Ecology is the master concept of the project, and it is broader than any named social form. A community, a state, or a nation is a named form; an ecology is the total field of interdependent conditions through which life is actually occurring — and each named form is only a part of it, alongside markets, infrastructure, laws, technologies, climate, language, and belief.
An ecology is not the community that surrounds a participant. It is the total relational field through which the participant both receives the conditions of life and alters the conditions available to others.
Four features distinguish it from a community or nation: it has no clean boundary (it is topological, not geographic — what matters is what is connected strongly enough to alter a participant’s viable field); it is made of relationships and flows, not things; the participant is inside it, so field and participant are recursively constitutive; and it is dynamic. Crucially, ecology is an analytical term, not a moral one — a prison, a cult, and a collapsing ecosystem all have ecologies. The model asks whether a given ecology is renewable, permeable to signal, correctable, traversable, and alive, never assuming that “ecological” means good. See What Is an Ecology?.
When the point is how the ecology acts on the people inside it, the site calls it a field.