Ecosystem Stewardship Is Economics

Feeling the World

When I first learned the word economics, I thought it was about money—interest rates, supply chains, GDP charts. But that word, economics, comes from the Greek oikos (home) and nomos (stewardship or management). Oikos-nomos.
Oikos (pronounced ecos) is as well the root of ecosystem and as well can be used for society.
Ecosystem = Oikos
Stewardship = Nomos

It hit me like a bell: economics and ecosystem stewardship share the same root.

That realization changed my life. Suddenly, all the dissonance I’d felt growing up—watching how society coordinated (or failed to coordinate) its resources—made sense. I wasn’t crazy for sensing the world was out of tune. I was just listening closely.

Hearing the World

Even as a kid, I remember listening—not just to music, but to people, systems, the land. I didn’t know the words for it then, but I was picking up on socioception: a felt sense of harmony or disharmony within groups, ecosystems, and resource flows.

You don’t need perfect pitch to hear when a song is off. You don’t need a PhD to feel when an economy is hurting its people, or when money blocks rather than connects.

I could feel it in the way water flowed—or didn’t—through a community. In the way people who wanted to help each other couldn’t, locked in silos of currency or bureaucracy. In the way trees on opposite sides of a road seemed lonely without their roots touching - I wanted and still want to bring them together.

Roots That Remember

Eventually, I found language for what I’d been sensing all along—in forests, in communities, in ancestral practices like Mweria. That’s a rotating labor system used in Kenya, where neighbors help each other farm, build homes, and share resources—not out of obligation, but out of embedded reciprocity.

It reminded me of mycorrhizal networks—the underground fungal webs that link trees and plants in living systems. These networks transport nutrients, balance flows, and foster resilience.

A tree doesn’t need to own all the phosphorus to survive. It trusts the network.
A person doesn’t need to hoard money to feel secure. We can trust each other.

This is the heart of what we call commitment pooling: sharing commitments like seeds, with the understanding that what flows out, flows back—maybe not immediately, but rhythmically, like rain returning to the soil.

Gardening the Commons

Becoming a grassroots economist wasn’t a career choice—it was a way to heal the dissonance I felt between what is and what could be.

When I garden, I’m practicing economics.
When I help weave people’s promises into cooperative networks, I’m stewarding an ecosystem.
When I create systems of curation, valuation, limitation, and exchange that mirror nature’s ways, I’m restoring the symphony.

The land and the ledger are not separate.

And when I see people eager to share—offering skills, care, food—but unable to because of artificial separations like “lack of money,” I feel that same dissonance.
When I see trees cut off from each other by roads or property lines, I want to reconnect their roots.

That’s what commitment pooling does. It’s a mycorrhizal memory for social systems—a way to bring back flow, balance, and harmony through shared promises.

A New Sense of Wealth

If economics is how we manage the household of life, then we need new metrics for health and wealth:

• Soil fertility as economic resilience

• Water retention as liquidity

• Biodiversity as portfolio diversification

• Mutual care as the highest Return On Investment

• Reciprocity as the bottom line for long term resilience

And let’s not forget the felt sense of things: when you walk into a place and it feels whole—when people are laughing, when food is growing, when no one is left behind—that’s real GDP: Gross Deep Peace.

Closing the Loop

The systems we need are already encoded in us—in ancestral wisdom, in fungal networks, in villages that never forgot how to care. Ecosystem Stewardship is not separate from economics—it is economics in its truest form.

I believe we’re all born with this sense of flow, this ability to perceive relational health. We just become accustomed to the dissonance and forget. But the remembering is happening now—in gardens, in mutual aid groups, in digital ledgers inspired by ancient trust.

So let’s keep listening. Let’s build economies we can feel in our bodies—systems that sound like harmony, smell like rain, and taste like reciprocity.

Let’s bring the roots back together.