The Locals

What do we mean when we say “the locals”?

It’s not just the people who live nearby. The locals include everything that lives and breathes in a place—soil, trees, rivers, ants, birds, fungi, wind, rocks, even the air you’re breathing right now. It’s the full web of life and matter that makes a place what it is. The locals are biotic and abiotic, natural and human, seen and unseen.

The Locals are grounded in the physical systems of the planet that make all financial and digital systems possible in the first place.

  • Every cryptocurrency transaction requires electricity generated from some physical source.
  • Every data center needs cooling water.
  • Every smartphone contains rare earth minerals extracted from specific places on Earth.

In cosmolocalism, the Locals play a key role by providing the real-world resources that digital systems need, setting natural boundaries that keep them grounded, and adding the local differences that make global collaboration more useful and alive.

Understanding the Locals through nature reveals why cosmolocalism isn't just another technology trend. It is a recognition of how real systems work. The Locals are not a problem to solve but a foundation to build on. It gives digital tools their purpose by grounding them in material reality.

This article explores the deep relationship between the locals and nature, how they shape and support one another, and how digital tools like Ethereum can help us care for these systems rather than break them.

Nature: The First Local

Nature demonstrates perfectly what makes something fundamentally "local" in the cosmolocal sense. Natural systems are deeply specific to their place, and they lose meaning when taken out of context.

Barcelona’s water crisis shows what happens when we treat nature like a global commodity instead of respecting its local reality. Faced with severe drought, the city tried importing water by ship—an expensive and inefficient fix that ignored the natural flow of its watershed. Water doesn’t follow political borders; it follows land, climate, and place. Real solutions come from working with these local systems, not around them.

Nature's specificity creates what we might call "local differentiation"—the diversity of conditions and solutions that makes global coordination valuable.

If every place were identical, there would be no benefit to trade, communicate, or share learning.

It's precisely because different ecosystems have different capacities and constraints that global coordination can create value while respecting local limits.

Why Local Solutions Work Best

Even in a world shaped by Web3 and globally connected tools, the most effective solutions begin with the local. Ecosystems show us that systems thrive not through central control but through shared coordination combined with local responsiveness. Across nature, we see examples where global patterns exist, such as migratory paths, seasonal cycles, or nutrient flows. But the success of these systems depends entirely on how they take shape in specific places. Each forest, river, or soil system operates with its own conditions, limits, and possibilities.

The same principle applies when we design digital systems to interact with the real world. A shared blockchain protocol may connect thousands of communities, but what gives it meaning is how each community adapts it to suit its climate, economy, and culture.

Local implementation allows people to work with their ecosystems instead of working around them.
Global coordination should not erase local differences but create space for them to thrive.

Cosmolocal thinking shows that strong systems are not built by removing place-based complexity. They are built by recognizing and supporting it through patterns that connect across scales.

When digital tools are used to strengthen local context rather than replace it, the result is more adaptive, more sustainable, and more rooted systems that truly serve the people and ecologies they are part of.

Bridging the Cosmos to the Locals

To connect global systems with local realities, we need a way to translate between the two. This is where the Cosmos, the digital infrastructure layer comes in. It acts as a bridge between the digital world of protocols and the physical world of ecosystems. Data recording tools such as sensors, satellites, and monitoring tools can collect information from the ground such as soil moisture, carbon levels, or water flow and attest these to, for example, the Ethereum blockchain. This data may help guide decisions and coordinate action across different bioregions.

However, this kind of translation is never exact. Different tools reveal different parts of reality, and some knowledge cannot be measured. A farmer's sense of the land or a community's understanding of their watershed often holds insights that technology alone cannot capture. This is why the data layer must remain connected to the place it represents. It should reflect the actual conditions of a landscape rather than reduce everything to simplified averages.

When the data layer is rooted in local reality, it makes global coordination more intelligent and responsive. It allows protocols to adjust to real-world change and helps digital tools serve the needs of living systems rather than ignoring them.

To inform action with localised context is the most important requirement for a Cosmolocal future.

From Nature to Neighborhoods

Understanding the Locals through a nature lens reveals the quiet but essential role of place, process, and physical reality in building systems that last. Digital tools may help us coordinate and share, but they still rely on the health of local ecosystems and the people who care for them.

Humans are not separate from these systems. The way we live together, make decisions, share resources, and solve problems is part of the same local fabric. Just as forests and rivers thrive through diversity and balance, our communities do too.

In the next part of this series, we will shift focus from soil and water to people and relationships. We will explore how the same patterns that shape living ecosystems can guide us in creating communities that are rooted, responsive, and resilient.