Fun news this morning: Resilience.org is carrying Dave Rollo’s article “Bioregional regeneration: Lessons from Whatcom County and Cascadia.” Dave is a policy specialist at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE), where the piece first ran on October 1, and we’re really glad to see it in front of a wider audience.
The article starts somewhere a lot of counties will recognize. A government plan for Whatcom County calls for 30 percent more people by mid-century, and the glacial melt its water supply depends on keeps shrinking. Dave uses Regenerate Whatcom, our Landscape Group up in the northwest corner of Washington, to show what it looks like to start from somewhere else.
The article draws on David MacLeod and Brian Kerkvliet, who’ve been starting community groups in Whatcom for years, and it goes into good detail on the mapping. Brian prefers “water catchment” to “watershed” because it gets you thinking about keeping water instead of shedding it. At a mapping session, neighbors mark up a catchment map with the places they want to protect, the places that need repair, and the places where people are already doing well, then invite whoever wasn’t in the room to add their own. Brian describes what comes out as layers of a place that used to be invisible.
There’s a good section on how the work gets paid for, too. Through Cascadia BioFi, our finance program, Landscape Groups use flow funding, which means the groups (not us) decide which local projects and people get the grants. David MacLeod says groups know where a community’s acupressure points are and big outside funders usually don’t, and he puts the pace of it this way: “We talk about moving at the speed of trust.” That says it better than we usually do.
Thank you to Dave Rollo and CASSE, and to Resilience.org for giving it more room. Most of all, thank you to David, Brian and the whole Regenerate Whatcom team, who are doing everything the article describes. We wrote about the CASSE original earlier this month. If Whatcom is home for you, the Regenerate Whatcom page is the place to start.
Featured image: participants at Regenerate Whatcom’s bioregional mapping workshop, Rome Grange, July 2026.