A New Order of Regenerative Kinship

The below interview is part of Ecologies of Entanglement, a collaborative series between Are.na Editorial and Dark Properties.

What if, despite the name “anthropocene,” the future doesn’t need to be so anthropocentric?

While most new technologies have been specifically devised with humans in mind—to make our lives and work more productive, seamless, and (on a good day) enjoyable—perhaps there is a better way. Perhaps, by expanding our pool of “users” to encompass the more-than-human world, we could devise tools and technologies that help us form stronger, more engaged alliances with other species, and with the natural world more broadly.

Austin Wade Smith is someone who’s highly skilled at imagining subversive, expansive uses for new technologies. In fact, that’s where they seem most comfortable: In the murky, vernal pool of nascent, ready-to-spawn ideas that feel heady and far-out but also reasonable, even actionable. In this way, they want us to envision how we might make use of evolving tools, many of which have yet to be applied with the best of intentions—such as blockchains, remote sensors, and AI—in ways that empower all living entities. As Austin sees it, a river’s right to flow with clean, cool water is not something we should just aim to protect; rather, we should aim to empower the river with its own tools and resources so that, in a way, it can protect itself. As they put it below, “If people think this idea is a little bit absurd, then the point is getting across. It’s meant to stretch the ideas of, who has the right to be seen, and to be considered legitimate?” We’ve already designated corporations as people, so why not use a similar legal hack in service of the natural world?

Austin told me over email that they “feel spiritually connected to moth camouflage,” which makes sense, as Austin seems fully capable of shape-shifting between environments, hovering ever so gently between the realms of design, technology, and ecology. As the current Executive Director of Regen Foundation, a non-profit developing new economic models that aim to make regenerative ecological work more sustainable, Austin has a lot to teach us about how we might use these still-developing technologies to collaborate with other species, as a way to ensure both their and our own survival.

Willa Köerner: I know you grow a lot of orchids. Can you tell me about your long-running interest in them?

Austin Wade Smith: Growing orchids has always been a way to connect with my family, and with my dad in particular. I grew up with orchids in my room, with hydroponic lights and everything, so it’s been a lifelong interest. But when I relocated recently, I sent most of my orchid collection—about 120 plants—to my dad out in California. I’m still helicopter parenting a few of my orchids, but the rest are happier with him. They outgrew the confines of apartment living. [Laughs]

At some point when I get a little more stability, I’d like to spin up a greenhouse where I can grow a lot more of these highly sophisticated plants. But they really need a high humidity content, and a significant fluctuation between day and night temperatures to be happy. Long-term, I’d like to end up in a place that’s conducive to orchids, since growing them just feels like an extension of my own growth.

Overall, orchids are some of the most highly specialized organisms on our planet, particularly in their pollinator relationships. In some cases, it’s almost impossible to determine where the flower stops, and their pollinator begins. I find it comforting to think of my interactions in the larger world in a similar way.

Willa: As someone who’s very specialized yourself, it makes sense that you’re drawn to orchids. Professionally you’ve cultivated quite a niche, between the seemingly disparate areas of blockchain technology, climate activism, economics, law, and architecture. What is it like to work so interdisciplinarily? How do you tie it all together?

AWS: I think animism [the belief that objects, places, and creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence] is the core through-line of my work. I see animism as a way of participating in a broader cognitive ecology, kind of like what’s happening between orchids and pollinators. In that way, I’m interested in how we can think with the living world. I’m also interested in how living things become legible to other living things, and to infrastructures—such as legal and economic systems. Inherent in that is the tension of quantifying or classifying living systems.

In undergrad I studied plant ecophysiology and endomycorrhizal relationships between trees—basically Wood Wide Web-type stuff. I was very into that, and still am, but I eventually got tired of being a scientist and decided to instead become a designer. I’m a spatial thinker, so I got into architecture, and ended up running an architecture office for many years. I also taught classes on architecture, fabrication, and computation related to the environment at Columbia and Cooper Union. While I enjoyed my time teaching and designing, eventually I felt like I was working to decorate the drapes while the house was on fire. I felt a smoldering push to do something more.

Around that time I became really interested in the Rights of Nature Movement, [a legal theory that ascribes inherent, fundamental rights to ecosystems and non-human species]. I ultimately went looking for an org that was doing good work in that space, and eventually found the Regen Network, an open-source protocol that helps communities define the value of regenerative practices locally. Fast-forward a year and a half, I now run the nonprofit side of the org, the Regen Foundation. It’s become a place where I can collaborate with our larger team to test out ideas around animism, legibility, and the ethics of how we might classify living systems in tangible and applied ways.

Willa: It’s exciting to see Regen Foundation using new technologies to evolve the Rights of Nature Movement. Can you explain the organization’s mission a bit more?

AWS: When I introduce what Regen Foundation does, I start by saying we “build frameworks and tools to do the opposite of fining people for polluting.” Essentially, we try to make it possible for environmental stewardship to be a viable way to make a living. It turns out that’s actually very difficult.

While it’s straightforward to enact punishment for wrong actions, as soon as we begin defining rewards for doing regenerative work, things get complicated. A sticking point is that it’s actually quite difficult to prove and define the value of regenerative care work at a bioregional or planetary scale. In part this is because care work doesn’t often interact with monetary systems, which is probably why people doing care work often get exploited.

Long story short, it’s hard to build mechanisms to support stewardship based on “proof of regeneration”—but that’s what the Regen Network is working towards building. Wearing my Regen Network hat, the core idea is that the power to articulate what regeneration looks like, and how it is valued, must be determined at a local level. This is because regenerative work should always be driven by the particular context in which it’s taking place. And that, we think, can best be decided through a kind of ecological governance process. In the same way that various kinds of collectives have protocols or practices by which they steward common resources, it’s the same idea.

Willa: This is a good segue into Ecological Institutions, an idea you’ve been developing with Regen Foundation. Can you explain the general concept?

AWS: “Ecological Institutions” are emergent, eco-social assemblages that begin to ask, what might an expanded field of subjects look like?

Also referred to as “Earth-native institutions,” the idea is to make the more-than human-world legible within legal, economic, technical, and political systems. The framework of Ecological Institutions is an invitation to evolve our commodity-based relationships with non-human kin through an expanded notion of subjecthood, and to devise new institutional forms that could replace our existing, extraction-based ways of viewing the natural world.

The idea for Ecological Institutions builds on the Rights of Nature Movement. For example, we would say that if a river has the right to flow, we should treat it as a subject, and literally ascribe it personhood. Legally, we’ve already done the mental gymnastics to believe that corporations are people. The Rights of Nature Movement takes this idea and uses it as a kind of legal hack to bestow rights to non-human entities, and to make the legal system work in service of the natural world. In this way, it made the rights of rivers impossible to ignore, as just one example. With our Ecological Institutions project, we’re asking, can that approach be extrapolated to an economic and political dimension, too?

Willa: So essentially, Ecological Institutions is a term that could be used to describe any non-human entity—such as a river, or a species, or any other ecological subject—that has the right to do something, or own something, or even just to exist. How would these rights be enforced?

AWS: As an example, Boulder Creek Canyon in Colorado was given a regulation that designated it as a legal person. An advocacy group in Boulder County argued that case to prevent a dam from being built on the creek. So, to take this a step further by arguing that the river has “standing,” we would say that the river has inherent rights. Since installing a hydroelectric dam on it would curtail its rights, then the creek, in theory, should have the ability to sue for loss and injury or damages. Ecological Institutions lays out a framework so that the river could actually sue for those damages.

There’s a famous 1972 book by Christopher Stone that gets into this, called Should Trees Have Standing? The Ecological Institution idea takes it a step further. You can think of it as an evolution of land trusts, which is to say that the land has agency to do things in society, because through this framework, the land is a member of society. So if the land was ever threatened, and there were donations and momentum around protecting the land from human stewards, then it legally could have the right to own those accrued assets—which could then be distributed towards efforts to protect itself by way of a collective form of governance.

At the root of this, again, is the question of “ecological governance.” In the case of Ecological Institutions, this governance process could happen through people gathering together to decide how funds should be distributed, or by using data that demonstrates that a river, for example, has been polluted, or somehow otherwise threatened or harmed. Then there would be an automated process to issue something like a bounty to people who want to work towards righting the situation on behalf of that river. Essentially, the idea is just to build a mechanism for the river, or for any other kind of threatened entity, to accrue its own assets—and then support its own processes of stewardship.

If people think this idea is a little bit absurd, then the point is getting across. It’s meant to stretch the ideas of, who has the right to be seen, and to be considered legitimate? We live in a world that’s populated with living subjects, both human and non-human, and the legitimacy bestowed through different social infrastructures is tenuous for many. Ecological Institutions play into what we too often assume are immutable social truths. We should think of that river, for example, as an accumulation of both human and non-human collective wealth. And with Ecological Institutions, we’re building trusts that can be governed in ways that enable humans and rivers to work together towards mutual prosperity.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is a substitute for the more fundamental transformation that’s needed in terms of how we comprehend kinship in an animate world. Rather, Ecological Institutions are a form of social hacking to create space where these relationships might be nurtured, within our existing frameworks.

Willa: I love how the Ecological Institutions idea walks a line between provocation and tool. It’s like, let’s get your brain churning and see what we can imagine. But then parts of it do feel like they could become actionable and enforceable right now.

AWS: Totally. Just like anything being built outside of extraction capitalism, the goal is to show the potential of these hybrid models, while integrating them into the existing work being done. We’re asking, how can Ecological Institutions support land-back initiatives that are already in play? How can we help defend critical habitat and critical biosphere?

A lot of the work Regen Foundation does is an outgrowth of the idea of “the commons” as shared resources that we all collectively use and take care of. Commons used to be all over the place, but the birth of private property, and the subsequent enclosing of the commons, has been an enormous, world-defining force.

We’re thinking about how to develop hybrid integrated commons that exist outside of state-controlled, market-controlled systems—all in favor of a new kind of coordinated entity. We are collaborating on several pilots, spun out of our enDAOment project, which lean into the decentralized governance model of DAOs as mechanisms for coordinating ecosystem restoration.

[Editor’s note: If you’re not familiar with DAOs, essentially they’re just groups of people who choose to link themselves together in service of a shared vision, and who collectively govern a pool of resources. Usually the idea is that as the group works together, they will simultaneously accrue resources, which can then be distributed in ways that DAO members democratically agree upon. There is no central governing body, like a CEO or board, so the group has to come up with its own ways to make decisions and govern itself. Just like a cooperative might create bylaws, it’s the same idea; the key difference is that the group is run using blockchain-based technologies, so members can participate digitally, and governance proceedings are enacted via smart contracts, which aim to ensure fairness and transparency.]

The DAO space is exciting because people are looking for new ways to work in transparent, hard-to-co-opt manners. DAOs are also a way to coordinate work outside of the conventional permissioning systems that state actors follow. A core thesis of Regen Foundation is that DAOs should be understood as an evolution of commons. Most people think about DAOs as online communities, but I’d argue that they can actually be used to represent native webs of life. As a mechanism, DAOs can be used to steward commons and to enact collective ownership so that physical resources, and the knowledge around them, can be preserved across a community that cares for them.

Willa: Maybe this is a good segue to talking about the still-evolving possibilities of the internet. I feel like we’re in the process of rewiring our idea of an ecology and a locality through the web, and just starting to think of ourselves as unbound by physical location or citizenship. In this way, I feel that the web is central to our evolution as a species, and to how we’re able to branch into each others’ thought processes and establish networks that really do mirror ecological networks, in terms of offering support to each other, and sharing information, and creating pathways of sustenance. It almost feels like the only way that we could get to that inter-mingled point of emergent intelligence as humans is through the internet. And it’s exciting to me that we’re doing it. I guess that’s not a question, just a provocation. [Laughs]

AWS: One piece of common sense I have to offer is around building commons of sense-making. We’re currently in a scenario where there’s an enormous number of webs being destroyed. We could talk about that as climate collapse, or mass extinction, or ecoside and genocide, or through a number of other lenses. But simultaneously to that, we’re spinning up a whole new regime of new kinds of webs that bestow new kinds of social interactions, and which offer new kinds of global communities.

So, there’s an interesting relation with the collapse of some kinds of webs, and the emergence of others. Allowing those two truths to hold relation to one another, and unpacking what’s happening in the dual meaning of “web-based communities”—whether it’s technically online or an ecological interdependent kind of community—is a unique way to think about how the internet is changing us.

Willa: This makes me think about the worldbuilding potential of networked technologies. It’s important to recognize that through new technologies, we can actually rewire our pathways for engaging with the world. How do we get more of that, and develop a more kaleidoscopic entanglement between technology, the natural world, and our human selves?

AWS: I like the way you put that. As just one possibility, we could look at various systems of orientation, which is how one positions themselves in the world—whether that’s through Polynesian wayfinding practices or with something like GPS. I’m always looking for technologies that are able to better situate us within a place, and help us entangle ourselves further; where the tool enables the process of observing the world more closely, and helps us better understand our relationship with it.

I feel like we conflate technology with harvesting apparatuses, as that’s how many new technologies have been employed under capitalism. Because of that, we assume any new technology implies an extractive process. But I like thinking about technology in terms of, where does the thinking occur? Where is the attention held?

With Google Maps, for example, we’re outsourcing an attentiveness to the world around us; we’re deciding not to pay attention to the landmarks on our route, or to where the sun is in the sky, or to other things that we might use to position ourselves and know where to go. With that kind of technology, we’re basically outsourcing the whole process of thinking to a data center, which is participating in the capture and mining of our cognition. This is why we associate technology with an alienation of our attention: because it takes our thoughts somewhere else and does stuff with them before returning them to us.

But I don’t think technology needs to be defined by thought extraction. We can cultivate technologies that help us better observe and understand how we are situated in place; which support practices of attentiveness and thinking in context with one another; which don’t harvest us, but instead animate and extend our relationships with the living world. Navigation tools are a helpful way of initiating that conversation, but they’re not the only example. In fact, they’re just one small gesture in this direction.

The next interview from Ecologies of Entanglement will be published on Sunday, September 15. Subscribe to Dark Properties and Are.na Editorial to make sure you don’t miss it.