On Friday, July 17, 2026, Regenerate Whatcom hosted its first bioregional mapping workshop at Rome Grange, along the Mt. Baker Highway outside Bellingham. It was the first such gathering gathered by any of the landscape groups working with Regenerate Cascadia, and the room it filled was exactly the room this work needs: nearly two dozen residents of the Nooksack River watershed and the country around it, including regenerative farmers, community organizations, local officials, and people from Western Washington University.
The day ran from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, on breakfast and a lunch built from local farms. Between those two meals the group worked through three rounds of mapping on large printed base maps, laying transparent overlays one on top of another until the landscape started to read as a whole system rather than a set of separate problems. Geology and water first. Then the places showing damage, and the places already healing. Then the social layer: who is actually here, and what are they already doing.
What the maps surfaced
A knowledge fair let people add what they knew to shared sheets, one sticky note at a time, across every layer. One round asked a question that is easy to skip and hard to answer honestly: who is not in this room, and who needs to be here next time. The last stretch of the afternoon went to small groups working on a restorative vision for the Nooksack watershed.
What came back from those groups was not a list of projects. It was a set of conditions. People said they needed a space where it is safe to say what they actually see, and relationships strong enough to hold disagreement, before any shared vision could be real. Flooding surfaced repeatedly as a leverage point, the kind of recurring pressure that is also a recurring opening. So did the question of how to bring students and young people into work that currently depends on a small number of very busy adults.
Regenerate Whatcom’s organizing team, including Cory Sevin, David MacLeod, Dave Ketter, and Brian Kerkvliet of Inspiration Farm, built the day and ran it. Clare Attwell and Brandon Letsinger came up from Regenerate Cascadia in a support role and captured video and audio so the workshop could be written up as proceedings rather than living only in the memory of the people who were there. The maps themselves are being combined layer by layer and brought back to the same group.
August 28: harvesting the maps at Inspiration Farm
The next step is Friday, August 28, from 4:00 to 7:00 pm at Inspiration Farm, where Regenerate Whatcom hosts the August meetup. The focus is being out on the land at the height of the late-summer harvest, and mapping what people love about this place.
The afternoon includes activities on the land, an update on the ongoing bioregional mapping work, and a chance to work through mapping exercises with other participants, reviewing and harvesting from the July 17 workshop. Bring a dish to share or something from the garden; a potluck and open discussion follow.
Details and directions are on the event listing.
Also coming up in Whatcom
- August 21 to 23 — WILD: Water Integrated Landscape Design, at Empyrean Farm in east Whatcom County. A hands-on permaculture earthworks and water-design weekend with Brian Kerkvliet and Kyle Babcock, walking a real property from observation through implementation.
- September 25 — Owl Farm September Meetup, 4:00 to 7:00 pm at Owl Farm, 3977 Griffith Ave, Bellingham. A 34-acre permaculture idea site and wildlife refuge. Tour, apple pressing, discussion, and potluck.
Why bioregional mapping
Bioregional mapping is a way of seeing a landscape as a living whole across ecological, cultural, social, economic, and regenerative layers at once. It is slow on purpose. The point is not to produce a map so much as to produce the shared picture that lets a set of separately busy people recognize that they are working on one thing.
Each landscape group in the Regenerate Cascadia network is preparing a gathering like this for its own part of the bioregion, as part of the year-long Landscape Hub Cultivator program. Whatcom went first, and the rest of the network has been learning from how they did it. Regenerate Vashon is planning its own workshop for October.
If you are in the Nooksack watershed and want to be part of what comes next, come to Inspiration Farm on the 28th.