with artwork by Clare Atwell

If you’ve been following the progress of the How to Organize Your Bioregion Learning Journey hosted by the Design School for Regenerating Earth that began in March of this year, you know we are just over halfway through the six-month course. So much has happened! 

The second half of the course presents an opportunity for each person in the course to move from being a passive recipient of knowledge toward being an active participant in landscape stewardship, community organizing, and bioregional education, if they hadn’t already been looking for opportunities to plug in. 

With great examples from Richard Coates (River Thames) and Maria Elena Daynes (Tarn-et-Garonne) on how their design immersions took shape and with support from the three pillars of bioregionalism, we are moving into a new phase of activating ourselves alongside our landscapes. 

Three Pillars of Bioregionalism

As we begin to approach organizing our bioregions—and, on a smaller scale, our landscapes/watersheds—there are three primary pillars to keep in mind: a tapestry of projects, funding/governance, and education. These three aspects create a strong backbone for bioregional organizing when grown in a landscape together. 

Education

This pillar is often the easiest place to start as you begin to offer what you’ve learned about bioregionalism, listening to the land, permaculture, and native plants to your community. This can be something as small as hosting a plant identification walk, doing a trash pickup, or developing a waterwalk of a local stream.

What makes these activities bioregional is the way you talk about how each of these small activities feeds into a greater whole—the way streams feed into rivers, which feed into the ocean. When we think about the way that the landscapes are coherently nested and organized and return our human systems to that inherent wisdom, we co-facilitate a process of healing the future. 

Who in your community is eager to hear what you’ve been learning? What sacred places can you invite others to experience? How can you teach others the ways you love the landscape?

Tapestry of Projects

There is so much work already being done in the landscape—we are not in this healing process alone. However, because many of the regenerative projects in mutual aid, food sovereignty, ecological restoration, communal knowledge, community care, creative reuse, and restorative justice don’t know each other—or worse, are actively competing for grant funding—it’s very difficult to work together. 

That’s where bioregional organizers come in. By acting on behalf of the land at the pace of relationships, we can weave together existing projects, support non-hierarchical governance structures, and ultimately develop resource pipelines so we can live into radical abundance together. 

What projects exist in your area that are aligned with the work you want to do in the world? Are they collaborating with each other? Can you hold the threads between these organizations? Can we build a coherent strategy around how to maintain autonomy while participating in the greater network? 

Funding/Governance

Inside our current capitalistic structures, it is difficult to envision a future where collaborative organizations come together to prioritize community projects and share funding sources, but it is possible, and it’s already beginning to happen. 

When we expand our understanding of funding to include non-monetary resources and when we ask ourselves what is possible when we organize non-hierarchically, a new plane of relationship opens up. 

While many groups are experimenting with Bioregional Financing Facilities as is laid out in this book, funding and governance can look many different ways. It can be as simple as organizing mutual aid groups in your local neighborhood or practicing council turn-taking rounds in meetings. The diversity in funding and governance is important and valuable just as it is in the ecosystem. 

Many people in the learning journey are getting more deeply interested in sociocracy, a non-hierarchical circle structure that makes it more possible to hear from all voices at the table, using consent-based voting practices. 

With your current groups, could you practice rotating facilitation? Could you do needs/offers mapping to identify possible resource flows? Where is there already abundance within your collaborative spaces? 

Design Immersions

Many learning journey participants are getting excited to host their own immersions, modelled after some of the immersions that have occurred in the south of France, along the River Thames, and in Barichara. By documenting and doing storytelling about these journeys, we can continue to share about bioregional frameworks while deepening our relationship to place. 

Design immersions in the Willamette Valley and Fraser Lowlands are well underway, with an upcoming ecoregional listening tour being planned and ongoing ecoquests. More information to come! If you would like to support the Willamette Valley tour, you can find out more here. 

These immersions don’t need to be anything big or elaborate! Taking the time to get to know the regenerative projects in your area is enough and is exactly the work we need to do in these critical times to foster resilience. Every moment of listening to the land heals long-standing wounds of disconnection. 

Know that doing what lights you up is enough. 

Where Do We Go from Here?

We recently did a halfway poll of participants to identify how successfully we are moving through the goals of the learning journey, especially for the Cascadia cohort, and it is so inspiring that so many people have found connections and learning about their landscapes through this process.

Much of the conversation in the learning journey is shifting toward curiosity about what comes next. There are only eight weeks (four webinars) left in the course, but the Design School creates a community of practice with ongoing learning happening in BioFi, inner work, leadership, organizational constellations, member-led themed dialogues, regional calls, and much, much more. The learning never truly ends. 

And, in these last couple months together, we want to focus on the ways the landscape is the classroom while weaving together the underlying currents of bioregional work that echoes throughout the planet. What are the ways we can support each other with tools and practices that can be adapted to unique locations across the globe?

We are looking forward to these emergent conversations and the network of relationships that will develop as we continue to deepen our personal and collective practice. 

Thank you for tuning in. 

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