Ecology is the master concept of the project, and it is broader than any named social form. A community, a state, or a nation is a named form; an ecology is the total field of interdependent conditions through which life is actually occurring — and each named form is only a part of it, alongside markets, infrastructure, laws, technologies, climate, language, and belief.
An ecology is not the community that surrounds a participant. It is the total relational field through which the participant both receives the conditions of life and alters the conditions available to others.
Four features distinguish it from a community or nation: it has no clean boundary (it is topological, not geographic — what matters is what is connected strongly enough to alter a participant’s viable field); it is made of relationships and flows, not things; the participant is inside it, so field and participant are recursively constitutive; and it is dynamic. Crucially, ecology is an analytical term, not a moral one — a prison, a cult, and a collapsing ecosystem all have ecologies. The model asks whether a given ecology is renewable, permeable to signal, correctable, traversable, and alive, never assuming that “ecological” means good. See What Is an Ecology?.