This is a transcript of the video I posted…
I can sense that we need to organize around the movement of financial flows into bioregional organizing all over the world to live into the Story of a Bioregional Earth where humanity learns how to find the path acting in service to life.
In the last year, we have been doing a lot of work to help catalyze and strengthen the ability for people to have shared language and shared context around bioregional learning centers, around the creation of knowledge commons, of educational ecosystems, and of bioregional funding ecosystems so that it becomes possible for living landscapes to dream through the human beings who act in service to the sacred, to what is special and reverent about each place so that we can begin walking the path home.
What I want to invite is a way of dreaming and a way of organizing so that we can take action together. I want to name a couple of key moments that we can leverage that we can organize around as a point of focus for us to do this sacred work together on a planetary scale.
As many of you know in the Design School for Regenerating Earth, my partner Penny and I have spent two years engaging in "bioregional activations" where we would go to landscapes, invited by local people, to help them imagine what their bioregion is. To help them to imagine their life place, to organize around functional landscapes. These functional landscapes are watersheds, ecosystems, mountain ranges, coastal estuaries, wetlands – the organizing patterns of life organized through the movement of water through living systems.
One of the ways that I see us doing this now is to bring a shared vision to the different networks that are place-based around the world. I'm only going to name a few here. I'm sure that I'm missing some. But I think you'll see the power of this vision.
Think about groups like the Global Ecovillage Network that has been organizing around place-based reintegration into life all over the world. Or the Transition Network where people are organizing around peak oil and around transitioning their economies into local living economies. Or there is Ecosystem Restoration Camps which has evolved into Ecosystem Restoration Communities. Or the EcoRestoration Alliance that is helping to organize ecosystem restoration.
The Global Earth Repair Convergence and Festival that is coming in May, 2025 in Port Townsend, WA is a gathering call for people to come together around this vision. What I want to invite is that we organize ourselves around a shared strategy and that we each work with autonomy and independence around this strategy so that we can enliven and engage local grassroots action for the Regeneration of the Earth.
I want you to imagine all of the people who have financial resources around the world that want to contribute to addressing the climate crisis, who want to address biodiversity loss, who want to address the pollutants and the contamination of our air and our water and our bodies.
What do we do to bring healing? It's quite simple actually: we gather around bioregional organizing teams – who are the people working and collaborating with local people who are already acting in service to life in their local places – to help them create shared visions and shared agendas for working together and collaborating at these larger landscape and bioregional scales.
We do this while holding an understanding of the dynamic Earth, and how the Earth connects us to each other primarily through the movement of water. The water that evaporates off the ocean flies over the continents and lands on our mountains, bringing a snowpack that feeds our rivers. Or, in the tropics like where I live in the Northern Andes, to the páramos, unique forests and wetlands in the high elevations, that bring life down into the soil and flow it into life across the planet.
Imagine if in all of our local places we begin to organize around these living patterns so that those who want to mobilize financial resources to support us can come through an entry portal which is the bioregional organizing team. Gathering the knowledge together for whole systems understandings of their place so that these financial flows can move as funding ecosystems in service to life.
With this invitation, I invite you on this Solstice, during this time of inward reflection for those in the north and those who are living into the vibrant expression of life in the southern part of the Earth, to dream with me. I already see several groups organizing in this way and they're looking for their North Star. They're looking for their way of organizing together, and the way of organizing together is to help us organize locally around this planetary vision.
As we do this, we can start to weave efforts as shared stories. Our shared stories of becoming bioregional. Of becoming life expressed in place through the movement of water into the living ecosystems of the Earth.
I invite this because I already see it happening. I see it happening in the BioFi Project helping to invite people to organize themselves bioregionally so that they are structured and ready to receive the flows of nutrients of the financial resources that will enable them to enliven this vision. I see this through groups like Open Civics and the Design Science Studio of Buckminster Fuller Institute where they want to invite people into a process of creating shared knowledge, templates, protocols, and processes for learning. And I see it in what we're going to be doing in the Design School starting in March with a six-month learning journey called "How to Organize Your Bioregion."
What I want to invite is I want you to dream with me about how in the year 2025 we stop worrying about what's broken and start creating something new. Most of us want to live in service to life. We want our children to be healthy. We want a future for humanity. And if humanity is to be part of the Earth, it will be because we have organized ourselves to move toward the vision of a Bioregional Earth.
If this is a vision that calls to you, if it's something you're already working on, join us in the story of organizing your local place to prepare for the financial flows that need to come and support local people to grow agroforestry and agroecology systems; to practice permaculture and to do organic gardening; to bring regenerative education to children; to transform our local economies; to change what tourism means so that we don't go to a place to escape the broken economy but we go to a place to seek living regenerative economies.
This is something we're doing in Barichara, Colombia, in the Northern Andes of South America. And it's something we're doing collaborating with other bioregions, like those who are organizing the North Sea and the Atlantic along the western coast of Europe. Or those who see that the Mediterranean brings three massive land areas together – Europe, Asia and Africa – so that we can all start to see the planetary patterns of our connections.
That's what I invite you into today.
If this is something you'd like to help manifest and make happen, join us in the Design School for Regenerating Earth for our learning journey on "How to Organize Your Bioregion" that begins in March, 2025. Or join with any of these other groups.
I can name more too, like 1000 Landscapes for 1 Billion People organized by EcoAgriculture Partners or Commonland Foundation and the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective organizing in Europe, Africa, and increasingly moving toward collaborating in South America. You can feel the pattern. And I know that we have many friends in Oceana, many friends in island cultures, many friends in Australia and New Zealand, who are thinking and already organizing themselves.
Now what we need is shared vision, the vision of an Earth Regeneration Fund that is the collaboration of bioregions to create their own funding ecosystems. Sharing stories, sharing knowledge, sharing experiences, and sharing a good meal – to comfort and support each other through these difficult times.
This is what I invite. Will you join us?
