Relational standing answers why a participant counts without falling into the trap that ruins most answers. Ground standing in an attribute — rationality, humanity, consciousness, productivity, innocence, citizenship — and the same move immediately begins defining acceptable being, drawing a line that some fall outside. The framework grounds it in relation instead:
If you are actually present in the ecology and capable of being affected by it, the ecology has entered into relation with you, and can no longer pretend you are nothing.
That establishes only the first condition — you count — and leaves the full extent of rights and jurisdiction to be worked out from there; it is a floor, not a settlement. Because it turns on relation and susceptibility rather than a checklist of qualifying properties, it is also the grounding most likely to survive the arrival of participants who are not human, where every attribute test breaks down first. One refinement keeps it from proving too much: capable of being affected has to mean affected in a way that is at stake for the one affected — a rock is susceptible to weather, but nothing is at stake for it — so relation and non-subordination turn out to be one criterion at two depths: the ecology is in relation with an entity for whom that relation can go better or worse.