Bounded ecological observability resolves what looks at first like a fatal contradiction. To size responsibility to consequence you must be able to see the consequence — but seeing what crosses every boundary sounds like a demand that states, firms, and households all become legible to one master observer, which is precisely the universal surveillance the framework forbids. The resolution is a distinction: the framework does not need global transparency, only enough global observability to detect transferred cost.
The two are genuinely different. You do not need to see inside a factory — its machines, contracts, or secrets — to know how much electricity it draws, how much waste it emits, how much product leaves, and how many people it employs; the interior stays opaque while the boundary effects are legible. The same holds for a company, a city, or a state, whose aggregate compute growth, energy use, cyber-incident rates, cross-border capital concentration, employment displacement, and supply-chain dependency can be estimated without breaching anyone’s right to opacity. The effects may be observable even when the interior remains opaque — the sentence that lets ecological accounting coexist with privacy instead of destroying it. It is worked out on Accounting Without Transparency.