« Ecological solidarity » has been promoted as a conceptual tool for rethinking ecological and social interdependence and for sketching new relations between humans and non-humans. In so doing, the promotors of the notion challenge the division between subjects and objects which structures the juridical architecture of our modern legal and property order. Ecological solidarity is a multidimensional phenomenon: it is based on the recognition of the interdependences between natural organisms and their physical environment, but it also tends to express a political sense of solidarity (solidarisme) that gives humans the responsibility to become representatives or spokespersons for non-humans. This paper sets out to demonstrate that other forms of ecological solidarity have historically existed, that were neither based on the will of individuals nor on political representation, but were rooted in material forms inscribed in things. Such material solidarities are best observed in the management of water in France after 1789: local institutions, namely associations of private owners that outlived the Revolution, granted rights to pieces of land rather than human subjects; the commoners of these water associations were not humans but pieces of land. Such institutions occupy a privileged place in Ostrom’s literature, where they are presented as integral to any lasting management success for land and resources by local or regional communities: Ostrom described them as “empirical alternatives” to the “Tragedy of the Commons.” Distancing itself from the property system imposed during the nineteenth century, which put the subject’s will at the heart of the relation between man and land, this historical inquiry shows a reverse image of the relation between man and nature. Contrary to man’s traditional representation as master and possessor of nature, the inquiry shows that human actors inscribed themselves within a generational chain and can be viewed as heirs and guests of a previous ecological and social system.