A bioregion is a living mosaic defined through its watersheds, and found by combining the oldest "hard" lines: geology, topography, tectonics, wind, fracture zones, and continental divides, working through the "soft" lines: living systems such as soil, ecosystems, climate, marine life, and flora and fauna, and lastly the "human" lines: human geography, energy, transportation, agriculture, food, music, language, history, Indigenous cultures, and ways of living within the context of a place.
This is summed up well by David McCloskey, author of the Cascadia Bioregion map:
"A bioregion may be analyzed on physical, biological, and cultural levels. First, we map the landforms, geology, climate, and hydrology and how these environmental factors work together to create a standard template for life in that particular place. Second, we map the flora and fauna, especially the characteristic vegetative communities, and link them to their habitats. Third, we look at native peoples, western settlements, and current land-use patterns and problems in interaction with the first two levels."
A bioregion is defined as the largest physical boundaries where connections based on that place will make sense. The basic units of a bioregion are watersheds and hydrological basins, and a bioregion will always maintain the natural continuity and full extent of a watershed. While a bioregion may stretch across many watersheds, it will never divide or separate a water basin. A bioregion is a shorthand designation for a "bio-cultural region." It is rooted in the idea that culture stems from place and that human cultures develop in relation to the natural ecosystems they inhabit.
Bioregions Emerge from the Landscape
Unlike arbitrary lines on maps, bioregions exist. Right now. Look at a map of your area from space and you will quickly become an expert of your place. Most importantly, unlike many maps, bioregions are not created with simple "lines" — rather they emerge from the realities of place, of many different layers of stewardship coming together to help shape the curves and flows of life. They include the oldest stories of place — the jagged edges of continental plates jamming into each other — subduction zones, fissures, fractures, mountain ranges — and from that, how does that guide the energy of a place? Rain, wind, soil and ecosystems — plants, animals, fish — and from that, how have human cultures adapted to that place? More than anything else, a bioregion is simply a whole system lens for answering that question.
Every Living Being Has a Bioregion
While bioregions exist for humans, every plant or animal has a bioregion — an interconnected web of life where they thrive. Each organism has a zone of territory that presents the optimal conditions for it to reside, exist, and flourish, shaped by layers such as predators, prey, food sources, nesting habitat, migration corridors, and the physical extent within which they may be found.
Cascadia is also known as Salmon Nation. A map of the current and historic range of salmon helps reveal the bioregion for salmon — not just where they swim, but the watersheds that feed their rivers, the forests that shade their spawning beds, the insects and marine life they depend on, the nutrient cycling that Cascadian ecosystems require, and the conditions that allow salmon and the ecosystems around them to thrive.
Each person or community may have a small, personal bioregion in which their daily life extends — but the cultural element is just as important. What is the bioregion of an elk, an orca, or a falcon? While a specific animal might exist in a specific ecosystem, the entire watersheds and webs of life for that animal must be included as part of its bioregion. The process of creating a bioregional map is just as important as the map itself — which will be a living document that is not static, but changes and evolves.
The Context of Bioregion: Peter Berg & Raymond Dasmann
The term bioregion as we use it was initially coined by Allen Van Newkirk in 1972. Raymond Dasmann and Peter Berg, who founded the Planet Drum Foundation in 1973, carried it forward and developed it. Planet Drum, located in San Francisco, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023 and defines a bioregion as:
"A distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, including human and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole 'life-place' with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured."
Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann wrote their foundational definition in 1977 as part of the essay Reinhabiting California. For Dasmann — an environmental conservationist who had studied under Aldo Leopold, worked with the IUCN to create some of the first maps of biogeographic provinces, started the Man and Biosphere (MAB) project, and helped coin the term "biodiversity" — renaming bioregions to include watersheds, ecosystems and human cultures was critical to putting people back into place, rather than removed from it.
Peter Berg gave his famous definition at the Symposium on Biodiversity of Northwestern California in 1991:
"A bioregion can be determined initially by the use of climatology, physiography, animal and plant geography, natural history and other descriptive natural sciences. The final boundaries of a bioregion are best described by the people who have lived within it, through human recognition of the realities of living-in-place."
Kirkpatrick Sale, another early pioneer, defined it in 1974:
"A bioregion is a part of the earth's surface whose rough boundaries are determined by natural and human dictates, distinguishable from other areas by attributes of flora, fauna, water, climate, soils and land-forms, and human settlements and cultures those attributes give rise to."
Why Shared Definitions Matter
As nation state and traditional western economic institutions begin to fail, bioregionalism and bioregions are experiencing a moment across the world. Many people are coming across the idea and becoming excited, looking to connect it with their passion and work — though not necessarily familiar with the definition. While this is wonderful, if not tended, this can create confusion and incoherence in the field.
Shared definitions and context help us grow and build a coherent movement, with shared values, principles and north star. It means we can trust and build relationships with any other bioregional movement, group, or organizer around the world and know that we are aligned, working towards a similar, regenerative goal. Without this, it allows people to co-opt the term, even when well intentioned, and begin using it ignorant of the meaning, context, or history.
If you are looking to use the term bioregions as part of the bioregional movement, understand that there is no "map" of the world's bioregions — because we have not created it yet. Efforts to label maps of bioregions using only ecoregion data creates incoherence and confusion. Bioregionalism says that humans are a keystone species, and need to be put back into visions, plans and maps of our place. This separation of human from environment is one of the most damaging things western science has done.
For us here in Cascadia, we use a simple rule: call it what it is. If it is a watershed, call it a watershed. If it is an ecoregion or biome, call it an ecoregion or biome. If it is a bioregion — a whole system lens that includes at least one intact watershed, the regional ecosystems within that watershed, and has been given definition and shape by the people living there because it best represents the realities of that place — then call it a bioregion.
Two Distinct Elements
Scientific: Defined by the physical landscape — geology, topology, hydrology, plate tectonics, geography, erosion, rainfall, soil type and variation — and the biological beings and ecosystems living within them, each distinct, each suited and evolved slightly differently. How is nature different in different areas? What natural diversity makes these regions so distinct, and how does that impact what we should do?
Cultural: The people and inhabitants living within the bioregion. The sum of our personal actions and interpersonal relationships that make each area distinct — the food we grow, what we eat, our sports, music, the clothes we wear, our shared identity, our economy, governments and politics. How does where we live affect these things? What are things we can each do that, taken together, will see the world shift in healthier ways and improve the well-being of our communities and bioregion?
Four Thresholds for Determining a Bioregion
- Place-defined territory. A bioregion is a land and water territory whose limits are defined by the natural realities of a place and the communities within them, and is the largest geographical limits where connections based on place will make sense.
- Self-reliance at scale. Such an area must be large enough to be self-reliant and maintain the integrity of its biological communities, habitats, and ecosystems.
- Watershed integrity. Watersheds and drainage basins are the building blocks of a bioregion. Bioregions might extend across watersheds, but they will never be divided.
- People matter. Ultimately, it is up to the people and inhabitants of a bioregion to determine what stewardship frameworks make sense for that area, what best represents them, and their way of life and living.
How Do We Map a Bioregion?
Peter Berg laid out a beautiful and simple process for finding your bioregional address through reinhabitation — the process of becoming aware of the intricate relational web of a bioregion's ecological qualities and inhabitants. One can begin by learning the local watershed, then asking simple questions: What are my closest native plants, animals, berries, and grasses? What is the average rainfall for this time of year? Where does my garbage go? Where does my water come from? Where does my power come from?
Ecologies are nested: ascending in scale from local ecosystem, to watershed, to bioregion, and onwards to continent and planet. Berg described his own bioregional address: "I say that I live in the Islais Creek Watershed, of the San Francisco Bay Estuary, of the Shasta Bioregion, of the North Pacific Rim, of the Pacific Basin, in the planetary biosphere of the universe."
David McCloskey spoke to this process of boundary-finding:
"While there are few straight lines in nature, there are many definite and powerful edges — various ecotones, watershed divides, climatic zones, fault lines and scarps. Careful attention should be given to such beginnings and endings, for these dramatic turnings in the earth serve as clear and powerful articulations of diversity."
The external boundaries of a bioregion are hard and jagged — mountain ranges, fault lines, geology, and hydrology — and from these hard edges, interconnected systems of rivers, weather patterns, ecosystems, and soil types define the shapes of our bioregion. Such an area must be large enough to maintain the integrity of the region's biological communities, habitats, and ecosystems; to support important ecological processes such as nutrient cycling, migration, and stream flow; and to include the human communities involved in the management, use, and understanding of biological resources. It must be small enough for local residents to consider it home.
Watershed, Ecoregion, Bioregion
Watersheds are the smallest unit bioregionalists work with — the area created from where a raindrop falls or a spring surfaces to the body of water it connects to. A watershed is an area of land that drains all streams and rainfall to a common destination. Watersheds can be large or small, divided by natural ridges and hills. They are entirely concerned with the travel of water. Larger watersheds contain many smaller ones. Watersheds, like Cascadia, transcend arbitrary borders and are critical to understanding where our water comes from and where it goes.
Ecoregions are the rooms in the house of a bioregion. Short-hand for regional ecosystem, an ecoregion is a relatively similar area united by common geography, ecology, and culture. They help articulate the internal diversity of a large and complex region. Ecoregions are often drawn as a series of contiguous watersheds with similar character, though watershed lines may be crossed when other factors predominate — such as landforms, tectonic suites, regional rivers, or major cultural boundaries. A key difference: while ecoregions are based on biophysical and ecosystem data, human settlement and cultural patterns play a crucial role in defining a bioregion.
Bioregions encompass multiple watersheds and ecoregions into the largest coherent unit where place-based connections make sense. They are smaller than a continent but larger than any single ecoregion, and they are unique in that they are defined not just by natural borders but by the people living there.
Scales We Use for Regenerate Cascadia
Planet — Earth.
Continent — Defined through continental crust: Antarctica, North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia.
Bioregion — Shaped from continental divides. Large hydrological basins that are the largest scale of connection based on place. Example: Cascadia bioregion.
Major Watershed — Major watersheds within a bioregion, larger than an ecoregion. Example: Columbia River.
Ecoregion — Shared watersheds of a drainage area with similar flora and fauna. Example: the Salish Sea.
Smaller Watershed — Watersheds within an ecoregion that make up cities and other features. Example: Cedar or Green River.
Discrete Landscape — Our home. A collection of one or more watersheds that we directly steward. The scale on which we take action. Example: Whidbey Island.
Bioregions as Part of Bioregionalism
The definition and idea of a bioregion emerged from and forms the foundation for a set of ethics and philosophy called bioregionalism. As the environmental movement developed in the 1970s, a counter-current emerged, developing primarily in Western North America. This movement sought to address environmental issues through a politics, practice, and personal identity based on a local and ecologically attuned sense of place.
In the early 1970s, the contemporary vision of bioregionalism began through collaboration between natural scientists, social and environmental activists, artists and writers, community leaders, and back-to-the-landers who worked directly with natural resources. They wanted to do "more than just save what's left." Peter Berg had attended the 1972 UN conference on the environment in Stockholm and came away convinced that global institutions were not going to solve the problem — indeed, they very much were the problem.
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Berg and other like-minded individuals — including Judy Goldhaft, Raymond Dasmann, Kirkpatrick Sale, Judith Plant, Eleanor Wright, Doug Aberley, Stephanie Mills, Jim Dodge, Freeman House, Van Andruss, David Haenke, and Gary Snyder — sought to create a locally rooted environmental movement from the ground up. This new form of environmentalism was not reactive, responding to every threat, but proactive, seeking to create the conditions for a more ecologically suitable world in which such threats were avoided.
Because it is a cultural idea, the description of a specific bioregion is drawn using information from the natural sciences and many other sources. Bioregionalism utilizes them to accomplish three main goals: restore and maintain local natural systems; practice sustainable ways to satisfy basic human needs such as food, water, shelter, and materials; and support the work of reinhabitation.
Bioregional Mapping
Bioregional mapping is a community and participatory process to create maps that combine ecological and physical information with social and cultural information within a given place, as defined by those living there or the communities most impacted. It is both a tradition dating back thousands of years, inspired by countless forms of Indigenous mapping, and a direct modern response to the erasure of local cultures in the face of ecological, economic and social crises.
Bioregional mapping is the art of making people care.
The goal is to help humans collectively re-inhabit the continents and bioregions they live within, encouraging lifestyles that are healthy and democratic, self-resilient communities living within a sustainable carrying capacity, and working to actively regenerate their region and world. It is also deeply personal — as a person charts their own experiences, getting to know their home places, every person becomes an expert and part of this process.
Beyond a map on a screen or lines on paper, bioregional maps can be stories told around a campfire, sung, danced, quilted, painted, or however best communicates the purpose that participants want to share. 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.
By mapping our home places and the things we find special, we challenge perceived notions and chart pathways to new realities and futures for how our society can live.