Metabolic ontology begins from a simple observation: nothing lives by remaining what it is. Existence persists only through continual transformation, through the conversion of decay into the conditions for further life. Entropy is not disorder but the movement that makes order temporary. Biology calls this metabolism: the exchange of matter, energy, and information that maintains form by constantly undoing it. This is not a metaphor but the world’s operating principle.
Where substance ontologies posit enduring entities and relational ontologies begin from relation, metabolic ontology insists that both entity and relation are secondary effects of exchange. Life is not composed of things in relation; relations themselves arise from processes of ingestion, breakdown, and reconstitution. Being is always becoming-through-loss. Every organism, system, or idea is a temporary knot in the wider metabolism of matter and meaning. Metabolisms nest and overlap across scales (cellular, social, ecological, planetary) each sustaining its coherence by drawing from and returning to others. What we call a system is simply a rhythm of exchange visible at a particular scale.
This carries ethical weight. If all forms persist only by transforming others, then participation always has cost. To live is to draw from the world’s vitality and to return it in altered form. Ethics thus shifts from universal prescription to response-ability: the capacity to sense and answer for the consequences of one’s participation in the ongoing metabolism of life. The question is no longer What is right? but What enhances the vitality of the system that metabolizes us?
Metabolic ontology therefore demands a new epistemology. Knowing cannot stand apart from the processes it describes; it must itself be metabolically implicated. Observation, theory, and practice are entangled acts within the same field of transformation. Knowledge is a mode of participation, not representation. To know is to be changed.
In educational terms, this reframes learning as a metabolic process: learning&doing as an inseparable act of transformation. A regenerative pedagogy witnesses how vitality circulates through relations, how each encounter reorganizes the participants. Assessment becomes testimony to shifts in the quality of reciprocity rather than measurement of output. Schools, like forests, thrive when they convert decay (error, loss, exhaustion) into new conditions for life.
Metabolic ontology is thus a philosophy of participation grounded in thermodynamics and enacted through ethics. It replaces the will to preserve with the willingness to transform. To live regeneratively is to join the world’s metabolism knowingly—to become compost for what comes next.
Coconut Thinking 