The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The Future is Local: Bioregioning 101

Episode Date: January 19, 2025

(Conversation recorded on December 11th, 2024)     The past century has been marked by the rise of globalization in every sense of the word - through production, culture, agriculture, consumption and more. This trend has brought great wealth and opportunities to many people - but what have we lost and forgotten through this process?  In this Reality Roundtable, Nate is joined by members of the bioregioning movement, Daniel Christian Wahl, Samantha Power, and Isabel Carlisle, to discuss the necessity of reconnecting to our local places for the sake of addressing our ecological, social, and economic challenges. In this fascinating exchange, Nate and his guests emphasize the need for decentralized governance and institutions, as well as communities organized around resilience and regeneration.  How deep are the historical and indigenous ties of humanity to the bioregional way of life? In what ways can individuals begin to engage with their local bioregions and contribute to a regenerative future? Finally, how can more humans who are connected and in relationship with the land influence future societies and cultures to be more aligned to the well-being of all life?    About Daniel Christian Wahl: Daniel Christian Wahl is one of the catalysts of the rising reGeneration and the author of 'Designing Regenerative Cultures' - so far translated into seven languages. He works as a consultant, educator and activist with NGOs, businesses, governments and global change agents. With degrees in biology and holistic science and a PhD in Design for Human and Planetary Health, his work has influenced the emerging fields of regenerative design and salutogenic design. Daniel is winner of the 2021 RSA Bicentenary Medal for applying design in service to society and was awarded a two year Volans-Fellowship in 2022.   About Samantha Power: Samantha Power is a Co-Founder and the Director of the BioFi Project and the Founder and Principal Consultant of Finance for Gaia. She is a Regenerative Economist, Futurist, and Bioregionalist based in Oakland, CA on the ancestral land of the Ohlone people. Samantha channeled her 15 years of experience learning and working in this space into a new book: 'Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet'. The book makes the case for and explains how to build institutions to shift capital to place-based regenerators to achieve global climate and nature-related goals, while enabling the transition to regenerative economies. To turn this vision into a global movement, Samantha co-founded the BioFi Project — a collective of experts supporting bioregions around the world to design, build, and implement BFFs inspired by the templates laid out in the book.   About Isabel Carlisle: Isabel Carlisle is a communicator, educator and large-scale project organiser. Her experience in the London art world (where her work included writing as an art critic for The Times and curating exhibitions at the Royal Academy) led her to set up and direct the Festival of Muslim Cultures that took place across Britain throughout 2006. Over 120 events in almost every conceivable art form brought audiences into contact with the Muslim world in order to build bridges of understanding between cultures. Isabel moved to South Devon in 2010 and created and led learning programmes for children and young adults with Transition Network. Since 2012 she has trained in Regenerative Development and Design with Regenesis.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

There's no need to wait for further collapse. There's no need to wait for someone to come and give you permission. Bioregionalism and bioregiening is available to all of us right now. You can do it in the place where you live. It's about a different way of seeing and being in that place in reclaiming our agency, but also responsibility to be good citizens. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins.

On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. It is reality roundtable time again. Today I'm excited to be joined by Isabel Carlyle, Daniel Christian Wall, and Samantha Power. Each of them are deeply involved in what is known as the bioregiening movement. And in this conversation, we discuss the introductory foundations to bioregioning and why it's relevant to the future human lives under the broader arc of the Great Simplification. Isabel Carlyle is the founder and director of the Bioregional Learning Center in Devon, UK,

which offers a climate resilience learning journey for the bioregion there, with aims towards creating systemic change for the area. Daniel Christian Wall, who is a former guest on this program, is also one of the catalysts of the rising regeneration movement, as well as author of the book Designing Regenerative Cultures. Finally, Samantha Power is a co-founder and the director of the Biopi Project, as well as the founder of Finance for Gaia. She's also the co-author of the book, Bioregional Financing Facilities, Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet.

Other than Daniel's first episode here, prior to this recording, I knew next to nothing on bioregiening. But I felt it's important to explore this as a central theme of the podcast. But this conversation taught me at an embodied level, the importance of bioregioning and the practice of people working in their bioregion, leading to believe that this is really a center node of what's ahead, bringing human societies back in balance with nature. Lastly, if you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our substack newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament, where my team and I post special announcements related to the great simplification.

And in 2025, there will be much more written content knocking on. wood with plastic veneer. You can find the link to subscribe in the show description. With that, please welcome Isabel Carlyle, Daniel Christian Wall, and Samantha, and Samantha. Good morning, Daniel, Isabel, and Samantha. Actually, afternoon for Daniel and Isabel. How are you today?

Yeah, we could. Maybe each of you could just briefly introduce yourself 30 seconds, name, where you live, what you do. My name is Daniel Wall. I live on the island of Mallorca where I moved 13 years ago because it's a perfect case study for bioregional development. And I've been working with trying to fit the human species back into a planet with a biosphere through design and the shift towards regenerative cultures returning to our original pattern for the last 20 years. So I'm sitting in South Devon in England. it's the bulgy bit, which is next to Cornwall.

And I've been living here for, I guess, about 14 years now and came across the whole narrative of bioregions and the kind of concept of bioregions, I suppose back in about 2008, I was sent a paper by Donella Meadows, which you might talk about later on, which kind of lays out this concept for a bioregional learning center, and that's been inspiring us here ever since.

Samantha Power, welcome. Thank you, Nate. really happy to be here with you and these amazing friends. I am a regenerative economist, a bioregionalist, and a futurist. A few months ago, about six months ago, I launched a nonprofit called the BIOP Project that I am one of the co-founders and one of the stewards of that is working to build a new layer in the global financial architecture of financial institutions. that are in service to the bioregional movement that we call bioregional financing facilities. And that's what my colleagues and I are up to these days.

Excellent. So I've asked you all here to talk about bioregionalism or bioregioning. And the only time that I've discussed this in our 150-odd episodes was when Daniel Valle was briefly mentioned in his first appearance here. I've heard this term a lot, but I'm not really clear on it. So I thought we would do kind of an introduction to bioregioning. What is it? Why is it important? Why is it relevant to the listeners?

And why is it relevant to our future? So who can kick me off on what is bioregiening and maybe what is the history of the movement and the practice? So bioregioning is something that. humans and early pre-humans homonyms have done really since the beginning of time. And it means living in a place, understanding that you're part of the natural systems of the place, and in a sense working with those natural systems. So we might get onto this later as well. But for instance, Neanderthal people knew where their food came from, where their herbs were, where their water was, where their stones were, and what kind of trees were growing what. So they were

kind of they were thinking in systems basically, and they were thinking as part of the natural world. And while the bioregional movement went through what I would call a slightly romantic phase back in the 1960s and 1970s on the northwest Pacific coast, I would say that this latest iteration of bioregions and bioregiening, which is the verb, like how do you do it, really is kind of getting to grips with existing power structures. with politics, with economics, with climate change, with all the kind of challenges and ills that we're facing. And some people see it as a response to the polycritus because it embraces everything, because it covers ecologies and economies and human health and the health of our biosphere as well.

Well, I have a historical, speculative question based on what you just said. So I don't know how much you know about my work about the fact that humanity is outsourcing. our wisdom to the broader financial system and we've become this globally interconnected economic superorganism that just blindly eats energy and ecosystems. But let's just speculate that that didn't exist. And there wasn't this global economic system. Would a pro-social, benevolent, alien philosopher visiting Earth find humans naturally organized by bioregions without all the fossil input and all the things that we've done.

Is that like the natural default state of how we would self-organize? Yes. Well, you only have to look. Obviously, I know more about the United Kingdom than anywhere else in the world because I'm a native of here. But if you only have to look at all the native accents that existed 100 years ago in in Scotland and Wales and Ireland and England to understand that our living was a very very regional, and yes, it was bioregional, because what we produced in each place, the kind of

food we ate, the kind of trading we did, was entirely located within our bioregion. So we haven't actually really described what a bioregion is, but it's a coherent geographical entity, it's a landscape, it's not politically defined. It has a coherent geology and landform type and fauna and flora and rainfall and human history in the terms of economic history and social history and political history. So there's a coherent story that runs through all these different layers. And when we are thinking about the kind of islands of coherence or lighthouses that we need in order to kind of move our species forward at this present moment, by regions give us that kind of cultural grounding, if you like,

what was historically true and what we need for the future. I alluded to this earlier when I mentioned something that my mentor, David Orr said 20 years ago that to fit, how to fit a species arrogant enough to call itself homo sapiens onto a planet with a biosphere is a design challenge. And he said we needed a form of ecological design to refit this homo-economicus that you just described that is briefly running a pattern that seems almost cancerous to the living system

back into the biosphere and that is by remembering that our core pattern as a species has been to be bioregially regenerative for the long journey of evolution and that the pattern of falling out of that has only been somewhere between five and ten thousand years. And so I would go as far as saying bioregioning is our species

evolutionary survival pattern. None of us would be here if we hadn't been regenerative expressions of place or to scientifically speaking a keystone species that has worked to create the ecosystems, co-create the ecosystems within each dwelt, meaning that there are places around the world and there's evidence coming up hard and fast that whether in North America, South America and Europe and Africa, the forests that we call pristine rainforests are not forests that have not been touched by humans. They have been gardened by humans to be as abundant as they are now. The wonderful research of Dr. Lila June, architects of abundance, details that for North America in quite a lot of detail.

So basically, your conjecture is absolutely right. Bioregioning is essential to refitting humanity back into a planet with a biosphere, into the regenerative patterns that sustain life on this planet. I could do the thought experiment in the other direction, too, that well after the carbon pulse, hundreds of years from now, thousands of years from now, those humans living, our descendants, however many there will be, will almost by definition be living bioregially. Yes, absolutely.

Trick question, Daniel. If and when we colonize Mars, would people there be living bioregially? I can respond to that. Please, Samantha. That sounds good with you, Daniel. So bio-regionalism for me is a way of organizing ourselves, governing ourselves, telling stories about ourselves that is rooted in living systems, patterns, and principles. And because life on Earth did not evolve on Mars, I think it would be very difficult for us to live bioregially there. So it would be missing the living part.

Yes, yes. well, the Earth is a part of our body, right? Like humans are an extension of the Earth. We were born out of the web of life on Earth. And bioregionalism is about coming back into a deeper recognition of that truth and living in harmony, in reciprocity with all of the plants and animals in insects and water and rocks in the places where we live. And that we are tasked with humans on this planet as stewarding.

And if you, you know, take us and put us on Mars, it's not going to work quite the same way, in my opinion. So that's, again, that's one of the juxtapositions of technology and putting things in buckets as opposed to ecology and systems. How important is indigenous cultures and ways of living contribute to the work in bioregioning and bioregionalism? Yeah, I'm happy to take that one. So certainly indigenous wisdom, indigenous ways of seeing and being and governing are some of the best information we have about how to live bioregially, how to live in a way that's rooted in living systems, patterns, and principles. And that is, you know, why you see such a resurgence in interest in these indigenous ways. of relating to the natural world, but also to structuring economies and governance systems in this moment, because we see that they have been holding these intelligences that so much of modernity

has forgotten. Is it fair to say that indigenous cultures extant today have been living a bioregiening way? it's just that their regions have been shrinking from external forces. So bioregiening, which we haven't really talked about yet, but it's a practice of relationality. And indigenous people live in relation to place. You know, it's a two-way exchange between place and people. And in many ways, that's what bioregioning is trying to get back to.

That kind of two-way exchange, but also the sense of belonging to place, having an identity that's rooted in place, that we've lost so much of that. here's a dumb question and since at least Samantha and Daniel are friends of mine I feel entitled to ask dumb questions does one have to understand bioregiening in order to live in a bioregional way or do you just be a human and follow our natural instincts and live a certain way I mean how do you how do you parse all that I've had indigenous colleagues say bioregiening is just a word that the white folks came up with for what we're already doing, how we're already living. And likewise, loggers in this Sierra, there are so many people out there that are bioregiening and they are not yet steeped in the philosophy, nor do they need to be around this return to that way of life because they've never lost it.

I think it's so important to understand that both when we talk about regenerative cultures and when we talk about bioregiening, they're not some kind of new fringe proposition that we now need to maybe consider taking mainstream and supporting. They are life's pattern. They are going on whether we want it or not because that's how life organizes. And every act of caring, sharing, nurturing, protecting, loving, that people have with community and place, that binds them into the living fabric that they emerged from, is bioregiening and is regenerative culture.

So it's much more a fanning of the embers of what is there behind the story that separates us from nature. And that's where the link to indigenous cultures, it actually doesn't really serve to separate humanity between indigenous and non-indigenous. We need to all come back home to place. We need to all come back into that living fabric. And then we will all be indigenous again. We are born into life as life.

We are life. So how do you define a bioregion, both like its definition and in terms of the actual place? Like I live on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota. I've never really thought of what is the bioregion here. So here in South Devon, we've defined ourselves by water. So bi-regions are defined by geology and geography, but it's really a felt sense. This is not a scientific process, I have to say, defining your bi-region. It's very much a felt sense of do you feel at home?

Because people who live in South Devon know instantly when they're crossing into Cornwall or they're moving over Dartmoor into North Devon. You know you're not in your home place any longer. And your home place can be very big. it can be Cascadia, which is huge, or it can be smaller like South Devon, which you can cross in any direction in a car in about two hours. Are there concentric circles of what might be defined home? Because I know the 20-minute bike ride from my house, that has a real intense recognition.

And then there's the three-hour drive is like central upper Midwest has a feel. And I mean, where do you draw the boundary? Is there strong form, semi-strong form, weak? form bioregional boundaries or how do you guys think about that? I found it really helpful in a conversation with Tyson Young Caporta about the natural

bioregional boundaries in Australia between the different tribes. When we talk about boundaries we must first call into place that indigenous way of understanding boundary. He said a boundary is a place of kin making, not kin breaking.

It's about relationship making. It allows you to say this is where we are and there's a beyond but in order to then connect and interweave and be dynamically interlinked with that beyond not that's the border and we're going to build a big wall and not let you in so so it's really important to understand that when we engage with bioregiening there are these two terrains that we're engaging with one as peter Berg says is the biogeophysical terrain, the topography, the river system, the soil series, the fauna and the flora, what makes that ecosystem distinct. But then the other is the

terrain of consciousness. And that's what you were speaking to Nate, that sense of, yes, the 20-minute bike ride, but then there's this other crossing that bridge, going through that tunnel, going over that ridge where you kind of go, okay, I'm out of the Shire to, to to speak in English terms. And if I could just quickly add, we at the BioFi Project like to talk about drawing bioregional boundaries in terms of hard lines, soft lines, and human lines. So, geological lines, ecological lines, and cultural lines, and all of those are important in mapping a bioregion. And certainly life is organized fractally. And bioregions are as well. So some of the bioregions that we work with are working in a very small watershed. But they are,

are seeing themselves nested in a larger watershed. They are seeing themselves nested in salmon nation, a bioregion that spans the Pacific coast and encompasses everywhere where there are salmon along that coast. And so the working fractally and seeing these different layers and designing economics and governance that is informed by those various fractals is an important part of bioregiening, I believe. So back when we were the OG hominid in Tanzania and the plains of, you know, by the Olduvai Gorge, it was just one bioregion.

And then we expanded around the world and how much of bioregiening both the geographic boundaries and the conscious feeling boundaries runs up against. population constraints where no, that's my new bioregion. Like how much of a bioregion is kind of implied by its own carrying capacity? Well, I would say the carrying capacity is not fixed, right? These places evolved as humans moved into them and stewarded them and brought more life there in many cases. And so, you know, at a long, geological time scale, these carrying capacities moved with how well the humans were stewarding

those places. And the regenerative potential of life tells us that we can change the carrying capacity of places today, even in very short periods of time. Yeah. Oh, I just had an insight. What is it? The existence of hydrocarbons moved our bioreas, moved our bioreas, underground in a way. So it messed up the whole calculus of the actual ecological real-time flows. Daniel. Well, we could also say that there was a bifurcation where we could have had the choice as we became more to either do what our ancestors have done, which is how do we make

the carrying capacity of this particular land higher by terracing. by caring, by foresting, by building more complex forms of agriculture so complex that when Cook arrived in Australia, he said the heathens don't practice agriculture nor the system was just so evolved over 40,000 years that this heathen couldn't see it. So it's a, we had this choice of either going into the power with each other and with nature and build more productive ecosystems or go the power over city, state, nation state, annex other countries,

and basically run another path. So we took the wrong path, but it wasn't we, it was some faction of we that then because of that amassed power and metabolism and military and all the things. And if you take that back to the species pattern, in biological ecological, ecological evolutionary terms, five to 10,000 years is about as long as a maladaptive pattern of a species

is tolerated by the evolutionary system. And then the kickback starts. And that's exactly what our maladaptive pattern, which is industrial civilization, Elon Musk's dream, is the whole idea of Mars and going off planet is the perversion of that power over. story. And we're going to turn into the locusts of the known universe and end up burning this planet while we try to find the next one to burn. So it's literally as deep as that, that we're

coming back to our species' survival pattern. So you could say the hinge point for this was between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic. I mean, the kind of change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, definitely put us onto a different track. So it depends on how far you want to go back in time to say we made the wrong decision. But we had been making decisions of which we were not aware of the consequences for many centuries, if not millennia. So it kind of lay blame in any one particular spot is quite hard to do, I think. But in hunter-gatherer times, was there a recognition that, oh, this is not my bioregion, this is someone else's? Well, if you go back to Neanderthal Times, which is what I know most about because I was an archaeologist,

so the site that I excavated in Jersey, which was a site for butchering big game, like Woolly Mammoth, was inhabited, you say inhabited or used, there weren't actually any dwellings there, but it was used over 250,000 years. That's an extraordinary long time. and the people who were using that site went south when the ice came south, and they went back north when the ice came back north, when the ice retreated. So they were working with geosystems.

We talk about geosystems and earth systems. So what we're seeing at the moment is the kind of destabilization of many of our earth systems, like the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, aka the Gulf Stream, or the melting of the ice caps or whatever it might be, those are our Earth systems. And in those very early days, humans were consciously or otherwise, they were de facto living with their Earth systems.

And they were moving with their Earth systems. Of course, we can't do that any longer. It's much harder for us to kind of shift our location and to simply kind of move around our planet. So were they traveling from bioregion to bioregian, to buy a region, yes, because they would have had to know how does the game function in this region? Where is the water in this region? We're going to be traveling, you know, thousands of miles to get back to this particular spot, and we want to know what life is going to be like along the way

and how we're going to adapt to it. So for me, this keeps on coming back to adaptation. How adaptable are we, both for our good and for ill? I'm going to just take a 30-second side tangent because I had forgotten you were an archaeologist. What's the cool? coolest thing you ever found in your field studies? Well, I did find a woolly mammoth task. Wow. That would be cool. That would be cool.

Because it brings you emotionally back to when that thing was alive just for a brief moment. It really does. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. So how can bioregiening, which we've been discussing, be used to address some of the issues that we discuss on this podcast, the ecological, social and economic, challenges that humanity faces.

So what we are pursuing here in South Devon is this experiment in bioregiening. So bioregiening is a term that relates, for me, back to the commons and commoning. So commons is only kept alive by the people who are commoning. In other words, taking care of the commons. And bioregions only come alive because of people that are of. functioning in a bioregional way. Can we even have bioregiening unless we have a commons? Is a commons a necessary precursor? Okay, that's a very good discussion, which I think we should get into in a few minutes time. Okay, sorry, sorry. Lots of good questions here. So what are we doing

in terms of bioregion here? So there are many gateways into a bioregion. You can come at it through green manufacturing or you can come at it through regenerative agriculture, or you can come at it through democratic processes which relate to Eleanor Ostrom's work on governing the Commons. So yes, you could say the Commons come back in here. But it's kind of like, how do we reimagine what it means to be a citizen? Because unless we are all given that possibility of reclaiming our agency and taking responsibility for how we live in our places and share decision making and an awarded resources to be able to do this, I don't think we are going to be able to.

make it through. So in many ways, bioregiening is the antidote to the economic superorganism, which has sucked our agency away, or at least we perceive it as. Daniel, how would you answer the question on how bioregioning can solve some of our metacrisis issues? And then Samantha. Well, it's actually interesting to think of the metapotential of coming home to place rather than lose ourselves in the meta-crisis of yet again trying to find solutions to a problem at global scale. That's what we failed at for 50 years, for 60 years. And we still have international conferences that try to solve problems by making them ever more abstract and then responding to these abstract problem definitions and then rolling it out or scaling it up by bringing it back

into the local. The bioregioning proposition is the exact opposite. It is saying, what if all the facets of what we now call the world problematic or the polycrisis show up in my bioregion, but they show up with a name in a face, they show up with a specific ecosystem, they show up with a specific history and timeline and everything. And suddenly by becoming specific and detailed and nuanced and full of warm data, as Nora would, Nora Weyzen would call it, suddenly they become alive and what is perceived. as a problem is actually potential. That is the living potential of life coming through us and expressing ourselves as bioregional custodians again. And in the context of the

polycrisis where the cart house is already falling, I mean, George Soros recently said the collapse has started and he's got a little bit of a eye on that system that he made so much money of. Biorigioning is also our community resilience building strategy. It is the only way that our species might get through the eye of the needle of the coming decades of cascading collapses that we now can no longer avoid. If we use our time wisely and build the resilience infrastructures at local and bioregional scales that allow us to adapt in our own.

uncertain times. We might just use our time a lot better than starting another Third World War in the chase for resources. And it's literally a species level right of passage that we have to decide on. So I'm not kidding about it. This bioregional thing is not a proposition. It's a pathway through the eye of the needle if we're lucky. And most likely not for all of us. have spent the past 10 years of my life thinking about how to shift this economic superorganism and change where money is flowing so that it supports life and the well-being of people and moves away from this monoculture, extractive, destructive economy that is sucking up the earth and turning it into money. And as you and I talked about last time we were hanging out,

I spent many years trying to do this from the top down and saw the limits of logic and research to change the minds or change the actions of the people that have power in the superorganism. And eventually, I came to bioregionalism and it was a real desire to get closer to what was real and move out of this world. of abstraction that brought me to bioregionalism. And certainly the most urgent work in the world right now, I believe, is the stewardship and regeneration of our lands and waters and a culture that is truly regenerative and is connected to life. And bioregionalism invites us all back into that to being, as Isabel and Daniel have said, good citizens of the places where we live. And particularly in this moment in the country that you and I live in, Nate, there's a real hopelessness around what can be accomplished at the nation state level. And I see this, you know, both as something we should

grieve, absolutely. The recent election in the United States is going to create incredible suffering in our country. But it's also an opportunity to think about how we, create governance structures and economic structures that are aligned with more agency, as Isabel said, and responsibility and sovereignty and well-being and with the flows of life. And before the United States existed, there was a tapestry of Native nations across this country. And I feel like now is a moment where we can recreate nature states and we can rebuild nature. Native nations in a much more place-based, decentralized, ecologically informed way. I just want to add a little beautiful bit of history I only learned last week that in 1879,

John Wesley Powell, who later became the director of the U.S. Geological Survey or whatever it was called, suggested that all of America should be organized by watershed boundaries. And there's even a map of the entire United States organized as watersheds. That was a real missed opportunity. And maybe since you're now stuck with the government that is wanting to change everything fundamentally, coming back to more nuanced, place-rooted administrative boundaries that actually root people back into the biogeophysical reality of the bioregions they live in, the watersheds they live in,

might be an opportunity. Okay, so this gets into some thorny questions and ideas. With a lot of the things that we discuss in this podcast, there's different timelines, There's the triage, the transition period, and then the longer term. I am convinced that the longer term, we're going to, by definition, have to live bioregially, you know, whatever human civilizations exist. But to building on what you said, Samantha, to change the boundaries and have nature states and different boundaries while there is. is a functioning country, the United 50 states of America, is the concept of bioregiening

a threat to a centralized power structure? I think kind of not because it's such a small thing, but if it were to grow and become an actual movement with millions of adherence, what do you think about that? Is there a, is there, can, or let me frame it a different way, Can bioregiening and bioregionalism coexist within national governments as they exist today? Or is there a conflict? I'll give you an answer that is my favorite permaculture principle. It depends. And it depends who you're talking to within those governments and within those systems.

And what their worldview is, Nate, right? And what their objectives are. And there is more and more conversation really just over the, the past six months or so, emerging around bioregionalism within the United Nations, an entity that is driven by historically nation states. And the folks in that organization are seeing the limits of what can be done within the nation state paradigm to achieve these very beautiful, very ambitious goals for large-scale ecological regeneration, verting the worst impacts of the climate crisis, you know, protecting 30% of the Earth's lands and waters that they've laid out.

And just to give an example within the United States, the Biden administration, of course, oversaw this very exciting inflation reduction act, which is supposed to flow massive resources to communities to implement climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. and if communities aren't organized and able to apply for those funds, receive those funds, and govern those funds, then that money isn't doing any good. So even at the multilateral level, the UN level, the World Bank level, the nation-state level, and the subnational level, I've been talking to the California Governor's Office about by regioning in California. There is a recognition that to avert the ecological crisis, And to get us back on track to, you know, restoring our watersheds and living in harmony in our places,

this work will have to be decentralized. So there is some interest in flowing public resources from nation states, from multilateral entities, from subnational governments, to bioregional organizing teams that are doing the very difficult work of bringing together people in their landscapes, in their watersheds to decide what are the most. most important projects we should be investing in here and how do we work together to implement those regenerative activities. Could you briefly follow that up with a couple three brief examples of what such projects might look like? Like what define a couple? Sure. So the BioFi project is working with around 15 different bioregional organizing teams across North America, Central America and South America. And these variant,

scale going back to our conversation earlier about how you map a bioregion and what the boundaries are. But one of those teams, I'll give a local example, is based in West Sonoma County, so not far from where I live in the Bay Area. And they are starting very small with a town that has been kind of neglected for a while. There's a lot of empty buildings in this town. There was a blighted lot and they invested in creating a town square. And in the center of the town square, there is a museum for the future, which is essentially a shipping container where people are going and sharing their ideas for the future of that town and the whole watershed that's surrounding that town. And what ecological and cultural regeneration in that place would look like, what types of

gatherings they'd like to have, what types of indoor common spaces they'd like to have, how would the salmon be brought back to that creek? So that's one example. Another example is our mutual friend, Atosa Saltoni and her colleagues at the Amazon's Sacred Headwaters Alliance have a huge bioregional plan for regenerating this massive area that is the headwaters of the Amazon River, and they've been working with 30 indigenous nations over three decades to develop this large-scale bioregional regeneration strategy.

And that organizing work is incredibly valuable for any entity that cares about the protection of the Amazon. And so we're working with them to figure out what are the capital sources that we can tap into to fund that stewardship and regeneration, including multilateral or bilateral donors that are interested in that. I wanted to chime in and say that by regional practice, I think, has a very important role to play in depoliticizing what we're seeing happening right now. So it depoliticizes climate change. It depoliticizes the injustices of inequity. It depoliticizes all sorts of things because it brings us back to a level of practice and connecting. And this is very much a practice. It's not a theory, which kind of gets underneath all these kind of

dualistic ways of kind of, you know, right or wrong, left or right, whatever, but it kind of takes us into a different space. I think that's incredibly important. And I also see the capacity of bioregions and bioregiening to step in where governments can't function in a joined-up way. So so much, I mean, just to take the UK as an example, so you've got sort of central government at Westminster's responsible for things like, um, defense and you then you have county councils which cover fairly big regions that are responsible for for education and for transport and then you get our regional authorities are responsible for the roads and they're responsible for waste collection and you get our parish councils but they're all

working in silos none of them are thinking in a joined up way and we need to start thinking in a joined up way and having joined up strategies so so in a way bioregiening the verb the activity is post-partisan. Yes. Yes, that's a good way of talking about it. Daniel. With regard to the European situation and is it a challenge to the political superstructure, the European constitution enshrines the political ideal of subsidiarity as the concept

of how we want to be governed in Europe. The reality of Brussels and most nation states within Europe is different. But in theory, national governments and the European government are subsidiary too in support of the local and regional decision-making processes of people in place where they're affected by the decisions that they're making. And so it is actually in many ways an opportunity to implement what has already been professed that we do need to devolve governance. in such a way that people have more say over how the money is spent, participatory budgeting and all those kinds of things are being experimented with. And just to give you a few more examples, like in Holland for the last 12 years,

an organization has set up called Commonland, that primarily focuses on ecosystems restoration, but it does so in a regionally bound way, with a theory you've informed social engagement strategy of building first a multi-stakeholder network in a particular region of landowners and then it starts working with them on transforming over 25 years

landscape scale ecosystems. And they've been working in a number of places for over a decade now. There's a place in southern Spain near Moosia where a million hectares have been pulled together into a regional transformation project, a million hectares that otherwise would have deserted, and where people were fleeing villages.

And so in many cases, bioregiening is a response that enables the public-private partnerships at the local level that solve the problems that government at national level has not been able to solve. So it's not a challenge. It's a support strategy for them, as we turn into failed states. Could you define or alter the definition of bioregiening as just applying permaculture principles

to the scale of watersheds and regional ecosystems? I just spent 10 days in a permaculture course up in West Sonoma County last month, Nate, where I was asking this exact question. And I was particularly looking at permaculture principles and rainwater harvesting principles. and Friedoff KAPRA's living systems principles and how they inform the design of financial institutions and economies that are aligned with bioregionalism and supporting the transition to bioregional regenerative economies. So in that case of designing a bounded financial institution or an economic transition strategy,

yes, I believe they can be applied, but I'll let Daniel answer on the overall bioregionalism. I just would frame it slightly differently because in many ways, permaculture is a Western abstraction of indigenous land management and relating patterns that are ancient and do respond to our species' core pattern of regeneratively bioregiening. So in many ways, it would make sense that if they did a good job in codifying this into a language that we understand, it would also. help us in applying by regioning at a regional scale. But I guess what I, my insight was instead of me and my neighbor, I'm, you know, each doing some permaculture principles that were borrowed from indigenous wisdom, we're all part of a watershed and there's a logic that makes sense for the synergy of 10,000 people in this area doing similar things because of the soil and the wind and the seasons

and the, and the, and all that. One thing I would like to add, Nate, I gave a very positive answer to your question about, you know, these entities need bioregional organizing teams to achieve their goals and objectives and carry out their mandates and avert these risks that are quite existential to their survival. But at the same time, it is explicitly one of our objectives in building these bioregional economies to build power in grassroots and indigenous communities, and that can be very threatening to the existing paradigm. And something that I've been talking to our friends at the Civilization Research Institute about

is how we build a protective membrane around these emerging, very, very nascent bioregional economies that allows them to build something that is rooted in living systems principles within the broader monoculture capitalist economy that wants to squash them. About half of what I know about bioregiening, I've learned in the last 45 minutes. So I'm really just a student of it. But when I think of bioregionalism, in my mind, I think of watersheds and ecology and systems. But what I'm hearing from you all, especially you, Samantha, is bioregiening is really a merger of ecology and watersheds with some sort of a governance,

a decentralized governance apparatus. It's not just ecology. There's got to be some governance thing embedded in there, yes? There has to be power. Well, I mean, just again, as we're doing a bioregiening 101, it serves to bring in people like Peter Kropotkin and Patrick Geddes. There have been other 100 years ago, 120, 30 years ago, propositions in Western culture in Russia and also in Scotland that we need to organize at the regional

scale. And so there's always been a social and a political and an economic dimension to this movement. It's not entirely a sort of only ecological movement. It's where all of that comes together at a sense. scale that actually makes sense for human settlements. Except if people are, I mean, apologies to the listeners in southwest Arizona, if people understand and agree that bioregioning is the future, it implies that some places like Cascadia are wonderful destinations and they've got a lot of, you know, watersheds and rain

and others like Phoenix, Arizona are way out of line with their carrying capacity. So the discussion in Washington State and Arizona would be quite different with current population levels, yes? There is a worldview dimension to all of this. And that's also coming back to your question about indigenity. The one thing that we had all in common at that bifurcation point of carrying capacity and too many people is, if you believe that you are part of life and that life is kin and that what you do to the tree of life you ultimately do to yourself, that puts you into checks and balances when it comes to invading on your neighbor's bioregion.

You begin to understand that you cannot become the locust of the known universe. And that's what, of course we had conflicts in the past too. in human history is full of them. But within a worldview of kin-centricity, of understanding that life is kin, and that we cannot saw on the branch that we're sitting on, the competition within the human species is regulated by the overall living system having to be maintained.

And that's where I think we lost a lot of the north when we called cultures primitive that we're actually giving us the core survival patterns of how to live in right relationship with a living planet and with each other. So this kind of brings us to the question of how do you actually do this? How do we get back into right relationship with the land? How do we imagine bioregional governance? What would a bioregional economy look like, et cetera, et cetera? there's no doubt in my mind that, and this may be contentious or may not be, that climate change and then imperative for climate adaptation gives us this opportunity to start to think into what

it would look like to organise ourselves bi-regionally, because there's no doubt also that organising, human organising, functions very well at the scale of a bi-region. And interestingly, when we ran a series of seven bi-regional conversations back in the spring and summer, the guests that we invited to come and join the conversation from South America immediately identified that their political organizing was happening at the scale of the bi-region. And that's how they related to their bi-region. So how do we actually kind of do this thing? So what we are experimenting here with here in South Devon is working with our regional council.

We're not setting up anything that's going to kind of take over from it in any particular way. but we are saying we need an entity that sits outside the council that is not aligned with party politics, but it's able to make decisions and is resource to make decisions about the kind of projects and things in the bi-region that need investing in. And we do this in a way which is strategic. So we look at how an investment here in a community energy generation projects is related to the water quality over here, which is related to farming, which relates to farming, which relates. to other things like transport or livelihood. So we're looking all the time at the whole picture.

I actually think that is a wonderful idea because we know that the politics of our current metacrisis-fueled, you know, national and global governments make these things difficult for others in power to integrate the concepts we're talking about. But if there was like a shadow council in each watershed, that didn't have political authority, but they had, they would convene and do scenario planning and look at the decisions and investments needed in that bioregion and then report to the actual official council once a quarter or something like that. I mean, what's preventing something

like that happening everywhere right now? Yeah, absolutely. And that course relates to exactly what Samantha's doing, because you need to have that financed. And it needs to have finance coming from multiple directions so that it maintains its independence, but it shouldn't be reliant on government funding or philanthropic funding or just community funding. It needs to have a kind of a whole menu, if you like, of different kinds of funding coming into it. So is bioregiening a philanthropic government funded out of necessity, or can it be its own, can it be a for-profit pursuit? I think it could be for-profit, but Samantha, this is your department.

I see Daniel raising his hand, though. Daniel, do what to go for it? I mean, to some extent, how do you define profit? Is it regenerative for the future, or is it profit for the economic system, I guess, is a sub-question? If we, again, have the audacity of saying neither regenerative cultures nor by a regional regeneration nor regenerative economics is anything new. And that in every place and in every bioregion, there are mothers and sons and daughters and fathers caring for children and for elderly in ways that are not part of the current economic

system. That is the living, caring, bioregially active regenerative economy that is already in place. And in re-regionalizing our patterns of production and consumption, creating economic opportunities at the regional scale, at that watershed scale, to meet the basic human needs within the region from regeneratively grown resources in the region, we make the economic activity of the local economy and regional economy a driver of ecosystems restoration, of healing our ecosystem. ecosystems and our watersheds. And that's really the massive opportunity here, is that in a time of increasingly volatile global economic systems and supply line disruptions, we are building a scale-linked and place-rooted economy again. Isn't another word for bioregiening reality?

I mean, it just seems like this is just another shift in our perception. Like the listeners and watchers of this program, they could, after this episode is over, walk outside and declare that they themselves are bioregionalists and just shift the perception that they live their lives, start to do things more locally in the direction of the things the three of you have been discussing. Absolutely. And in a recent piece, I published a kind of call to action after the election. I said, exactly this. There's no need to wait for further colloquial. lapse. There's no need to wait for someone to come and give you permission. Bioregionalism and bioregiening is available to all of us right now. And you don't have to move, you know,

for those Americans that are like, we need to get out of this country. You don't need to move to Costa Rica or New Zealand to do this. You can do it in the place where you live. It's about a different way of seeing and being in that place in reclaiming our agency, but also responsive. to be good citizens. So many of us think all we have to do to be good citizens is like vote every other year and maybe volunteer a couple times a year. It takes a lot of work to be a steward of your place and to be invested in regenerating culture there that is aligned with supporting life. And so there's a responsibility component here that I think it's important to emphasize. So what would it mean for each of you to define that you see in the next decade that bioregiening is succeeding, that it's becoming a successful movement? What are some of the guideposts that we might pass en route to this occurring at a much faster and larger scale than we're seeing today? Well, I think we definitely see more regenerative farming, or farming moving towards thinking about how to take care of the soil. and take care of the water.

I think we'd see a lot more acceptance that being a citizen actually means some devolution of power and decision-making from existing government structures down to more grassroots level. Ideally, we'd see some kind of citizen research or knowledge network. So citizens being able to share data and information about the changes that they're seeing or the changes they want to make. we would definitely see more funding coming into the bi-region to be able to make these systemic changes and this real ability to think in a joined-up way to really understand how our ecosystems and our human systems interconnect and also how we kind of deal with this very dynamic situation we're in

with Earth systems on the move. Samantha Daniel, I'd like you each to weigh in on that same question. What sort of guideposts might you hope for if this all succeeds? Sure. And to come back to your earlier question, Nate, about the finance and economics of bioregionalism, I'll answer in that space. Yeah, I think we would see the emergence of these place-based, regenerative, resilient bioregional economies that are more connected to the geology,

ecologies, and cultures of the places that they live, indeed to the caring capacities of those places, and to the regenerative potential of those places. And they will be tapping in to that regenerative potential. And so to answer your question about capital and what is the right type of capital to invest in bioregional economies, it's all of them. It can take in all of them. but we need to expand our lens with which we're looking at risks and returns and take a more holistic view to viewing those two things. And the way I would see this economy kind of manifesting in a felt sense is through healthier food, healthier water, healthier people, healthier animals, and more of a sense of belonging and connection to place.

And a different also theory of value. Right now our theories of value are so instructed by the global capitalist system. And we're often thinking in terms of quantification and dollar terms about our time, about, you know, how much wealth we have, about the options available to us. And through moving into a more bioregional economy, we can start to see value as relational and flowing in relational webs. And that's, you know, between people, between bioregions, between organizations, but also between humans and the more than human life and the places where they live. Would it be a truism in your estimation that those areas in the world that adopt a bioregiening, attitude and practice will be more resilient to the chaos and bumps that we know are coming.

Absolutely. Yeah, I think the current economic system and the dominant nation state governance system is incredibly brittle. And, you know, as Buckminster Fuller says, you don't change things by fighting the existing reality, you build something new that makes the existing model obsolete. I think building bioregional governance entities, building bioregional financing facilities and bioregional economies, these will all be more resilient. And as the old system is brittle and is up against increasing impacts of the meta-crisis over time, it will become less relevant. And these bioregional governing entities and economies will be the places where resources and energy flows. I think as we move into a time of increasing disruption through climate change and environmental disaster,

through supply line problems because of war and geopolitical issues, there will be a natural relocalization of especially the food supply chain. And just that, starting with food, connecting regional consumers to regional producers again and valuing the activity of agriculture when it's done well as agroforestry and other regenerative agriculture techniques to actually heal the local ecosystem. Because that then becomes a more holistic approach to the environmental issues like floods and disasters. You need proper forest management in order to avoid wildfires. So rather than seeing preventing wildfires and agriculture is two different stories. begin to at the bioregional scale develop plans which are about landscape management and landscape

custodianship. And this is already happening. For example, in Catalonia, the voluntary credit market in the offsetting conversation has a new model to it, which is not based on carbon but on hectare. And it includes not just carbon fixation, but includes water retention in the landscape, and all sorts of social flows and economic benefits. And so it's becoming a more holistic credit that companies can invest in an order to support regenerative activity in their bi-region. And I think we're going to see many more of these kind of models

where local businesses and even local governments can invest in maintaining the health and beauty of the region they depend on through these mechanisms. If people are following and agree with the general, direction of this conversation and the importance ultimately and sooner rather than later of more humans bioregiening. What are some things that viewers and all of us should be asking of our governments now towards these ends? Our governments are local, our state, or a regional, or maybe even national governments, although I see kind of a little bit of a conflict of

interest there, but what are some things that smaller scale governments should be doing now? Well, I certainly think they should be thinking about devolution. I think that's an inevitability. I think we will need devolution. How do you define devolution? Well, I'm speaking in the UK, which is the most centralized state in Europe. In Germany, they're more fortunate. They have the lender, and they kind of have much more responsibility and resource at what we would call. county level, but we think that in order to be more resilient, we need to be able to give more decision-making power, kind of bring it down a level, as it were, bringing down at least to the county level or the land level. And we also would like to see more resource coming down as well,

as, you know, political devolution needs to come with some kind of budget attached to it. And just the kind of conversations we're having at the moment. We're having conversations with people who work in planning. We would like to see planning become bi-regional because at the moment there's so much development going on, which is taking absolutely no account at all of the capacity of our rivers to support more people, whether to give them more drinking water or to take in more sewage and just kind of dispose of the sewage down the river. So we need to be able to think more comprehensively, more holistically, more strategically, but to just empower the people who want to change the planning system, the people who want to see governance devolve, the people who are

thinking about citizenship, they need to be shown some kind of leadership and to be say, you know, to hear that it's something that can be to be worked on and taken forward. Yeah, certainly it's easiest, I would say, at the local level, because municipalities and and sewage authorities and town boards of supervisors share so many objectives with those of bioregional organizing teams. And this is already happening in many places I know, particularly across the United States. At the subnational level,

I think there is an increasing interest in planning bioregially. So would echo Isabel. there to work together on landscape scale, watershed scale planning, particularly I know in the Pacific Northwest as dams are coming down. There's a lot of regenerative potential associated with freeing the rivers again. And so together with native nations, with folks organizing bioregially, states can invest in creating a regenerative bioeconomy in those places where the watershed is being restored. At the national level, as a former World Bank Nature Finance specialist, I have to say there needs to be reform of subsidies that are ecologically harmful.

And I published a paper in 2022 that lays out what ministries of finance can do to align subsidies with supporting recovery of the biosphere rather than destroying the biosphere. But there are hundreds of billions of dollars annually from public budgets flowing into ecologically destructive subsidies. And that is one of the most urgent things we can do. It's very difficult to build a regenerative bioeconomy when you have that type of capital flowing into destructive activities. And at the multilateral level. I think there's potential for the United Nations and the multilateral development banks to think about how to invest in global public goods that the health of the entire earth depends on like the Amazon and how we can pool public resources from

countries around the world to invest in those bioregions. I think it would really help to understand that we cannot tackle the climate change issues through the carbon lens. And that the minute we shift from this carbon myopic approach that allows for another casino to be set up to just make money as the Titanic sinks, to a more holistic approach, which is a watershed and hydrological cycle-based approach. if we understand that healing local hydrological cycles and slowing down the water in the landscape is vital to re-greening the planet and bringing back the forests that we cut down over the last 5,000 years. There's half the amount of forests on the planet that there were 5,000 years ago. And the 20th century, many wars were fought over oil, increasingly towards the end over water. most of the wars of the 21st century will be fought over water.

If we don't fundamentally bring ourselves back into right relationship with that element, and that can only happen at the watershed and regional scale, then we just set ourselves up for more war and more strife. So the way to deal with carrying capacity issues is not to invest into some kind of nanobot drone that will just, exterminate entire genetic profiles, as some people are working on, but to actually increase the capacity of watersheds to hold life, all of life, and in that process ourselves. So we need to fundamentally shift policy towards healing our watersheds, healing our soils,

healing our forests, and in doing so, these are not ecological issues. These are sensible strategies to solve social and economic problems. One additional provocation, I'll add, is that if governments decided that they wanted to urgently invest in regenerative land and watershed stewardship projects across their country, they could tell the central bank to buy up a bunch of bioregional bonds that were created by bioregional financing facilities that are funding organized portfolios of projects at the landscape and watershed scale. Instead of buying Carnival Cruise Line bonds as an example.

Exactly. I do feel that there's one thing that I would really love to also ask Samantha about. Because in the last three, four months, working and paying attention to some of the projects in the common land portfolio and all these other initiatives that are working on landscape scale, ecosystems, restoration and bioregional regeneration. I'm a bit concerned that in this blended finance idea that we're talking about, that there's, okay, very often it's initially philanthropic money that gets the initiatives going, that build the network and build the movement, so to speak. But are we not best advice to be extremely careful for one of the potential catastrophic caveats of building bioregional finance institutions,

which is how much do we let the chasing delta attitude come into the bioregion? How much do we promise patient or long-term capital return on financial return on financial investment? Because the minute you still offer that opportunity to pull out a financial return, If you don't properly protect the local biomaterial resources and local healthy ecosystem from that extraction, you've actually, in building the infrastructure for bioregional finance,

created the backdoor for the finance industry to still be extractive to bioregions. So you're saying that there has to be the payoff from current monetary surplus loishing around the world, has to be in a reverse King Midas sort of way, transmuted into ecological regenerative products that are not dollars and they have to be kept locally and regionally. Yeah, it's not financial return on financial investment. It's health return. It's social return. It's ecological return.

It's survival return. You're turning narrow boundary capital into wide boundary returns. Yes. Yeah. I like that. Neat. Maybe you and I can can. go deep on this on another podcast. But Daniel, my quick answer is, this is the work of our time,

right? How do we take this wealth, this financial wealth that has been violently extracted from places around the world and compost it so that it can support the regeneration of life in those places? And, you know, who are the people that play that bridge-building role between the capital and this decentralized web of regenerative projects. And what are the principles that can allow us to do that in a clear way that is in right relationship with those places that we are trying to bring those financial resources to? And I'll just mention a few attributes of bioregional financing facilities

that we've laid out to help us avoid this trap that you're mentioning. One is that they should raise capital from purpose-aligned, funders and investors. I've been a part of or seen too many projects where, you know, the people that have a vision for a fund, it's very beautiful. And then they go to raise for the fund and they say, well, if we want to raise capital, we have to have these returns. We have to have this risk profile. We have to have these structures. And then before you know it, you're perpetuating the old systems and the old power structures that are at the root of the polycrisis. And so, you know, as a bi-regional financing facility, if you start out with this mandate,

and you're engaging in conversations with potential funders and investors from a more equal place where you're not giving them power over you and your community and your financial institution, but you're building a relationship based on trust and reciprocity. And that funder coming into relationship with the place where you live and the people that are stewarding it. and over time trusting that they know how that capital should be invested. And it might not be generating financial returns, at least initially. So we use the Common Land for Returns Framework, which starts with inspiration returns at the top of the waterfall is first and foremost.

You have to inspire people to action. From there, flows ecological returns and then social returns, and then economic and financial returns. So we recommend a holistic view of how risk and return are assessed from the beginning of setting up the investment portfolio, developing the term sheets, building relationships with potential funders and investors. And then another one of the attributes of bioregional financing facilities is that growth and returns are a means, but not an end. So a means to achieving the long-term bioregional regeneration strategy of that place. but you don't start with, you know, this is our target financial return. We've mentioned common land a number of times.

And what's powerful about the common land approach is that because they've now been active in some of the landscapes over 10 years, they can now make the real-time argument to show that investing half a million a year for a landscape into the social process, the bringing people together, the return of inspiration, will then lead to ecological and social returns shortly after, and with a time delay of six to eight years, the diverse financial returns or economic returns for the local economies start to happen. So the new cooperatives are being built,

new employment is being created, new products are going to market, new value is being created out of the bioproductivity of the, landscape. And that is giving us a proof of concept that this type of investment makes a lot of sense. But it's really difficult up until this point. It was so difficult to get any funders to say to throw half a million a year over 10 years to a regional project. And the other thing that he also kind of created a breach for all of us with is that he always spoke of 25 years plus the time scale of landscape scale transformation by regional transformation starts 25 years plus any

type of financing that isn't interested to be involved for that kind of longer journey he said no to he had the guts to say no to funders that wanted to just work for a year or two and in creating that line he's really created a breach for for this movement so i have two questions uh to close this with. I'd like each of you to answer this. For listeners who are convinced that the future is zigging and zagging, but inevitably headed towards a bioregional sort of existence, what are some necessary baby steps that individual humans listening to this show can start immediately and get headed in that direction? Daniel, start with you. Earlier on, when you talked about, is it inevitable? I felt like bringing this up and this is my answer.

It's a poem by Gary Snyder and it's called For the Children. The rising hills, the slopes of statistics lie before us, the steep climb of everything going up, up, as we all go down. In the next century or the one beyond that, they say our valleys, pastures, we can meet there in peace if we make it. To climb these coming crests, one word to you. To you and your children. Stay together. Learn the flowers.

Go light. Thank you for reading a poem by Gary Snyder, who I also wanted to have on this roundtable. Isabel. I'm going to give a very different answer. I was asked this question by somebody who lives in the south of England. How do I get started? What my first steps?

And I said, well, I think that one way to go in is through climate adaptation because that's an imperative. And just find out what your local council is doing. Have they got a strategic plan? And it's almost likely that they don't. But we need to come in from the perspective of saying there are many, many things that we can do in order to join up all the different parts of our bi-region,

all the different initiatives in our bi-region. And if we can kind of go in with an offer to an organization, an entity that has some decision-making power in our bioregion, and start to work through that. I think that's a very good first step. So there is a table at the end of my book, Bioregional Financing Facilities, Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet, that is a call to action for many different types of actors and lays out specific actions that each of them can take.

So I would encourage your listeners to check that out. They can also join if they're interested in bioregional finance and bioregional economics, the biophile community of practice, a community of more than 400 people in growing on a pro-social social media platform called high-low. And on that platform, there's a map function. So you can go and see who in your bioregion is interested in bioregional finance or bioregional economics, and you can connect with them. And we have self-organized calls. have calls organized globally, where folks can connect and come up with plans to build

bioregional financing facilities in the place where they live. And I would say at the highest level, just find the others, start having conversations about bioregionalism in the place where you live. And December 12th is tomorrow, which is a holiday started by some of my friends called inheritance day. And on inheritance day, we embody a world 150 years in the future where humans are living in harmony with the earth. And we celebrate all the steps that we took to get to that place. And we look back at what we needed to do to get there. So your listeners, they might hear this after December 12th, but they can host an inheritance day any day of the year and start to envision what steps they need to take to achieve that sacred reciprocity with all of life.

in their bioregion. I recently had a podcast with Bill Plotkin who talked about ecological adulthood and how few humans actually attain that. And it's almost dovetails with bioregioning that we have to recognize that this is our responsibility. There's no one at the national level going to come and help our bioregion, our watershed. and there is a fiduciary responsibility as a human alive at this time to kind of learn about this spearhead on these efforts. And it starts in your own region, in your own, in your own backyard.

And so I think the first thing is a mindset shift change. So I appreciate all of your time today on this podcast and your steadfast work on this topic. this was bioregiening 101 because I just wanted to get a little bit more exposure for myself and the viewers. If there was a bioregiening 102, a kind of an advanced follow-up conversation, I would like to ask each of you, what is one topic that you are particularly individually passionate about that is under the broad umbrella of bioregioning, that you would be willing to take a deep dive on that topic? Yeah, mine is pretty easy. I'm really focused right now, Nate, on bioregional economics and bioregional finance. And just to echo your last point, our theory of change is that by engaging in the process of stewarding financial resources together and planning for a transition to a bioregional economy, you can catalyze worldview shifts, which further enable the transition to that regenerative economy and you have this teroidal flow. For me, it's bioregional governance and what it means to become a citizen of place and all the implications around that.

So, of course, governance is linked to kind of data and information. And, yeah, governance, you could say, goes everywhere. It goes into the rivers. It goes into soil. It goes into biodiversity. And that would be definitely my choice. So governance is one of the central challenges with the metacrisis and the human predicament. And your advice or your speculation or belief is that to address that, we have to do it using a bioregional lens.

Yes, I would say so, yes. I think topics like food, water, education, community resilience, how all of this is to some extent also about disaster preparedness, about getting ready for what, we pretty much clearly know is now no longer avoidable. And highlighting the wonderful stories that already happen. Like, for example, the Sinture Alimentaire of the city of Lijes, where since the pandemic, they've started a whole kind of plethora of cooperatives and organizations that are all interlinked to connect the city to its green belt and create farmers that don't commit suicide,

city dwellers who have a connection to the landscape and the food, they're eating again, and in all of that, create community in regional awareness and regional celebration. And whether you take the entry point through food, water, energy, or local economics, they're just wonderful stories to tell of bi-regioning being the way forward.

How much of a fringe topic is this. Are there bioregiening convenings all over the world that I'm just unaware of, or they called something different? Or is this growing these conversations? It's a movement, Nate, and it's a movement that at least in North America went underground for a little while, and it is experiencing a massive resurgent right now. And some of us are talking about organizing a North American Boregional Congress in 2026, and it would be the first, one to take place here since 2009. So where I live on the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota, does that bioregion have a name?

It might be the drift list, but let me look into it and get back to you. I'd love to connect to you to the bioregionalist and the place where you live. I'm about 100 miles away from the actual driftless region. But yeah, excellent. So thank you all. This was very illuminating for me. and I expect for our viewers to be continued all of you, and thanks for your important work. Thank you.

Thank you, Nate. Really enjoyed it. Yeah, wonderful. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our

Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.