Keystone Species Company

Better for our presence.

I build things that generate life and abundance — systems, communities, capital structures, and the people running all three.

Keystone Species Co. is where I write about the thinking behind it.

The name is not a metaphor.

— Eric Amyot · Founder

A keystone species is one whose influence on an ecosystem is far larger than its share of the living world would predict. Humans are 0.01% of Earth's biomass. We are deciding what happens to the other 99.99%.

Portrait of a bearded man against a dark background

Our influence is not a choice. Its direction is.

The sea star doesn't deliberate. The beaver doesn't weigh whether the valley would be better left alone. Every other keystone species has its sign fixed by biology. We're the only one that chooses. Which means the question was never whether we shape the world — only which way.

Better for our presence.

The pristine myth: managed land to managers gone to recorded as wilderness to value equals absence

What they called untouched wilderness was a garden whose gardeners had just died. That mistake is still shaping how we build.

Read the manifesto →

Five minutes for the short version.
Twenty for the full argument.

What I build.

Systems — Homes, and the energy, water, food and air that run them. New builds and retrofits.

Communities — Development that reads a place before it touches it.

Capital — Ownership and fund structures designed to hold a mission through decades rather than deal cycles.

People — Founders and funders resourced to do this work without me.

Where I build.

These are the companies where the argument gets tested. Each one takes a layer — the systems, the ground, the capital — and tries to make it work at a cost somebody can finance.

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See where I build

Eric Amyot

I've been starting, running, failing, selling and buying companies since 2001. Twenty-five years of finding out which structures hold and which ones only look like they do.

What I'm doing now is narrower than what I did then. Right now that's energy and storage for households across Colorado, California and Wyoming through issho, the planning and entitlement work for a health-and-longevity village in Canada through Oliizoi, and the capital structure meant to finance work like it.

The thesis underneath all of it is that the built environment can leave a place with more life in it than it had before — and that this is a manufacturing and financing problem more than a design problem. I've written down what would count as being wrong about that, in advance.

Writing.

I write about what this work looks like from inside it — including the parts that don't go well.

Read →

Better for our presence.

Our influence is not a choice. Its direction is.

Better for our presence.

What I build.

Where I build.

Eric Amyot

Writing.

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Make Humans A Keystone Species, Again