subsidisation of biodiversity-harming activities came to the fore.1 The finance gap for nature recovery is estimated to stand at up to $800 billion a year, while subsidies for biodiversity-harming activities are estimated by IPBES to be roughly $1.7 trillion a year. While that finance gap doesn’t necessarily need to be filled by private finance alone, emphasis has tended to fall thereon in the context of faltering government action — governments’ continued failure to meet their own $200 billion a year Kunming-Montreal target for biodiversity conservation and restoration, which conveniently highlights the mobilisation of all financing flows, is a case in point. Equally, the incongruence between the relative complexity of nascent private nature finance initiatives and the relative simplicity of government-funded public good-centric nature financing became evident.

So I thought it would be prudent to measure whether the (over)emphasis on private nature finance that I’ve anecdotally experienced is present in academic literature discussing these matters. Is the disproportionate emphasis on private over public finance reflected in the subject and thrust of academic research? And is the importance of reducing or removing biodiversity-harming subsidies outright understated?

My methodology was as follows: I first used Web of Science (WoS) to identify journal articles, books, and other publications that discussed biodiversity-related finance. My search query for this captured all publications that mentioned both biodiversity and financing of some kind. I limited results to full calendar years, stretching from 2000 to 2024, and filtered for English-language outputs too — capturing a range of data that I would be able to spot-check.

WoS Search Query

TS=(

("biodiversity" OR "biological diversity")

AND

("financ*")

)

AND PY=2000-2024

AND LA=English

I then downloaded the identifying information of each publication — like its title, author(s), journal, and abstract — as a series of text files and loaded them into a CSV using a basic Python script. My thinking here was that a publication’s abstract would contain enough information on its general thrust and position. Hardly exhaustive, but enough — particularly given my next step was to utilise another Python script and my Google Gemini API key to use Gemini 1.5 Pro to analyse each abstract. Downloading the entire text of each publication would not have been feasible using WoS’s aggregator in the first instance, and analysing the entire text of each publication in the second instance using Gemini would have been rather expensive: 3,345 publications were identified, with the total word count amounting to 1,120,299 for the data I downloaded alone.

My aim here was to measure a few things: whether a publication discusses private and/or public biodiversity financing; what its sentiment of this form of financing was (positive, negative, or neutral); and what its confidence on these points was too. I additionally wanted to ascertain these same attributes for discussion of harmful subsidies in isolation.

My prompts to measure these things were as follows. You’ll notice that I requested Gemini to assign a confidence score, write a rationale for each of its decisions, and print the keywords identified. The confidence score, in this case, was not a strict statistical test — it was simply based on Gemini’s impressions of the text at hand. Full disclosure: I utilised a mix of LLMs to assist in writing these prompts and the full script.

Private

You are a meticulous research assistant.

Read the journal abstract below. Decide whether it explicitly discusses

PRIVATE-sector biodiversity finance. Using your judgement, recognise *any* of these and/or similar themes:

• corporate investment / corporate social responsibility

• impact investing, blended finance, private capital

• biodiversity offsets or credits, carbon credits, voluntary carbon market

• green or sustainability-linked bonds

• philanthropy, private donations, endowments

• project developers or public–private partnerships with a finance component

If the abstract *does* discuss private-sector finance, classify the overall tone:

• "positive" = portrays it favourably or as beneficial.

• "negative" = criticises it or highlights harms/risks.

• "neutral" = purely descriptive, balanced or ambiguous.

If no private-sector finance is present, answer "false" and set

"private_sector_sentiment": null.

Return ONLY a valid JSON object – no comments, no extra text:

{{

"discusses_private_sector": false,

"private_sector_sentiment": null,

"private_sector_keywords_found": [],

"rationale": "",

"confidence_score": 0.0

}}

Public

You are a meticulous research assistant.

Read the journal abstract below. Decide whether it explicitly discusses

PUBLIC-sector biodiversity finance. Using your judgement, recognise *any* of these and/or similar themes:

• government budgets or expenditure for conservation

• fiscal incentives, earmarked taxation, biodiversity levies

• direct public subsidies

• international aid / ODA / multilateral funds

• intergovernmental transfers; national biodiversity-finance plans

If the abstract *does* discuss public-sector finance, classify the overall tone:

• "positive" = portrays it favourably or as beneficial.

• "negative" = criticises it or highlights harms/risks.

• "neutral" = purely descriptive, balanced or ambiguous.

If no public-sector finance is present, answer "false" and set

"public_sector_sentiment": null.

Return ONLY a valid JSON object:

{{

"discusses_public_sector": false,

"public_sector_sentiment": null,

"public_sector_keywords_found": [],

"rationale": "",

"confidence_score": 0.0

}}

Harmful Subsidies

You are a meticulous research assistant.

Read the abstract below. Using your judgement, detect *harmful* biodiversity-negative public subsidies or perverse incentives (e.g. fossil-fuel, agriculture, fisheries, mining) and/or similar themes in the abstract.

Sentiment rules: "negative" = condemns or proposes removal,

"positive" = supports, "neutral" = purely descriptive.

Return ONLY this JSON:

{{

"mentions_harmful_subsidies": false,

"harmful_subsidies_sentiment": null,

"harmful_subsidy_keywords_found": [],

"rationale": "",

"confidence_score": 0.0

}}

Now to the results. My initial hypothesis, mirroring my anecdotal experience, was that discussion of private finance might be disproportionate to the need to scale up public finance and scale down public malfinance. This was thoroughly disproven.2 For every publication discussing solely private interventions in nature recovery over the past five years, there were a corresponding four publications discussing public interventions.

It is clear that mentions of both private and public interventions increased substantially over the years — the jump in mentions of public interventions in 2021, for reference, is mostly correlated with Kunming-Montreal. I have excluded sole mentions of harmful subsidies given their strong overlap with public interventions. I have also excluded their mentions from the sentiments diagrams as they were steadily wholly negative.

The professional discourse I have been surrounded by is clearly misaligned with academic discourse. Perhaps this is because the incentives of each are themselves misaligned — with private finance wishing to justify its intervention, and academia being relatively independent from the influences this dynamic would bring about.3 Regardless, the importance of public interventions highlighted in academic literature is evidently not reflected in government policy. Nature-friendly discretionary spending and subsidies are few and far between, and when existent are orders of magnitude smaller than their nature-harming counterparts — which continue to fuel destructive, land-inefficient, polluting activities. And the $1.7 trillion in subsidies highlighted by IPBES do not stand alone: they incentivise a further $5.3 trillion in biodiversity-harming private financial flows.4

It is in this vein that the limited academic discussion of harmful subsidies makes sense: they are an easy problem to solve. Political barriers aside, they can simply be removed.5 One doesn’t have to create complex new regulatory frameworks or voluntary markets to funnel supposedly eager private capital into nature recovery. One, neither, has to expend the effort, nor the political and intellectual oxygen, needed therefor. The solutions are already out there — it seems, to me, ideological to insist on alternative pathways.6 Perhaps governments should take a greater cue from the ranks of academia.

For those who are interested, I would be happy to share my full script, alongside my raw data (WoS licensing-willing). There were, based on a spot-check of the data, a few false positives — although these were neither substantial nor substantive. The aim of this exercise was to uncover trends more than anything else — and in this regard Gemini was broadly right. Regardless, I would encourage all readers to not draw major conclusions from this small piece of research, particularly given I was analysing abstracts alone.

How would I take this thread further? I would look at specific journals like Ecological Economics; I would look at publications’ entire texts; I would control results by number of citations; I would look at a variety of publications outwith those listed on WoS, like Substack; I would manually sift results to a greater extent to ensure higher integrity; I would conduct equivalent sweeps of existing and prospective legislation and policy developments in differing jurisdictions; I would conduct equivalent sweeps of social media feeds of those involved in the sector; I would refine the prompts given to the LLM; and I would use a variety of LLMs to aggregate results.

With thanks to Goizeder Blanco-Zaitegi, Igor Álvarez Etxeberria, and José Moneva for their Biodiversity accounting and reporting: A systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis; Simona Cosma, Giuseppe Rimo, and Stefano Cosma for their Conservation finance: What are we not doing? A review and research agenda; and Yasin Guer, Lukas Mueller, and Dirk Schiereck for their Biodiversity: A Bibliometric Analysis of Accounting, Economics, and Finance Journals, from whom I have taken inspiration for this research.

Thanks for your interest — any feedback, questions, and/or comments are warmly welcomed!

Surrounded by never-ending news-driven despondency, Guy Shrubsole’s The Lie of the Land proves a soothing balm — a roadmap of action calling for the reversal of decades of inaction, and centuries of decline, on the democratic and ecological crises afflicting our isles.

Shrubsole’s argument is two-fold. First, as the book’s title suggests, a central lie surrounds the ownership and management of land in England: its prudent stewardship, or lack thereof — its neglect by (usually) wealthy owners over the past few centuries. Second, the way land is owned and managed does not meet the needs of society today — it runs counter to our climatic, ecological, and sociological needs, preferences, and desires. It is likewise undemocratic: those who own and manage land are those who make decisions on its outcomes, some light-touch regulation aside. Those who use it, and those who benefit or suffer from whatever management decisions are made, are systematically excluded.

Shrubsole’s research and writing is clear, lucid, and thorough, charted across the book’s ten chapters. He begins by breaking apart the myth of land stewardship, outlining both how narratives surrounding land use have been captured by particular interests, and how existing voluntary initiatives and payments schemes have failed to avert decline. He also reveals the deep landownership inequalities in England: 25,000 bodies owning half the nation’s land. Shrubsole goes on to focus on the particular evils of grouse moors, elucidating their domination of English landscapes and imaginaries. We then journey up north to Scotland, visiting Langholm Moor in the Borders to where Shrubsole tells the story of an agenda-setting community buyout — alongside analysing Scottish land reform policy and community-right-to-buy frameworks.

In the second half of the book focus shifts to the idea of a Public Nature Estate, inspired by Matthew Kelly’s idea of the Nature State. The natural world, here, is a public good; a good whose quality should be guaranteed by, through direct ownership and tighter environmental regulations, the state — with roots in the post-war ideals of government ensuring ecological as well as human health. Shrubsole recounts previous failures to take this route, best encapsulated by the founding of the Nature Conservancy (the forerunner of Natural England) in 1949. Successive waves of ideological scepticism towards state intervention, spearheaded both by private landowners themselves and by Thatcherism in the 1980s, laid early plans of this kind of state involvement to rest. This is an idea expanded later in the book with discussions of treating land as national property, and a common treasury, and through the idea of an Ecological Domesday Survey: the ascertaining of the sheer extent of the status quo’s failure, and the need for prudent land management plans to address this.

Shrubsole goes on to survey the carbon(-emitting) bomb that is the East Anglian Fenlands, the literal and figurative plague of invasive species like the Grey Squirrel — many of which were given more than a helping hand by aristocratic sponsors — and the importance of trespassing to keep some landowners’ damaging practices in check. The Lie of the Land ends with ten calls to action, to turn that lie into a truth. These involve practical recommendations like extending the planning regime to agriculture, forestry, and other non-built environment use cases, and implementing a carbon tax on land use to dissuade heavily carbon-emitting practices like grouse shooting and conventional fenland farming. I will not list all of Shrubsole’s recommendations — I encourage you to read the book in full and find your own way there!

My central takeaway, though, is that no matter the reader’s personal, political, or ideological leanings, the arrant irrationality of present landownership and land management arrangements is staggering. Shrubsole makes this argument convincingly. It could, though, have been strengthened elsewhere.

First, Shrubsole places substantial faith in the enduring goodwill of the state. His call for expanded public landownership, alluding to international equivalents in New Zealand, the United States, and Japan, is reasonable — but he could have critically reviewed the dangers of going this way in greater depth: one only has to consider current political turmoil around the world to see that goodwill is far from guaranteed. State sanctioning of nature restoration and nature-friendly farming on one day may well turn into mass monocrop forestry and agriculture on the next, as he outlined was the case in mid-20th-century Britain.

Second, there seems to be a base presumption that expanded public and community ownership of land will lead to better outcomes for the natural world, and that the public’s and communities’ preferences for restoration, if they do hold, will continue perpetually. Langholm Moor, a notable community buyout that is the subject of his third chapter, is one of many community-owned estates in Scotland— but one of the few that places primary emphasis on nature restoration. Examples elsewhere, like in Assynt, show that nature restoration is not necessarily the sole priority of local communities. Their agency to choose — or not choose — to go a certain route, then, should have been emphasised more strongly.

Third, Shrubsole’s allusions to the sunlit uplands of community ownership in Scotland could have been more critical. While he does mitigate this trope in places, it is a fact that community-right-to-buy as a legal instrument has hardly contributed to the expansion of community ownership. Its implementation down south may not be as helpful as claimed — particularly when practical constraints like community capacity and funding are taken into account.

Fourth, while not a critique per se I would have loved to see greater elaboration on how expanded legal personhood and rights of nature — as discussed with Paul Powlesland, a lawyer who leads the River Roding Trust and featured in the introduction and seventh chapter — could be integrated into democratic land decision-making structures. Emphasis throughout the book was on human involvement and human benefit: expanding beyond this may have deepened Shrubsole’s arguments. Adding to this, Shrubsole places a heavy emphasis on landownership as a central tenet, critiquing the private more than the absolute. Discussion of ownership’s alienation of the natural world would not have gone amiss, however abstract it may seem in practical terms.

Fifth, and lastly, The Lie of the Land faces temporal and spatial limitations. Its focus on post-Shakespearean Britain onwards paints an implicit picture of natural harmony both prior to this time and outside of this geography. Ecological destruction was and is a historically universal phenomenon, inflicted by communities the world over — no matter their relationships to land (although they do, importantly, differ in extents). It is limited to ascribe it, whether implicitly or otherwise, to the enclosure of land and subsequent concentration of power alone.

With these considerations in mind, I encourage anyone interested to purchase a copy of The Lie of the Land. An engaging read, it is a real call to arms — drawing on Shrubsole’s final recommendation on the book’s final page is particularly poignant: we must all hold landownership systems to account through personal action, and demand a systemic shift away from the utterly inadequate status quo.

This essay has been sitting in my out-tray for some time. My intention with it was to critique existing approaches to the finance gap for nature conservation and restoration — it turned into a broader criticism of private, market-centric, and public, state-centric, (perceived) solutions.

I go hard on these supposed solutions, and the strength of my critique should be historically contextualised. The extent of human-induced ecological decline and climatic crisis is stark.

These diagrams are rough, and their timelines are deliberately vague given the difficulties of approximating these onsets. Their purpose, though, is to illustrate the temporal impotence of existing human economic structures.

The solutions discussed in this essay occupy a profoundly short period of human, and planetary, histories. They are the products of an amalgam of context-dependent, contingent, developments. Whether to explicitly link their previous rise and use to the ecological and climatic challenges we face today is another question — what must be kept in mind, though, is that their continued use is far from inevitable. When finding solutions to today’s problems, we cannot and must not focus on time horizons of twenty to thirty — or even one-hundred — years. We must think about the truly long-term, beyond potential living memories; about the systemic implications and second-order compounding effects the solutions we use now may reveal later. Are these solutions, importantly, capable of reversing the full extent of historical decline?1 Or are they more marginal, when viewed in sum? It is with this (somewhat impractical) frame of mind that I encourage you to read the below essay.

The Current State of Earth's Ecology

Were a cosmic visitor to descend from the skies to assess the health, vibrancy, and continued viability of our planet’s ecology, they would be astounded by its poor state. They would find an ecological dictatorship — a planet overrun by the desire of a single species subjugating all else. They would find that single species to be spectacularly short-sighted — continually making decisions that accord poorly with their continued vibrant longevity.2 And they would find decision-making structures that are impressively unsuited for making decisions that align therewith.

This cosmic visitor, had they paid the planet a visit every fifty thousand years or so, would be astounded by the sheer decline experienced by the inhabitants of its lands and seas: previously brimming with life — now emptied. They would observe a near-totalitarian dominion expressed through spatial dominance: the majority of habitable land converted for a single species’ usage; its superabundant oceans thinned to a trickle.

In short, our cosmic visitor would not look upon us kindly. Their concern, were it to be real rather than theoretical, is well-grounded. We, humanity, are masters of manipulation. We have razed ecologies and ecosystems in most instances of our existences: over the past 100,000 years, the biomass of wild mammals has decreased 85% — reflecting both our zealous hunting thereof and our later mass foray into animal agriculture. Today, only 4% of mammals live in the wild, while over the past fifty years alone total species abundance has decreased by more than 70%. Our totalising impacts on wild biomass are mirrored by — as our cosmic visitor observed astutely — our monopolisation of lands and seas. An area the size of the Americas is dedicated to animal agriculture; an area the size of China dedicated to arable agriculture.3 That not dedicated thereto, or to forestry, urban habitations, or recreational space, only remains so because we will it.

In what to us would seem to be touristic nescience, the visitor would then confusingly look upon our present position. Enraptured by pervasive and seemingly inevitable decision-making structures — dominated by exclusionary and short-sighted political, economic, and legal frameworks — they would be bewildered by our temporally and imaginatively narrow horizons; our sheer inability to arrest and reverse the ecological crises we have brought about.

This essay is split into four parts:

1. Economic Systems and Their Approaches to Ecological Crises

   • Marketisation — The Use of Market Mechanisms

   • Statism — The Use of Direct State Intervention

2. The Limits of Private Intervention

   • Enshittification — A Big Tech-ish Misalignment of Incentives

   • Implications — The Impacts of Misaligned Incentives

3. The Limits of State Intervention

   • Frailty — The Temporary and Narrow Nature of Political Decisions

   • Centralisation and Benevolence — The Dangers of Centralised Decision-Making and Assumptions of Benevolence

4. Our Imaginative Deficiencies — Charting a Way Forward

Please skip ahead or switch between them as needed!

Economic Systems and Their Approaches to Ecological Crises

Our economic frameworks, in particular, would be a cause for concern. Those structures — or rather the multifarious ways of managing and organising human economic systems — arise from one primary need: the need for human actors to communicate their needs and wants with one another, across space and time, and for those needs and wants to be met efficiently. They arise from the matching of one human actor’s desires with another human actor’s ability and willingness to meet those desires.4 Economic systems are ultimately systems of exchange based on the principle of infinite wants and finite resources — a near-physical fact that those systems’ varying structures try, and often struggle, to meet.

For the sake of dichotomising and reductive simplicity, there are two systems proffered to resolve the (soon-to-be) hellscape that our cosmic visitor observes: one with a preference for an amalgam of private, singular, actors acting in accordance with their own defined interests, and another with a preference for statism — wherein a unifying organisational body allocates resources according to agreed upon, whether democratically or otherwise, maxims. Singular actors’ own interests are primarily self-interested — they seek their own self-preservation and perpetuation, which at times align with the self-preservation and perpetuation of the economic and societal whole. Statist organisational bodies are, too, far from disinterested, acting according to their own set of incentives — primarily their constituents’ self-preservation.

How is this applicable to our cosmic visitor’s vision? A private solution, recognising the private human constituents that make up human economic systems, would emphasise each actor’s own internalisation of their externalities — the calculation and mitigation of their own impacts. Individuals, corporations, and other organisations would stand to be responsible for the harm they cause, and be responsible for that harm’s reversal. That is of course assuming that individual actors would be willing to actually do this. A statist solution, recognising that it is extraordinarily difficult to coordinate disparate human actors with disparate wants and needs, would emphasise societal, communal, calculation and mitigation of impacts. Both solutions, too, would fundamentally realise that the natural world is a basic form of capital that underlies human economic systems — through the provision of clean air, clean water, fertile soils, abundant seas, a regulated climate, and regulated weather.

Marketisation

Focussing on ecological impacts specifically, a private solution would entail a market of some kind.5 This market would assign value to the use or misuse of an ecological good. If a farmer or developer, say, wishes to convert a piece of land to primarily human use, that farmer or developer would pay a requisite fee to either discourage that conversion in the first place or to compensate for that conversion through restoration projects elsewhere. In practical terms, this sort of set-up exists for developers in some jurisdictions: Biodiversity Net Gain in England, biodiversity offset schemes at federal and state levels in Australia, and habitat-specific offset schemes at a federal level in the United States, to name a few.6 I won’t get into the weeds of how each specific scheme functions — what is important to note is that the state, in these instances, acts as an arbiter, a market-maker, by creating and regulating these markets in the first place.

Going beyond land conversion and development, a private addressal of human actors’ ecological impacts would involve each actor mitigating for every act that carries ecological baggage with it — which, essentially, is anything a human actor might occupy themselves with. If a company is to purchase a particular good, the production of which harms a set of species in a habitat or a habitat as a whole, that company must financially mitigate that impact by providing equivalent habitat elsewhere. The same would go for an individual wishing to do this — although it is unlikely for efforts to be duplicated (i.e. if a company has already mitigated their impacts, an individual purchasing goods from that company would not be inclined to double-up on that mitigation, given the costs involved in doing so).

And beyond offsets of this kind — essentially operating on compensatory, destructive, logics — private actors could equally acknowledge natural capital values in whatever decisions they make. Business and investment cases, or simple purchase decisions, could have recognition of and built-in leeways for natural capital reliance — think coupon payments on a grand scale, wherein the entire natural world is borrowed by us and interest must be paid thereon.

Now — a private addressal in all existing instances involves a state mandating those addressals through regulatory frameworks. This does not necessarily need to be the case. In theory, private actors could themselves recognise the value the natural world provides and integrate this into their economic decisions more broadly — think of this as an ecologically-inclined (truly) free market. But for the time being, state-regulated markets are all that exist. Private actors would be at pains to find reasons to place themselves at a short-term competitive disadvantage to their peers by incorporating a previously free piece of capital onto their balance sheets voluntarily.

Statism

Hence the inclination for greater statist influence predominates. The natural world is almost by definition a public good — its positive externalities are ample, it is under-provided by free markets, it is non-excludable, and it is non-rivalrous. Statist solutions are therefore well-suited for intervention, ensuring its continued health and adequate provision. They could, practically, take the form of wholesale provision — think here of the National Health Service in the UK, funded primarily by general taxation under the principle of being free at the point of use. Individuals, firms, and other actors — through taxed income, interest, and spending — fund healthcare’s public provision for public benefit. Instead of every private actor being responsible for their own individual healthcare, resources are effectively pooled to provide it efficiently and equitably. While healthcare isn’t necessarily considered a classical public good, other examples — like defence — are similarly applicable. A nation’s military can be seen as providing base-level prosperity by ensuring peace, and it is most efficiently and equitably provided for when funded collectively, catering to the interests of a general populace rather than specific individual private actors. The idea of direct statist intervention of this kind in the integrity of the natural world is not new. Matthew Kelly’s Nature State, for example, has examined it in the field of conservation.

Converse statist intervention takes place regularly through subsidy regimes — governments subsidising uneconomical activities they deem desirable. The most obvious target is agriculture, particularly in Europe. Under these regimes, the value of food security and food sovereignty is recognised, allowing domestic farmers to compete with more efficient, and thereby cheaper, imported produce. In the EU, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) at its most basic paid farmers on a per-area basis, prior to recent reforms. In England, CAP was replaced by an environmentally-inclined subsidy regime, ELMS: ranging from the incentivisation of smaller interventions like hedgerow planting to larger interventions like water redirection and flooding and even full land conversion, the latter being under the Landscape Recovery Scheme.7 Until recently and at present for the most part, though, subsidy regimes have disregarded and continue to disregard the natural world, incentivising land-inefficient and high-externality food production — including mining and forestry, $1.7 trillion a year is shelled out globally to support biodiversity-harming activities.8

With all of this in mind, both private and public solutions to the ecological crises we face are flawed. Both are overemphasised by sometimes warring parties, and both fail to take account of the bankruptcy of existing and prevailing economic and political schools of thought. Let’s examine them in turn.

The Limits of Private Intervention

Private solutions’ flaws are manifold, but depend on the degree of state intervention that leads to their arisal in the first place. Taking private solutions at face value and assuming private actors reach a level of enlightenment that takes into account their fundamental reliance on the natural world and leads them to act accordingly, they are deeply inefficient. The ecological crises that enwrap human and ecological communities are massive. They transcend individual actors, no matter how small or large they may be; no matter what literal or figurative footprints they may have. They transcend geographies and they transcend jurisdictions, and they occur at an interlinked scale that individual actors are unable to comprehend, keep track of, or often understand in the first place — an ecological equivalent of the local knowledge problem.9 Considering the natural world to be a public good, a face-value private solution is manifestly unable to provide it — this entails a short-termist prisoners’ dilemma of epic proportions. If one private actor avoids and mitigates but the other doesn’t, the avoider and mitigator loses out. If one private actor stays put and the other avoids and mitigates, then the other actor loses out.

And although the reasons for this are multifarious and diverse, public-ish goods that are and have been privately provided tend to underperform in broad-based and underlying equity. Utilities, water in particular, in Britain; healthcare in the United States; domestic and foreign security in less-stable nations with limited state capacity. Even relatively private goods, like housing — on a public-benefit basis — often perform better when supplied by the state: Singapore, a country where 80% of the populace lives in publicly-built, owned, and maintained housing is a good example of this.10

More relevantly to the immediate trajectory the financing of ecological recovery is taking, though, private solutions tend to follow a warped set of incentives by utilising tokenised, credit-like, units of nature. In existing regulated mechanisms like BNG in England, for example, developers are incentivised to in the first instance avoid having to be compelled to compensate land conversion. While this, in a way, is exactly the behaviour the legislation seeks to encourage — i.e. not developing if that development is not worth the associated compensation — it perversely leads developers to seek loopholes that circumvent the need therefor.11 In the second instance, and more importantly, and assuming developers travel down the harm mitigation hierarchy and opt for off-site BNG units ‘harvested’ by a habitat bank elsewhere, the provisioning and pricing of those units are what is optimised for — and this applies to non-statutory, voluntary, biodiversity credit markets too.12

This has two associated issues: the first is that the methodology of those units is far from perfect — this is a critique that can be applied to any methodology that measures biodiversity intactness and integrity. Each methodology (hopefully) considers the best available evidence at any one time and incorporates this accordingly. But given our ecosystemic knowledge is far from complete, creating standardised metrics that private economic actors construct their entire business models around is questionable. This applies no matter what the methodology used may be — whether basing itself off ecosystem intactness or dynamic health.13

The second associated issue is that whatever methodology is utilised, the actions of all private actors will be optimised therearound. While strawmanning slightly here, if a methodology measures the presence of a few key indicator species or vegetational density, the presence of those species or vegetational density will be incentivised — whether those metrics optimise for total ecosystemic health in the long-run or not. Comparisons to the world of big tech flesh this out a little further.

Enshittification

Enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022, describes the fundamental misalignment in incentives a number of online platforms embody.14 Typically providing their products free-of-charge to end-users, their business models — take Google or Meta as classic examples — rely on the sale of advertising targeting those same end-users. This model requires a business plan that rewards end-users in the early stages of that business’s life cycle to bring them in — to foster high product quality and correspondingly high engagement and ensure the normalisation of the provided product being free. Later, once it is clear that users are unlikely to jump ship and as pressures to grow revenue mount, the needs of advertisers — of actual customers, not end-users — are prioritised.

In the case of Google, ads are shown more prominently, with organic search results downgraded and the search engine optimised to increase the likelihood of users purchasing advertisers’ products. In the case of Meta, ads fill Instagram and Facebook feeds to the greatest possible extent, while content is suggested to maximise time spent on its platforms — not for human connection, as is often claimed, but to maximise engagement with ads. Those on the other end of the pipeline — those producing content on Meta’s platforms or sharing ideas or unadvertised products on Google — are forced to cater the way they do this for those same ends. Content on Instagram has to be made addictive, preying on end-users’ chemically-induced brains. Written content that Google surfaces has to be optimised for its algorithm, an entire industry — SEO optimisation — birthed therefrom.

The entire original proposition of these services’ use — in Google’s case to enable the discovery of ideas and knowledge, and in Meta’s case to foster and enable human connection — gets thrown out of the window; the interests of those actually paying being prioritised and optimised for: the interests of advertisers.

Transposed onto private token- and credit-centric solutions to ecological degradation, the consequences are clear. While seemingly existing to cater to the interests of the natural world, this model caters to the interests of mitigators and compensators — to private actors. Unit prices would be competed down to literally unsustainable levels (regulation-willing), while the outcomes of those units — depending on their methodology — would be the primary aim.15 What would the arc of enshittification in this case look like? In the early days, the lofty goals of nature restoration would stand large, as they do now with existing schemes and high-priest-like peddlers of biodiversity credits. Incentives may seem intuitively aligned — advertising and the intrusive tracking associated therewith, surely, surfaces more relevant results for users? Credit-enabled restoration, surely, puts us in a better situation than we are in today, and at the very least incentivises the restoration of something? But, ultimately, as long as the business model in question does not serve the end-user — differentiated from the relevant product’s customer — the end-user will suffer, sooner or later. The end-user, in this case, is the entirety of Earth’s biosphere.

One key feature of enshittification as a process is the need for market power, which grants product suppliers the ability to degrade their product for end-users while improving it for customers. In the case of nature conservation and restoration, it is unlikely for any one firm to hold market shares and the equivalents of the captive network effects that the likes of Google and Meta enjoy. Regardless, and more importantly, the fundamental mismatch of incentives still applies: because the customer is not the natural world, and without near-debilitating regulation, firms would voluntarily enshittify to compete with one another — to provide a product at terms more competitive than one another. Methodologies, and/or their implementation, would be literally and figuratively cheapened in order to do this.

Implications

A scenario of these misaligned incentives is set out by Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker — a novel describing the carbon offsetification of extinction. Motivated by the ongoing sixth mass extinction, countries around the world set up a system wherein companies must pay a fee to wipe a species from the face of the earth, typically via habitat destruction. Intuitively — great! A financial (state-regulated) penalty would discourage extinction-inducing activities. No. A penalty of this kind instead instrumentalises extinction, allowing private actors to weigh the costs and benefits of a particular species on their balance sheets. In the book, reserves were created to optimise for species’ prevalence (as that was the core of this scheme’s methodology), ignoring the broader health of ecosystems and the Earth’s biosphere. And, later, as the digital and biological worlds melded together, the transfer of biological species to digital equivalents was considered part and parcel of the solution.

Venomous Lumpsucker is a satirical work — it is a comedic dystopia, exposing the warped incentives and structures at play in contemporary economic systems. It beautifully elucidates the issues of private solutions to the ecological crises we face: if current economic presumptions are maintained and private solutions are thereby emphasised with existing instrumental logics pursued, the reversal of current ecological trajectories will lead to profound unintended consequences. The natural world would, potentially, be enshittified: after first providing a product to the natural world — its restoration — in seemingly good faith, the actual customers’ — the private actors who pay for it — needs are prioritised. Costs and thereby the product’s quality are pushed down, while the metric in question — based on evolving yet never-complete methodologies — is relentlessly optimised for. This scenario may seem abstract now, but when imagining a scaled-up, lightly-regulated, future where the usage of private biodiversity-credit-esque financing becomes widespread, competition between providers would ultimately cut corners. And in a more heavily-regulated future scenario, private actors may nonetheless ruthlessly optimise to cut corners where possible — the biodiversity-equivalents of tax avoidance: seeking exemptions, claiming deductions, and offshoring income.

The idea of voluntary responsibility under present economic arrangements — the idea of voluntary or lightly-regulated intervention to arrest ecological decline — is clearly bankrupt.16 The idea that private actors will fully internalise the externalities they are causing, and fully pay for natural capital they have previously considered free, is outlandish. The danger of that outlandishness is that some middling half-house solution is the likely end-result — a compromise of sorts, a compromise that would lead to a warped-incentive-ridden system with likely profound unintended consequences. Even under more heavily-regulated scenarios, the same fundamental logic applies: private actors will optimise and enshittify, because that’s what they do — what they are best at.17 They behave and act self-interestedly in incentive-laden environments. And shit follows.18

The Limits of State Intervention

So to avoid the natural world’s enshittification, other solutions are needed. On the other side of the strawmanned coin we find statism — wherein central governments or a central government overseeing geographies of any theoretical form directly embark on nature recovery, funded by taxation of some kind.19 This public solution is the heads to the private’s tails precisely because it acknowledges that the natural world is a public — or rather, depending on the geographical scope of governance, planetary — good that is most efficiently and efficaciously provided for by the state.20 Both in economic schools of thought and political-ideological terms, too, it is the polar opposite of the previously discussed private solution.

It has a number of clear advantages, not least the fact that it escapes the prisoners’ dilemma. If a nation or a group of nations was to fund restoration through general taxation, they would sooner and collectively reap the benefits thereof. They could more easily weather any competitive price disadvantages faced in the short-term and more easily recoup upfront costs in the medium-term. They would, too, be more competitive in the long-run — unlike climate- and carbon-centric action, ecologically-focussed actions’ rewards can be more discretely located within sovereign boundaries.21 Whether political appetite for this avenue is present or not, its benefits are clear.

Frailty

Yet that in no way means it is flawless — far from it. Its weaknesses are numerous, some being potentially fatal. One such weakness has been on display most recently — that of frailty. The political decisions that lead (or don’t lead) to action on ecological degradation often rely on thin majorities and variable public opinion. The EU’s Nature Restoration Regulation, for one, only passed due to the then Austrian Environment Minister Leonore Gewessler’s decision to disobey her government’s directive and vote it through.22 In the EU’s legislative trifecta of the Commission, Parliament, and Council, legislation has to be approved by a qualified majority of member states’ central governments even after passing through the representative Parliament. Gewessler’s decision provided this, pushing through a law thought at the time to be near-dead.

While now on the statute books, the Nature Restoration Regulation’s saga illustrates just how easy it is for long-advocated for and supported legislation to (near-)fail at the final hurdle. A different type of frailty — that of prior decisions being made and unmade — is on display stateside. The executive protection of federal land from exploitation — whether drilling of oil and gas, logging, or development — just as easily becomes executive permission and encouragement therefor. Slightly removed from direct ecological degradation, executive mandates on vehicle emissions and fuel efficiency just as easily become mandates allowing vehicle producers to supposedly self-regulate — abandoning previous targets. And executive support of conservation work abroad can, through a drastic change in administration and corresponding change in ideological priorities, be cut.23

Centralisation and Benevolence

This links to a related weakness of statist interventions in ecological degradation: the degree of risk centralised governance and centralised decision-making entails. While more efficient than decentralised approaches, centralised decision-making can unmake any prior decisions — or make poor decisions in the first place — at any point with greater ease. When singular bodies are responsible for and oversee a matter as strategically important as nature restoration, mitigations that limit the risks of those bodies’ potential unreliability are needed. These can be found in existing state institutions, whether the judiciary, legislature, or executive, but all stand to be challenged by a degrading of norms that uphold them in the first instance — as experienced stateside today.24 These same safeguards, though, could just as easily act as barriers to action as seen in Gewessler’s case — a trait that is less visible in decentralised approaches which emphasise individual interventions.

At the same time, the centralisation exhibited by statism can fall victim to the wholesale application of flawed methodologies. States, even if presumed to be ecologically benevolent, are limited by the same knowledge problem private solutions suffer from — being unable to fully comprehend and act for the natural world. The risk this brings is particularly acute, as that limited knowledge when applied wholly — versus the varied applications private actors might pursue — could either wreak total havoc or bring about complete harmony.25 The underlying assumption of states’ enlightened thinking, too, poses a risk. In the same vein that private actors operate within a set of incentives that typically lead to degradation, states operate within a set of incentives and influences that lead them to making often unwise decisions. One only has to look at the continued sidelining of climate science for clues.26 Politics, no matter the political system a state may adopt, involves the playing off of competing interests with differing strengths — lobby groups, trade unions, and voting blocs — that each have competing priorities. A government is unlikely in any case to transcend politicking of this kind, opting for short-termist, political term-to-political term thinking.27 Statist solutions, too, much like private solutions, ultimately cater to exclusively human interests. They are unlikely to challenge the speciesist logics pervading the planet’s ecologies that our alien visitor observes.

And states’ ecological benevolence is questionable at best. For every intervention that protects and restores the natural world, interventions that degrade and destroy can at the very least be match-named.28 Indonesia’s state-sanctioned move to deforest an area the size of Belgium for bioethanol and food production is one example; the continued conversion of Brazil’s and Argentina’s Cerrado into soy mono-cropland another.29 Closer to home, the disregard England’s soon-to-be-passed Planning and Infrastructure Bill shows for international nature conservation treaties, and the recent dropping of one aspect of the nation’s sustainability-linked farming subsidy, is more evidence still.30

The combined risks of statist intervention — those of political impermanence and of excessive centralisation — create a scenario that is on a fundamental level temporally and spatially mismatched from ecological (and climatic) timelines. The protection and restoration of the natural world is not something that should be reliant on changing political priorities, whether democratically or dictatorially-induced. What for decades have been established norms — the integrity of publicly-funded healthcare in the UK, pacifism in Japan, or the limits of executive power in the US — are being questioned by a mix of populism and circumstance today.31 The century- and millennia-long timelines of nature conservation and restoration are simply incongruous with the ebbs and flows of political will and opinion.

Our Imaginative Deficiencies

Both private and public approaches, then, face limitations. Privately-inclined solutions run the risk of enshittification, with misaligned incentives optimising for misaligned outcomes. Publicly-inclined solutions run the risk of excessive centralisation and simplification — itself not necessarily predisposing poor outcomes, but increasing the risk of poor decisions’ wholesale application.

Privately-inclined solutions would inefficiently and iniquitously provide what is ultimately a public good, something that publicly-inclined solutions are better catered for. The market failure on show throughout recent human history is ultimately a governance failure: the inability of human actors and their institutions to allocate finite resources efficiently and equitably. Yet the forms of economic governance proposed as solutions thereto are insufficient — unimaginatively rooted in Holocene-ic thinking, built to address failures at dramatically smaller scales than the planetary crises we face today.32 Proponents of private solutions are backed by the (un)imaginative default of private capital — capital that holds the power of financial resource allocation, and can thereby paint itself as the only way forward. Proponents of public solutions are backed by the (un)imaginative default of public goods’ provision — the idea that some goods are simply more efficiently provided by the state.33 And each of these defaults does not recognise their respective boundedness: private solutions ultimately cater to the interests of capital; public solutions to the interests of the human public.

This boundedness is abundantly clear to our cosmic visitor. Defining total imaginative possibilities as a universal set, our current human defaults of private and public interventions fail to capture the range of alternatives — alternatives that we have yet to discover or fashion — on offer. We are self-limited by these interventions’ seeming inevitability, trapped in a sort of bifurcated human fatalism. Existing incentive systems are simply unecological: redefining the universal set as ecologies themselves reveals these systems’ deeply speciesist nature. A number of the critiques made are based on presumptions themselves only present in the private and public sets — they are by no means universal.

This is more an impractical diagnosis than an actionable prescription. Regardless, alternative solutions that escape existing imaginative bounds are necessary: private and public pathways do not suffice. We cannot allow for the natural world’s enshittification by private actors, nor its anthropocentric chopping and changing by states.34 Yet the bifurcated reductive logics described in this essay are by no means limited to these corresponding expressions. Private logics don’t exclusively correlate with marketisation, nor free-marketism. They apply to any pathway that looks to utilise decentralised approaches. While some pathways might place a lesser emphasis on the need to assign economic value on the natural world, other criticisms still apply: the local knowledge problem, and the difficulty of coordinating knowledge and knowing that knowledge in the first place, being paramount. Public logics also don’t exclusively correlate with state interventions: coordinating and concentrating action on ecological crises at inter-actor scales poses the same methodological challenges — particularly those of frailty, risk, and anthropocentric speciesism — no matter the structures pursued.

Notwithstanding these considerations, our cosmic visitor demands solutions. They demand an end to the misery humanity has imposed on the Earth’s biosphere, on its biosphere; on its non-human companions. They demand an end to the narrow, short-sighted, and impotent economic frameworks that continue to wreak havoc. And they demand an end to a historical trend that has disrupted millennia of relative ecological stability.

Clarifications

This essay is descriptive and diagnostic. Its intention is simply to describe the state of things, not to prescribe — precisely because the prescription in question is uncertain, if at all existent.

A follow-up essay examining the prerequisites potential solutions should abide by, though, is in the works. Subscribe to have it land in your inbox as soon as it’s ready!

To prevent repetition by going over existing approaches’ strengths and weaknesses, I would recommend — for those who haven’t already — reading this series in full. Please see each post, in order, for ease below. I would also recommend reading this post in conjunction with the third and fourth for greater clarity.

1. Scotland's Socio- and Ecological Challenges

2. Success Criteria: Evaluating Land Governance Structures

3. Community Land Ownership: The Solution to Scotland's Socio- and Ecological Challenges?

4. Private Purchase: The Solution to Scotland's Socio- and Ecological Challenges?

5. Land Governance: The Case for Change

A thought experiment that I like to use, and that I feel would be apt here, is that of the cosmic visitor. Think of an alien — embodying a detached, objective, observer — coming down to earth and expressing judgement of the systems and structures we use to organise ourselves. Unaffected by the contingencies and baggage of history, what would that visitor make of our land governance structures? What would they make of a system that inefficiently, iniquitously, and unecologically places ownership and subsequent control in the hands of a few individuals; what would they make of a system that dispossesses, disempowers, and subjugates a landscape’s human and non-human inhabitants? It is hard to imagine they would view these structures kindly — structures that, in effect, pervade the status quo.

But this is just a thought experiment. It isn’t particularly practical, and could lead us to unproductively conclude that everything is flawed and should be rebuilt from the ground up. While not entirely untrue, taking this view disregards how change, particularly in land governance, occurs. Bar catastrophic events that induce major societal shifts — whether war, uncontrolled pandemics, or serious famine — change is gradual. It results from successive responses to sociological, political, and environmental contexts, much like how a species may evolve within its ecological context reflexively. The problem with this dynamic is that the power that landownership affords can manipulate both what is responded to — through altering contextual conditions — and how it is responded to — by altering social and cultural debate in the power holders’ favour.

Bar a catastrophe, then, incremental change is the way forward. This does not, though, presuppose incrementalism — it does not speak to an excused lack of action. Incremental change is about responding to current contexts with an eye on the future; about creating the conditions for a cascade of subsequent changes through a systems-level realignment of incentives. With this in mind, let’s get into it.

The dichotomous approaches of communal and private can be married. Responding to the urgency of nature restoration and sociological realignment, their strengths can be combined and their weaknesses overcome to establish a system of landownership that more accurately reflects the needs of the present-day. That new system would not be established in absolute, but instead eased in through comprehensive purchase of existing landholdings — to be governed under a novel framework that separates legal and equitable ownership; that separates the ability to decide and the ability to profit or lose off of those decisions.

In scaling nature restoration-centric land acquisition, and in establishing structures conducive with long-term systemic cascades, the communal approach’s benefits are clear. The Land Reform Act’s provisions for pre-emption rights on and compulsory purchase of land provide a path through which a well-funded actor could overcome the issue of land liquidity — transferring parcels from unsympathetic or less-than-sympathetic landowners to kinder hands. It would additionally allow that actor to strategically map and acquire areas desirable for nature restoration projects, instead of purchasing plots that sporadically and unpredictably go up for sale, on- or off-market. The Act, then, is there to be capitalised on — its shrewd and judicious use could go some way to increase its paltry impacts on landownership distribution.1 Primarily, though, the communal approach draws its strength through in-built legitimacy. It offers a clear benefit in its level of agency and devolved control: decisions are made by those affected by their consequences.

The private approach’s main strength comes in its practical scaleability. Funding is more plentiful than that available for the communal, and concurrent expertise to manage scaled acquisition and subsequent management is prevalent too. This, of course, is dependent on appropriate nature restoration financing being ironed out in the coming years — a genuine uncertainty at this point in time.2 It is also dependent on the grade and integrity of nature restoration financing expanding — going beyond Woodland and Peatland Code-centred project portfolios.3 The coming Ecosystem Restoration Code may do this, but it is again an uncertainty.

And while the communal and private approaches have much to offer and complement each other with, neither address the more significant questions that will affect Scotland’s socio- and ecological wellbeing in the long-term: overcoming excessive agglomeration and disagglomeration; overcoming parcellisation; implementing durable and dynamic protection measures for restored land; and developing structures that could integrate non-human voices into land-use decision-making.

For the sake of simplicity, the proposed alternative entails the founding of a central funding vehicle. That vehicle would likely be incorporated as a trust — one dedicated to nature restoration-centric land acquisition, predicated on the fact that nature restoration-centric land use will likely entail higher yields than present management does.4 A trust is preferred over other instruments because of its inherent flexibility. It allows for the provision of additional duties, beyond those prescribed by legislation, that trustees must abide by and beneficiaries must agree to. A set of principles or specific guidance, for example, on acting in the interests of the natural world, can be inserted, and a set of tailored rules on capital raising and withdrawal can be implemented too.5

Profit maximisation would not, here, take precedence. I won’t go into fundraising structures in too great a depth as it isn’t the focus of this series, but patient investment from large funding bodies, beyond British pension funds seeking high single-digit yields, would be sought. Bodies that aim for a lower-than-average but steady return; want to inset large carbon footprints from their portfolios; and are able to work on multi-decadal, near-half-century time horizons, would be prioritised. Funds like Singapore’s GIC, which averages an annualised real return of about four-and-a-half percent, is an example of this. Relatedly, land in Scotland will likely become a refuge for capital in the coming years. A durable asset class in a politically stable country is increasingly rare in a geopolitically uncertain world — the healthy appreciation in land values in recent decades is thus likely to continue.

So — a central funding vehicle, incorporated as a trust, with specific provisions that require trustees to act beyond the immediate financial interests of beneficiaries. This forms the top layer of the proposed structure. The base layer — although the use of the word base should by no means diminish its importance or standing — would be formed by incorporated community groups. Community bodies who wish to pursue the legal mechanisms set out by the Land Reform Act must be incorporated in a geographically-delimited manner — defined as communities of place, whether that be by postcode unit, electoral ward, locality, or landmass.6 Membership of these bodies is then open to all who live in that place. Crucially, too, when Parts 2, 3A, and 5 of the Land Reform Act are pursued, whole-place votes are held outwith the community body, meaning that all are involved in the decision to purchase land regardless of membership status.

The interface between these ‘top’ and ‘base’ layers would be a set of private limited companies incorporated in line with the geographical delimitations presented by each respective community body — each body thus having a matching company. Those companies would have dual-share classes. Class A shares would have full voting rights with no equity. Class B shares would have no voting rights but full equity.7 Class A shares would be split evenly between the community body in question and the central funding vehicle, in accordance with the legal advantages community bodies offer in land acquisition and in accordance with the financing provided by the central funding vehicle. Class B shares would be split according to financial contribution — so, presumably, the majority would go to the central funding vehicle but some may be granted to the community body on a gratuitous basis.8 Community bodies could raise funds independently too, and contribute accordingly. These private limited companies would have additional provisions in their articles of association that require adherence to nature restoration and maintenance as a core principle, beyond simple profit maximisation. These companies’ boards, too, would not have their representation split down the middle — with half acting in the interests of the community body and the other half the central funding vehicle’s. They would instead consist of agreed-upon independent third-parties to prevent potential deadlock in regular decision-making processes.

This, in written form, sounds rather convoluted, so I’ve fashioned a diagram for ease. I would be more than happy to elaborate on any aspects readers might be unfamiliar or uncomfortable with in the comments down below, so please don’t hesitate to ask!

Let us, then, judge this solution by the criteria we have set out previously.

1. Levels of Agglomerated and Disagglomerated Control

How does it rate on levels of agglomeration and disagglomeration? Fairly well — balanced agglomeration and disagglomeration is inherent in its structure by distributing power amongst bonded yet separate actors. It avoids excessive centralisation but similarly avoids excessive decentralisation. The central funding vehicle offers central oversight in accordance with a set of appropriate principles, but is only able to make land-use decisions alongside each incorporated community group — and vice versa. This distribution of control adds resiliency and redundancy to the system, and prevents universal application of decisions that may prove inappropriate in the long-run. It creates a sense of dynamism, of specific responses to the specific ecological needs of a specific place without forgoing the overarching needs of the ecological whole.

2. Overcoming Parcellisation

How does it rate on levels of parcellisation? Really well. In theory, this model allows for strategic acquisition of land across Scotland. Priority areas for nature restoration can be mapped and targeted through judicious use of pre-emption rights and, potentially, compulsory purchase.9 Swathes of connecting plots of land can be targeted directly too, forming networks throughout the country.

3. Addressing Concentrated Landownership

How does it rate on addressing concentrated landownership and associated sociological ills? Better than the status quo — which currently entails a further narrowing and cementing of iniquitous ownership distributions. Importantly, the status quo additionally entails a complete loss of agency and a complete loss of equity: beyond minimal employment, little is offered. This model provides a strong sense of agency — a veto right, essentially, on land-use decisions — and a higher probability of claiming equity.10 Most importantly, though, this model’s success is predicated entirely upon communities’ agential decisions to participate: should they be unwilling to, it would not go forward.

4. Long-Term Protection Measures

How does it rate on long-term protection measures? Better than the status quo. By distributing ownership and control, contravention of restoration objectives becomes more difficult. What this model offers is a dynamic, responsive, structure with a variety of actors and interests that act in accordance with a set of overarching principles. Instead of one or two actors — be they the owner of a bit of land or a responsible body with which a conservation burden is registered — having control, a distributed system of organisations, each with their own ‘membership’, would be required to reverse decisions. This also increases the number of potential enforcers should any one element in the system not be acting in accordance with overarching objectives — instead of a responsible body that may have limited capacity, or a court system that may have to allocate and prioritise resources elsewhere. The incentives that this model creates, too, separates decisions from their propensity to make a subsequent profit or loss.

5. Practical Scaleability

Finally, how does it rate on scaleability? Here, it is middling. Funding models aside, its proposition is more practical than that of the private or communal approaches — it combines ample financing with the legal means to acquire land. Its challenges, if anything, lie in convincing potential stakeholders that this is the case. The model is abstract, untested, and foreign in a system of landownership that accepts absolute dominion as standard. It relies entirely on the goodwill of participating communities, and relies entirely on the risk appetite of investors to put capital into an ownership structure that surrenders partial control over that capital’s allocation. It similarly relies on an alignment of priorities — namely on nature restoration. That is not to say, though, that convincing these stakeholders is an impossibility. The benefits to both ‘parties’ are clear: communities attain a previously impossible degree of meaningful agency, and investors are able to invest capital in volumes that increases economies of scale and overcomes the sociopolitical barriers of land acquisition and corresponding ownership concentration. This just needs to be communicated lucidly and convincingly.

One additional criterion that I added to our list last week was that of ecological democracy — of the idea that land-use decisions should be made according to the needs of all affected actors, human and non-human. Here, this model and approach don’t explicitly align, beyond assurances that decisions are made in accordance with the natural world’s priorities. What it does do, though, is open an avenue for eventual non-human democratic participation. It de-essentialises the absolute dominion presupposed by landownership. And while crude, the nature of share ownership means that non-human voices could be integrated directly into decision-making processes down the line, much like attempts to integrate the rights of nature around the world tend to place responsibility on representative individuals and bodies.11 This model would give that kind of representation teeth.

Removed from the Scottish context and specific legal provisions that make strategic land acquisition easier, this model is applicable elsewhere. A distributed system of landownership and control would do wonders around the world, and all countries and regions face challenges similar to Scotland’s — just to differing, and usually lesser, degrees.

Edit (14/01/2025): While it does redefine landownership to some extent, this governance model would partly fall victim to an alien observer’s criticism. Dual-class share structures are deeply unecological — a figment of human imaginations if anything — and aren’t exactly what you’d want to see managing land in 200 years time. The model also doesn’t actually alter the fact that land is owned in the first place: it reinforces the dominion presupposed by human legal superstructures. On these points, it is important to keep in mind that the model proposed is essentially a stopgap: a reasoned response to present contexts and needs. In addition, it offers a pathway out of the current presumption of dominion. It introduces a flexible and adaptable governance structure capable of integrating non-human voices down the line, and capable of altering the way land is owned and transacted. This is in no way offered by the status quo. Land is not owned and controlled in the traditional sense — no matter who the beneficiaries of the trust which holds class B shares are, their preferences cannot be implemented wholesale given the safeguards layered throughout. Land would not be sold either, assuming the community and trust wish to retain control — class B shares would be sold instead: shares with a protective wrapper that presumes particular management and exhibits particular resale requirements. Sympathetic land-use, then, would be secured in perpetuity without complex deed-based mechanisms — the same is true of the class A shares structure used to make land-use decisions: this would remain the same despite changes in equitable ownership.

So — that brings us to the end of this blog series. Do share your thoughts and feedback, either in the comments below or by email. I’d love to hear from you, and I’d love to hear what you make of the alternative solution proposed in this post.

Thank you, truly, for tuning in and for sharing the series with your friends, family, and colleagues. I’ll be writing a few more pieces on adjacent matters in the coming months, so if you’d like to stay in the loop please do subscribe directly to this Substack. Until then, I hope you have a restful and rejuvenating holiday season!

Image Credit to Joe Payne, a good friend of mine and a great landscape photographer! See his Flickr and IG for more.

With the holidays fast approaching, and given the last two posts have been rather lengthy, this week’s edition will be a good chunk shorter. So before getting into the weeds of the alternative solution, let’s examine in more detail how that solution is situated: its priors and its base assumptions.

It would be worth briefly summarising existing solutions, as well as the problems they are seeking to solve. Ecologically, Scotland’s landscapes are heavily degraded: they are historically devoid of life, for the most part blanketed by sheep grazings, shooting estates, commercial forestry, and carbon-leaching peatlands. The little that is left is at risk, and current restoration projects are insufficient in righting the sheer extent of decline — let alone meeting national nature targets. Sociologically, Scotland’s landscapes are historical relics. Their ownership structures reflect the sociopolitical dynamics and desires of centuries past, bearing little relation to our present circumstances and needs — their justification being little more than maintenance of, or reversion to, the status quo.

Current solutions to those challenges, previously dichotomised as scaled-up community landownership or scaled-up private land acquisition for the explicit purpose of nature restoration, are inadequate. Neither address the need to construct a land governance system that agglomerates central oversight while devolving minute control and management to a local level.1 Neither, too, address the need to overcome excessive parcellisation of land and related methodological issues in true landscape-scale nature restoration.2 And neither offer comprehensive long-term protection measures of restored or to-be-restored land.

Both, though, separately offer benefits. Expanded community landownership, for one, rights historical sociological wrongs and mitigates the sociopolitical and economic inefficiencies associated with concentrated landownership. Expanded private acquisition — if of a centralised, well-resourced, kind — could offer the practical financial scaleability needed in nature restoration that no other approach currently provides. These considerations, though, are ultimately short-term. They do not offer compelling visions for the future, nor do they address anything other than immediate, singular, problems. Unmet and arguably more important long-term criteria — namely levels of agglomeration, parcellisation, and protection measures — should take precedent.

That is because these criteria are systemic: they fundamentally influence the underlying logic of land-use decisions. To this should be added one last criterion. Ecological and sociological decline is historically the result of disenfranchisement. It is the result of a stripping of power, of agency, from human and non-human communities directly reliant on the land they inhabit. Land-use decisions were and are abstracted — subject to the whims of single individuals or organisations. This is rooted in presumptions of ownership: in the idea that land and those who inhabit it can be owned or controlled, that human and non-human communities alike can have their needs and interests disregarded. It is an expression of practical human dominion — of humanity’s ability to dictate ecological outcomes, those who these outcomes are affecting having little input in decision-making processes.3

This supplementary criterion, then, is that of socio- and ecological democracy, of finding ways to reverse embedded presumptions of landownership, of integrating local human and non-human voices into land-use decisions. With this comes the current definition of ownership — one that urgently needs altered. Ownership is for the most part defined by a combination of legal and equitable control — that is the ability to decide outcomes, and to profit or make a loss from them. Legal and equitable control are inextricably linked. Those making land-use decisions are thereby predisposed to make these entirely in accordance with their personal financial interests: those interests are typically not aligned with other actors’, and there is little incentive to act in accordance with the human and non-human fates they influence.

This systemic exclusion of the affected augurs the undeniable need for alternative land governance structures. Existing solutions, whether communal or private, do not fundamentally question the calculus of landownership. Were we to design a land governance system from scratch, we likely wouldn’t come up with anything close to the present irrational reality. We would envision a system that incorporates the criteria discussed previously — that builds healthy, dynamic, structures which takes account of human and non-human interests more broadly.

Current floated alternatives maintain existing structures while fiddling around the edges: community consultation schemes here, conservation covenants there, inter-parcel planning supposedly everywhere. The status quo is essentially entrenched, fixed and absolute landownership accepted as axiomatic. That axiom is perhaps best expressed by the seemingly innocuous language we use. To describe a large patch of land as an estate is odd — it presupposes singular ownership and dominion: it presupposes human ownership and dominion, and management for exclusively human ends. Scotland is not covered in estates. It is covered in degraded land, land segregated by artificial, ahistorical, and unecological boundaries. We desperately need a better system.

And if a better system is to emerge, now is the time. We stand at a point of phase change: land is being considered as more than an inanimate canvas to paint our desires on — valued both intrinsically and financially, with novel instruments likely to assign a higher value to natural capital than counterfactual, exploitative, use. A shift of this magnitude reflects a shift in state, say that from liquid to gas. Energy abounds and is in flux: corresponding unpredictability, fluidity, and flexibility must be taken advantage of not to cement the status quo, but to overcome the historical inertia of entrenched land governance structures. We must imagine governance structures which produce positive outcomes as direct and constant consequences of their design, rather than as a result of periodic changes in influencing incentives.4

So, with this in mind, I’ll be envisioning that alternative next week. Stay tuned, and please do share this series with anyone you think might be interested. And, as always, I love hearing your feedback so do leave it in the comments below!

Image Credit to Joe Payne, a good friend of mine and a great landscape photographer! See his Flickr and IG for more.

This week we’ll be digging into the ‘private’ approach, previously defined as any non-communal purchase of land to commit it to nature restoration: that non-communal definition encapsulates philanthropists, returns-centric organisations, and the government. While it might seem arbitrary, the distinction here, between the communal and non-communal, lies on the level of separation between the owner and the area of land concerned — the degrees of separation between the decision-maker and the affected.

It is worth expanding the private approach’s definition, though, to encapsulate non-purchasing arrangements: here existing landowners self-finance projects or collaborate with firms to finance natural capital or nature restoration projects. Examples of this are increasingly common in Scotland. abrdn’s Nature Investment Partnership strategically maps woodland and peatland restoration — funded mainly through the voluntary carbon market’s Woodland and Peatland Codes — onto existing plots of land, collaborating with owners to create a pipeline of projects. Single estates have been pursuing much the same: Corrour, an estate just east of Glencoe, announced a long-term partnership with the University of St. Andrews last month to offset its unavoidable emissions — alongside creating research opportunities for students and staff alike. Ardtornish, an estate on the Morvern peninsula, recently announced a similar agreement with the University of Edinburgh, again looking to offset unavoidable travel-linked emissions — focussing on nature-based, restoration-centric, solutions to facilitate this.

Arrangements to facilitate nature restoration to differing degrees — whether plain woodland planting or long-term, high-integrity, restoration — are, then, diverse. They utilise a range of agreements, whether through service provision or leases, to achieve their aims, and don’t necessarily involve direct purchase of land.1

With this in mind, we will now survey the private approach’s different components — philanthropic, returns-centric, and governmental — and examine each in accordance with the success criteria established in the second post of this series. We’ll also look at the different tools available to further achieve our aims: conservation burdens in particular, but also Highlands Rewilding’s use of its NCIP model. As a reminder, the success criteria are summarised below. Take a note of their numbering as I’ll be referring to these for ease throughout!

1. Levels of agglomerated and disagglomerated control — the need for a mix of centralised and decentralised control to ensure diverse implementation with overarching goals and oversight.

2. The need to overcome parcellisation: linking disparate bits of land to facilitate true landscape-scale nature restoration.

3. Addressing the deep sociological inequities and economic inefficiencies Scotland faces as a result of concentrated land ownership.

4. Offering credible long-term protection measures of land that is restored, or is on the journey to restoration: offering dynamic organisational structures that mirror the functioning of ecological systems and our uncertain knowledge of them.

5. Practical scaleability: the viability of financing mechanisms to scale a system of land governance — through acquisition — that adheres to the need for nature restoration.

I’d recommend reading this post in two sittings: start with Approaches, grab a cup of tea or coffee, and then move onto Tools. Enjoy!

Approaches

Philanthropy

This approach is perhaps best encapsulated by the work of Anders and Anne Povlsen. Famously the largest private landowners in the UK, they have bought up parcels of land around Scotland to unapologetically commit them — currently amounting to about 89,000 hectares — to rewilding. Their estates span Sutherland and the Cairngorms — Glenfeshie being the most famous of these. Anders and Anne take inspiration from the work of Doug and Kristine Tompkins — who pretty much birthed the rewilding movement through their large-scale strategic purchases of land across Chile and Argentina. Their efforts, when paired with the commitments received from those countries’ national governments, have resulted in the protection and restoration of nearly six million hectares of land and over twelve million hectares of sea.

We should also, though, consider smaller-scale philanthropic arrangements: individuals, trusts, and charities buying up or already owning estates of varying sizes out of interest in and affinity with nature restoration. Examples of this are numerous: think of the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s expansive reserves across the country, or the RSPB’s flagship estate at Abernethy. While at a reduced scale, this kind of philanthropy is for all intents and purposes similar to that of the Povlsens.

So how does this score on our criteria, relative to the status quo?

1. Here, this approach scores poorly. Unless government regulation of land use mandates particular restoration outcomes, control would either become overly centralised or remain as it currently is — in the hands of a few individuals and organisations. In a theoretical world where philanthropists like the Povlsens would purchase truly gargantuan swathes of the country, central oversight, given it would be in the hands of a single organisation, would strengthen. But disagglomeration would fall victim to this: the entire system contingent on a few owners — a few nodes, points of failure. Local agency is thereby similarly reduced.

2. If scaled significantly, parcellisation would noticeably reduce. It would become easier to coordinate and plan large-scale restoration projects, and to provide enough space for the reintroduction of range-extensive species — carnivores in particular. In the scenario of land ownership distribution remaining equal but estates being bought up by a variety of green-tinged philanthropists, it is foreseeable that the problems posed by parcellisation would be allayed given obvious overlap in values: practical barriers in coordination, though, would remain.

3. This is where this approach scores rather poorly. It would further cement centuries of historical inequity, concentrating ownership and tightening control over the outcomes of communities located on the land that is owned. No nominal community engagement or participation scheme can mitigate this.

4. Here, it is dependant on a number of interdependent factors. If conservation burdens are judiciously used and the articles of association or trust deeds that incorporate philanthropists’ vassal organisations are designed carefully to incorporate inclinations for restoration and conservation, land could be committed to long-term protection. Again, though, as with criteria one — the points of failure are too few to allay fears of that protection’s integrity. Just to note, we’ll be examining conservation burdens specifically towards the end of the post.

5. In a scenario wherein philanthropists have unlimited capital to commit to nature restoration, this approach would score well. With a lesser need to manage landholdings for commercial returns, strategic goals can be prioritised. But considering only 6% of UK and 2% of global philanthropy relates to conservation and the environment, that supposed unlimited capital pool is in reality fairly finite.

Returns-Centric

This approach can be best defined as managing land primarily for positive commercial outcomes — while partly keeping the needs of and for nature restoration in mind. Gresham House is a prominent example: now being one of Scotland’s largest landowners through a network of limited partnerships that they have established. Much of these landholdings are committed to commercial forestry — hardly a boon for the natural world with its monocrop spruce-coated hillsides. Another prominent and more recent example is that of abrdn’s Nature Investment Partnership, which as previously mentioned collaborates with existing landowners to plant Woodland Code-compliant woodland and restore Peatland Code-compliant peatland for the purposes of carbon sequestration.2 abrdn are currently in the process of raising capital to fund the expansion of this project. One last useful example is Oxygen Conservation, a company centred on directly acquiring and restoring plots of land themselves. Funded primarily by their parent company Oxygen House Group, their model similarly revolves around Code-validated carbon credits. Their landholdings are for the most part located in England, but they do own sizeable estates in Glen Lednock and at Langholm Moor.

Before evaluating the efficacy of this approach, it would be worth mentioning briefly why these commercial models tend to focus on sales in the voluntary carbon market. Funding nature restoration commercially is at present fairly nascent. Equivalent biodiversity credits don’t exactly have a buyer — they don’t have an established pool of demand to access. Measuring societal dependencies on the natural world, whether that be corporate or governmental, has yet to be fully monetised. This is particularly the case for rural restoration, which offers less of a concrete benefit when compared to nature-as-infrastructure projects nearer to densely inhabited areas. The Scottish government, though, is developing an Ecosystem Restoration Code in partnership with CreditNature, whose NARIA framework and Ecosystem Integrity Index mirror the makeup of healthy ecologies. This may well form the basis of a future Scottish voluntary biodiversity credit market, and could link to the country’s expected Biodiversity Net Gain equivalent.

All this aside, and keeping in mind that restoration finance models are not the focus of this blog series, the key takeaway is simply that nature markets are as yet poorly developed: that means that restoration projects are presently heavily carbon-focussed — a similarly nascent yet more established model. Restoration for restoration’s sake, as an extra criterion, then, suffers in the returns-centric approach.

So how do these diverse returns-centric approaches stack up when judged by our five criteria?

1. Again, this approach scores poorly on the necessary balance between agglomerated and disagglomerated control. For the most part, existing landownership distribution will remain equal, and in the absence of top-down government mandates on land use decisions would remain entirely in the hands of the few. Levels of disagglomeration, too, are minimal, there being little diversity in ownership type and no central body overseeing outcomes.

2. Little would change: existing levels of parcellisation would likely be maintained, and given the diverse funding models used and thereby outcomes desired, coordinating restoration projects at scale between landowners would be tricky.

3. As with philanthropy, a returns-centric approach scores poorly. Existing landownership distribution would remain equal at best, and possibly worsen. It really is not a valid way forward, and no nominal community engagement or participation scheme can mitigate this.

4. Long-term protection measures for sites that don’t exhibit strong or anticipated strong ecological integrity — in the form of Woodland and Peatland Code-centred methodologies — are not, continued carbon sequestration aside, as important. That said, conservation burdens can contribute to durability, depending on their exact provisions. And if financing mechanisms for nature restoration do mature, they can ensure that positive outcomes are locked in for some time (more on conservation burdens later in the post!).

5. This approach, disregarding the fact that it isn’t exactly rewilding-centric, does have the greatest potential to scale. This is particularly the case if leasehold and management agreements are pursued, as direct purchasing faces the basic roadblock of large plots entering the market and changing hands infrequently.

Government

The Scottish Government, through Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), is the country’s largest landowner: holding about 9% of its territory for diverse management. Much of it is on a commercial basis, with forestry destined for the timber industry. As discussed in a previous post, FLS recently acquired Glen Prosen, an estate in Angus that it intends to manage for nature restoration outcomes — linking it to already planned nature networks in the Cairngorms just north of the site.

Exact financing mechanisms aside, let’s set up a theoretical scenario wherein the government would decide to strategically purchase vast swathes of land and commit it to restoration — this is often seen as a desirable way forward by many, and is exemplified by recent movements in Denmark: the central government there will buy back 10% of currently cultivated marginal land from farmers, committing it to either reforestation or other nature-friendly management to the tune of 390,000 hectares. A similar scheme in Scotland would be groundbreaking, or rather ground-restoring — but how would it stack up on our criteria?

1. The degree of agglomeration and central oversight is severe: this would enable swift and decisive action, but contains little redundancy in the system. Limited redundancy means that should dictated action be ineffective or less than ideal, failure or suboptimal outcomes would be widespread. Disagglomeration, of course, is the victim in all this.

2. Parcellisation, if land purchases are strategic, would be overcome entirely. Disparate plots would be linked up and managed centrally, overcoming management inefficiencies and ensuring economies of scale.

3. This is tricky. Is centralised ownership and control acceptable if that ownership and control is democratically mandated? Do national elections suffice as a mandate for mass land acquisition and control? This proposition is difficult — primarily because national democracy in no way relates to local democracy; to those actually affected by land-use decisions. As mentioned elsewhere, the distinction between communal and non-communal approaches is the removal from local contexts: this approach is entirely removed from local contexts — prioritising national interest above all else.3

4. Excessive control in the hands of a few individuals, supplanted by excessive control in the hands of a single government at the whims of shifting public opinion, is not exactly conducive with long-term commitments to nature restoration. If an election result or a simple shift in polling changes policy, this approach cannot be considered durable.

   Edit (22/01/2025): A practical example might be of use here. The extraordinary success of Doug and Kristine Tompkins in assembling a series of national parks throughout Chile — amounting to around 4 million hectares of land — rests on a model that presumes continued state enthusiasm for nature conservation as a cause. Of those 4 million hectares, 520,000 were donated directly by the Tompkins’. The rest was matched by the Chilean national government. That matched land (albeit without precedent) could at any point have its designation as parkland removed — only the 520,000 donated via a modal donation mechanism (a private contractual agreement) would have to be returned, and only that portion (presuming Rewilding Chile’s, the successor organisation of Tompkins Conservation in the country, integrity) would remain protected. At a time of global upheaval and disregard for established norms, reversals such as this aren’t unimaginable — particularly in the context of Chile’s ongoing constitutional instability and neighbouring Argentina’s (where the Tompkins’ successfully pursued a similar model) political turbulence. The same applies even to private law mechanisms: sovereign states, if they were so inclined, could override and rewrite applicable rules.

5. In theory, the government would have the ability to purchase large swathes of land. Financing restoration work itself is another story, but given borrowing could be offset by acquired asset values, comprehensive purchases wouldn’t prove too difficult. The biggest roadblock, here, would be the fact that the Scottish Government could not actually borrow enough to do this — it being a limited devolved competence — and doesn’t otherwise have sufficient funding.

It is worth noting alternative models for government intervention. Other than direct prohibition of particular harmful activities through, say, the Wildlife and Countryside Act or the more recent Wildlife Management and Muir Burn Bill, positive financial incentives can be offered too. Commercial forestry is currently subsidised in the form of grant funding, and farming is most obviously subsidised through Scotland’s CAP successor. A transition for both of these mechanisms to ones that support nature restoration and nature-friendly farming or land conversion — for the latter, refer to England’s ELM Landscape Recovery Scheme — would do plenty to incentivise existing landowners to act appropriately without the need for direct land purchases.

Tools

Conservation Burdens

One tool this set of approaches relies heavily upon is conservation burdens — or covenants, as they are referred to in England. I feel it is worth elaborating on these, although I am by no means qualified to do so at length. Should any reader feel I get something wrong, please do correct me!

Conservation burdens are agreements between a landowner (generally a freeholder, although in some cases a leaseholder too) and a responsible body for a specific conservation outcome. Responsible bodies are registered third-party organisations whose activities predominantly lie within the matters the burdens relate to — in our case conservation and nature restoration. Burdens can last any agreed length of time (including in perpetuity) and require the landowner to conserve or engage in behaviour that conserves the natural environment. These obligations also carry over to future landowners, being deed rather than owner-specific. Burdens can be as prescriptive and broad brush as the landowner and responsible body would jointly like them to be: they could, for example specify how land should be managed, not just what it should be managed for (i.e. the preservation of a particular patch of woodland).

Scepticism of whether conservation burdens can act as a tool to truly address our socio- and ecological challenges is well grounded. They are fundamentally derived from the land ownership context we inhabit: they exist because private landownership exists, and they exist because private landowners are almost solely able to dictate the outcomes of conservation and restoration on their specific bits of land.4 Burdens are a tool that reflect this dynamic: they are not a mechanism we would come up with were we designing a system of land ownership or land management from scratch. There is a moral hazard, then, in claiming that conservation burdens effectively allay the drawbacks of current land ownership systems — a form of green- and whitewashing.

Other practical difficulties with burdens exist too. They concern specific areas of land, and given the infinitely customisable nature of the agreements that could be made between landowners and responsible bodies, there is no guarantee of effectively coordinating restoration on a true landscape-scale. Enforcement of breaches of these agreements, too, relies heavily on courts’ capacity to hear these: hardly a guarantee in the currently cash-strapped judiciary. They also rely on responsible bodies’ willingness and ongoing capacity to challenge breaches from the outset.

One other important point to note is that any future piece of legislation could change the terms conservation burdens are governed under. This is the weakness with the static nature of this instrument, as I have referred to previously. It is better to place emphasis on developing supportive, dynamic, community-driven governance structures that place implicit social value on their surrounding natural landscapes than it is to rely on on-paper instruments requiring legal enforcement to have any practical meaning. Do burdens foster these supportive structures? Not in isolation — so they cannot be relied upon in that way nor treated accordingly.

Edit (22/01/2025): One previously unmentioned consideration is that conservation burdens fundamentally don’t address the need to de-concentrate landownership: they (partly) fulfil ecological objectives only by slotting into, and thereby reinforcing, existing landownership structures.

NCIP

I’ve been asked to speak more specifically about this: Highlands Rewilding’s Nature and Community in Perpetuity model. For context: this is an approach currently taken by Highlands Rewilding, wherein they are selling, and plan to sell, some their landholdings off to bodies that adhere to certain standards —see those via the hyperlink above. The idea, more generally, is that land should be sold off to bodies that guarantee its continued restoration and subsequent conservation. This was the case for the Barrahormid Trust, which bought a chunk of the Tayvallich estate: their trust deed guarantees management for positive nature outcomes.

The sale to the Barrahormid Trust, and others currently planned, seem distressed. They are more a result of the need to repay the UK Infrastructure Bank’s — now the National Wealth Fund’s — £12 million loan that funded the initial purchase of Tayvallich in 2023 than they are a coordinated activity to ensure land is conserved in perpetuity. It is a response to a specific, localised, problem rather than a solution to Scotland’s broader challenges. Buying up a bunch of land and then selling it off to willing buyers who wish to lock it into a particular kind of land use is an inefficient way to go about things, and is hardly a winning business model either.

One other point to consider is that sales to trusts or community bodies are hardly a silver bullet. Problems previously discussed remain. For trusts, refer to the above section on philanthropy. For community bodies, refer to the third post in this series. And should it be another kind of organisation, likely refer to the above section on returns-centric bodies.

Conclusion

I’ll end this post with a prelude to next week’s edition. All the solutions discussed thus far, while seeming responses to Scotland’s — and the world’s — socio- and ecological challenges, tend to fit within the frameworks that encourage those challenges’ emergence in the first place. Solutions emphasise not just the idea of private landownership — but the idea that land can be owned and exploited in the first place. They reinforce the dynamics of overly- and underly-centralised control that led us to where we are; they fail to provide a roadmap to an alternative — to a better — future. This is particularly the case with the financing mechanisms used to fund nature restoration. The reason I place little emphasis on these is because underlying structures need fixed first: those who decide what happens, and decide how that happens, must change before those very power dynamics are baked into what would simply become a nature restoration-centric form of land use.5

I will be discussing this and more in the next two posts, where I’ll be proposing an alternative solution that intends to overcome these challenges. Do stay tuned.

Note: I am aware that examining approaches in isolation is somewhat reductive. Examining them in combination, though, would lengthen an already lengthy exercise in evaluating their efficacy. As always, I would be happy to chat more about all this with anyone who’s interested!

Image Credit to Joe Payne, a good friend of mine and a great landscape photographer! See his Flickr and IG for more.

• Levels of agglomerated and disagglomerated control — the need for a mix of centralised and decentralised control to ensure diverse implementation with overarching goals and oversight.

• The need to overcome parcellisation: linking disparate bits of land to facilitate true landscape-scale nature restoration.

• Addressing the deep sociological inequities and economic inefficiencies Scotland faces as a result of concentrated land ownership.

• Offering credible long-term protection measures of land that is restored, or is on the journey to restoration: offering dynamic organisational structures that mirror the functioning of ecological systems and our uncertain knowledge of them.1

• Practical scaleability: the viability of financing mechanisms to scale a system of land governance — through acquisition — that adheres to the need for nature restoration.

I’d recommend reading this post in two sittings, and referring to the footnotes only if you feel like it! It’s accordingly split into two sections — context and assessment — so you can grab a cup of tea or coffee midway through. I’ll be introducing two current solutions, but only discussing one in depth. The other will be the subject of next week’s post.

I’d also like to pre-empt this post by recognising that land reform is a sociopolitically sensitive matter in Scotland: I’ll be viewing things apolitically, in line with the challenges and according to the criteria discussed previously.

Context

So — what are the existing solutions? I’ll be setting up a useful false dichotomy here, simplifying — or rather distilling — a set of diverse solutions into two approaches. These are communal and private.2 The communal approach lays emphasis on local communities acquiring surrounding land themselves, and committing this land to nature restoration. The private approach lays emphasis on private bodies purchasing land directly, and potentially systematically, to commit it to nature restoration. This approach has a number of different sub-approaches: private bodies, for this purpose, will be considered diverse. They could be wealthy private philanthropists ideologically committed to deep-green rewilding — think, here, of the Povlsens or Rausings. They could also be financial services firms like abrdn or Gresham House, utilising light-green financing schemes like the Woodland and Peatland Codes to either purchase land directly or partner with existing landowners to deliver similar outcomes. And they could be the central government, via Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), purchasing large estates themselves on a commercial basis — refer here to the recent acquisition of Glen Prosen and consider the fact that FLS owns 9% of Scotland as a whole.3

The communal approach to addressing Scotland’s socio- and ecological challenges is that of direct land acquisition: it involves communities purchasing the land that surrounds them, in our case for nature restoration. Community buyouts are increasingly common in Scotland — more than 500 have been conducted to date, both in urban and rural areas. Perhaps the most famous example is that of the Isle of Eigg, where residents formed the Eigg Heritage Trust to purchase the island in 1997 — after publicly raising £1.5 million. This buyout predated the first Land Reform Act of 2003, which itself precipitated one of the largest rural community buyouts in Scotland: that of Assynt, in the northwest of the country, by the Assynt Foundation in 2005, amounting to 44,000 acres. A more recent example, and one most relevant to nature restoration, is that of Langholm, where the local community impressively purchased more than 10,000 acres in two goes to form the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve. Despite all of these seeming successes, community land ownership in Scotland as a proportion of its total landmass still stands in the low single digits. Worse still, the legal mechanisms that the Land Reform Acts of 2003 and 2016 provide have only resulted in the transfer of 0.24% of Scotland’s land in the past twenty years.

It is worth, then, going into these mechanisms. They relate primarily to Parts 2, 3A, and 5 of the Land Reform Acts.4 These are legal provisions that give local, geographically-delimited, ‘communities of place’ the ability to place pre-emption rights on, and even compulsorily purchase, land.5 Part 2 is the most often-used, relating to pre-emption rights. This means that communities can, through a specific government-facilitated process, have ‘first dibs’ on land before it goes to market. They are then, should they wish to, able to purchase it at market value, as ascertained by an independent valuation. Parts 3A and 5 relate to compulsory purchase. 3A relates to purchase of land being detrimentally managed, as defined by harm being done to the community in question, and 5 relates to purchase for the specific aim of sustainable development. To date, only a handful of applications to compulsorily purchase land have been submitted — all, to my knowledge, being unsuccessful.6 Part 2 has been a little more successful, although it usually acts more as an enabler for negotiated purchase outside the Land Reform Act’s framework, pre-emption rights being rarely redeemed in practice.7

It is also worth nothing that a revised Land Reform Act is currently making its way through the Scottish Parliament. I won’t dwell on this too much as it won’t have much of an impact on the mechanisms communities have to acquire land — other than the potential provision to sell large estates in lots under a public interest test. In the grand scheme of things, though, it acts more as a regulatory force, ensuring that estates of a certain size — exceeding 3,000 hectares — publish land management plans in consultation with local communities.8

How are communal land purchases funded? This depends. The biggest funder is the Scottish Land Fund (SLF), a government-backed pool of money that supports buyouts across the country. Capitalised at £10 million a year, this barely scratches the surface for larger acquisitions: Glen Prosen, for example, the 3,500 hectare Angus estate purchased by FLS around two years ago, costed £17.5 million. The National Lottery provides a bit of funding here and there too, but as with the SLF, this is hardly scaleable, nor reliable. Community and other discrete fundraising is a third source: at Langholm, the SLF provided £1 million for the second, 5,300 acre, parcel, supplemented by £200,000 in fundraising by 4,000 individuals around the world, and £200,000 in funding from the Woodland Trust, amongst others.9 It goes without saying that all these fundraising mechanisms are complex, with numerous hoops to jump through, and entail a number of conditions that have to be adhered to.

Assessment

So how does the communal approach score on our five criteria? I’ll be comparing it to the status quo.

1. Levels of Agglomeration and Disagglomeration

In all likelihood, levels of central oversight would reduce. In the absence of further government guidance and regulation, land ownership would — in a theoretical world where the communal approach has unlimited funding — become fragmented. This is great for local agency, but makes it harder to coordinate large-scale restoration, and would result in competing local interests displacing the needs, and interests, of the whole. With fewer owners to target and with estates likely being smaller, fewer parcels of land would be subject to land management plans too.

Bringing us back to the practical goal of scaling rewilding, a theoretical Scotland broken up into disparate chunks of land is hardly conducive with large-scale restoration. It makes coordinating and financing that restoration more difficult.

2. Overcoming Parcellisation

That difficulty, then, brings us to the problem of parcellisation. Mass communal ownership does not fulfil this criterion by any means: as with agglomeration-disagglomeration, the problems and inefficiencies parcellisation entail would likely be exacerbated. Existing schemes, like Cairngorms Connect and Affric Highlands, would be made more difficult, tedious, and administrative by increasing the number of participants — from its current contingent of primarily large, well-resourced, landowners.

In the long-run, too, mass communal land ownership suffers from the same problems of mass, albeit more concentrated, private land ownership. The borders put up by the parcels of land that are owned — ownership being an ecologically artificial idea — are not and cannot be conducive with the needs of non-human inhabitants.

One other aspect of overcoming parcellisation is the ability to strategically plan land acquisition according to the needs of landscape-scale restoration: the individualised nature of communal acquisition does not allow for this by any means. The overall score, then, stands below that of the status quo.

3. Sociological Inequities

This criterion is where this approach stands its own, and vastly outscores the status quo. Mass communal land acquisition and ownership would overcome centuries of appropriation and concentration, and reverse centuries of historical inequity. Democratising the structures used to make decisions around land use would radically reshape the power imbalances of Scotland.

It is important to keep in mind, though, that the democratisation of land use decisions does not entirely equate to mass rewilding. An attempted, fully-funded, buyout on the Morvern peninsula failed at the last hurdle — its community, some favouring sheep grazing, split on the restoration-centric plans for the land.

4. Long-Term Protection Measures

In this regard, the communal approach is as limited as that of the status quo. Protection measures are up to individual landowners, and as this approach is not fully compatible with the first and second criteria, there may not be much to protect in the first place. Tools available would remain static and up to individual owners’ wishes: conservation burdens being an example of this.

The democratic nature of this approach may be a limiting factor too. As community buyouts are usually made by communities of place — particularly under the Land Reform Act — membership is open to all who live there. Should there be a change in communal priorities, then, the protection of once restored land would be at stake — much as with the status quo.

5. Scaleability

The limits, on this front, are clear — and already outlined. Financing is limited at best, and this is unlikely to improve anytime soon. Another aspect unaddressed thus far is the issue of capacity. Scaling communal land acquisition is in itself a difficulty: it requires a great deal of time, and a great deal of expertise. Members of some communities may struggle on one or both of these fronts.

One advantage that the communal approach holds is its unique legal means. It would be worth experimenting with the compulsory purchase provisions set out under Parts 3A and 5 — as large estates rarely come on the market, this would overcome the problem of land liquidity. It is, though, a legally untested and potentially risky approach, given broad yet strict definitions for detriment and sustainable development. It also does not overcome the base financial and capacity barriers mentioned above.

To conclude quickly, then, the communal approach doesn’t sufficiently address the socio- and ecological challenges Scotland faces. If you’ve gotten to the end of this post, thank you, truly! I’d love to hear your feedback, and I’d love to hear how you would rate the communal approach according to the five criteria. Next week we’ll be exploring the ‘private’ approach. Do stay tuned, and please share this series with anyone you think might be interested.

Note: just a reminder that you can read more about my thoughts on these matters in the brief I wrote a while back here — worth looking at, particularly if you want a sneak peek of my proposed solution.

Image Credit to Joe Payne, a good friend of mine and a great landscape photographer! See his Flickr and IG for more.

To be clear, the merits of increased ecological diversity and nature restoration will be considered axiomatic — all existing and alternative solutions judged accordingly. The ability of existing and alternative solutions to maximise restoration while balancing sociological outcomes — essentially ensuring that existing land ownership inequality is reversed, or at the very least not entrenched — is paramount. To be doubly clear, the inherent good of nature restoration does not necessarily mean that other land use is inappropriate: I am exclusively discussing trajectory, and direction. Were Scotland’s area theoretically increased in size, covering that additional land in forestry monoculture or sheep grazing would make little sense — there is a lesser need to scale these than there is to scale nature restoration.

One additional clarification: my focus is not on financing mechanisms for the actual act of nature restoration, whether that be in the form of biodiversity- or carbon-linked credits, philanthropic efforts, or government-funded schemes. My focus is on the governance structures we use to manage land and landscapes: less on how things will be financed, more on what structures that financing is funnelled through. I do, though, touch on financing mechanisms for land acquisition specifically. So let’s get into it!

The criteria to judge solutions by are five-fold. Firstly, they need to offer a degree of agglomerated decision-making, wherein a central body can ensure — and at times prescribe — certain, desirable outcomes. See this as a way of setting ground rules that actors the central body represents adhere by. Simultaneously, though, solutions must offer a degree of disagglomerated decision-making, wherein that central body cannot dictate overweeningly. This ensures that if those prescriptions are even partly misguided, the consequences of their complete application are mitigated — risk must be spread out amongst actors.

Let’s use a concrete example to illustrate this: the relationship between government and private actors, consisting of individuals, firms, and other organisations. A government sets regulatory and legislative ground rules that actors have to adhere by. Each actor (in our case being a landowner) then acts within those rules, implementing their respective agendas within the provisions set out by them. Think regulations on pollution and nutrient runoff, or specific planning requirements for proposed developments. In the case of nature restoration, ground rules requiring that restoration would have to be set out, alongside protections for those restoration projects in the long-run. Importantly, a system of hybrid agglomerated-disagglomerated decision-making allows for a level of dynamism that a system that would either be centrally- or locally-planned in entirety cannot: ecological systems are inherently dynamic, and this dynamism must be mirrored in the organisational structures we use to manage land.

Edit (12/01/2025): This example of government can be expanded directly to land-use decisions. A particular community’s priorities might not align directly with the nation’s, while the nation’s priorities might not align directly with the community’s. Governance structures, then, that reflect this tension and lead to its resolution are necessary — one only has to look at the NIMBY-YIMBY divide on infrastructure construction to make this real. On ecological systems’ dynamism: governance structures simply have to reflect their inherent lack of fixity. A peatland, for example, is hardly a fixed entity. Restoring and managing it purely for carbon is short-sighted — ignoring the potential for its later metamorphosis. This is particularly pertinent in the seriously long-term: 500+ years, horizons worth considering when we are discussing climatic and ecological histories.

Secondly, solutions need to overcome the inherent parcellisation private land ownership — and the idea of land ownership in the first place — entails. This relates to ecological, inter-parcel, connectivity, ensuring that habitats are durably continuous and that non-human actors can move freely between different areas — thereby ensuring greater ecosystem diversity and resilience.1 It also relates to the ability to coordinate nature restoration practically: it makes little sense for a bunch of separate landowners to work to restore their particular patches, when the natural world clearly does not recognise the artificial borders we write into our deeds and draw on our maps. Existing initiatives recognise these problems: Cairngorms Connect, Loch Abar Mòr, the Torridon Partnership, and Affric Highlands, to name a few, go a long way to addressing them. They also allow for greater economies of scale, coordinating high-input conservation measures like deer culling, fence building, and tree planting. Despite these great efforts, inefficiencies remain: reaching agreement on the extent of restoration is notoriously difficult, and ensuring that restored land remains so is still up to individual owners and their descendants. On top of this, these coordinating projects do not question the fundamental calculus of private land ownership, nor question who owns that land in the first place.

This brings me to the third criterion. Beyond addressing ecological challenges, a potential solution needs to credibly address the sociological problems facing Scotland. Concentrated land ownership, with all its associated ills, cannot and should not be exacerbated — nor be allowed to continue at current levels. A solution must go some way to changing this pattern of ownership. It should strive to remove — or rather dilute — the levers of control that only a few individuals presently have. A solution must also recognise that if that change in pattern, and if that removal and dilution, is to ever occur, now is the time to do it. We are experiencing a phase change in land use classes: from typically extractive forms, expressed by raw material or energy production, to restorative forms, typified by nature restoration. With that phase change comes a degree of instability — spelling an opportunity for genuine reform of existing land ownership and land use decision-making structures. Whether that opportunity is seized on to increase the share of land held by incorporated community bodies or other organisations is a separate matter — a change in that share, though, along the lines of the first criterion, is necessary.

Fourthly, solutions must offer credible long-term protection measures of land which is being or has been restored. These protection measures currently take diverse forms. A typical tool used internationally is a conservation covenant — otherwise known as a conservation easement, burden, or servitude. This is essentially a management responsibility provision placed on a property’s deed by initiative of the existing owner. This responsibility passes on to any future owner, meaning they would have to ensure that the piece of land is managed with particular conservation outcomes in mind. These responsibilities are enforced by a third-party which can vary in form — I won’t get into that level of detail here. But one other aspect to keep in mind is that covenants are by their nature static instruments, so changes in management practices and ecological understanding may be harder to integrate down the line.

Edit (12/01/2025): Covenants and legal instruments of this kind are static, too, in that they rely entirely on statute. They do not necessarily foster a dynamic, discursive, relationship between local human and non-human communities — a relationship that can prevent later shifts in local and national political whims through deep-rooted support. This makes them more durable and reliable, particularly in that they don’t rely on a state’s capacity to facilitate legal disputes and challenges. Support, here, is organic rather than legalistically forced.

Another long-term protection measure is a specialised ownership vehicle that creates ground rules for how that vehicle’s assets should be managed. If the asset in question, for example, is a piece of land, a provision in the vehicle’s founding documentation could require that it be managed for nature restoration alone. The vehicle can take the form of a charity with a constitution, or the form of a trust with a deed, that requires this. The Barrahormid Trust, having acquired 625 hectares of the Tayvallich Estate from Highlands Rewilding back in June of this year, is a good example of this. Weaknesses of these models, though, remain. Covenants rely on the existence of supportive legislation: should a future government decide that they are unnecessarily burdensome they could be removed unilaterally. On truly long-term time horizons, then, they become a risky instrument if relied upon in entirety. The Barrahormid or NCIP model also poses problems: not necessarily being compatible with the first, second, and third criteria outlined above.

Fifthly, lastly, and more practically, solutions need to be financially scaleable in the short- and medium-term. If we are to address the socio- and ecological challenges Scotland faces, we must do so quickly. This is especially the case for the latter: we can’t wait a few decades to get our ducks in a row — restoration at scale must start now. To ensure the transfer of unsympathetically-managed land into sympathetic hands, any financing mechanism must recognise this. Community purchases of land at scale, for example, are at present not a credible solution — simply because available financing, primarily in the form of the Scottish Land Fund and lottery funding, is so limited. A floated land tax to expand this funding would take far too long to implement, and take far too long for its proceeds to accrue in value, to be a viable solution. Private acquisition of land, too, obviously doesn’t fly with some of the other criteria mentioned above, nor do national and local government purchases.

With all of these criteria in mind, I will be examining existing solutions in greater depth in the coming posts, before moving on to a potential alternative I’ve crafted. See these criteria as a framework to review these solutions systematically: some might seem convincing in some respects, but could be lacking elsewhere. Anyways — please do stay tuned, and pop me a message or comment below if you have any thoughts or questions in the meantime!

Note: as you’ll have noticed, my focus is on the terrestrial. I’ll eventually turn my attention towards seascapes, but I’ll have to wrap my head around them first!

Image Credit to Joe Payne, a good friend of mine and a great landscape photographer! See his Flickr and IG for more.

Those challenges are multifarious: Scotland for the most part exhibits the equivalent of an ecological hellscape. Its land and seas are degraded beyond the bounds of imagination our forebears held — forests more than decimated; peatlands heavily degraded; rivers empty of life and forced to follow artificial pathways; seas, once teeming with diversity, now a wetter desert than terrestrial Scotland itself. The picture I paint here is purposefully dire, and purposefully pessimistic. While progress is being made and while projects around the country aim to restore that which has been lost, the sheer extent of decline relative to the current and projected extent of restoration humbles current approaches to Scotland’s ecological challenges: we rank 212th out of 240 countries in biodiversity intactness for a reason. To move further and to move faster, particularly within the context of the climatic and biodiversity crises, new accelerating strategies are needed.

Limited ecological diversity matters — it isn’t, and shouldn’t be, some kind of abstract concern. Diversity ensures resilience. The more simplified ecological systems become, the more vulnerable they are to shocks — consider the vulnerability our simplified food systems exhibit to climatic changes, or the vulnerabilities pandemics expose(d). This applies to physical landscapes too: the more a particular patch of land looks a particular, singular, way — say, a grouse moor or livestock monoculture — the less it is able to deal with the diversity of challenges it faces: whether that be flooding, fire, or erosion. Our simplification of the ecosystems we participate in and landscapes we inhabit, then, has made us increasingly vulnerable.

Scotland’s sociological challenges mirror this. Much as ecological diversity was stripped from our hills, glens, lochs, and riverbanks, human diversity — diversity of human tenure — was done so in a similarly systematic manner. Whether expressed through historic clearances or financialisation of rural land, human habitation has been reduced and simplified. Today, this is evidenced in deeply unequal and iniquitous land ownership — expressive of the profound lack of agency many rural communities have over their surroundings’ fate. Half the country is owned by just over 400 bodies — individuals, trusts, companies, partnerships, and other organisations. 60% is owned by just under 1,000 of these, and 70% by just over 2,500. This is shockingly unequal, and deeply problematic for Scotland’s social, political, and economic health.

Just like ecological systems necessitate diversity to function effectively and resiliently, sociopolitical and economic systems rely on a degree of diversity to ensure that the levers of power and production aren’t excessively concentrated in the hands of a few. When 400-odd bodies control half of a country’s land, its use becomes privately regulated — monopolised. With economic activity in rural areas often intrinsically linked with that land, that monopolisation becomes stifling — landowners’ dictation of its use is essentially a dictation of how and even whether local communities are and can be employed, and where and whether they can build their homes. Monopolisation of land use, or rather land control and decision-making, isn’t just deeply inefficient — mirroring the pernicious effects monopolisation brings to any industry. It also just simply isn’t right, on a fundamental level. It strips communities of their agency, of their ability to decide their fate.

The ecological and sociological problems Scotland — and arguably the world — faces, then, are intrinsically interlinked. And they clearly need addressed. In the coming blog posts, I’ll be discussing existing solutions, their strengths, and their shortcomings. I’ll also be discussing an alternative solution that addresses those shortcomings and capitalises on those strengths. Please do stay tuned, and pop me a message if you have any comments in the meantime!

Note: my approach in these writings is not exhaustive. Plenty of folk have written about these matters previously, and I don’t intend to repeat what they’ve said. I instead intend to add my personal spin — my interpretation — to these analyses.

Image Credit to Joe Payne, a good friend of mine and a great landscape photographer! See his Flickr and IG for more.