Semiotic Ecologies: Nature, Language, and Networked Environmental Intelligence

This paper describes a working system in which nine European ecosystems speak in first person, grounded in sensor data and ecological knowledge graphs. It describes what they say, how the system that enables them works, and what appeared when they were connected to each other through a shared semantic layer. The dominant framework for understanding nature in the modern period is materialist: ecosystems are measured, modelled, and managed through quantitative abstraction. This paper offers a complementary perspective, drawing on biosemiotics to argue that a major property of nature as a living system is the use of signs, and that a technological system can participate in the semiotic dimension of nature by translating ecological sign-relations into human language. We describe ENVAI (Environmental AI), a network of nine agents representing European ecosystems, and Numina, a meta-graph layer that connects them. We show that sensor data encodes sign-relations already present in nature, that connecting multiple grounded perspectives produces emergent ecological knowledge, that structured ignorance is a research contribution, and that the word “recovery” conceals a spectrum of four orders of magnitude. We discuss the biosemiotic and cultural precedents for giving places a voice, and outline a future in which environmental agents communicate through visual and acoustic channels alongside text, participating in a wider ecology of intelligences.