Noema Magazine: Inside Bioregionalism’s Tech-Driven Revival
As the climate crisis deepens, an old green dream is returning — with new tools and technologies. By Doug Bierend. December 4, 2025, Noema Magazine.
What does tech have to do with bioregioning a place? A blog highlighting the Noema article.
If you’re new to the resurgence of bioregionalism, you may have heard the term Bio-Fi;. One might say that this resurgence is the ‘third wave” with the first beginning with our elders in the late seventies and eighties; the second wave, the Gen X’ers revived it in the nineties and early aughts, and now, the Millennials have brought tech into the conversation of bioregioning a place. This is the revival that Cascadia has been waiting for.
The Cascadia movement gained traction as a “marginal secessionist effort, though there is little apparent overlap with Cascadian bioregionalism, which is defined by broader environmental and community-based goals that have persisted and evolved for decades.” (Bierend, 2025)
In the second decade of the 21st century, the growing and urgent ecological movement has a solution: tech-driven investment into the reorganization of the very social and economic values of modernity around the natural places and boundaries of its ecosystems which hold and sustain humanity.
“The Cascadian movement has long been one of the most visible expressions of bioregionalism. Historically, Cascadia has also been the center of a marginal secessionist effort, though there is little apparent overlap with Cascadian bioregionalism.” (Bierend, 2025)
SEE MORE from Regenerate Cascadia and Cascadia Dept. of Bioregion: Bioregional mapping and Secessionist movement
Bioregional finance, shortened and catchy: Bio-Fi
Bio-Fi, explained quite well in Doug Bierend’s article.
“New financial systems and decentralized technologies to establish the technical, institutional and cultural bases for bioregional forms of economics and governance. The mission is to leverage existing economic systems in ways that prioritize bioregional regeneration over extraction.”
The Bio-Fi Conference
At 2025’s first BioFi conference in Seattle, Brandon Letsinger, Department of Bioregion’s Executive Director, spoke confidently that Cascadia has what it takes to reorganize in this resurgence of bioregionalism using tech-driven investment that could truly be the lever of power to hold the systems that we will certainly need as the planet warms, and if carefully executed, the concept of bioregioning a place could “leverage significant resources and influence” as we are sitting amongst a concentration of natural resources including some remaining old growth forests and leading technology companies. The carbon-storing forests along with the financial wealth of Washington state, Cascadia has one of the largest economies in the US. Read the highlights of 2025’s BioFi conference in this Regenerate Cascadia blog by Ashley Bonn.
New funding opportunities
The term: the great wealth transfer, describes the expected redirection of assets and funds from the elder generation over the coming years. Bio-Fi intends to “establish the means of directing those funds to bioregional ends, and to leverage various new and innovative funding models for the cause.” This is the opportunity to reimagine the status quo – measured differently.
In 2024, the BioFi Project published “The BioFi Book,” which argues for prioritizing the regeneration of damaged ecosystems in economics, introducing various innovative financial instruments designed to reorient the systems of capital that undermine them. The book also offers a range of strategies and case studies demonstrating the principles in practice.
From the technological advances of the industrial revolution to the current mess we’re in, technology can help regenerate and reorganize the places and systems that will sustain us through the unraveling and the turning that modernity is long overdue for.
Follow this link to Bierend’s article in Noema Magazine: Inside Bioregionalism’s Tech Driven Revival.
Read more:
Post Carbon Institute’s report: Welcome to the Great Unraveling: Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown