Activating a Bioregion
THE PROBLEM: Although a few small, determined groups around this North American Turtle Island are already succeeding at regenerating watersheds and rivers, there are many other groups that look at the challenges of their particular river and wonder how to proceed. The succeeding and struggling groups don't know the others all exist, because they are spread around the country. They figure they are all alone in their crazy work.
WHO'S ALREADY ON IT: Joe Brewer, the Earth systems/cognitive scientist I introduced here, has been on a trip around the Cascadia bioregion – that is, the Pacific Northwest region of Canada and the US - since the beginning of October. It's not a "speaking tour," he insists. It's an "activation tour" to catalyze local citizens who know damn well we have to Do Things, but just aren't sure how to get everything to sync up.
I was at Joe's talk on Whidbey Island, WA on October 17. Attendance was standing room only, in a spacious event hall. The turnout, and the talk, and the audience sharing afterwards, was phenomenally encouraging; this is a pathway for small, local actions to become coordinated and spread around an enormous landscape, with a shared intent to invigorate soil, water, and creature ecosystems to remain habitable as the Earth changes.
Joe gave the same intro talk in cities, towns, and villages around Cascadia over a month. At the end of the month, the sponsoring organization, Regenerate Cascadia, held an online summit to draw together the audiences from the tour. Joe gave this keynote talk: his overview of what he and his partner saw and noticed in their travels and meetings; the opportunities for collaborations to begin between organizations; the necessity for groups to learn from each other; the sobering assessment by a local indigenous elder that we have roughly five years before the work being done now to preserve and restore ecosystems and food-growing knowledge will be all that is left to keep humanity alive. (We seriously need to give up Empire and reframe our definitions of living, yo.)
The online summit lasted a week, and you can watch all the video presentations here. My favorites were the one on Bioregional Mapping, with Brandon Letsinger (who is also a co-founder of Regenerate Cascadia), and a surprisingly upbeat presentation on how to prepare and stay resilient in the projected Cascadia Earthquake that's overdue for our region.
Me, I feel called to cheerlead for small radio stations - community, campus, tribal stations, and individual short-wave enthusiasts - around the Cascadia bioregion to start talking up the bioregional regeneration projects and why they are important. Such small stations are locally-focused, and already crucial for providing emergency information in times of floods, wildfires, blizzards, etc. Why not share environmental programs via streaming and newsletters, to introduce organizations and activists to one another? Sounds pretty SANE to me!
#Cascadia #bioregions #watersheds #permaculture #regeneration #resilience #mapping #communityradio