Relational Accounting

Living beings, abiotic systems, and human cultures co-construct shared worlds through continuous exchange of matter, energy, information, and signs. Life is material and embodied: to persist, a body takes in matter and energy and spends to do so. Each participant pays: energy, time, attention, bodily integrity, foregone opportunity, cultural commitment, heritable consequence. Each participant draws on what others supply: affordances, scaffolding, sustenance, niches, knowledge. This note treats those exchanges as one pliable accounting problem and asks what makes an exchange fair. The motivating challenge is thriving and justice.

Working example throughout: people who kill and eat eels yet call them kin or ancestors (Eel).

Cf.

Familiar Ground

Several fields already treat relations, not individuals, as primary. Each gives part of the foundation. None assembles the whole.

Process philosophy of biology. Organisms persist as stabilised processes, not things; birth and death cut through flows rather than mark atomic facts.1
Symbiosis, symbiogenesis, the holobiont. Host and symbionts form one consortium; anatomically and genetically "we have never been individuals."2 Mostly stops at the organism boundary, rarely reaching ethics or culture.
Theoretical biology and the materiality of life. Life is an embodied, far-from-equilibrium process that maintains itself by taking in matter and energy; astrobiology and the philosophy of biology test how general and how material the conditions of life can be.3^,4^,5
Niche construction theory. Organisms build the environments that select them and hand conditions on as ecological inheritance.6^,7 Strong on mechanism, silent on justice.
Coevolution and mutualism. Reciprocal selection couples lineages, so each becomes a condition for the other.8^,9
Biosemiotics and ecosemiotics. Organisms inhabit species-specific sign-worlds (Umwelten)10^,11 and lean on semiotic scaffolding to coordinate; interpreting signs costs energy and time continuously.12^,13 Rich on signs, thin on bodies and energy.
Systems ecology and metabolism. Life runs on measurable flows;14 an organism keeps its identity by exchanging its parts.4 Quantifies flows, brackets meaning and value.
Ecological economics and bioeconomics. The economy draws low-entropy resources and returns high-entropy waste; value and ownership can be recast as ecosystem-wide commons rather than private extraction.15^,16
Gaia, habitability, and planetary intelligence. Life and its medium co-regulate the conditions for life, and information processing and feedback can run at planetary scale, a frame shared with astrobiology.17^,18^,19^,20
Affordance theory. Environments offer opportunity and danger at once, relative to a body's capacities.21
Multispecies studies and environmental humanities. Assemblages, becoming-with, precarious coexistence, feral effects.22^,23^,24 Strong on description, weak on metrics and design.
Gift, reciprocity, Indigenous knowledge. A take becomes honourable through what returns to sustain the giver.25
Care ethics, relational values, multispecies justice. Value and obligation grow out of relations, and institutions can widen who counts.26^,27^,28^,29
One Health and One Welfare. The health and welfare of humans, other animals, and environments form one interdependent system.30^,31
More-than-human politics. Parliaments of things, animal citizenship, the animal agora, and farmed-animal sanctuaries test how non-humans enter negotiation.32^,33^,34^,35
Law, rights, and personhood. Earth jurisprudence, legal standing and nonhuman personhood, and animal rights including to labour and against property status extend the ledger into law.36^,37^,38^,39^,40^,41
Information, semiosis, and intelligence. A sign works as a cheap bet placed to avoid an expensive test of the world, and intelligence measures the energy a directed policy saves; both run across individuals, collectives, and cultures.12^,42
Capabilities and flourishing. Thriving means exercising a being's capabilities, not merely surviving, and grounds a claim to inclusion in justice.43
More-than-human design. Design and custodianship can follow nonhuman leadership, build and maintain habitat scaffolds, and treat artefacts as trials that need upkeep.44^,45^,46^,47 Young, and still short on measurement.

A recent synthesis gathers many of these into resonance fields and dissonance fields for riverine lifeworlds.48 It shows the promise of the relational-field idea. It also marks the gap: it stays human-centric, reads signs rather than measuring exchanges, treats technology only in passing, and never reaches design or practice.

The Proposition

What this note adds to the familiar ground:

A pliable ledger, not one metric. Hold biotic, abiotic, informational, and human-cultural costs and benefits in one account, yet keep it plural: many incommensurable currencies, many epistemologies and ontologies, no single number, no one world. The ledger coordinates across worlds rather than collapsing them, and records who sets the terms, who benefits, and who bears the cost.28 Cf. Uncertainty.
Attention as a generalised currency. Every living participant spends the energetic, temporal labour of sensing and interpreting. That spend can serve as a common measure of investment and debt.
Information as part of the account. Treat signs, knowledge, and intelligence as exchanges in their own right, not as a layer floating above the "real" economy of matter and energy.12^,42
Two disaggregations. Move from individuals to fields, and from unitary events (birth, death) to durations and trajectories that actors can extend, curtail, or foreclose.
Wider membership. Count what other accounts drop: abiotic participants (water, fire, ice, sediment) and human cultural commitments (ceremony, custodianship, restraint, heritable obligation).
A design tool, not only a description. Designers and custodians build affordances, maintain scaffolds, and set harvest terms. The ledger tells them who pays and who gains, so they can act on it.44
A fairness test. Convert the accounting into criteria that bridge description, thriving, and justice (below).

The claim: existing fields each see one face of the exchange. Assembling them into a plural, measurable, design-facing account is the work this note proposes.

Provocations to think with:

A dam that blocks eel migration: whose lifetime does it take, and who owes the debt?
A city that builds nest-scaffolds for swifts: does it earn a credit against the lives its glass shortens?
Domestication: who pays the heritable cost, and across how many generations?
A sanctuary that feeds and confines: reciprocal care, or a softer extraction?
If attention is a currency, can it be owed, saved, or stolen?

Two Disaggregations

From individuals to fields.

A bounded organism is a useful abstraction, not the working unit.1^,2^,3
The working unit is the relational field: a domain of material and sign relations in which participants sense and answer each other.48
Fields thrive or fail. Individuals are moments within them.

From events to durations.

Death resists one definition. Organs and cells die on their own schedules, and senescence runs partly under the organism's own control.49^,50
Death also feeds others. The food and death relation puts humans inside the community rather than above it.51^,52
The quantities that matter morally are duration, health, reproductive continuity, and the survival of the relations that make a kind of life possible across multispecies time.53 Cf. Temporal.

The Exchange Grammar

What flows toward a participant:

Affordances. Relational openings, "for good or ill," capacity-relative, ambivalent: the same structure supports or exposes.21
Costs. Energy, time, bodily integrity, foregone opportunity, attention as the standing cost of interpretation, and, for cultural beings, cultural commitment and heritable consequence.12
Scaffolding. Material (ecological inheritance), semiotic (stable cues), and collective (assemblages) structures that let relations persist.6^,12^,22

What flows against:

Risk. Constitutive, not incidental. Perception stays fallible and exposure continuous.21
Rupture. Coordination breaks, assemblages exceed control, and infrastructures spawn feral effects.24
Redistribution. Extraction turns living relations into cheap nature and offloads slow violence onto those least able to refuse.54^,55

These six terms give the ledger its line items.

Information, Knowledge, and Intelligence as Exchange

Information belongs in the ledger, not above it. It is the same exchange in another register.
A sign is a cheap investment placed to avoid a costly test of the world; semiosis spends signs where bodies would otherwise spend joules.12
Read this way, intelligence is the energy a directed policy saves over blind search: a measure of exchange efficiency available to microbes, plants, and ecosystems, not only brains. Cf. Intelligence.
Knowledge passes between individuals, collectives, cultures, and civilisations, and across hybrids of bodies and machines. Its loss, whether a killed elder, a severed migration route, or an erased archive, is an exchange harm, not only a sentimental one.42 Cf. Dataome, Information.
At the largest scale this processing runs as planetary intelligence, tying the ledger to habitability.20
Open question: can attention be owed, and who holds the debt when a lineage's knowledge is extinguished?

Negotiation, Technology, and Design

The ledger needs venues. Parliaments of things, the animal agora, sanctuaries, and legal personhood are experiments in where and how non-humans negotiate terms.32^,35^,38 Cf. Deliberation, Representation.
Technology, broadly understood, mediates these exchanges: tracks and scent-marks, fish passes and lagoons, sensors, digital twins, and AI translators. Each can widen or narrow who registers a preference or a refusal.56 The standing risk is ventriloquism and capture, where the tool speaks over the being it claims to voice. Cf. Uncertainty.
Design sets terms in material form: which scaffolds to build, which affordances to open, which lives to lengthen or shorten, and who maintains the result over its lifecycle.44^,57 It can follow nonhuman leadership rather than override it.46^,47
A working schema separates propositional communities, any being or process that expresses a directional capability and so generates proposals, from evaluative communities, those that take up, resist, or transform them, with delegation running both ways.58^,59 Cf. Deliberation.

Test Case: Eels, Lagoons, Ancestors

The problem: people kill and eat eels yet name them kin or ancestors. Stated flatly, a contradiction.
The resolution runs through terms of exchange, not denial of the kill.
An honourable take returns something that sustains the giver, not only the taker.25
The prohibition it must respect: do not treat beings as killable, that is, as available for unlimited, unaccountable use.60
Budj Bim shows the positive case. Gunditjmara channels, weirs, and ponds extend the eels' duration, abundance, and reproduction. People pay with labour, attention, restraint, and cultural obligation across generations.61^,62 The exchange runs between fields, not between a hunter and a victim.
The terms are set in built form: a fish pass or a lagoon decides which eels pass and which die, so the design carries the ethics.57
A managed lagoon can lengthen many lives, shorten some, and still be fair, provided people also pay and the field keeps reproducing.

A fair exchange:

Returns enough to sustain the giver;25
Protects the scaffolds and reproductive conditions, so it can recur;6^,48
Stays proportional and accountable, treating nothing as killable;60
Loads costs onto beneficiaries, not onto the weak;54^,55
Weighs durations and heritable effects, not the instant alone;53
Admits plural framings (kin, ancestor, teacher, resource) and represents non-human participants.28^,33

The contradiction dissolves where these hold. It stands where they fail.

Where the Work Is

Gaps in existing work, and the moves this note proposes:

No common currency yet. Test whether attention, energy or exergy, time budgets, and ecological-economic accounting can compare investments across species without false equivalence.15 Cf. Metabolism, Lifecycle.
Concept-rich, method-poor. Relational-field accounts read signs but rarely measure exchanges. Build instruments that do.48
No design bridge. Turn the ledger into design and custodial practice: which scaffolds to build, which affordances to open, which harvest terms to set, and how to account for them over a lifecycle.44^,57 Cf. Ecocentric Design.
Information justice. Decide who may leave traces, who can read them, and who must keep them legible across generations.42 Cf. Dataome.
Abiotic participants underdeveloped. Extend exchange and reciprocity to water, fire, ice, and sediment as forces, not backgrounds.63 Cf. Water, Fire.
Scale up and down. Connect the ledger to planetary intelligence and habitability above, and to microbial exchange below.20
Events in law and policy. Work out what replacing the bounded individual and the birth/death cut with fields and durations means for rights, representation, guardianship, and the status of animals as labourers rather than property.38^,40^,41 Cf. Representation.
Defensible-harvest criteria. Test the fairness checklist against cases: eel aquaculture, fisheries, rewilding, urban cohabitation, hunting.25^,22

The promise: a relational, process-oriented account that names the participants, measures the exchanges, and tells designers and custodians how to make them fair.

References

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