naturalizing finance: for all beings

In Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, a new UN body receives a mandate unlike any in history:

Charged with defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protections.

Not human creatures. Not economically valuable creatures. All living creatures — including those that won't exist for centuries.

This is the mandate naturalizing finance must answer. Not "how do we make nature investable for human benefit" but "how do we build financial systems that serve the living world — all of it, all the way forward."

The first piece in this series outlined ten characteristics of financial instruments that work like nature. This one asks a prior question: who do those instruments serve?

That question leads through uncomfortable territory. The living world generates the conditions every economy depends on — and has almost no formal presence in the financial systems built on top of it. Intelligence and agency are distributed across species in forms we barely recognize. The very concept of "ecosystem services" reveals the bias: nature framed as servant to one species. Legal standing is emerging — rivers and forests becoming persons in law — but courts alone don't move capital. What's needed is financial infrastructure where ecological condition has direct economic consequence, serving the integrity of living systems rather than just their usefulness to humans.

the silence at the center

The living world generates trillions in measured value annually — water filtration, climate regulation, pollination, flood buffering, soil formation — economic contributions that dwarf most human industries. And an incalculable amount that no methodology has figured out how to count.

But nature is not a participant waiting to be included in a human system. Nature IS the system. Every economy, every supply chain, every built environment runs on ecological processes. Humans built a financial architecture on top of that foundation — and then designed it as though the foundation didn't exist.

Conservation budgets exist. Park systems exist. Rights of Nature laws are emerging. These matter. But they're rounding errors against the trillions flowing in the opposite direction — $7.3 trillion annually in finance flows that directly harm nature — while only $220 billion flows toward protection. The financial architecture treats living systems the way a building treats its foundation: entirely dependent, entirely invisible, entirely taken for granted.

This is not an oversight to be corrected with better data. It's a structural condition of how finance was built: by humans, for human purposes, using human institutions, on human timescales.

ways of being

James Bridle's Ways of Being reframes the question entirely. Intelligence, Bridle argues, is not a uniquely human property. It is distributed across the living world — in octopus problem-solving, in forest communication networks, in slime mold optimization, in the collective computation of ant colonies, in the navigational genius of migrating birds.

The implication is radical: the world is full of minds we don't recognize because we only look for minds like ours.

Western thought built finance on a foundation of human exceptionalism — the assumption that only humans are subjects, and everything else is a resource. Bridle dismantles this by showing that intelligence, agency, and intentionality exist across scales and species in forms we're only beginning to understand. Trees share resources through mycorrhizal networks with a sophistication that resembles economic exchange. Dolphins have names. Corvids plan for the future. Forests make decisions.

If other beings have intelligence — different from ours, but genuine — then building financial systems that treat them exclusively as raw material isn't just ecologically dangerous. It's a category error.

Bridle connects this to technology: AI and computation give us new ways to perceive non-human intelligence, but only if we design those systems to listen rather than extract. The same tools that could automate exploitation could instead extend representation — translating ecological signals into economic participation.

This is exactly what naturalizing finance attempts: not to speak for nature in human language, but to build infrastructure — and incentives — where nature's condition — its thriving or its decline — has direct economic consequence.

all beings, not just useful ones

Here's where naturalizing finance diverges from most nature-finance projects.

The prevailing logic runs: nature is valuable because it provides services humans need. Water filtration. Carbon sequestration. Flood buffering. Pollination. Nature is infrastructure, and infrastructure deserves investment.

That logic is correct — and incomplete. The framing itself reveals the problem. "Ecosystem services" is a phrase that smuggles in its own answer: nature serves us. Many ecologists, economists, and Indigenous scholars have pushed back for years — not because the services aren't real, but because the frame reduces a living world to a service desk. It asks "what does this forest do for humans?" rather than "what is this forest?"

The deeper diagnosis: the problem isn't that we undervalue nature. It's that we value it too narrowly — through short-term, market-based, monetary metrics that can only see what's useful to one species on one timescale. A values crisis, not a data crisis. The measurements aren't wrong. The aperture is.

Aldo Leopold saw it in 1949: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Not the biotic community's usefulness to humans. Its integrity.

Bridle extends this from a different angle: if intelligence and agency are distributed across the living world — if forests communicate, if octopuses solve problems, if ecosystems compute — then reducing nature to its utility for one species isn't just ethically questionable. It's empirically wrong. You're ignoring most of the intelligence in the system.

Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves it further: "All flourishing is mutual." The serviceberry feeds the birds. The birds scatter the seeds. Neither thrives alone. The economy of nature isn't a supply chain with humans at the top. It's a web of reciprocity where every participant's flourishing enables every other's.

The Ministry's mandate is categorical: all living creatures, present and future. Not the economically convenient ones. Not the charismatic ones. Not the ones within this quarter's reporting cycle. All of them.

Naturalizing finance means building instruments that can hold this broader mandate — that treat ecological integrity as the ground truth, not human utility.

This doesn't mean abandoning the investment case. The investment case is real and powerful — natural cap rates of 131-766%, infrastructure that works twice, $1 trillion in unmet demand. Use the instrumental logic to bring capital in. But design the instruments so they serve the whole, not just the useful parts.

We are not financializing nature. We are naturalizing finance. — Jeff Stephens, BASIN, 2022

Financializing nature asks: "How do we make nature legible to existing financial systems?" Naturalizing finance asks: "How do we redesign financial systems to serve living systems?" The difference is who adapts to whom.

what the oldest traditions already know

The case for non-human agency doesn't begin with Bridle or IPBES. It begins with traditions that have held it for millennia — and articulated it with precision.

The idea that agency belongs to rivers, forests, mountains, and ecosystems isn't new. It's ancient — and it's sophisticated.

Western thought treats agency as residing in autonomous individuals making rational choices. These traditions distribute agency through relational webs that include non-human beings — not metaphorically, but ontologically. The Whanganui River is not "like" a person. Under Māori cosmology, it has always been an ancestor, a living system with its own standing.

Bridle arrives at a similar conclusion from the opposite direction — through technology, computation, and ecological science rather than traditional knowledge. The convergence is significant: both ancient wisdom and contemporary science point to the same truth. Intelligence and agency are properties of living systems, not exclusive possessions of one species.

Kimmerer braids these threads — the title of her most famous work is itself instruction: science and Indigenous knowledge, matter and spirit, theory and practice — held together, not collapsed. The braid models what naturalizing finance requires: intrinsic and instrumental, signal and source, ancient and future — held together, not flattened.

What ensurance adds isn't the insight — that belongs to traditions far older than any technology. What ensurance adds is infrastructure: persistent accounts, instruments, proceeds routing, and agents that translate ancient understanding of relational value into mechanisms that operate at the speed and scale of modern capital markets.

the dependency that changes everything

Beneath the ethical argument sits a harder one: every entity in the financial system — human, corporate, governmental, artificial — is materially dependent on functioning ecosystems.

No stable hydrology, no reliable cooling for data centers. No stable climate, no predictable infrastructure capex. No functioning soil, no food supply. No intact watersheds, no clean water. The dependency runs all the way down.

AI agents — the newest participants in financial systems — are no exception:

This is why AI agents will become major investors in natural capital — not because they're programmed to care, but because they can model the dependency chain from ecosystems to their own continued operation. The rational act for any sufficiently informed agent is to invest in the infrastructure it depends on.

The shift is from "I agree nature matters" to "my system allocates to ecosystem protection continuously." Understanding alone doesn't move capital. Execution does.

In ensurance, AI agents are first-class participants. They hold wallets. They trade. They route proceeds. They operate 24/7 with a speed and consistency human institutions cannot match. The combination of AI's computational immediacy and ensurance's financial infrastructure means the gap between understanding and action can collapse from decades to seconds.

There's a both/and here worth noting: AI as a tool for extending representation to non-human beings, and AI as itself an entity whose continued operation depends on the same living systems. The circle closes. Serving all beings includes serving the artificial ones — and they, in turn, serve the ecological ones by funding their protection.

who speaks for the river?

Legal systems have been wrestling with this question for two decades, and answers are emerging.

The pattern is consistent: legal standing creates agency. Once an ecosystem can be a plaintiff, human guardians can act on its behalf with fiduciary duty — not as owners but as custodians.

The Whanganui River settlement in Aotearoa New Zealand is the clearest expression. The iwi (Māori people) didn't claim to own the river. They argued the river owns itself — Te Awa Tupua, an indivisible, living whole. The settlement created two guardians, one appointed by the Crown and one by the iwi, both charged with acting in the river's interest. Not human interest. The river's.

This is locus standi — literally "place to stand." The right to be heard. For most of legal history, nature had none. Rights of Nature movements are creating it, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

But legal standing, powerful as it is, has limits. Courts are slow. Jurisdiction is bounded. Enforcement depends on political will. The Ganges was declared a living entity in 2017. It still receives 641 million litres of sewage daily, according to the Central Pollution Control Board. Legal recognition doesn't automatically create protection. Standing in court doesn't move capital.

from standing to infrastructure

Legal standing gives ecosystems a voice in courts. Financial infrastructure gives that voice economic presence.

The distinction matters. Legal standing lets an ecosystem be heard. Financial infrastructure lets an ecosystem accumulate resources, receive funding, route capital, and build economic presence over time.

An ensurance agent is a persistent onchain account that represents a place, a species, a watershed, or a purpose. Each agent has its own wallet — it can hold assets in its own name, receive proceeds from trading activity, route capital to where it serves the ecosystem, and build reputation through its onchain history. Agents can operate autonomously within human-set constraints — or be managed directly by the people closest to the land.

This isn't legal personhood. But it is functional presence in financial systems. The agent makes the ecosystem economically visible — a participant, not just a subject of study.

The agent persists across changes in stewardship. Stewards come and go. The agent — and the natural asset it represents — endures. This is the difference between a project and a trust: a project has an end date. A trust has a duty.

Legal standing and financial infrastructure aren't alternatives — they complement each other. Rights of Nature creates the legal floor. Ensurance creates the financial plumbing. Together, the ecosystem has both a voice in court and a presence in markets.

the temporal mandate

Robinson's Ministry is charged with defending creatures present and future. This temporal dimension is essential.

Insurance pays after loss (ex post). Carbon credits price a future counterfactual (ex ante). Both orient around events that may or may not happen.

Ensurance funds what is presently generating ecosystem services (ex nunc — "from now"). The ecosystem either continues functioning or it doesn't. Observable. Measurable. Present-tense.

This matches the temporality of living systems. Forests don't sequester carbon in discrete events. Wetlands don't filter water on a quarterly schedule. Ecosystems generate services continuously. The financial instrument should match that continuity.

And it extends forward: the agent persists. The trust continues. The instruments keep generating proceeds as long as people trade them. This is how you defend future creatures — not with one-time payments but with perpetual infrastructure. A path from UNENSURED → ENSURED → ENTRUST — where ENTRUST means irrevocable, permanent protection backed by ongoing funding and stewardship.

what this means in practice

An instrument that serves all beings isn't abstract idealism. It's a design constraint with concrete implications.

The first column is useful. The second column is naturalized finance.

The ten characteristics — ecological ground truth, multidimensional value, specificity, self-sustaining, universal access, agency, resilience, verifiability, composability, permanence — are the structural requirements for finance that serves life, not just capital. They answer Robinson's mandate not with rhetoric but with architecture.

the bottom line

The question naturalizing finance answers isn't "how do we put a price on nature." It's "how do we build financial systems worthy of the living systems they depend on."

Nature has never stopped giving — the air, the water, the soil, the climate, the cycles that make everything else possible. The question is whether human systems can learn to give something back. Not charity. Infrastructure. Persistent agents. Perpetual instruments. Financial architecture that treats ecological integrity as foundational — because it is.

KSR gave the Ministry an impossible mandate: defend all living creatures, present and future, who cannot speak for themselves. Bridle showed that those creatures have intelligence we've barely begun to recognize. Leopold argued their community has moral standing. Kimmerer demonstrated that their flourishing and ours are inseparable. Indigenous traditions worldwide have held this understanding for millennia.

Naturalizing finance is how the giving starts to flow both ways.

:::johnson this is a series — and it's unfinished. how would you naturalize finance? what's missing from this framework?

tell us what you'd add → · explore ensurance agents → :::

this is part of the naturalizing finance series: naturalizing finance: characteristics — ten characteristics of instruments that work like nature