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In this essay I will explore the possibility of an objective ecological ethics. To do this, I follow the embodied ethos of relationships: meaningful expression and mutual sharing occuring in living organisms and systems. Living beings on various levels of identity (cellular selves, individuals, and ecosystems) strive toward increased aliveness. They are self-healing, and generate meaningful relationships, all without the need or interference of human ethical thinking. Ecosystems tend toward complexity and organisms tend to avoid their own destruction. Both tendencies create "natural values" – values not extractable into abstraction, yet nonetheless fundamentally embodied in the actions of living beings and living systems. An ethics based on these principles (or insights) is inclusive in that it can be conceived as a sort of "poetic objectivity". Here the ethically good is the increase in "aliveness", which can be shared by other beings, and which is only possible as "being through the other". Aliveness is ineffable and cannot be extracted analytically. Hence it is objective only in a poetic sense that can be shared through participation. An ethics of poetic objectivity leaves room to negotiate individual relationships and narratives while providing goodness as an encompassing context tuning into the degree of sharing and mutual inspiration to be more alive. The natural values generated by sharing transformative relationships produce the whole of nature as an "ethical commons". Its principles can be instructive in reorganising human exchange on ethical and economical levels.

Feeling is the existential experience of being matter from the inside. Feeling entangles us with the whole, parallel to the entanglement between observer and observed described in modern physics. Understanding organisms as embodied feeling is the missing link to making sense of the weirdness of modern physics, particularly the fact that the 'observer' is always connected to the 'objects' described (so-called 'entanglement'). In organisms, such entanglement is created through subjective experience—feeling. Feeling is entanglement experienced as inwardness, and as desire for more entanglement in order to unfold and live (Spinoza's 'Conatus'). Through inner experience organisms reveal that 'observations' are not made by 'observers' about 'objects', but actually are the inward aspect of the world's involvement with itself. Every standpoint is an experience of the whole getting in touch with itself. This panpsychic view can help us understand the degree to which all of reality is profused with subjectivity, and how our own subjective experience is an experience which the whole makes about being itself. With this, we are able to formulate a 'general theory of conativity'. This views the desire for mutual transformation and its accompanying creation of standpoints of meaning and concern as an irreducible feature of reality.

In the years after its foundation in 1814, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands witnessed the emergence of several new sites where natural history—the study of naming, describing and classifying plants, animals and minerals—was carried out. These new sites, such as the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (National Museum for Natural History), founded in 1820, the Rijksherbarium (National Herbarium) and the colonial site Nederlands-Indië (Netherlands Indies) had not existed in that form and in that combination before. The Rijksmuseum and the Rijksherbarium, established in Brussels in 1829, were the first national and fully state-funded natural historical institutions in the Dutch kingdom. In the course of the nineteenth century, both institutions rapidly developed into well-known centres for natural historical research in Europe. Significant parts of their collections derived from the Malay Archipelago, a region the Dutch kingdom regained from the British for strategic reasons in 1814. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Malay Archipelago, which had remained a terra incognita to European naturalists and colonial administrators, witnessed an unprecedented run on its natural wealth—initiated and propelled by both the emerging Dutch colonial state and the natural historical institutions in the Netherlands.