--- title: "pay the land, pay the people" canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/pay-the-land-pay-the-people markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/pay-the-land-pay-the-people.md subtitle: "our bet: a financial system based on the living condition of the earth" category: ensurance --- # pay the land, pay the people *our bet: a financial system based on the living condition of the earth* Every scheme with a credit in its name exists to do one thing: pay the land, and pay the people who keep it. That is the whole job. A carbon credit, a biodiversity unit, a water credit, a habitat bank, a plastic credit, a nature share: each is a different route to the same two payees, a living place and the people who already care for it. Take a headwaters meadow in the Rockies that holds snowmelt into July and lets it go slowly into a river a city drinks. The routes to that meadow differ in their registries, their methodologies and their buyers. The destination does not. If you have asked what a **financial system based on nature** would look like, start there, because the answer is not a new kind of credit. It is money that reaches those two payees and keeps reaching them. :::johnson **pay the land. pay the people. everything else is the plumbing.** Our bet is that the plumbing converges on money and a financial system based on the living condition of the earth, and that nothing in it is a claim on the earth. [name the place you would pay →](/guide/what-do-you-want-to-ensure?from=guide) ::: ## the one job Someone keeps that meadow: a rancher who fences cattle out of the willows, a crew that plugs the gullies, a land trust that holds the easement. The meadow does its work whether or not anyone issues a unit for it. The people do theirs whether or not anyone pays them, until they cannot. Every environmental credit is an attempt to get money to that meadow and those people. That is worth saying plainly, because the critiques of credits are loud and mostly fair, and they can make it sound as though the people who built the schemes were building something else. They were not. The carbon desk, the habitat banker, the water-quality trader and the nature-credit methodologist are all trying to route money to a living place and the hands that keep it. The first post in this series lists their names and gives each a real job: [every credit is trying to become money](/guide/every-credit-is-trying-to-become-money). Who is paying today, and who is not, is in [who pays for nature](/guide/who-pays-for-nature). The second half of the job is the half that gets dropped. Good, capable people are choosing this work, and most of them are not making a living at it. *Financing Nature 2026* puts the gap at $1.317 trillion a year. The people plugging the gullies cannot raise a season's budget. We think the people who steward living systems should be among the best-paid people in the economy, and wealthy twice over: in the nature they keep, and in income, because their care is what everyone downstream depends on. A financial system based on nature that does not pay its stewards well is a system based on something else. ## our bet: a financial system based on nature Here is the flag. We think all of this converges on money, and on a financial system based on the living condition and living function of the Earth. Not a better credit. Money: something that circulates, pools, can be held, can be spent again, and can be built on by anyone ([money that acts like nature](/guide/money-that-acts-like-nature)). A system in which a watershed, a herd, a reef or a meadow has an account addressed to it, signed by named people, and in which the value that moves through that account follows the condition of the place. We think this not because the other systems will fail. Compliance markets will keep pricing a tonne, and a legal allowance is the one truly fungible unit in the whole family. Domestic public budgets still pay for most nature finance, as *Financing Nature 2026* reports, and should. Beneficiary-pays deals will keep repaying utilities for work that cuts their own costs. We think it because that is what the rest of those schemes are already trying to become. Judged as money, most credits are a currency that cannot circulate, cannot be split, and stop the moment they are used ([a credit judged as money](/guide/a-credit-judged-as-money)). The people building them know this. It is why the conversation in that world keeps turning to liquidity, to stacking and bundling, to secondary markets, to tokenization. They are describing money. We would rather say so. ### what would a financial system based on nature look like? It would have four properties, and they are the properties of the water cycle, not of a registry. Money in it would **circulate** among the people and accounts that keep a place, so that stewards both earn and spend it. It would **pool**, holding reserves in good years and releasing them in drought. It would **compose**: a coin, a certificate, an account, a pool and a payout rule would be separate parts that anyone could use some of without using all of them ([composable, modular, open](/guide/composable-modular-and-open)). And it would be **based on** the living asset without being a claim on it. The first three are what the system reaches for. The fourth is the rule. ## the rule Our rule, and the reason this series was written: all of this is based on the underlying natural asset and the underlying ecosystem. Not on claims. Especially not debt, a security, or collateral. Here is why the rule is the rule. A claim on a place is how a place ends up on a table. A mortgage is a claim; when it is called, the land is sold. A share is a claim; when the company fails, the assets are liquidated. A bond is a claim; when the coupon cannot be paid, the collateral goes. Every one of those instruments has moved money to land for centuries, and every one of them, in a bad enough year, converts the living asset into the thing that pays the holder out. A coin that can be redeemed for timber rights is the same instrument with a greener name. Money based on the asset works the other way. The living system is the foundation, the reason the unit exists and the thing its circulation funds, and no holder can reach through the unit and take any of it. Nothing is owed by the place. Nobody holds equity in the river. Nothing can be seized. Where an instrument has anything to meet at all, it meets a pool, never the land and never the place's income. That is the difference between a watershed fee and a mortgage, and it is the whole of what we mean by based on. One stage is different and we say so: while a place is ensured and not yet entrusted, a titled policy can hold the deed as the cost-side investor's security, until the policy matures and the place enters permanent protection, free of claims. The coin and the certificate add no claim at any stage. The longer argument is in [living money](/guide/living-money). ### who gets paid in a financial system based on living systems? Two payees, always. The place, through an account addressed to it and signed by named people. And the people who keep the place, in income they can live on. Anyone else who is paid, a protocol, a registry, a verifier, a market maker, is plumbing, and plumbing earns its keep only when the two payees are paid first. ## the cousins making the same bet We are not the only ones who think the credit is trying to become money. Several designs are reaching for the same thing from other doors. Each deserves to be named as its author's work, with its limit in one clause. **Nature shares**, proposed in a 2025 research paper reported by Carbon Pulse as a crowdfunded alternative to biodiversity credits, and separately **Kwaxala's Living Forest Shares** with the Kwiakah First Nation, hold a longer position in a forest than a one-off credit. The limit: Living Forest Shares pay holders a share of the forest's revenue, and the paper's shares are reported to do the same, which is the line our rule does not cross. **Interspecies money**, Jonathan Ledgard's proposal for a bank for other species, puts value in an account for the animal; in the first pilot the wallet is held in trust by people, and we wrote about where that stands in law in [can an animal have a bank account](/guide/can-an-animal-have-a-bank-account). James Quilligan's **commons reserve currency** proposes a co-credit whose value rises and falls with a measured rate of what a commons can carry; it is a proposal, not yet a pilot. **Nature-based central bank money**, proposed by Open Earth, would have a central bank issue money against natural capital that firms then borrow, which makes it debt by design. **Minted-from-nature coins** such as MERIT turn measured forest carbon into a spendable unit while the landowner keeps title; the unit is minted per measured amount of carbon, which ties it to one stock. Each does something a credit cannot. Each has to answer the same question: what can it call? Where those designs make the forest a reserve asset or a redeemable claim, we part ways, respectfully. Where they make it a foundation, we are reading the same page. ### is this a replacement for carbon markets? No. A [compliance market](/guide/what-a-carbon-market-actually-is) prices a tonne under a cap, and a government that wants emissions to fall needs that price. Public budgets are the largest source of nature finance. Beneficiary-pays contracts, debt-for-nature swaps and outcome bonds all move real money, and the honest survey of what else exists is here: [alternatives to carbon credits](/guide/alternatives-to-carbon-credits). This is where we think the private, voluntary and onchain work lands. It stacks beside the rest. It does not ask them to leave. ## where we are Plainly, from the public catalog. On 21 October 2026 [general ensurance](https://ensurance.app/general?from=guide) listed 191 coins plus $ENSURE, the [protocol currency](https://ensurance.app/ensure?from=guide), most named for a species, a place, a stock or a flow. One hundred had a pool where the coin can be bought and sold, and trading across the whole catalog in the previous twenty-four hours came to a few dollars. There are certificates on [specific ensurance](https://ensurance.app/specific?from=guide), each 1:1 with a named agent and each a record of a hold, not a share. Each pooled coin routes part of its trading fees to a payout account; today that is mostly the protocol's own addresses, and for some coins a named agent's account. That is a seed, and we would rather you read it as a seed. The volumes are small. The protocol is its own first user. The flag is not that the market exists. The flag is the shape of the thing: money based on living places, with no claim on them, built in parts anyone can pick up. ## the next move is small If this is your bet too, the ladder has short rungs. Read the series, starting with [every credit is trying to become money](/guide/every-credit-is-trying-to-become-money). Name one living thing you would pay for; that question has its own post, [what do you want to ensure](/guide/what-do-you-want-to-ensure). If no coin exists for it, [suggest one](https://ensurance.app/general/create?mode=suggest&from=guide); a person reviews it and, if accepted, the place gets an address. If you already keep a place with other people, a group can hold the account ([run a group for what you already care about](/guide/run-a-group-for-what-you-already-care-about)). If you fund this work and want the money to reach both payees, [talk to us](/contact?from=guide&topic=money-that-acts-like-nature), or start with the [foundations page](/solutions/foundations?from=guide&topic=money-that-acts-like-nature). The meadow holds the snow whether or not anyone pays for it. The rancher fences the willows until the money runs out. Pay the land. Pay the people. We think that is where all of this was going, and it is better to get there on purpose. ## sources [Financing Nature 2026 — Paulson Institute, The Nature Conservancy, WWF](https://www.paulsoninstitute.org/conservation/financing-nature-2026/) — the $1.317 trillion a year gap; domestic public budgets still pay for most nature finance [Paper pitches 'nature shares' system to scale biodiversity investments — Carbon Pulse, July 2025](https://carbon-pulse.com/414175/) — the nature-share proposal, as reported [Jonathan Ledgard — Interspecies Money (Brookings)](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Chapter-Five_Breakthrough.pdf) — a bank for other species [James Quilligan — Commons Reserve Currency (P2P Foundation wiki)](https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Reserve_Currency) — the co-credit proposal [Open Earth — nature-based currencies (Green Central Banking)](https://greencentralbanking.com/research/nature-based-currencies/) — nature-based central bank money [Single.Earth — MERIT](https://www.single.earth/blog/merit-token-minting-started) — the minted-from-nature model in its own words [ensurance general coins](https://ensurance.app/api/general) — the live catalog this post's counts were read from, 21 October 2026 ## the series [every credit is trying to become money](/guide/every-credit-is-trying-to-become-money) — the names, and the one job [a credit judged as money](/guide/a-credit-judged-as-money) — the scorecard [a registry is not a market](/guide/a-registry-is-not-a-market) [money that acts like nature](/guide/money-that-acts-like-nature) [composable, modular, open](/guide/composable-modular-and-open) [pay the land, pay the people](/guide/pay-the-land-pay-the-people) — this post, the flag