The Bioregional Pulse #1
Weaving together stories of active hope from bioregional changemakers
Welcome to The Bioregional Pulse — a periodical newsletter of the learnings, reflections and stories of active hope from the changemakers at the heart of bioregions 💗
Brought to life by the Bioregional Weaving Labs (BWL) Collective, a growing collective of system-changing people, projects and places that orchestrate geographically grounded, multi-stakeholder partnership processes to enable transformative change towards regeneration at a bioregional scale 🌐
In this newsletter we weave together threads of art and awe, Bioregional Financing Facilities, the Scaling of Systemic Innovations, the Art of Gathering, Narratives of Active Hope, and much more 🌍
"I wanted to teach people to listen to the pulse of nature, to partake of the wholeness of life and not forget, under the pressure of their petty destinies, that we are not gods and have not created ourselves but are children of the earth, part of the cosmos."
—Hermann Hesse
Magic, Awe, and Gratitude
The Power of Film 📽️
We believe that co-creating captivating films can serve as powerful tools to inspire and activate bioregional changemakers. Art and awe have the unique ability to help a system "see and sense itself" by making the invisible visible and the implicit explicit.
That is why with the support of Woka Foundation and in collaboration with Brechtje Smidt from Dutch Picture Industry, we are working with bioregional weaving teams in Ireland, Spain, The Netherlands, Poland, Greece, Romania and Austria to capture inspiring changemaker stories.
These films are co-created with local filmmakers, highlighting the unique challenges faced by different landscapes and cultures, while weaving together practical insights about regenerative practices. Keep an eye out on our LinkedIn.
Discover Oltenia
A prime example of the power of film is "Discover Oltenia", which was recently launched by BWL Oltenia de Sub Munte in Romania. This 17-minute cinematic journey by renowned filmmaker Charlie Ottley, offers viewers a glimpse into the heart of this beautiful region and its geo-cultural heritage.
Multi-Species Sand Art
Meanwhile, in the South-East Ireland bioregion, Sean and Miranda Corcoran of The Art Hand created the 'Multi Species Sward'. The 150m long sand art at the Copper Coast Geopark was a response to working with multi-stakeholder groups feeding into a national initiative considering the future of sustainable dairy farming in Ireland. It celebrates the diversity and beauty of nature in Irish bioregions — and the importance of preserving them.
By making abstract ecological concepts visible and emotionally resonant, the multi-species sward sand art project serves as a powerful tool for helping "systems see and sense themselves".
“No art or film with the title 'Multi Species Sward' would have been made without some special farmers' daily dedication to finding nature-friendly ways of working with the soil and animals they care for.”
–Sarah Prosser, Weaver South East Ireland Bioregion
Honouring the Pains
Funding Weaving Capacity 🧶
While in many bioregions an abundance of regenerative projects and initiatives are surging, the capacity to come, learn and do together is often missing, as Michel Bachman experienced while exploring the possibility of a "Bioregional Weaving Lab" in Switzerland.
“In Switzerland so much is happening already, yet people are so busy that many don't have the capacity to engage with each other beyond their own projects. So most are just doing their own thing.”
–Michel Bachman, Weaver in Switzerland
How might we overcome this time and resource constraint to facilitate the "cross-weaving" of siloed efforts?
The newly emerging field of Bioregional Financing Facilities might hold an essential piece of that answer…
Bioregional Financing Facilities 📖
Besides other innovative bioregional initiatives, the BWL approach and Bioregional Weaving Lab South East Ireland have been an important source of inspiration to the book “Bioregional Financing Facilities” by Samantha Power of The BioFi Project and BWL Backbone team member Leon Seefeld from Dark Matter Labs.
“Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) are a new layer in the global financial architecture that can drive the decentralisation of financial resource governance, design of project portfolios for systemic change, and the transition to a regenerative economy at the bioregional scale.”
Rather than reducing finance to legal and financial architectures to make finance flow, the book holistically weaves together governance, finance, economics, philosophy, technology, culture, and Indigeneity.
Both Dark Matter Labs and The BioFi Project offer resources, capacity building, training, and thought leadership for Bioregional Organizing Teams intending to design, build, and implement their own Bioregional Financing Facilities, inspired by this book and beyond.
Systemic Innovations: Why Reinvent the Wheel? 🛞
When working on the systemic challenge to protect, restore and regenerate the land and seascapes you care about, it can often feel like you need to reinvent the wheel. Yet, it doesn’t have to be that way.
For the last year, we’ve been curating a living collection of Systemic Innovations: a careful selection of scalable innovations that have proven to systemically contribute to inspirational, social, natural and financial returns.
We hope that this collection can serve as a source of inspiration for bioregional changemakers, and enable learning and potential replication across different contexts.
Scaling Learning Journey
An expression of this approach was when a delegation of weavers and changemakers from the South East Ireland bioregion and the Vistula River Valley bioregion in Poland came together in The Netherlands in April 2024.
The intent of the field trip was to learn more and get inspired by two Dutch innovations, founded by weaver and serial social entrepreneur Geert van der Veer: ‘Herenboeren’ as a scalable model for community-owned and nature-inclusive farming, and ‘Plaats De Kleine Aarde’ as a scalable model for a regenerative hub.
Since the visit, the Irish delegation has taken the idea further and is currently undertaking a feasibility study. They now receive support from the BWL Backbone Team to see if the principles of the Herenboeren model might have relevance and replication potential in the South East Ireland bioregion
This type of cross-pollination between regions and innovators is what we hope to fund and facilitate more often 🌺🐝
Seeing with new eyes
The Art of Gathering 🪄
Gathering is an art. With every gathering, we try to cultivate spaces of belonging – spaces that help cultivate deep and meaningful relationships to each other, ourselves and our bioregions.
Bioregional Learning Journey
After the wonderful Commonland summit this year, a handful of funders, friends and weavers from Germany, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Romania and The Netherlands came together for a BWL learning journey at Plaats De Kleine Aarde (Place the Small Earth) in the Southern Sandy Soils region of the Netherlands, guided by Ashoka fellow Geert Van Der Veer.
We learned about the interdependent web of concepts and initiatives that aim to transform the food system into a sustainable and ultimately regenerative one, like Aardpeer, Herenboeren, Caring Farmers and Stichting de Plaatsen.
Bio-cultural Restoration Ceremony
“If you take care of place, place will take care of you”
The following day, weavers Eduardo Cáceres Salgado and Janneke Bruil, took all of us through a wonderful bioregional learning session on their 'bio-cultural' approach in convening people around a shared purpose and sense of responsibility to restore and revitalize the South Veluwe watershed.
Through a beautiful ceremony, which is a key pillar of their bioregional work, they showcased the symbiotic relationship between three vital elements for fostering bio-cultural resilience: 1) Places (where we are), 2) Cultures (who we are), and 3) Economies (what we do).
By re-connecting cultures and economies to place, and taking the principles of agroecology as a starting point, we can take deeper root in the places where we live, and co-create cultures of collective care.
Going Forth
Weaving together a Regenerative Meta-Narrative 🔮
With BWL partners OpEpa, Together Institute and Matters we co-created a comprehensive changemaker activation strategy, weaving together best practice insights from weavers and landscape practitioners, Ashoka’s Climate Changemaker Playbook and the Community Weaving Framework by backbone team member Michel Bachmann from Together Institute.
As part of this exploration, together with Luis Camargo from OpEpa we researched principles and best practices for an effective meta-narrative that can serve as a guiding compass for the growing network of Weaving Teams and BWLs to tell stories that mobilise Changemakers.
Inspired by Joanna Macy’s spiral in the Work that Reconnects, we envision ways to build unique local narrative to express each bioregion’s voice and, at the same time, resonate with a larger regenerative movement.
Considering the expression of each context, culture and natural environment is unique, bioregional narratives express the plurality of regenerative cultures.
We’d love to hear from you 👂
We feel a larger bioregional movement is on the rise.
Are you a bioregional changemaker and do you have stories of active hope to share? Or would you like to write a guest post for this newsletter? ✍️
Feel free to get in touch with Tijn Tjoelker, or leave a comment below 👇
Living breathing Gaia!
I love this post and seeing this collaborative project that is happening. My heart is lighter with hope and gratitude. Thank you💗🌏🙏🌺🐾