Why We Must Bioregionalize Now
And thoughts from New York Climate Week
New York Climate Week closed this past weekend amidst steady showers, the leftovers of Hurricane Helene which killed over one hundred individuals (and counting) in the US Southeast. The region around Asheville, North Carolina - an area that has attracted many folks for its relatively stable and catastrophe-free climate - today looks like a warzone. It’s a reminder that there is no refuge on a planet connected by the flows of wind, water, and globalized trade. With nowhere to run, we are left with no option but to deeply investigate the places we live in - the cities, sprawling suburbs, farms, and wildernesses around us - and ask ourselves a simple question: how do we live with the gifts of that place, with its unique intelligence, or what the Romans called genius loci?
I came to New York Climate Week (NYCW) to link up with folks who are asking this question and developing the social, financial, and technological infrastructure to build local resilience in the face of a collapsing, globalized world system. This involves channeling capital to communities on the ground and developing governance structures and digital tools to coordinate and allocate resources, and creating bioregional hubs that serve as decentralized but interlinked physical nodes for these efforts. Trust me, I would rather spend my days playing music on the side of a river somewhere with an aperol spritz, but this is what the times call for.
And the work is not only urgent, given how quickly we are moving past our planet’s tipping points. It is also, more fundamentally, our only path forward. Our centralized systems of production, distribution, and governance are faltering under the strain of environmental collapse and global instability. The relocalization of our social-economic systems will happen whether we like it or not. The question is whether we will pro-actively usher in that transition by building systems of mutual support and localized production, or whether we will be forced into that transition like an addict refusing to let go of the needle, with more disasters, more displacement, more exploitation.
Bioregionalism is a movement that works to help humans reinhabit their local ecosystems, living with what the genius loci has to offer, rather than extractive, fragile, globalized supply chains. Bioregion is shorthand for bio-cultural region and expresses the insight that healthy human cultures are rooted in the natural ecosystems they inhabit. As Peter Berg explained in 1991:
“All life on the planet is interconnected in a few obvious ways, and in many more that remain barely explored. But there is a distinct resonance among living things and the factors which influence them that occurs specifically within each separate place on the planet. Discovering and describing that resonance is the best way to describe a bioregion.”
Bioregionalism is not a new movement. The term emerged in the 1970s as a distinct counter-response to the centralized top-down approaches of international organizations like the UN. Drawing on the past 200 years of work by utopians, geographers, anarchists, socialists and ecologists , activists on the US West coast, including poets like Gary Snyder, started exploring locally-rooted, ground-up environmentalism that wasn’t reactive, placing band-aids on emerging crises, but pro-active, creating the conditions for communities to live within the constraints and opportunities of what their ecosystems offer.
Today, this movement is experiencing a second life as we increasingly realize that the biospheric crisis is so bad and the top-down approaches facilitated by the likes of the UN so ineffective that we need to take matters into our own hands. “The next big thing,” says the designer Thomas Lommée, “is a lot of small things.”
To bioregionalize means to become native to place again, and to develop solutions and responses appropriate to place. Whereas talk of carbon emissions is completely gobbledegook to the average person, bioregionalism can speak a language rooted in everyday experience: what does the land, water, and air offer? What can my business, my farm, my town, offer? How can I build trust with my neighbors? How are we going to survive, and perhaps thrive, together?
These are not just philosophical questions. They are deeply practical. How we answer them determines how we grow out food, build our cities, and collaborate together. It structures the flow of energy and capital through our communities, and in the process reveals the uneven societal distribution of resources, opportunities, and environmental vulnerabilities. In deeply investigating our local places, we come face-to-face with the legacy of colonialism, industrialization, and systemic inequity. More than just a cultural process, this is a deeply emotional and spiritual process of restoring our bond with life itself.
At the end of one of the climate week panels, an ecologist reminded me that “an optimist is a well informed pessimist,“ a quote attributed to Mark Twain. We have a long way to go, and nothing to guarantee our success, and we have to accept that we may not see the fruits of our work. Any optimism we have thus comes from a well-informed, honest understanding of how deeply broken our systems are. Our hope comes from allowing our feelings of despair to empower action. This is a merger of left and right brain - the capacity to feel holistically and the capacity to think strategically and with granularity.
As the philosopher Bayo Akomolafe is fond of saying: “The times are urgent; let us slow down”. Now is the time to feel and start the slow, patient work of building trust so that we can live and play together in a changed world where even the safest havens are exposed to catastrophe. Bioregionalism is not a shiny tech platform we can design and scale in six months. Building trust amongst human communities, and more importantly, learning to trust our selves again, is the work of a lifetime and many more.
To close, here is a short list of resources/organizations developing the bioregional framework. It’s not a list of local bioregional initiatives (of which there are too many to list) but more a list of meta-initiatives looking to empower bioregioning projects. Please message me to add some to the list. Thank you.
Resources
Podcasts
Articles
“What is a Bioregion?” by Brandon Letsinger
“A brief history of bioregions and bioregionalism in scholarly literature” by Karl Burkart
Bioregional design & incubators
Bioregional finance
The Capital Institute (regenerative finance think-tank and education)
Regen Network (block-chain based ecological restoration platform)
Education
Design School for Regenerating Earth (global)
Tierra Valiente: Center for Applied Cultural Transition (Costa Rica)
Monviso Institute (Italy)
Planet Drum Foundation (USA)
Glad to see this in substack. I am active in the Regenerate Cascadia bioregional work. Just attended a workshop from the Design School to Regenerate Earth that is developing this innovated infrastructure for funding. I urge folks to check out the resources listed in post. A really dynamic international community is emerging around this.
Fantastic read and great resources, appreciate your work 💙