The basics of bioregioning: Three videos for your watch list

Building regenerative communities

Bioregioning. I’ve been seeing that word around more. Signifying the active process of making a bioregional life. The art of living in place, in tune with natural realities. Bioregionalism has that “ism” to it, which calls to an ideology. That’s okay. We need to start thinking in bioregional terms to come back into balance with the planet on which we depend. But bioregioning - an integrated set of acts that moves us there -really gets at what it is.

Three recent videos provide a basic education on bioregioning and the bioregional concept. One which dropped just the other day is an interview by Nate Hagens with three bioregioning practitioners on his podcast, The Great Simplification. The name comes from the proposition that complex human civilization is overshooting its ecological boundaries, particularly through its dependence on fossil energy, and will inevitably have to downshift and simplify to survive. In the show Hagens says he is just learning about bioregioning, which I found a little surprising since he is in many ways on the ecological cutting edge. His three guests provide him with a basic education on the concept. They are:

• Daniel Christian Wahl, author of Designing Regenerative Cultures. Described as the Whole Earth Catalog of the 21st century, “The book asks how can we collaborate in the creation of diverse regenerative cultures adapted to the unique biocultural conditions of place? How can we create conditions conducive to life?”

• Samantha Power, regenerative economist, futurist and bioregionalist, co-founder and director of the BioFi Project, a collective of experts supporting bioregions to create financing facilities that fund transition to regenerative economies. Her new book, Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet, explores the concept.

• Isabel Carlisle, a communicator, educator and large-scale project organizer with the U.K.-based Bioregional Learning Center, “Building collaborations to shift South Devon towards long-term climate resilience. We work in and at the intersection of economy, ecology, learning, arts and culture and the gaps in between.”

Here it is, 1 hour, 28 minutes well spent.

The next two, h/t to Brandon Letsinger of Cascadia Bioregional Movement, are shorter. The first is from Nerdy About Nature, which seeks to engage people in their natural surroundings. It is a 4 minutes, 50 seconds brief on the basics of the bioregional idea from another inhabitant of Cascadia, set in a coastal temperate rainforest typical of the bioregion.

The second is a 20-minute video from Claudio Ayuso’s Origin Story. The U.K.-based channel seeks to look at today’s problems and “imagine the future in which humans are part of the solution.” Here she takes on the question of artificially drawn borders with no relation to natural realities and looks at the bioregional idea of nature-based boundaries, with Cascadia as an example. Brandon is one of her interviewees.

These videos underscore a trend that heartens me as a bioregionalist with roots in the movement dating to the 1980s and ‘90s. A new generation is coming to the bioregional idea, seeking a way to grapple with the global crises with which our older generations have left them, by building a new way of living rooted in the places we live. Enjoy the watch!