People talk about "then invisible hand of the market" or "fate" or a great many other things as if they have agency. They also talk about themselves as if they have agency. But so far as I know there's nothing rigorous behind any of it, it's just stories that we tell about phenomena.

Which circumstances are emergent and which are consequences of the intent of some character or another is more of a stylistic choice on the part of the storyteller. And if there's no story being told, then everything might as well be emergent.

I can see that we differ in how we prefer to style discussions about ecosystems, and that's fine, but so far as I'm aware there's no evidence to make one of us right and the other wrong. We're well away from science and squarely in the unknowable here.

Or put another way, the mofo that wasn't specific about which facet of the Jungle killed me is not as lazy as the one that that failed read the room and adjust their usage to fit the story that was being told at the time.