Our friends at The BioFi Project have published a beautiful and clear-eyed essay, “Becoming Inhabitants,” on the return of the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress. Written by Félix de Rosen, it grew out of conversations with the Congress organizers, our own Brandon Letsinger among them, and we think it is well worth your time.
After seventeen years, the continental Congress reconvenes this September in Vernonia, Oregon. The essay uses that homecoming to ask a question this whole movement is living inside of: can bioregional organizing mature from a loose coalition of scattered experiments into a movement that can move resources, coordinate action, and sustain communities through what is coming?
It is an honest piece. It holds together the “better and better and worse and worse,” in veteran organizer David Haenke’s phrase, and it names the two challenges most on our minds: weaving isolated pockets of work into real place-based coalitions, and building a durable floor of funding beneath the people doing the work. As Brandon puts it in the essay, “People are doing the work. But they’re burned out. They’re isolated. They’re not being supported.” It also captures something we feel deeply, that a congress is a verb and not a noun, and that the people gathering are delegates, accountable to the landscapes and communities they carry with them.
For anyone wondering what the bioregional movement is actually building, and why this Congress matters, it is one of the finest introductions we have read.
Read “Becoming Inhabitants” at The BioFi Project.
The 11th Turtle Island Bioregional Congress takes place September 15 to 19, 2026, in Vernonia, Oregon, on Chinook traditional land. Learn more and register at tibc11.earth.