Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The sociological relevance of a C.L.T. is in developing a community orientation for living a life aligned with autonomous Degrowth and the promotion of New Local Post-Capitalism.
Many of us are already nurturing the potential of a regenerative future and regenerative cultural impulses are connecting people and communities to their places and bioregions.
I want to talk to all of you today about the humans that survived the current planetary predicament. How did they organize their lives? What was the key to their success?
Wellbeing Farm will explore an array of innovative heritage and leading-edge technologies by which individuals, communities, and the Hudson Valley Bioregion can thrive in decades ahead – designing and realizing pragmatic, environmentally and economically sound tools for peacefully, equitably, and intelligently transitioning away from fossil fuels.
We need to organize our societies (and all of their material flows) around bioregions. Only then might we learn how to function as regenerative economies that restore ecosystems and heal the Earth. This is what my colleagues and I are supporting at the Regenerative Communities Network. We are mobilizing a growing number of existing efforts to create bioregional economies into a peer-to-peer learning network that shares tools and knowledge to speed up all our efforts.
This book is not about pre-cooked solutions. It’s about building on what has already been done, in our various social and cultural histories, and on what’s being done, right now, in diverse contexts around the world.
Bioregions are geographic areas defined by the intersection of ecosystem boundaries — typically things like watersheds, mountain ranges, and so forth — with human systems that have a coherent cultural identity
Sparked into action by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring John Todd and his wife Nancy Jack-Todd, together with their friend Bill McLarney, founded the New Alchemy Institute (N.A.I.) in 1969 “to restore the land, protect the seas, and inform the Earth’s stewards.”
A bioregion is the integrated system of all human activities within a given area with all of the larger ecosystems on which they depend. It has a shared cultural identity expressed through love of place, shared values and worldview, and commonly understood modes of exchange.
The notion of the city as a living system generates cultural energy, too: A narrative based on caring – for each other, and for our places – creates the meaning and shared purpose we’ve been so badly lacking.
Everywhere on Earth there are problems with the buildup of pollution, runoff of topsoils, bleaching of coral reefs, and thinning out of forests. What I propose in this article is that we use the well-known fact that universities have been located in cities as a “platform solution” for creating bioregional-scale learning ecosystems.
A bioregion, in this sense, is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’, in Robert Thayer’s words, that is definable by natural rather than political or economic boundaries. Its geographic, climatic, hydrological, and ecological qualities – its metabolism – can be the basis for meaning and identity because they are unique.
