Commoners understand that they and their provisioning is deeply entangled with living natural systems. They realize that they are embedded within nature and participating in an interdependent relationship with the nonhuman. This leads to some very different attitudes and ways of meeting needs. It also shifts our understanding of human/nature relations out of the economistic framework ("resource management," commodification and financialization of natural systems) into one that respects the intrinsic value and dynamics of (for example) soil, forests, watersheds, wild animals, and their embeddedness within networks of living organisms.
The Iwi people in New Zealand say of the Whangunai River, "I am the river, and the river is me." See story in The Guardian on the granting of legal personality to the Whangunai. html 
Permaculture, Dave Jacke insights. Cooperation in ecological "guilds."
Eco-mimicry. See Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan, Ecological Design (Island Press, 1996).
Andreas Weber, "Enlivenment" essay. Biology of Wonder (New Society Publishers, 2016). Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology (Chelsea Green, 2017). **Instead of wilderness without humans, humans in interaction with nature to increase its biodiversity AND usefulness to humans. **Nature as a source of human identity and knowledge.
M. Kat Anderson, Tending the WIld: Nature American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources (University of California Press, 2005). Anderson ....
See also, Elisabeth Malkin, "Handing Civilians the Key to a Guatemalan Forest" The New York Times, November 26, 2015. html In the face of cattle ranchers, farmers, illegal loggers and drug traffickers laying waste to forestland in the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala -- which the government is unable to stop -- an experiment is coming to the conclusion that "the most effective way to protect forests is to give control of them to the communities who already live there."
# See also