Resilience.org republished Dave Rollo’s article “Bioregional regeneration: Lessons from Whatcom County and Cascadia” today, and we’re excited to share it. Dave is a policy specialist at the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) and serves on the city council in Bloomington, Indiana. The piece first ran on the CASSE website on October 1, and we wrote about it then in an earlier post.
Dave opens with a plain observation: counties are lines people drew, and ecosystems and economies don’t stop at them. A government plan for Whatcom County in Washington calls for 30 percent more residents by mid-century, and the glacial melt its water supply depends on is disappearing, so a county that wants to be self-sufficient has to look past its own borders.
What he describes in Whatcom is a group of neighbors who sit around a map of their water catchment and mark what they want to protect, what needs repair and where people are already doing well, then invite more people to add to it each time. Regenerate Whatcom, a Landscape Group of Regenerate Cascadia, calls it bioregional mapping, and the group keeps widening its circle as it goes (a public utility district board member took part in a recent session, and local officials keep getting invited).
The article also puts the work in a longer line. Dave says bioregionalism was inspired originally by Indigenous stewardship of this region, and that Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann of Planet Drum developed it further in the 1970s. Cascadia held its first bioregional congress at Evergreen State College in 1986. If the word bioregion is still new to you, our Bioregionalism page is a good place to start.
It ends with David MacLeod’s view that policy change has to be preceded by a parallel path: people building ways of living that regenerate the land, and a community to walk it with. We think that’s right. Thanks to Dave Rollo, CASSE and Resilience.org, and to David MacLeod, Brian Kerkvliet and the rest of the Regenerate Whatcom team. We keep coverage of the movement on our In the News page.
Photo: the North Fork Nooksack River, by PinchyCC, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
