S8 Ep. 2 - Technologies Grown from Dirt - Bioregionalism and Permaculture Practice

Transcript

Welcome to the Green Pill podcast. This season of Greenpill is all about Ethereum localism. Your hosts are Alex, Max, and Josh of the Ethereal Forest, which is a placebased DAO, which brings localism to the blockchain and the blockchain to localists. Ethereal forests are the creator of a conference which explores how to do that. Gel, the general forum for Ethereum localism, which gives its name to the meme Ethereum localism. They're also the organizers of the local Dow summer and the producers of the Ethereum localism book. They're exploring the big themes of Ethereum localism, how localist coordination works from neighborhoods to bio regions, why it matters, which frameworks localists are using, and how blockchains can horizontally scale their

impact. This season, you'll hear about strategies for bringing local change makers and global developers into deeper collaboration. Why that matters for the future of a free and open internet and how it impacts the shape and function of future network states. We're talking about whether or not blockchain create recreates the extractive and asymmetric systems we know and what must be true to usher in a revolution of global sovereignty and decentralization. To navigate this novel space and complexity of the intersection between technology and localism, you'll hear a different style of podcasts. Your host will be weaving into conversation interviews with experts and practitioners while supplying context into its relation with Ethereum localism by making localism accessible to technologists and

technology accessible to localists. This season serves as a primer you can share with your family and friends to help explain the revolutionary potential you see in blockchain technology and the ways it can impact daily lives in local communities. The next voices you will hear are your hosts, Alex, Max, and Josh. Enjoy this season. This is the second episode in a series covering the general forum on Ethereum localism, where we explore the ins and outs of localism, how it's practiced, why it matters, and the role that technology can play in creating a more local and grounded future. We're your hosts. I'm Alex. I'm Max. And I'm Josh.

We'll also discuss why we believe the future of a free and open internet depends on a localist first approach. The network state must be built bottom up if we don't want web 3 to end up like the walled gardens of the internet as we know it. We'll talk with software developers, mechanism designers, and systems engineers who are crafting the tools to build new economies and means of community organizing. We'll also learn from seasoned localists about what works in creating positive impact for their communities, the limitations they face, and the opportunities for building decentralized networks of people who put impact over profit. Last episode, we explored localism, cosmolocism, and Ethereum localism. How decentralized tools can support place-based governance. We discussed the

intersection of localism and decentralized technologies. How Web3 tools can amplify the work of local organizers by offering transparent, participatory, and collectively owned alternatives to centralized systems. Whether you're a community organizer or a blockchain builder, you have the chance to align your work with grounded, regenerative values. Thinking locally opens us up to scale sustainably without compromising local agency. This week we're zooming in even further into the landscapes, watersheds, and cultural geographies that shape how we live. We're talking about bio-reionalism, a model of place-based organizing that roots governance in the ecological, cultural, and political realities of specific regions. On today's episode,

you'll hear Brandon Letinger and Claire Atwell of Regenerate Cascadia speaking to their experiences organizing in the bio region of the northwest of the US and Canada. We'll also see parallels to the experience of Antonio Paglano working with blockchain mechanisms in the volcanic region of Sicily. Bio-regional place-based methods can create sustainable systemic change rather than disruptive hyperrowth tech adoption that is wrought with unintended consequences and often results in negative outcomes for the most vulnerable communities. Bio-regionalism by contrast is all about change that grows from the distinct characteristics of the particular region. So what exactly is bio-regionalism? What if our political and economic boundaries followed natural ecosystems rather than

arbitrary borders? What if governance happened at the scale where life and culture actually occur? We'll explore these questions. Bio regionalism's origins, how it's practiced, why it matters, and how it intersects with Ethereum localism. Let's dive in. If you've spent much time in Portland, Oregon, which is where myself and my co-hosts are local, you've almost certainly seen the Cascadia Bio-reional flag around town. It's ariccolor flag with dark blue, white, and dark green horizontal bars and a silhouette of a Douglas fur tree, given it the name the Doug flag. The flag's designer is a Portland local who has this to say about it. The flag conveys something far more tangible than an abstract concept of

demarcation of space. Flag captures that love of living communities in our bio region. Unlike many flags, this is not a flag of blood, nor of the glory of a nation, but a love of the bio region, our ecological family, and its natural boundaries, the place in which we live and love. The flag is an icon of shared identity rooted in the context of this place. It calls for decentralized community-based governance and the use of local knowledge to address ecological and social challenges. At its root, it is a way to restructure society to work within each given region rather than transforming each to human needs.

Bio-regionalism emerged as a response to industrial capitalism's disregard for place. It was influenced by indigenous knowledge and systems thinking, looking at whole ecosystems instead of arbitrary state borders. As Judith Plant says, bio regionalism means learning to become native to place. Fitting ourselves to a particular place, not fitting a place to our predetermined tastes. It is living within the limits and the gifts provided by a place. Creating a way of life that can be passed on to future generations. Regenerate Cascadia is a nonprofit focusing on creating a regenerative culture in Cascadia so that future generations can enjoy a higher quality of living in harmony with their

ecosystems. It is a social movement and capacity building organization developing a vision and framework to administer a regeneration fund for Cascadia. We caught up with Brandon Leinger and Claire Atwell to discuss how they founded this movement. Their work has directly contributed to our thinking on Ethereum localism and helped contextualize the work of other bio-regionalists outside of Cascadia. I'll let Alex take it from here. Can you tell us more about the origin of this term Cascadia? How do you define the region that we're in and what informs those boundaries? Yeah, I would just say that the idea of Cascadia has been growing in this region for more than four decades. And so it really grew out of the 1980s. There was a series of

Cascadia bio-regional congresses that really explored and challenged this question of what is a bio region and then what is our bio region in place. Today Cascadia is defined basically from southeast Alaska from Mount St. Elias in the north which would be the traditional territories of the Haiden Tingot people and then all the way south along the coast along the Cascadius abduction zone to Cape Menesino and the Cape Menescino fracture zone and then all the way in the east for the Canadian Rockies down through and along um to the Yellowstone Caldera. And so Cascadia is basically our region, our bio region as defined through our geology and then it's really created by looking at all of these different layers starting with the whole

the oldest stories and then working your way up through the the ecological the ecosystems and then all the way up through the human cultures that call this place home. And so really it's a way of examining this place through and looking at how does these like hard jagged edges really help shape and define the wind, the rain, the soil, uh the ecosystem and then acknowledging that we need to have a whole system lens if we're talking about any of these issues affecting our area or where we live. And so you know if we're talking about flooding or drought or wildfires, earthquakes food energy salmon all of these are by regional issues. So nature acts on the scale of landscapes and watersheds and eco regions and bio regions. And so if we're talking about

true regeneration, those conversations are also going to need to be in this in the shape and context of of a bio region. From what I understand about bio regions, these different layers that you're referencing, we're talking about ecological factors. So geological, hydraological, biological, but we're also talking about about us, about the human factor, the anthropological. So bio regions share some piece of common political, economic or cultural boundaries with one another. So if bio regionalism is both the natural and the social phenomenon of an area, how can we be coherent about these diverse schools of thought? These are usually viewed as distinct disciplines in academia, completely different ways of thinking or

seeing the world. So how does understanding your sense of place create coherence between these concepts? when you start to look at the land as a whole system that um that actually all works together and but we actually have to understand how it works together as a whole system. And the problem is is that we've come in with our ideas into a landscape and just decided that you know we'll just draw boundaries here. We'll put a road in here because it works for human infrastructure and we've only considered it from the anthropological perspective. Not realizing like just how much incoherence that actually brings.

And when you basically build over that and over that and then intergenerationally people don't even realize that that is the incoherence that they're sitting on top of. So when you cover over a stream that's part of a watershed and you start to cover the watershed, no wonder you're going to get flooding. No wonder you're going to get all of the unintended consequences that actually comes out of ignorance. And so the idea of a bio region where you're starting to actually understand the story of place and how we live in relationship to place and that we're actually part of that place rather than these globe trotting citizens that can kind of relocate anywhere without having any connection to that wisdom that helps us live well in that place. So that that

whole concept was really powerful. And so when I came across Cascadia knowing that it was part of this thinking, it's really powerful. And the other part of that is that I know that when you have groups of people who come together and can understand that they have a shared context, that's a really powerful constraint and container to start dealing with stuff that's real that can't just be made into something abstract and then disconnected and then actually made incoherent. kind of like GDP, you know, GDP doesn't consider planetary boundaries. It just it's abstract. It's disconnected. So, when we're connected to the place, it's this real place that has actually real feedbacks. We can't just wash away the

feedbacks that are coming. So, it sounds like a lot of what makes this coherent is understanding our own actions in relation to our environment. Us human animals is also part of the ecosystem, right? So if this is our our natural way of being like this is what is almost normal and we have so many examples throughout indigenous culture of a way of self-standing which more closely resembles what you're describing Claire. So if this is actually the normal way of understanding oneself why have we gotten to this place in modern society where we're so departed where this actually sounds so foreign to us h like how did we go off the rails here and and what interrupts that connection to place? Bio regionalism I think is so exciting to me

as it really is growing out of a desire for healing between the best that indigenous knowledge and wisdom can share with the best that western science can also do but also like coming in that place of healing a lot of this earlier trauma. And so I think getting now to work with indigenous communities and communities that are traditionally left out of conversations about what that might look like as we can actually reclaim that has been very very powerful. And I want to say that I think that naming that lineage and when you connect into place is really important. So those early Cascadia bio regional congresses I think you know one of the things that was so powerful about them was those early organizers when they were growing the idea of the Cascadia bio region and bio regionalism were

doing it with indigenous knowledge holders. So here in Cascadia they worked with a cultural uh kind of knowledge holder and language holder named uh V. Hilbert who was like a very well-known indigenous elder who really held a lot of knowledge and and was able to transfer it and then you know especially in that that southern lash seed and then for the northern lash seed they worked with Lee Miracle and Ayanna Miracle who were also two culture and language holders and that was a really important part of how those congresses grew and this whole idea even before that and grew out of this idea of bio-regional mapping which was all emerging at the same time in the '8s working with different first nations in British Columbia who were fighting for their

their sovereignty and land claims and it came down to these court cases where they actually they invited people in like uh there was a geographer Luis Scod but then really working with the Gitscon it was the Gitson the Wetszuetan the Nisa around creating bio regional atlases that basically had oral interviews with elders around hunting and migration patterns and other stuff which they then turned into these atlases that they used as part of these Supreme Court cases. And so that was really important. And then the last thing I might just name is then how that was transferred in towards different First Nations working around community art and mapping um or sorry and then how that transferred into around the identity of creating things like the Salish Sea that didn't exist right like

the Puget like it's existed for millennia but then the United States and Canada had carved it up as two separate bodies and they use different language systems and they use different reporting metrics and databases. So by creating the sish sea, we're actually creating these bio regional tools and frameworks which then can break down that um and and really actually truly decolonize our our space. And then you also really saw that with the third North American bio regional congress in 1988 um which was invited and held on on Squamish territory and hosted in their long houses that even invited um and included Haida elders. And so I think that there was just a really there's a true strength in helping recognize a lineage and that becomes very important in also making sure that these don't become

abstracted or co-opted as the ideas go into a broader more global and planetary space. The wisdom that Brandon and Clare talk about here is learned through generations of repeated interaction with the environment. History is full of stories of collapsed civilizations that either failed to respond to changing environments or changed the environment themselves through unsustainable practices. For example, there was a moment when the indigenous people of Easter Island, also known as Rapanoui, cut down the final trees on their island, leading to their ecological and cultural collapse. And they were probably not thinking about beating quarterly profit expectations in order to maximize shareholder value. You can see that while living within the context

of your environment might seem like the obvious thing to do, it is also something that can be forgotten or deprioritized. Sustainable resource maintenance is a filter which separates the extent from the extinct civilizations. As modern western civilization is operating outside of the constraints of its resource environment, it is wise to remember that we're not so different from the Easter Islanders. The good news is that many indigenous communities have maintained practices that work within the constraints of their environment. So as we relearn to practice right relation to place, we can be thankful for those who have kept the lineage of these practices alive and give credit where credit is due. Some of

those places where right relation to place have stayed alive, according to one bio-reionalist, include parts of mainland China and the Mediterranean. Antonio Paglaniano, also known as region Avocado, currently lives in Sicily, but was deeply informed about experiences throughout China and the US in coming to bio regional work and to blockchain as a tool for building at that scale. Once again, Alex has the story. So, in your own words, what exactly is bio regionalism and what in the world does it have to do with with crypto and with blockchains? How do you find yourself at the intersection of these two things? If we think of, for example, Chinese food, what comes to mind when you think of

Chinese food? And of course, like if it's Chinese food that's been imported around the world, adapted to local tastes, there's a whole interesting story of of how Chinese cuisine has has evolved around the planet. But if you go to China and you ask what is Chinese food, they have a very structured, detailed answer. And there's actually eight different regional cuisines in China. And so Chinese food has evolved and adapted over time to basically reflect the biohysical realities on the ground and that translates into cultural traditions that are passed down through generations. So there's eight regional cuisines in China and they're all very distinct. And so this to me is what bio-regionalism is is that the place is

defining the culture. And so in the context of bio regional finance is we are trying to relocate our culture and to do that we need to redesign our finance methods which if we're talking about our global society how much we are influenced by monetary markets. So bio regional finance is helping to bring a culture of place back to prominence and back to like center stage. Awesome. Yeah I love that background. So then that brings us to the question of what does it have to do with crypto if anything and what sort of advancements can be made in bio regionalism if we're using blockchain technology you know I think this is a bridge the bio regionalism is

a bridge to how we get to planetary regeneration so it's not the destination um the destination is everybody has like all their needs met we want to have the ability to showcase the things that we care about and so I think a lot of it is just shifting the signaling It doesn't necessarily have to be monetary which I mean a lot of times you know we do need finance financial capital to do the capital expenditures. So if we need to buy land or invest in machines or do a lot of these things that do require upfront financial capital in the short term while setting up this longer term cultural operating expense, right? And I think that's probably the most important thing is to focus on that cultural um

investment. And so bio regionalism um gives us a framework and a container to take all of those things that make a place important to the people living there as well as like the need to regenerate the living ecosystems. I think that's probably the most important thing is that the culture is connected to the practice of relationship to place. Everything else on top of that should work towards flowing resources to that purpose. So you live in Sicily now and you obviously continue to work with a informed consciousness of the place that you find yourself. How did you develop that practice and and how does place informed the work that you're

doing? So I studied environmental economics in college and I was very fortunate to be able to study abroad in China in 2008. I moved there after the financial crash which was a a blessing in disguise because there was no illusion that the future that was being sold was the future that I wanted to participate in. I was able to kind of deprogram myself to see what is the world really about and so you go to China and you can see their development model uh compare that to the US and realize that neither one I actually want. And so we have to create a third way you know now that we have bio-regionalism as a meme. We didn't have that you know 15 years ago. So now we have refi, we have bio regionalism, we have crypto, like we have all of these tools that we didn't have when the

last financial crash happened in the US. And so I am of the opinion that the next financial crash will actually be the biggest driver of innovation in the crypto space because it's going to bring back all of those issues that caused Bitcoin to be released in the first place. And hopefully because of the climate crisis, it's basically a forcing function that if it's a hurricane or rising sea levels or like the trash apocalypse, whatever it is, the the issues that we're dealing with here in Sicily are are fires and droughts. And so these two main ecological crises are forcing society to come back to communalism um in a way that we have to work together to fight the fires, we have to work together to reforest the

mountains, we have to come together to clean up the beaches. And so this is a massive shift. And what's exciting is because Sicily is at the forefront of climate change as well as decaying institutions. I mean, this is on the edge of of the EU. This is like the poorest region of Italy. And so there are not the support systems in place. So people have to rely on each other more to actually find the solutions. You may have heard Antonio mention the word practice as I had previously done. I deliberately use the word practice to show that bio-regionalism is not simply an abstract concept but consists of a myriad of concrete actions. I'm now going to bring in my co-host Josh to discuss how bio-regionalism is

practiced. Bio-regionalism it's a library of practices about living in right relationship with the land, waters and communities both human and non-human of a particular place. It's not just about sustainability. It's about regeneration, reciprocity and resilience. that's rooted in the specific conditions of a bio region. Practicing bio regionalism begins with developing a deeper understanding of where you live. This includes recognizing ecological boundaries, learning about the cycles and natural rhythms of your area, becoming familiar with the native species of your region, and identifying the water systems that sustain your environment. So, let's talk about some ways in which bio regionalism is practiced. We'll cover watershed stewardship, land management, and food production, and finally, cultural

considerations. We'll examine the governance and economic components of these issues. Then we'll explore a practice which underpins and enables each of these bio-regional mapping. Starting with watershed stewardship. Bio regional organizing often begins with the wershed, the circulatory system of any region. A watershed is more than just a river or a stream. It's the entire area that drains into it. Forests, fields, urban areas, and everything in between. It's a natural unit of organization that transcends state lines and municipal borders, making it an ideal scale for collaboration. The water's constantly flowing through us in a variety of ways and that connects us with the larger water cycle and here in a terrestrial setting that is uh predominantly streams

and rivers. That was Will Zaul. I'll let him introduce himself. I am calling in today from Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, which is in the Connecticut River Valley. I'm just a few miles from the Connecticut River, which is the the largest watershed in New England, uh, and spans from the Canadian border down to Long Island Sound. I had helped start Regen Network back in 2017 and these days I serve as the president of the board of Regen Foundation, the nonprofit arm of Regen Network. You'll hear more from Will in the following episodes. So Josh, tell me more about Watershed

stewardship and how it relates to governance. Wershed stewardship includes everything from community-led restoration projects and river cleanups to native species replanting and water quality monitoring. In many places, watershed councils or river alliances bring together residents, farmers and ranchers industrialists indigenous nations, scientists, and local governments to co-manage these shared lifelines. These efforts aren't just about ecology. They're about governance. Stewardship invites everyone into a role of responsibility from upstream to downstream. It's where local knowledge and scientific insight meet to co-create regenerative water systems that serve both people and the planet. In a bio-regional framework, governance starts from the ground up. It follows

the principle of subsidiarity that decisions should be made at the most local level possible by the people most directly affected and where the values and risks of those decisions occur. Here's how Clare defines this concept. The idea is that we need to stop flowing funding into the landscapes, but we need to have an anchor point in the landscape of people that are trusted that the community has kind of recognized it cannot be us. So the whole idea is there's a really important concept that we work with. It's called subsidiarity which translates to the lowest level that decisions can be made at is where they should be made and if they can't be made at that level then they can move up a level and if they can move down again they should move down to that level.

Yeah. So that it's held there and then yeah really wanting to build sovereignty within communities rather than relying on distant bureaucracies. Bio-regional governance encourages things like community assemblies, citizen juries, elders councils, and collaborative stewardship models. It's not governance as control. It's governance as caretaking and empowerment. This means engaging people in the messy but meaningful work of deliberation, trust building, and shared responsibility. And as we've been discussing, bio regionalism recognizes that ecological boundaries don't always align with the political ones. So it calls for new forms of coordination that are participatory, adaptive, and rooted in place. Blockchain is a particularly good tool for designing and implementing methods of governance because it

introduces transparency, security, decentralization, and automation. I'll briefly go into how each of those contribute to blockchain as a governance tool. First, blockchain transactions are recorded on a permanent public ledger, meaning all votes can be audited by anyone and tampered with by no one, making corruption far more difficult. All voting records are then permanent and can't be changed or deleted. Second, because the security of blockchain data can be decentralized, there is no reliance on a single authority or middleman for this transparency or security. Third, smart contracts allow for automation of vote processing, but it also gives us the ability to develop and implement novel forms of votes and voting, allowing communities to decide

what rules of democracy they want for themselves. And finally, voter credentials may be automatically verified and voters may vote from anywhere. Taken together, blockchain provides a near ideal platform for participatory governance that can increase voter confidence and potentially voter participation. Okay, let's shift gears from water and governance to land and economics. Last episode, we discussed some alternative economic tools which may be useful in the local context. To review those, a bio-regional economy might include things like local currencies and non-monetary exchange systems which keep goods and services circulating within a community. Cooperative enterprises which are owned and governed by their workers

and members. Distributed manufacturing networks which are small-scale locallyowned and use appropriate technologies that match the scale and resource base of the region. And mutual aid networks which provide care and resources outside of market or state structures. Land management is another feature that is inextricable from the economic systems that are appropriate to the land and its people. This means building resilient place-based economies that are less dependent on global supply chains and more rooted in local production, circular flows, and community needs. A principal aspect of land management and local economics is a focus on local food systems. Communities can prioritize food sovereignty by reviving region specific crops, supporting small farms, participating in

urban gardening, and practicing regenerative agriculture and permaculture. It's about growing what makes sense for the land and its stewards and not what global markets dictate. Wait, say more about permaculture. Of course, permaculture is more than just a method of organic gardening. It's a whole systems design philosophy for how we live, build, grow, and relate to each other in the planet. The term itself comes from permanent agriculture and permanent culture. It's about creating systems that are regenerative, not extractive, designed to last and not collapse. At the heart of permaculture are three core ethics.

Earth care, people care, and fair share. First, earth care. This means protecting and restoring natural ecosystems. Working with nature rather than against it. Building soil health, conserving water, planting poly cultures, and designing landscapes that increase life rather than degrading it. In permaculture, the land isn't just a resource, it's a living relative. And second, people care. Just like ecosystems, communities thrive when their needs are met with care. Permaculture design includes how we structure our homes, neighborhoods, and social systems to support well-being, cooperation, and interdependence. It's not just about growing food. It's about growing healthy relationships. And last, fair share. Sometimes also phrased as return of surplus. This ethic asks us to

recognize limits and redistribute surplus, whether that's food, energy, time, or wealth, so that all beings have what they need to thrive. It's about equity, reciprocity, and living within our means so that others can as well. Permaculture offers a toolkit of design principles like observing and interacting with natural patterns, capturing and storing energy, valuing diversity and integrating rather than segregating. These principles are applied not just to land but to organizations, economies and even digital systems. So when we talk about bio regionalism, permaculture gives us the how. how to design systems that are rooted in place, that honor natural limits, and that regenerate life from the ground up. And in a cosmological context, permaculture wisdom can travel

through global knowledge commons while the practices stay deeply rooted in local soil rather than extractive models that treat people and places as expendable. Bio regional economies emphasize regeneration, replenishing soil relationships livelihoods and culture. They support work that is appropriate to place. Whether that's forestry, herbal medicine, urban farming, or artisal manufacturing, all while respecting ecological limits. And it's not just about buying and producing locally. It's also about reweaving the fabric of community interdependence, one that's economically viable and ecologically sound. And that brings us to culture. Culture is also a cornerstone of bio regionalism. It's not just enough to restore landscapes. We

also have to restore meaning, memory, and belonging. Bio regional practice uplifts the stories, songs, ceremonies, and languages that are rooted in place, especially those held by indigenous nations and the long-term stewards of the land. These are more than just traditions, though. They're blueprints for living sustainably within an ecosystem. Cultural revitalization often looks like language reclamation projects that reconnect people to ancestral tongues, land-based education that teaches history, ecology, and spirituality as intertwined, community rituals that honor the seasons, waters, and harvests, and arts movements that reflect a region's unique character and challenges. By centering cultural memory and creative expression, bio regionalism helps communities resist the

homogenizing forces of globalization and rediscover what makes a place worth protecting. Okay, that's the land, water, and human elements. But how do we start practicing these things? It begins with a process called bio-regional mapping. It starts by asking what region are we actually a part of? Not in terms of state or municipality, but in terms of ecosystem, the land, the water, the human element. Bio regional mapping is both a literal and symbolic act. It's a fundamental practice for developing place-based awareness and reorienting our relationship with the land. It involves creating maps of community skills and productive capacity, wersheds, energy, and other natural resources, land rematriation efforts, or the social and cultural contours of a

place. But mapping is just the first step. The real work is in reimagining. Reimagining how we organize education, transportation, housing, and economies within the contours of a bio region. And this is a paradigm shift from thinking in terms of ownership and extraction to those of stewardship and interdependence. By reorienting ourselves to the land, not just as a backdrop, but as a teacher and participant, mapping becomes a powerful act of reclaiming place, identity, and possibility. Regenerate Cascadia is an example of an organization doing this kind of work. Preparing to use bio-regional mapping and flow funding to direct capital to local projects. what is the minimum that we need to do to help actually hold and build the capacity at the grassroots with the kind

of frameworks and structure that's needed to actually deeply shift the way that we do things. So one of the containers is the bio regional mapping process which is very much a participatory process where people from the area are invited in that are already part of network like they would already work cooperatively. So they're they're the people that are the easiest to work with. They're the most ready. Um so the bio regional mapping will start to create a shared story of place and it's just the very beginning because all the people that need to be there are not going to be able to be there but it's to start the idea of that through that process the people that are the weavers the ones that kind of are that that are trusted have relationships and can

connect the dots and then also connect between what regenerate Cascadia is beginning to hold. I was able to travel but up by sea plane to uh with Claire um and we went to Salt Spring Island where we met with Brian Penn and it's where Sheila Harrington lives um who helped host this art project that I think has been a deep deep inspiration for us called community uh sorry islands in the sailor sea a community atlas that was a bio regional mapping and art project that they hosted in starting in 1996 uh with a series of of workshops and then in 1999 they launched it and they ended up pulling in uh 17 different islands, 3,000 of the islands, 25,000, you know, uh inhabitants actually took part in

this bio regional mapping and they created these atlases that actually helped create the identity and the shift for the name Salish Sea. You know, the book was published in 2004 and they just came out with a beautiful GIS rendering of it. And so you can actually uh get the book or see the website contains some of these beautiful art maps. Then we had two days of deep conversations with open futures coalition and salmon nation collab where salmon nation is our like sister bio region where it's a different layer whereas cascad is you know really looking at the geology and the watersheds and the human populations salmon nation's looking at the historic and current extent of salmon and so we're different layers of the same bio regional atlas u you know having very similar conversations and what's so exciting about that is we're talking

about how do we model bio regional collaboration in ways so that we're not just building new vertical silos, but we need to be growing deep in place, but we also need to be spreading horizontally so that we're doing it together and and doing this in ways that aren't, you know, recreating the past. One of the major roadblocks I see to the proliferation of bio regionalism is a lack of funding reaching the people actually doing the work on the ground. I'm personally really excited about BIO or bio regional finance. Bio is a framework that organizes the flow of financial capital and other multic capital resources towards the regeneration of ecosystems, culture and communities in bio regions. Bio is still an emerging design space, but we'll touch more on that later in the episode.

Here's Brandon on their efforts. We're really exploring two different programs that we'll be focusing on this year. And the first is that landscape regeneration, you know, the hubs, the teams, the, you know, the people on the ground doing the work. But also it's a recognition that we want to create a bio-regional finance funding ecosystem that can actually really help shift conversations and flow money into those landscapes and that as part of that those two things can't be separated and so we actually need to be empowering our landscapes and our communities to be co-creating and co-developing that with funders and so we've been exploring this in a lot of different ways. The first is is that we were featured is a case study uh with Samantha Powers with her new

book on bio regional financing facilities. We're also part of their new cultivator that's going to be helping us really look at how we're going to be growing a funding ecosystem, how we're growing a BFF, how we're growing funer networks, and how we're looking at kind of alternative different vehicles that can help really grow resources outside of the conversation of just money. And so that could be conversations like bioultural credits. could be really looking at different web 3 technologies and especially in the case of having a hardened border. We're really trying to look for innovative ways that we can flow funding across not just across landscapes but actually in the same systems or across these things that can actually be very large barriers. Then how do we build that in with the kind of reporting requirements so that we're really looking at like you know if we're

using a three horizon model framework how we're not just fitting into this H1 you know the now but actually how we're leading how this is leading to a transitionary and then building the institutions that don't currently exist that we actually need to really overgrow the system. We've been lucky enough to also be identified with a the open futures coalition impact fund and as as one of the regional resilience fellows. We were a part also of the creation of the design school for the bio regional earth regeneration fund which is also which is working with groups like kinship earth to look at flow funding and how we can actually be creating these ecosystems with the idea that we want to pioneer this grassroots concept

not the right word but yeah the grassroots kind of on the ground uh development of what this looks like and then also flowing money into these communities so that it can be regranted out based on the plans that they've identified in need. We've been also working very closely with the Nova Foundation and other foundations who are leading the way in in shifting the conversation around philanthropy to really implement and increase trustbased relational indigenous recatriation really important different concepts and as part of that we've also were a part of a edge finance accelerator which is groups that are working on the edges of finance and also exploring other tools outside of philanthropy um that could be impact investing. It's looking at uh

working with groups like Quala on Vancouver Island that are actually looking at like how people can create these investable portfolios that now we're investing in living futures rather than the extraction of dead trees, right? We're investing in living trees, not dead trees. And all to say that in in the next year, we want to be pairing this with earth repair and other conversations about how we're actually growing a Cascadia bio regional finance funding ecosystem which could include things like civic assets like bonds like taxes. There's different like public private partnerships of tithing. We're talking with the regenerative capital group around you know what does it look like for businesses to become buyer regional or you know workerowned

cooperatives or other things. And so all of this though has to be really held in the lens of community economic development and really empowering our local landscapes to build their own local funding ecosystems so that these can all be flowing and happening at these different nested scales. So let's zoom out a bit. Bio-regionalism can actually be viewed as a transition toward a new political unit. It's not just ecological. It's political in the deepest sense. If you look at the way centralized nation states are struggling to respond to our converging crisis, climate breakdown, social fragmentation, financial procarity, there's a growing vacuum of trust and efficacy.

Bio-regionalism starts to fill that vacuum with something far more grounded, place-based sovereignty. And beyond just efficiency or sustainability, this is about meaning, human connection. It's about people finding purpose and agency through grounded participation in their local ecologies and communities. from my past working as a community artist where I like it informs what I'm doing. From the activation tour, Joe Brewer came with us with Penny Hypel in the design school. They supported that and being able to tell stories really well about how do you regenerate a landscape at a whole at a watershed scale. as that storytelling was happening and and as people started to ask questions there's a vision that can actually hold

something that that is viable that there is there are pathways for doing this there is a kind of sense of recognizing the collective potential of who's in the room as they identify themselves that you can start to see this these things are possible I would bring together diverse groups and create the conditions and I think that's the thing to have open conversations getting to share in a very vulnerable way, but starting to name the things that were maybe getting in the way. So that eventually there's um trust and a sense of being real with each other. And eventually that starts to unlock this sense that actually there's these shared understandings and you no longer feel so

alone. So that that is incredibly powerful and um you know it it happens over a period of time. It doesn't just like when you're going deeper, you it takes a while for that to start to happen. And then as the artist and residents, I would create artwork that help lifted up the things that were important that were arising out of those conversations that kind of became like a collective holding. One of the the examples I think of is this 80s something year old lady coming to me like a few years later and wanting to come and tell me how she had never been heard like that but that she had never been she had so much to offer and most of the way that life happens we don't recognize what people's potential is how

that potential was unlocked and then seeing herself reflected in the artwork there's a sense that we were honoring and holding the potential that was there people start to feel valued and and their potential can be used. It's not that difficult, but we don't do that here. I think we need to learn how to do that. People want to feel useful. They want to be connected. And bio regionalism gives people something to belong to that isn't abstract. It's their watershed, their food system, their neighbors. This is a paradigm shift. We start seeing ourselves not as separate from nature, but as part of a living ecosystem. We stop organizing against life and start working with it.

It's working with life, not against it. It's not trying to force something that shouldn't be. And I think that that comes up in all the different patterns. So, you know, when groups are working well together, you're starting to get a net energy effect rather than draining. When we're working with nature, we just generally feel way more joyful and happier because we're not fighting and we're actually starting to recognize that there are there's healing going on. This is what we've been calling regeneration. Not just ecological repair, but systemic healing from our soils to our social systems, from our economies to our inner lives. I would define regeneration as healing. And I think that there's a lot of different

types of healing that that can look like. And I think we can talk about healing in terms of our financial systems and and flows and really um shifting from extractive back into regenerative frameworks. I think that that's really important, but it can also be in terms of our landscapes. And then especially also our relationships with each other. Bio regional economies help decentralize wealth creation and decision-m they reconnect people to what truly sustains them. Land, water, care, relationships, not just abstract metrics of growth. And as Antonio said so beautifully, bio-reionalism is the bridge to planetary regeneration. It's how we scale care, not control. It's local, yes, but interconnected.

Bio-regionalism doesn't mean isolationism. It means organizing in ways that match the complexity of life itself. Watersheds don't respect borders. Neither do pollinators or fires or cultural memory, but they do follow patterns. And that's what bio regionalism taps into. The Cascadia Department of Bio region puts it like this. By creating a place-based politic, sharing our land, air, and water, regardless of personal belief, we will have shared values and common concerns rather than a distant seat thousands of miles away with no vested interest in our place or people. If this sounds exactly like what we talked about in the last episode with localism, it's because it is. Localism and bio regionalism are part of the same picture. Both challenge

the idea that decision-m should be top down, abstract, and far removed from the consequences. and both emphasize decentralization as a principle and practice which brings us right back to where cosmoloism lives. It's about global knowledge and local action. Bio regions give us the scale where this actually makes sense. You don't need a federal mandate to clean your river, start a seed library, or launch a co-op. You just need community and commitment. And bio regionalism gives us a way to navigate the meta crisis without becoming overwhelmed or cynical. It narrows our scope to something we can feel, touch, and belong to all while still participating in a planetary story. And just as blockchain offers tools for decentralized coordination,

bio regionalism offers a worldview and operating system for where and how that coordination takes place. So whether you're a developer building DAO governance tools or a teacher starting a neighborhood garden, this matters. You are already part of a bio region. The question is what role will you play in stewarding it? So up to this point we've been talking a lot about things like farms, watersheds and land stewardship which all feels very rural. But what does bio regionalism actually look like for cities and urban environments? In fact, cities might be the most important places to bring these ideas to life because they're where so many of our ecological, economic, and social systems actually intersect. Urban bio regionalism involves the development and

maintenance of urban commons infrastructure. It's about shifting how we manage land, housing, energy, water, waste, and bandwidth away from private profit and distant bureaucracies and into the hands of communities who are actually impacted. Bio regionalism helps reframe the city not as a concrete island, but as part of a living ecosystem. And even in a city, you're in a watershed. You're in a bio region. And you're sitting on land with deep cultural memory. And here's a quick rundown on some of the tools bio-regionalist organizers are using in urban spaces. Community land trusts, maker spaces, food hubs, craft guilds, and tool libraries, municipal utility cooperatives, and participatory budgeting and blockchain based public

funding tools. Bio is a design space for reimagining how capital and resources flow. Financial capital, yes, but also social, ecological, cultural, and other forms of capital. It's about channeling those flows towards regeneration. the regeneration of ecosystems, communities, and place-based economies. And it's not just a funding model. It's a philosophy. Bioi draws from systems thinking, indigenous worldviews, permaculture principles, the rights of nature movement, and regenerative economics. It's a transdisciplinary toolkit that helps us ask how can the way we allocate and use capital be in service of life and not extraction enclosure. These urban common tools all exist within this broader bio design space. Bioi can be the meta layer. It's about designing the

architecture that supports the tools to interoperate to reflect shared values and to adapt across different bio regions and cultures. And I'll be honest here, this is all still really early. This is a space full of iteration, experimentation, and creative risk. No one has the answers yet. But that's part of what makes it so alive. People are asking, "What does it mean to make finance place-based, transparent, and regenerative?" And people are prototyping, trying stuff out. Some of it fails, some of it sparks new models, but all of it is contributing to an evolving ecosystem of tools for bio regional transformation. So if you're working on cooperative housing, food sovereignty, mesh networks, or circular economies, you are already a part of this conversation. And if you're a blockchain developer building onchain

tools, consider how they might serve the real world needs of bio regional communities. As we've explored today, bio-regionalism isn't just an ecological idea. It's a social, economic, and political framework for how we live together in place. It's about rooting our efforts, our technologies, and our values in the living systems that sustain us. It's something that we practice. Whether you're a bio-regional organizer working on local food systems, a web 3 builder creating new coordination tools, or someone just trying to reconnect with your community, bio-regionalism invites you to start where you are. to ask what is your techn? How do you practice technology?

For bio-reionalists, this is your coordination layer. Web 3 isn't just hype. It's offering real tools to move capital, track commitments, participate in governance, and build trust across networks of care. When used with intention, these tools can support the kind of deep local organizing that bio-regionalism is all about. And for web 3 builders and regenerative tech developers, this is your design space. Biofi is emerging as a vital framework not just for finance but for resilience at scale. Bio regionalism and BOFI gives us more than just strategies. It gives us hope. It reminds us that another way is possible. Not from the top down, but

from the soil up. It's a path forward through the poly crisis. Rooted, relational, and ready to be walked together. So, let's keep walking. Let's keep building. Let's keep stewarding. And wherever you are, whatever you do, remember you are part of a bio region. Looking forward in the following episodes of this series, we will take a deeper dive into the new governance and economic tools that localists have at their disposal to level an historically inequitable playing field. And we'll discuss strategies to bring these two groups together, the global thinkers and the local doers, so that as network societies develop, we may ensure they do so from the bottom up in a distributed manner so that we can scale the impact

of local action while preserving the future of a free and open internet. So whether you're building the global coordination layer or putting in the work to make your community better, tune in next time to see what the future of Cosmolo coordination has in store. If you want to learn more about Biopi, consider attending the Cascadia Biopi Conference in Seattle, Washington on May 16th through 18th. That's about a month from when this episode first airs. It's organized by Regenerate Cascadia, the guests you heard on today's episode, as well as Ethereal Forest, the organization producing this series, and many other amazing orgs, some of which you heard mentioned by Brandon and Claire. Check out cascadia biofi.org.

We'll include a link in the show notes. If you would like to learn more, check out ethereumlocalism.xyz, which we'll also include a link to in the show notes. If you want to support this work, share this podcast with a friend. It's really one of the best ways to support the movement, which is as much a social movement as it is a technological one. And finally, if you'd like to get in touch, follow us on Twitter at ETF Forest Dow or find our handles in the show notes. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time where we'll dive into open governance frameworks, modular tech stacks, and interoperable infrastructure that communities can use to self-organize from the ground up. We're talking about tools of the local commons.

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