We are always the ones who conjugate the verb.
Perhaps that is where part of the problem begins.
Human beings are not outside the ecosystem. They never have been. We are one more species within an extraordinarily complex network of relationships, dependencies and balances. However, we have built much of our relationship with the natural environment from a different position: not as part of the system, but as administrators of the system.
We have turned the ecosystem into an ego-system.
When everything begins and ends with us
An ego-system is a way of understanding the world in which human beings occupy the centre. The forest is conserved because it captures carbon. The river is protected because it provides water. The mountain is preserved because it attracts visitors. A species gains value because it is emblematic, generates tourism or performs some function we consider useful.
Even much of environmental discourse continues to respond to this logic.
We calculate how much we can visit, how much we can consume, how much we can emit or how much we can alter without the system collapsing. Too often the question remains: how far can we go?
Perhaps we should start with another one: what does this ecosystem need in order to keep functioning, and what should our role be within it?
The change seems small. In reality, it completely shifts the perspective.
Nature does not need a chief executive
We have grown accustomed to talking about managing nature. And, clearly, we do need to manage our activity on it: access, waste, water, mobility, infrastructure, emissions, tourist capacity or conservation funding.
But there is an important difference between managing our impact and claiming to manage the ecosystem.
An ecosystem has been functioning for millions of years without us.
Our responsibility should not consist of constantly deciding how nature ought to behave, but of understanding how it works in order to decide how we ought to behave within it.
That requires something considerably less technologically sophisticated and, paradoxically, considerably more difficult: observing, listening and understanding before intervening.
It also means accepting that not every human interaction with nature is necessarily negative. Human beings can be part of an ecosystem, relate to it and even contribute positively to its conservation. Communities that have lived for generations alongside certain territories are probably the clearest demonstration of this.
The problem is not our presence.
It is our position.
From control to relationship
This is where the fundamental difference between ego-system and ecosystem appears.
In the ego-system we observe nature from our own needs. In the ecosystem we understand our needs within its own.
That means abandoning a purely extractive outlook, including when the extraction is touristic, and beginning to build a relationship based on reciprocity.
Visiting a natural space should allow us to know it better. Knowing it should generate responsibility. That responsibility should translate into behaviour, data, resources and concrete actions. And part of the economic value generated by our presence should flow back to the territory that makes that experience possible.
Not as a moral compensation.
As a natural part of the relationship.
Because perhaps regenerative tourism begins precisely there: when we stop asking only how to reduce the harm we cause and start asking what can improve because we have been there.
An idea that comes from afar
The contrast between ego system and eco system is not new. Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer developed it more than a decade ago at MIT, particularly in the fields of economics and leadership, proposing an evolution from a consciousness centred on self-interest towards one based on the wellbeing of the whole.
Their reflection becomes especially interesting when we transfer it literally to the territory.
Because an ecosystem is not a sum of individuals acting correctly. It is a network of relationships.
And perhaps that is one of the great limitations of a certain kind of contemporary sustainability: we have transferred too much responsibility onto the individual without sufficiently reviewing the system within which that individual acts.
We ask visitors to be responsible, but then offer them tourism models that still measure success fundamentally by volume. We ask them to reduce their impact while designing infrastructure, incentives and economic models that need more people to arrive every year.
An ego-system can dress itself in green. It remains an ego-system.
Becoming part of it again
Moving from the ego-system to the ecosystem does not mean giving up development, tourism or our presence in natural spaces.
It means changing our position within them.
Measuring in order to understand. Understanding in order to decide. Limiting when necessary. Contributing when possible. Listening to those who live in the territory. Returning resources to its conservation. And accepting that protecting an ecosystem does not consist solely of avoiding its destruction.