Towards useful metrics in Bioregions
Bioregion: the word already takes you to new places
As we evolve our role from an ecoliteracy and outdoor activities centre focused principally on school residentials to serving a wider local community, we’re thinking more about this term ‘bioregion’.
The local Council is thinking about it too. We’re fortunate to have a local Council whose leaders are right alongside us. In fact, we see each other as partners in moving towards a distributive and regenerative local economy, and thriving community. Almost certainly they will be looking for useful measures of progress.
First, how should we make the most of this idea of ‘bioregions’ which is capturing the imagination of communities worldwide from the Grampian Highlands of Scotland to the olive growing regions of the Mediterranean, from the Columbian Andes to the Pacific Northwest? Can it make a material difference to people’s lives, can it move us towards this new economy, and if so how are we and the other organisations and communities of the Forest to work together differently?
In the early 1970’s when inspired organic farmers in California first came up with the notion of the bioregion, they defined it as:
A distinct area with coherent plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole ‘life-place’ with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted or injured.
Peter Berg, Planet Drum Foundation 1973
Then it had more than a touch of conservation about it: wanting to reconnect with and conserve the ways indigenous peoples had been caring and stewarding the landscape over millennia.
Today, for those of us more distant in time from the ancient peoples of our lands, faced with mounting inequalities and ecological degradation, the idea is if anything, more compelling. The word carries the potency to heal the separation of ‘bio’ nature, and human ‘region’; it brings them once again into a complete whole. It reminds us how successfully modernity has rendered the ‘bio’ a mute backdrop to our human drama; it reminds us we are all equal in the face of natural disaster.
In a society fixated with utility, where we speak of ecosystem services, carbon credits, biodiversity net gain, the ‘bioregion’ can connect us again to our deepest emotional needs and affirm nature’s place in the realm of the human spirit. We need the experience of awe in the every-day, not only in the exceptional, as GK Chesterton once wisely said. We yearn to root ourselves, to feel our sense of belonging to where we live, to the land we walk on, however recently we have arrived. And even to find our place in the on-going story of our place.
If the promise is once again to inhabit a vibrant, living, responsive world which has its own ways of speaking if only we could slow down to listen; if re-enchanting the places where we live is a way to reconcile ourselves to the inevitable upheavals of climate change; if supporting each other as well as nature is the path to survive and thrive through these times, then how must we be?
Our role must surely be to ask these kinds of questions.
Of Nouns and Verbs
One way of being we will need to challenge is that which fixes us on a world we can control, on targets that we ‘drive’ towards. Nature has no targets, it has no goal, and as the celebrated Chinese text the Tao Te Ching says: nature never rushes, yet everything gets done. Our language betrays our thinking. We use nouns to describe our world: house, community, car, job. Nouns we can manipulate, improve, change yet they are as dead as butterflies pinned behind glass cabinets, absent their living context. The risk is that the bioregion remains just another noun. While the term describes a ‘life place’, many who advocate for bioregional thinking prefer ‘bioregioning’ – the verb, to remind us that the work is alive, unfolding and unpredictable, without a determinate destination. Like the work with our thistles.
Interestingly, many indigenous languages are more verb than noun-based, highlighting relationships and the interconnectedness of life. It’s claimed that speakers of Mikmáq, a First Nation language of Canada's Atlantic Provinces can speak all day without using a single noun.
Politics, Power & Legal Rights for Nature
Before we dive a little deeper into the ‘being’ question it’s worth reminding ourselves of a huge bear trap bioregional thinking could unwittingly step into. We have heard that the term ‘bioregion’ has been co-opted by sections of the far right in Germany because it speaks to a nativist anti-immigrant ‘blood and soil’ ideology. Perhaps not only in Germany. Ella Hubbard, a geographer at Sheffield University whose essay earlier this year charted the history of bioregional thought reminds us not to be politically naïve, and champions using the verb:
Bioregioning refuses to know the destination in advance, instead focusing on the process, rather than outcome, of change. This turns the bioregion into a political project with the possibility of a radical critique of power.
There is power in saying who belongs, and who does not; there’s power in who allocates resources, who influences the cultural narrative, who owns assets, sets wages.
One critique of power is to follow the juxtaposition of ‘bio’ and ‘region’ to its natural conclusion: that nature should have the same legal rights as us. A campaign is growing for example to grant legal personhood to the River Wye, the much-loved local river. The Wye, together with the lower reaches of Britain’s biggest river, the Severn, forms the boundaries of our Forest of Dean bioregion. Wildlife in the Wye is being suffocated by eutrophication due to run off from agriculture and intensive chicken farming. A lawsuit to sanction these activities earlier this year was unsuccessful. But the legal ground is shifting. In October 2022, the UK’s Law Society publication ‘Law in the Emerging Bio Age‘ made the argument that granting legal personhood to non-human entities is essential to tackle climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. One of the reports co-authors Dr Wendy Schultz said:
We aren’t wise enough to...manage the ripple effects of decisions we make about our relationship with the living environment. Part of the issue is embedding some sort of framework for accountability and responsibility for the consequences of these things we do, and that’s where law comes in.
Who knows what ripple effect there may be on other unequal power relations if we elevate the status of nature? But more of that later.
Living Systems Thinking
Employing regenerative thinking and practice can also elevate us out of political naivety. It reminds us that living systems are nested; simpler systems take direction from higher-level systems and develop ways to add value to those higher ones. There are two radical thoughts within this understanding of life. First, that far from the bioregion being an entity to itself, a zone of exclusionary identity, it is in fact always nested in and contributing to wider landscapes. And second that the only way it can maintain its health is when there is a balanced economy of interests between parts and wider wholes. Think of the human body: no part of a healthy body gains its health at the expense of other parts. As Leen Gorissen and others write in a study on regenerative design for the Belgian Government (in their presidency role for the EU Council):
As long as the body is healthy, the body’s ecology and economy are one, there is no conflict. There are no rich and poor organs. The wealth and vitality of your body, as in any living system, is in the whole, not the parts...Vital for any regeneration process is thus living systems thinking, a discipline for seeing wholes, interdependencies, interrelations, and higher order potential.
Back to ‘Being’
Let’s return to this question of how are we being asked to ‘be’? It’s more nuanced than we think. Regenerative practice offers another useful framework. It focuses on three aspects of human nature: function, being and will. All three need to be in harmony with each other for systems to regenerate.
Function involves all that we do. In day-to-day life our predominant concern is with function—getting things done. But valuing only ‘doing’ and results, will be a restraint to doing or thinking about doing things differently.
Courtesy Regenesis Group
Being has to do with who we are as we function. It’s a quality of energy. Fixing something requires a problem-solving energy: we objectify the world, break it into components, analyse, ideate and scale solutions. Restoring and regenerating wholes requires an entirely different quality of energy. We listen and watch, wait for patterns to emerge, experiment, let go and let come.
Will is the key. The quality of will that shapes our being and doing differently, is a will that is bigger than all of us. Rather than inner wilfulness, the nature of this will is sourced from outside ourselves. It’s the will of life to keep unfolding, changing, evolving. We are simply instruments of this wider whole, motivated by the potential we see that it has to evolve, and by the unique contribution we can each make to grow its capacity and capability to do this.
Implications for our work
Story of Place
How do we find this potential? The wider whole for us, the Forest of Dean bioregion, most definitely sees itself as a whole ‘life place’. Reserved as a hunting ground in the Middle Ages by the Tudor Kings, its great oaks also built their warships. Coal and iron ore were mined even before the Romans came for its mineral wealth. Then during the industrial revolution, a million tonnes of coal a year were pulled from the ground and shipped on barges down the Wye and the Severn. It has long been the engine of the old extractive economy. The story that inspires the Council now is that the Forest could be transformed to become the engine of the new green economy. It’s a neat reversal. But imagine if we could create and sustain the momentum for such an ambition through people creating an inspiring and shared narrative of transition, rooted in the essence of the place?
Regenerative practice answers exactly this. Asking questions like ‘how does this place renew itself; for what purpose; and what value has it consistently offered to people who are drawn here’, the practice looks for patterns through deep time, drawing on local geology, hydrology, ecology, migration flows, social history. It looks for patterns that resonate in the present, in people’s daily experience, and because it reaches deep into the core that vitalises the place, it can also surface an answer to the question what could the place now become in response to the challenges of the present?
Community Wealth Creation and Metrics
The prospect of starting this process with local people excites us. The promise is that the story shapes not only the higher state the place can evolve to, but also how to get there, rooted in the culture of the Forest community. To ensure that this work is connected, we hope to work with the Council to convene a diverse group of stakeholders, a local guild if you like of organisations including the Forest Food Network (see the first blog), who would commit to bring the vocation to life. This will require each guild member to ask what new capabilities will each of us need to develop if the vocation is to be realised? We will need to plan to get there. And we will need to ensure we build not only financial capital, but human, social, natural and made capital too so that we manifest wealth for the community in the round. These ‘systemic effects’ will become the source of our metrics, the goals each organisation sets for itself and the data we each collect that will tell us we are on track.
Climate Change
While we cannot predict what will surface through the process, it’s a fair guess that nature will feature. There is overwhelming local support for the Forest to be designated a UNESCO Biosphere. Yet nature like us is vulnerable to climate change. The sheer unpredictability of weather patterns is disturbing nature’s rhythms and relationships and we know already some species will not cope. We need eyes on the landscape to watch for changes, pick up patterns, to enable the community to learn together based on data how to intervene to ensure nature survives and thrives. Bioregioning Tayside in Scotland is pioneering this through locally resourced ‘community science’, rather than the more commonly known ‘citizen science’ which is driven by professionals and experts from outside the community. Many of us are considering following suit:
Community science is defined as scientific research and monitoring, based on scientific modes of inquiry, which are (i) community-driven and community-controlled, (ii) characterized by place-based knowledge and social learning, collective action and empowerment, and (iii) with the normative aim to negotiate, improve and/or transform governance for stewardship and social-ecological sustainability.
The Power in the Doughnut
Our final consideration is of Kate Raworth’s Doughnut, which has been hugely influential. We have experience with it, contributing to the creation of the Devon Doughnut. Our local Council in the Forest is considering how it too might use the doughnut in the work of transition. Given the arguments that regenerative practice makes for evoking ‘will’ for restoring the natural capacities for places to renew themselves, we now believe the Doughnut has greatest value when in service to a community generated ‘story of place’. The questions posed in the Doughnut’s 4 lenses below can shape the vocation the story points towards because they give language to challenges of today. We think these questions might serve how the Forest responds from its core identity to our social and ecological pressures, and through this, express the next level of its potential as a bio-regioning community. But we step into this process first with a clear, and felt sense of the patterns that have endured and have made the place unique.
In other words, the Doughnut is a valuable instrument for stimulating a dynamic image in our collective minds of a future more highly evolved state that the Forest could move towards, as a whole. But we focus first on understanding, embodying the Forest as a whole living being, always like ourselves, in the process of becoming.
Courtesy Doughnut Economics Action Lab
There's another useful dimension to the Doughnut too. Earlier we discussed bioregioning’s potential to critique how power works. Ownership of local companies brings considerable power. The Doughnut, as applied to business, champions a change to power relations for the sake of greater and fairer wealth. It points us towards the steward ownership movement pioneered in Germany by companies first Zeiss then Bosch and now many others. Steward ownership is based on a radically different view of who owns the value created in a business. Steward owners believe it is both founders and workers who own the wealth; that workers should be the guardians of its mission and purpose. A key belief is that profits are not extracted, but reinvested for the common good, often in the local community.
Imagine the impact on social inequalities if we could bring more steward ownership into this country?*
The Doughnut elegantly codifies this shift in what’s called enterprise design. Design of a business is explored across five design layers: a company’s Purpose, Networks, Governance, Ownership, and Finance, to facilitate the shift. We are registered to offer this work. But what's becoming clear through writing this piece is that this too is absent a context, a context that a story of place can provide. In fact if you look at 'enterprise design' through the lens above of function-being-will, you see that the change in 'function' that enterprise design invites cannot be transformative as an island. For this it needs to be congruent with a new quality of 'will' which is sourced from the spirit of a wider whole, in our case the Forest, and congruent with a 'being' state of care, and connection, and open to the Copernican revolution we talk about in the previous article. For those local business pioneers who feel a pull to play a bigger role in their local community we hope this framing might arouse their curiosity.
And there I think I'll stop. It's strengthened me/us writing this (I've been checking in with fellow directors) because we've realised we've needed to pause and clarify together what it is it that we're doing, also so we can weave a narrative for those who visit. But now that the buzzing in our heads has died down, we're all ears.
Paul Pivcevic, July 2024
Paul has been consulting to the Wilderness Centre since 2020. He has now joined the Board of Wylderne Ltd., a Community Benefit Society that plans to trade as the Wilderness Centre, and to develop its role into a bioregional learning centre for the Forest of Dean.
* The Employee Ownership Association promotes steward ownership in the UK