I want to personally welcome you to Bioregional Earth.

This website is our gathering place for an emerging story. Humanity is making preparations to decide if we have a future as part of a thirteen billion year history. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Life has existed continuously within its planetary dynamics for most of this time – an inspiring 3.8 billion years.

Humans, on the other hand, are but one tiny string in the vast web of life. Our hominid ancestors go back a few million years. Homo Sapiens as a species a few hundred thousand years. And right now, it is our capacity for runaway cultural evolution that has driven the planet far away from a safe operating range for our species and many others that are going extinct right now.

The Anishinaabe people have a prophecy about the lighting of the Seventh and Eighth Fires that outlines the broad features of the moment we are living in. In simple terms, the Seventh Fire is a time of awakening to the planetary crisis that brings with it a sense of profound foreboding for our collective future. It is thought to have begun about fifty years ago. The Eighth Fire is a moment of choice where humanity either selects the path of fire that leads to our extinction or the green path of life that restores harmony in our relationship with the Earth.

Bioregional Earth is not an organization. It is not a corporate structure from the machine world of modernity. Instead, it is a story of great spiritual significance. The story of Bioregional Earth is humanity choosing the green path that brings us into harmony with the places where we live – the "bioregions" that both define a physical geography of tectonic plates, ecology, hydrology and a cultural geography of belonging and identity.

Bioregions are the self-organizing patterns of living systems. Humans have existed in bioregional patterns throughout the vast majority of our time as part of the Earth. For something like 98% of all human history, we were organized as indigenous cultures within ancestral lands. Territories of culture and ecology. The story of Bioregional Earth is our choosing to live in this way again while adding the very important dimensions of planetary consciousness.

How Was This Story Born?

‍Every story is a mere slice of reality. It cannot hold the full immensity of complex weavings. Nor should it do so – for stories are an imaginative capacity that we humans have for creating worlds in our minds. The story of how Bioregional Earth was born that I tell now is a mere slice of reality as well. Much more was involved. Yet for us to imagine it, we need a focus and simplicity that excites our imaginations so that we can dream it into being.

I tell this story as a personal journey. Millions of others are living into Bioregional Earth right now even though most don't use this name for it. The way I will focus is so that you can understand what this website is and why it is coming into existence in September of 2024.

First a bit of historical context… the bioregional movement took hold in several parts of the world in the 1970s. It was connected with the environmental awareness that emerged after the famous Blue Marble photograph was taken of the Earth from space. It was connected with the "back to the land" movement of people leaving cities. To the discovery of permaculture principles and better ethical ways to manage land. To the critiques of nation states and globalization. And more.

The first bioregional congress was being organized around the time I was born and in the same place. Between 1977 and 1980, the idea for a congress slowly took form in the Ozarks at the southern border of Missouri and the northern border of Arkansas. I was born in 1976 in southwest Missouri. This was paralleled with other congresses for Appalachia, Cascadia, the Northeast, Mesoamerica, and other locations. The bioregional congresses continued from 1980 to around 2010.

It is important for us to know that the ideas of "green cities" and urban sustainability emerged from this bioregional movement. So did the analysis of supply chains to increase recycling and reduce pollution. The removal of dams and healing of regional fisheries was greatly supported by bioregional patterns. The holistic approach to thinking geospatially also gave rise to Earth Systems Science and the various studies of climate change, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, and more – all of which are observed locally and patched together to create a global point-of-view.

My entrance into this discourse was to grow up with back-to-the-land parents in Missouri. Their friends all had big gardens. There were lots of artists, musicians, and craftspeople. They were quintessentially Ozarks more than they were "Americans" or people from Missouri. To this day, my family and friends back home are Ozark through and through.

But I didn't know about bioregionalism until I turned 40 years old. Imagine the surprise when I discovered that the first bioregional congress on Earth took place about 20 miles from where I was born. I came to see the world as bioregions by studying Earth Systems and cultural evolution to make sense of our planetary predicament. I began promoting regenerative design as a way to restore ecological and social health to landscapes. And I found my way by receiving a copy of an obscure essay written by Donella Meadows in 1983 about the importance of bioregional learning centers for getting to planetary sustainability.

I read that essay in 2019. Less than a year later, I wrote my own book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth that gathers ideas from many people to show that the only way to regenerate the entire planet is to organize ourselves into bioregions. Rather than publish the book (it was published later), I set up a free study group to read its chapters. The study group was called Earth Regenerators and gathered thousands of people together for about three years.

We began living into the design pathway outlined in my book. My own laboratory for practicing was the territory surrounding the small mountain village of Barichara, Colombia where I had relocated with my family in 2019. We launched the Barichara Regeneration Fund, wove together many local initiatives, created a territorial foundation to manage this process, and shared all that we were doing with the world through writings, social media posts, webinars, and online learning journeys.

In November of 2022, my partner Penny Heiple and I began two years of intensive travel doing bioregional activations all over North America, with one of the first being in the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion in Canada. We recognized that people need to LIVE INTO THE STORY of their own bioregion if they are to know how to regenerate it. We did this in the Great Lakes, across the Colorado Basin, in Cascadia, and in the Great Plains.

Along the way, I realized that a lot of people I knew didn't really have a way to conceptualize what it would mean to succeed at regenerating the Earth. In a moment of epiphany I realized that our planet would be regenerated when humans fully learned how to reorganize ourselves as a planetary network of bioregions. In other words, when we became a Bioregional Earth!

This gave language to what we were doing. We launched the Design School for Regenerating Earth in March of 2023 to start weaving this planetary network into being. In partnership with the Legacy Project we co-hosted a gathering called the 7 Generation Bioregional Earth Summit in February of 2024. Bioregional Earth was declared born during this six day process that brought 7,000 people into the conversation.

And now the website comes into being. A place to gather stories about Bioregional Earth as it emerges through human labor and love. A place to share how the process is being organized, how funding and governance are flowing into landscapes, and how people all across the planet see themselves as bioregional stewards.

Welcome to Bioregional Earth! This is one of many small fires that will help light that Eighth Fire and make it possible for humanity to choose a flourishing future. There is no time to waste.

Onward, fellow humans.