“Bioregions connect us with the living systems we depend on”

We all live in a bioregion, just as we all live in places on this Earth with a distinct identity: high desert, river valley, ocean city, tundra village, mining town. We may not name our places bioregions, perhaps because we are not paying attention to the edges where one kind of distinctiveness starts to fade into another. But they shape our sense of belonging to place in the way that vistas shape our vision or hills shape our calf muscles or local rivers that supply our drinking water give us around 64 percent of the fluids in our bodies.

The simple act of looking closely

Early hominins (around 800,000 to 40,000BC) gave us the story of the first bioregional cultures. With bounded mental maps and overlapping patterns of local know-how, our ancestors lived in a world of vast landscapes that they shaped over hundreds of thousands of years. In turn, their intimate knowledge of stone, water, wood, earth, herbs and edible plants, weather and animals shaped their brains and language as well as their bodies. The architecture of the places they inhabited – shaped in ways now largely lost, but likely akin to those of present-day Indigenous cultures – shaped how they perceived the world. 

Around two percent of our genetic make-up is Neanderthal DNA. While we can’t say for certain whether we’ve inherited their ways of perceiving the world, we do know they worked at landscape scale – creating overlapping patterns, shelters and systems. These embodied skills are the ones we now need to remember and return to.

Bioregioning is a practice, not a theory. It begins with noticing where you are – the land, the water, the weather, the people, and the challenges that shape life in your region. It’s about working with what already exists: the systems, organisations, ecologies and communities that define a place.

Evolution at the edge

The crises that humanity currently faces have taken us to an existential edge. Bioregioning responds by focusing not just at the friction points in systems – but at the gaps between, the connective tissue. The actions of linking, bridging and mending can show up as dismantling barriers between sectors so that information and ‘can-do’ starts to flow; working at the interface between the urban and the rural, not ‘either/or’ but both together; connecting local production to local procurement; finding resource for a local flood group; connecting up small producers to regenerate a sector; connecting pathways for biodiversity; connecting children to nature; investing in regenerative farming or fishing; boosting local livelihoods.

Bioregioning: Actions for positive change

Bioregioning creates coherence by re-connecting disparate elements in our inner and outer landscapes and, as edge work, it is a cultural act of repair and regeneration.

This is what you can do: 

• Map for vitality: Map the dreams of your bioregion as a social, cultural and creative activity. Make visible all the green shoots of resilience on the ground and celebrate.
• See the whole: Make the region visible to itself: clear identity and sense of belonging… but a fuzzy edge.
• Collaborate: Design solutions together with many stakeholders, addressing conflicts as an opportunity to take the work to the next level.
• Establish baselines: Democratise knowledge by establishing baselines of health, and ways of measuring, that any community can use.
• Share governance: Valuing natural assets as the building blocks of life: talking about sea, air, soil and water as ‘common pool resources’ that we all need to steward. Create or adapt new governance structures that allow shared decision making.
• Tell how-to stories: Raise the potential of a bioregion to operate at its best: telling a can-do story of resilience and possibility.
• Work at the edges: Dismantle barriers between sectors so that information and ‘can-do’ starts to flow. And work at the interface between the urban and the rural, not ‘either/ or’ but both together.
• Prototype & learn: Create a learning region, confidently working without a masterplan and at different scales, adapting your actions in response to learning what does and does not work.
• Pay attention to systems: Systems are made up of relationships and flows. Ecosystems, human health systems, drinking water systems, food systems.

This article is an edited version of The Bioregional Renaissance featured in Meander Magazine: a newly launched magazine for bioregional culture, slow living, and regenerative futures. You can pre-order their first edition here. 

Author: Isabel Carlisle, co-founder of the Bioregional Learning Centre.