Earth Regenerators, a term coined by Joe Brewer in The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, are people who work at the actionable scale of their bioregion while also understanding how what they do locally scale-links into larger planetary processes. The ultimate goal of Earth regeneration is a network of activated bioregions collaborating together around the planet. If these numbered in the hundreds or thousands, cumulatively they could reach a critical mass to regenerate the entire Earth.

Understanding bioregions is the difference that makes a difference. The bioregion – as opposed to the human-created boundaries of cities and countries – is what's real. The Earth has its own boundaries, made by mountain ranges and watersheds. Local geology, ecology, and culture define any given bioregion – an understandable scale at which we can be more aware of and live into the interrelatedness of all life around us.

What is a Bioregion?

There are different definitions of the word "bioregion." In fact, one article claims to have uncovered nearly two dozen definitions. If that's the case, we certainly need to clearly explain our meaning whenever we use the term.

The prefix bio comes from the Greek, meaning "life." Environmental writer and bioregional thinker Peter Berg described a bioregion as your "life place" – the place in which you live your life and which gives you life.

A bioregion encompasses all life in a place, which includes humans. Understanding a bioregion can start with the watersheds; a bioregion may include several watersheds (but never divides a watershed). From there, you can layer on landforms, characteristics of soil, flora, fauna, ecology, etc. And, as Brandon Letsinger points out in What is a Bioregion?, "People matter. Ultimately, it is up to the people and inhabitants of a bioregion to determine what stewardship frameworks make sense for that area, what best represents them, and their way of life and living."

If humans can exert such influence over the entire planet as to have an epoch named after them, the Anthropocene, then to exclude them from consideration in a bioregion is to miss a vital piece of the puzzle. The place people live certainly shapes them. At the same time, humans and the cultures they create affect any given place on Earth – currently often for worse, but possibly for better if we can (re)learn how to be stewards of our place, as many Indigenous cultures have done for millennia.

There is no map of bioregions around the world. That's because, like the story of Bioregional Earth itself, they're emerging – each from their own unique place defined by geology, ecology, and culture (including Indigenous history). The people in an area define their bioregion – no one else. And each distinctive bioregion designs locally while learning from others globally.

As people begin (re)discovering their own identities as part of Bioregional Earth, bioregions may emerge in all shapes and sizes, and may shift and evolve over time. For example, the Greater Tkaronto Bioregion (GTB) is 3 million hectares with about 10 million people. Locally, people recognize the "fuzzy boundary" of their "life place" through the groundbreaking bioregional work done by David Crombie in his 1992 Regeneration report, as well as natural features like the Niagara Escarpment and Oak Ridges Moraine, current cultural and planning patterns, and Indigenous hunting and trade routes. On the other hand, Cascadia encompasses around 138 million hectares with about 17.25 million people, also with a history supporting the local understanding of that region. Interestingly, the Great Lakes Basin, a coherent sub-continental scale of which the GTB is a part (touching three of the five Great Lakes), is 24 million hectares with approximately 34 million people.

When the focus is at the scale of the bioregion, then one person's backyard or farm makes more sense in the larger story – and activities/projects coordinated across the bioregion can multiply their effect. How does a plot of land (e.g. community garden, farm, park, forest) relate to the ecology around it (e.g. the river that might run through it) relate to the holistic landscape (defined by geography, ecology, culture, history) which ultimately relates to planetary processes (e.g. meandering and kinking jet stream, patterns of heat and drought)? Understanding the nested system of relationships and patterns supports deeper learning, wiser action, and can give everything more meaningful long-term effect.

Interconnected Bioregions

Joe Brewer intentionally titled his book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth because he became convinced that a Bioregional Earth, in which humans steward their place and work together to regenerate the entire planet, is THE only legitimate way forward. From the book:

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We need to learn how to see the functional relationships in our social niches as they relate to the material flows of nutrients and energy across the landscapes in which we live.

Regeneration is the dynamic processes inherent to all living systems that enable them to reproduce the condition of being alive from moment to moment. Any design pathway for Earth regeneration will need to match this description – effectively meaning that the design pathway must be an expression of autopoiesis, embodied as biomimicry for human economic, political, and social activities… It might help to think about this in terms of a nested hierarchy of scales that are all functionally interdependent with each other, centered on the bioregion.

All over the world, there are permaculture projects. There are also efforts to conserve landscapes, community groups transitioning away from fossil fuels, ecovillages and cohousing projects exploring different ways to structure human relationships with surrounding ecosystems, and Indigenous groups embodying their respective cultural heritages. These regenerative projects number in the tens of thousands – with elders dispersed among them who have devoted their lives to regeneration for decades and have much to share about taking what has been learned before and passing it along to younger generations.

What is generally lacking in these efforts is the capacity for regenerative interventions to achieve coherence at whole-system scales. It becomes clear that most of what has been achieved so far is too small, too fragmented, and too compartmentalized to become truly regenerative. The bioregion itself must be the scale of organization…

There is no such thing as water issues unrelated to biodiversity or prioritizing climate change over election reform. We must instead organize our efforts around functional landscapes at the bioregional scale… A crucial insight is that all sustainable human cultures in the past were organized as bioregions. A bioregion is the intersection of key ecological functions of landscapes (like a watershed) with a shared cultural identity of people who all know how to live in their particular environment.

We need to believe it is possible to regenerate the entire planet. And that will take a vision both ambitious and grand enough to feel adequate in scale while also being concrete and grounded enough that it feels like it could actually work. What if… people begin weaving a tapestry of regional-scale efforts to embody regenerative principles and restore vital functions to their lands? They organize themselves as regenerative bioregions of whole 'life systems' for humans to harmonize with their landscapes. These bioregions 're-localize' their economies and began an active process of monitoring ecological change for their landscapes, sharing their learnings with other bioregions around the planet… It becomes possible to see how micro-scale coherence can emerge for families and communities. This becomes interwoven with bioregional-scale coherence. And bioregions can self-organize around planetary restoration goals to achieve Earth system coherence.

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The long history of humanity has been one of deep harmony with all other life on Earth. We can find our way back to that harmony through bioregions. That's the story of Bioregional Earth.

Find out more by reading Grounding.