Sponsoring the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress
TIBC11 • Port Townsend, Salish Sea • September 14–20, 2026
Rekindling a Continental Movement for Place-Based Regeneration
After more than a decade, the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress (TIBC) is returning, this time to the Cascadia Bioregion, on the ancestral lands of the S’Klallam and Coast Salish Peoples near Port Townsend, Washington. From September 14–20, 2026, hundreds of organizers, educators, artists, and ecological stewards will gather for TIBC11, a living experiment in bioregional self-governance, culture, and renewal.
This year also marks a milestone: TIBC11 is the first fiscally sponsored project of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion (C-DoB), supporting the Congress with financial infrastructure, communications, and coordination to help grow the movement for a regenerative, place-based future.
What Is the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress?
The Turtle Island Bioregional Congress is a grassroots, intercultural gathering dedicated to restoring balance between people and place. Since the first Congress convened in 1984, these gatherings have united bioregional organizers, Indigenous leaders, ecologists, artists, and community builders from across the continent to explore how we can live in right relationship with the lands and waters that sustain us.
TIBC11 continues this legacy, a convergence of five decades of bioregional organizing, ten earlier congresses, and countless local movements working toward ecological regeneration and community resilience.
Why It Matters
We are living in a time when the need for local resilience, Indigenous leadership, and ecological repair has never been greater. Across Turtle Island, communities are awakening to the truth that bioregions, not borders, define our future.
Bioregionalism invites us to become active citizens of the living Earth, defining our home by watersheds, ecosystems, and cultural interdependence rather than political boundaries. It is a movement rooted in care, cooperation, and the understanding that our health and freedom depend on the health of the places we inhabit.
As early bioregionalist Stephanie Mills wrote:
“Bioregionalism calls for active citizenship in the whole of life... attention to place, to local history and natural history, and to how a community’s hopes, wounds, and dreams can inform enduring ways of life that will heal the planet’s bioregions and their inhabitants.”
The Invitation
TIBC11 invites everyone who feels called to the work of reinhabitation, to live more deeply in relationship with your place, your neighbors, and the more-than-human world.
Together we will explore:
Local self-governance and bioregional councils
Ecological regeneration and permaculture design
Indigenous leadership and cultural revitalization
Community resilience and climate action
Arts, ceremony, and celebration as tools for transformation
This gathering will weave together councils, ceremonies, workshops, storytelling, and skillshares, creating living systems of learning and coordination that continue long after the event ends.
Join the Wave
We stand at a threshold moment. The choices we make in the coming years will shape whether we continue as colonies of extractive economies or rise as self-determining bioregional communities rooted in reciprocity and care. If you have ever felt called to protect your watershed, build local food systems, or co-create a regenerative future, you may already be a bioregionalist. Now is the time to connect.
Turtle Island Bioregional Congress
September 14–20, 2026
Port Townsend, Washington
Salish Sea, Cascadia Bioregion
