For environmental protection to obtain at the scale of a technologically-extended political community (articulating the institutional conditions under which a population whose reach has crossed planetary-system horizons can maintain the biophysical conditions on which all participation depends), the framework's structural-necessity inventory specific to environment as intergenerational-recognition infrastructure runs as follows. No one of these conditions can be dropped; only all of them together make environmental architecture count as environmental architecture rather than as managed depletion of the future's inheritance.

*Intergenerational recognition mechanism.* Future participants cannot vote, lobby, litigate, or strike. Any system the political community uses to recognize direction (the [§9.3](<9.3 Representation.md>) representation infrastructure, the legal system, the price system, deliberative venues) takes input only from people already in the arrangement. Some institution has to compensate for that structural absence: constitutional protections of the conditions; long-horizon advisory bodies with real standing; budget processes constrained by planetary-boundary maintenance; intergenerational-impact assessment in major decisions. The specific compensating design is underdetermined; the requirement that some such design has to exist is not.

*Externality internalization architecture.* Any productive activity producing environmental externalities is constrained to internalize them through some mechanism: carbon pricing, watershed regulation, biodiversity-impact assessment, ecosystem-service accounting. Under unconstrained profit-maximization, environmental externalities are externalized onto the environment to the extent the political-economic order permits. The pattern is structural, not contingent on bad actors (Pigou 1920; Coase 1960). Internalization architecture is required as a structural condition; specific mechanisms among framework-compatible alternatives remain open.

*Planetary-boundaries respect.* The Earth-system science tradition identifies nine biophysical thresholds (climate change, biosphere integrity, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, land-system change, freshwater use, atmospheric aerosols, stratospheric ozone, novel entities) whose transgression destabilizes the conditions under which complex political life is possible (Rockström et al. 2009; Richardson et al. 2023). The structural-necessity condition is that environmental architecture maintain operations within these thresholds, not that it optimize within them on contestable cost-benefit terms. The thresholds set the floor; cost-benefit analysis operates above the floor on framework-compatible implementation choices.

*Technology-conditioned scope.* The framework's environmental claims are conditioned on what [§8.11](<8.11 Technology.md>) establishes about technology: a population whose technology has extended its reach to the climate, the oceans, the biosphere, and the atmosphere has a recognition obligation across that reach. As technology extends further (synthetic biology, atmospheric engineering, deep-time waste storage, machine systems whose effects propagate across centuries) the recognition obligation extends with it. The structural condition is that the architecture's scope track the technology's reach; architectures calibrated to pre-extension technological conditions systematically underprotect.

*Sustainable use within constraints, extraction preclusion at the constraint level.* The framework licenses human use of environmental resources within sustainable-maintenance constraints; it precludes structural-extraction patterns at the constraint level. The position is in the field with sustainable-use, ecological-economics, and Indigenous-stewardship traditions; it is against both unconstrained-extraction-tolerant and pure-deep-ecology positions. The structural condition is calibration to the reserve's actual replenishment rate, not preclusion of consumption from the reserve.

*Scientific input integrated through deliberative infrastructure.* Climate science, ecological science, and Earth-system science are constitutive inputs to environmental policy; the framework licenses scientific authority within the direction-recognition mechanism. But the framework is not pure-technocratic: scientific input has to be integrated through the political community's deliberative infrastructure (the [§9.4](<9.4 Information.md>) public-square channels) rather than delivered as policy from the science-side directly. The condition is coupling, not substitution; technocratic-environmentalist architectures that treat democratic deliberation as obstacle rather than as constitutive violate the condition.

*Indigenous and traditional governance integration.* Political communities developed under longer-than-modern intergenerational accountability — Indigenous land-management traditions, long-running commons-management institutions (Ostrom 1990) — have working solutions to problems modern political-economy is structurally vulnerable to. The structural condition is that these traditions be treated as living governance assets rather than as historical artifacts; environmental architectures that ignore them systematically underperform on long-run outcomes (Garnett et al. 2018; Fa et al. 2020).

Together, these seven conditions are what environmental protection as intergenerational-recognition infrastructure structurally requires: each one indispensable, none sufficient alone, substantive environmental architecture emerging only from the whole set. Against those conditions, [§9.5.3](<9.5.3 What is Predicted.md>) sets its predictions.


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← [9.5.1 What is Disputed](<9.5.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.5.3 What is Predicted](<9.5.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
