“A Guide to Bioregional Mapping & Planning: Ecological Design for Place-Based Regeneration” by Félix de Rosen
Several thought leaders in bioregionalism contributed to this publication, including Department of Bioregion’s Executive Director.
Mapping the Heart of Place.
A text by Brandon Letsinger.
Beyond a map on a screen, or lines on paper, bioregional maps can be stories told around a campfire, sung, danced, quilted, painted, posted or however best communicates the purpose that participants want to communicate. One important feature is that bioregional maps are often concerned with time; stories from the past, things that people find important to share, groups that are making a difference today, or mapping regenerative and sustainable futures that we want to see. From these community maps, we can create road maps to ideas that might not have existed previously, with tangible steps for how to get there. Bioregional mapping tends to be concerned with everything that current mapping is not —everything left off of google maps, or in between the road maps of interstates, gas stations and fast food restaurants. The plants, the trees, the animals, our stories and lived experiences. Everything that makes a place special. The last little batch of old growth in a neighborhood, the last hawthorne bush planted by your grandmother, the crazy lady with the chickens next door, the homeless encampment down the way, or colorful mural. Untold and forgotten histories of discrimination, genocide or earlier strategies of resistance more important than ever to tell now. Or maybe it’s the type of birds or fish that migrate with each season. The rivers that carry the fish, or the bushes that provide unique nesting for native bird species. Stories of the places that make living here special, that define what we think of as home.
At Cascadia Dept. of Bioregion, we understand bioregional mapping as more than a technical exercise, it is a living practice rooted in right relationship. From Indigenous stewardship of land as an interconnected whole and of life within dynamic ecosystems. We honor this lineage by recognizing that maps are not just representations of territory, but expressions of responsibility and belonging. Indigenous communities have reclaimed mapping technologies as tools of resurgence, resistance, and education.
As bioregional approaches gain momentum across diverse landscapes globally, thoughtful mapping and planning have become critical to empowering bioregioning initiatives to work with the unique intelligence of their homelands and articulate strategies for regeneration.
With this in mind, The BioFi Project has published the Guide to Bioregional Mapping & Planning.
Discover methodologies and tools available for conducting comprehensive bioregional assessments and developing evidence-based regenerative strategies.
by Félix de Rosen and a network of bioregionalists.
This Guide was designed to help bioregional organizing teams establish the enabling conditions for creating Bioregional Financing Facilities and their underlying portfolios, while accommodating the contextual specificity of each bioregion. Whether your initiative operates at the watershed, landscape, or bioregional scale, the guide offers methods for articulating and activating the distinct intelligence of your place.
Additional thoughtful input to the guide, include: Tyler Wakefield, Michelle Lee, Juan C. Ramos & Seth Shames of EcoAgriculture Partners and 1000 Landscapes For 1 Billion People, Martin Rodd of KMT Konsulting/Kreatamotive @kmttek, Brandon Letsinger of Regenerate Cascadia, Amazon Sacred Headwaters, Commonland, Eric Futerfas, Hyphae Design Laboratory, and Josiah Cain of Design Ecology
The BioFi Project is a collective supporting bioregions to design, create, capitalize, implement, and evolve Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) that connect financial resources with regenerators.
We partner with bioregional organizing teams and Indigenous communities across North and South America and around the world to apply the BFF templates and capital raising and allocation approaches, as laid out in the book Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet published in June 2024 and has since become a global bestseller and has been translated into Spanish.
Authors Samantha E. Power and Leon Seefeld.