In 2022 I started asking people one question. Not about climate, or finance, or crypto. Just: what/where on Earth is most special to you?
I asked it in DMs, in Telegram threads, in a form, and in public posts. Over four years, more than a hundred people answered. I saved the answers. This week I finally understood what they were telling me.
Years ago I came across the National Trust for Historic Preservation's This Place Matters campaign, which has run since 2009. People photograph themselves holding a sign in front of a place that matters to them. Theirs asks it about historic buildings. I kept thinking it could be anywhere on Earth: a creek, a reef, a ridge, a meadow behind a house.
A friend who contemplates "place" similarly noted two recurring themes in his work: "there is just something about this place" and/or "i like this place, i really like this place". He'd spent years in the gap between space and place: space is coordinates, place is what it means.
What became apparent is that it is not just place or places. It is common-place. We we all relate to places differently but the place is the thread.
What/where on Earth is most special to you?
Nobody answered "nature."
Some chose a species, ie a charismatic animal or a type of orchid. But most answered with a specific place. And most, without asking, gave a reason as to why they chose it.
Owen picked a fjord on the other side of the world. He hadn't been there in years and debated if he should pick somewhere closer to home. But he stuck with the first answer.
Matt named his family's home in the countryside. A year later, asked again, he wrote: ducks, hedgehogs, insects, wildflowers. A meadow, and the pollinators in it.
Walt picked a public waterfall and swimming hole instead of his own land.
Kate named her family's farm, the place with the lions.
Timur picked a sea that is mostly gone.
Ray sent a 400-foot waterfall where a river runs off a plateau.
John picked a place at the foot of war torn mountains in Afghanistan.
So I started asking: what makes it special? This second question did more than the first.
One of the first people to answer was someone I hadn't met yet. Let's call him Rafa. He pinned an island in the Caribbean and named it "blue-paradise." I'll come back to him.
Everyone answered a place. But what makes it special is why they named it. Usually a relationship: the trail because of the creek, the farm because of the lions, the island because it's home, the riverbank because of the way it feels. The reason they relate.
Some answers turned into the rough draft of what ensurance is today: an address for a place, held onchain, that could receive funding. They were the first .basin accounts. The waterfall got a test account within five days, so did a tree, and a creek, all with a little money already inside it. A mountain someone named in 2024 has an account today, and the person who suggested it is recorded as its origin.
But the main realization is: a place not just receiving funding but doing the funding itself. Funding the people who care for it, the species who live there, and the other places that make that place possible.
The answers also taught us how to ask. When we asked for coordinates, we got coordinates and nothing else. When we asked "and why?", we got stories. When we asked "what do you want to ensure?", no one knew what that meant. People don't answer an instrument. They answer: why this place.
We built on this insight without it being fully apparent, the parts: agents for places, people, and purposes, and the research on what each place depends on, who already looks after it and who would also probably help look after it. Each part worked by itself but none of it was something I could hand back to the person who answered. In isolation it was not coherent. As a system, a network, a graph, a protocol, it is.
This month we focused the app around a single field: one map where every place, person, and purpose sits and how they are connected. And you act from wherever and whatever places are important to you. Finally, the parts have become the thing.
You can name a place, and the research starts: what it depends on, and who already looks after it, and how to fund it. How to ensure it. Once it is spoken, it is on the graph, connected to all other places. You don't have to fund it alone or at all, the protocol will. The why is yours, and yours alone.
Which brings me back to the island. Rafa, who pinned "blue-paradise" in 2022, was born in that archipelago. Four years later, he's doing the science on its coral reefs and the living systems that make those reefs possible. And working with helping us with key, or should I say keystone, parts of this. This connection was not made visible until yesterday. Spillover is really bi-directional especially once made legible.
So I'm asking again, and will keep asking:
What/where on Earth is most special to you?
Then, when you've named it:
What makes it special?
It takes just a few seconds. Your answer goes on the map and we start connecting the dots: on what it depends on, and who/what depends on it. And that helps ensure it.
Turns out all places are connected. In more ways than we could ever imagine.
If you answered circa 2022-2024, you'll hear from me directly.
— TMO
People names changed for privacy. If your place was mentioned above and you want your real name associated with it here, dm me.
Read more: the one question that gets people to care about a place · the waterfall that asked a question back · far away is still specific · the place that's mostly gone · the home you won't pin