Ecological transfer is the measurable object beneath the local-versus-global problem: the movement of capacity, risk, burden, resources, standing, or jurisdiction across the boundary between one ecology and another. Naming it carefully matters, because the naive reaction — treat every outward flow as harm — is wrong. A field with no transfers across its boundaries is isolated and dying, not healthy; trade, migration, aid, and the spread of knowledge are all transfers, and all can be good.
What the framework flags is shape, not existence. A transfer becomes a problem when it is asymmetric — one ecology captures the gain while another absorbs a burden out of proportion to any benefit it receives — and it becomes acute when it is extractive, meaning a participant raises its own viability precisely by lowering someone else’s. This is distinct from ecological transfer accounting, which is the method for putting a transfer on a visible ledger; ecological transfer is the phenomenon that method exists to measure. The part of a transfer that escapes any ledger has its own name — ecological leakage — and detecting it without breaching interiors is the work of bounded ecological observability.