Wellspring Commons Bioregional Collaborative Cohort
Three Workshops on
Right Relationship and Bioregioning, and a Forest Festival
Events Overview
​​This page summarizes a series of events for an invited cohort of representatives across the fields of land conservation, agriculture, environmental health, and biodiversity protection to develop collaborations for bioregional regeneration and resilience in the Housatonic River Valley Watershed. Beginning in April, 2024, each event has built on the previous one, culminating in a Forest Festival, August 2-4, which is open to the public.
A bioregional lens helps create a framework for stewardship that takes into account the many contexts of a place. It provides a narrative of coherence to weave healthy human communities (food systems, economies, housing, energy) in relation to a healthy planet.
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Thomas Berry was an early bioregionalist. His quote from “The Ecological Age,” p.42 of The Dream of the Earth describes the relational shift that is needed to come into right relationship with the rest of the living world.
“We are in trouble just now because we are in-between stories. The Old Story—the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it—sustained us for a long time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose, energized action, consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, and guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. But now it is no longer functioning properly, and we have not yet learned the New Story. Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species’ isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.”
June 4, 2024
Funding Bioregional Work:
Supporting the Transition to Local Living Economies
This was the third of four events organized for the Bioregional Collaborative Cohort convened by Wellspring Commons. In this webinar workshop we considered the importance of regenerative finance in the transition towards local living economies. Led by cohort members Bill Baue and Ben Roberts, we looked at examples of alternative funding ecosystems that direct money in service to life, addressing systemic problems and regenerating human communities and natural environments. Using Three Levels of Collaboration: Cooperation: supporting the work we are doing; Co-creation: combining things we are doing to create something larger; and Conspiring: creating something entirely new, we then explored the question "What possibilities for cooperating/co-creating/conspiring to move money excite you and have the potential to support and develop bioregional regeneration work?"
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Some resources from Bill and Ben:
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R3.0 blueprint on Funding Governance for Systems Transformation
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An article by Ben about thinking about funding like the clouds and the forests: https://thrivingresilience.org/clouds-and-forest/
Bill Baue is an internationally recognized expert on systemic transformation at global, company, and community levels. As a serial social entrepreneur, he has co-founded and instigated several enterprises: r3.0, Science Based Targets, Sustainability Context Group, Sea Change Radio, and Currnt. Baue currently serves as Senior Director of r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration), a not-for-profit common good that networks a global community of Positive Mavericks focused on transcending incrementalism to trigger necessary transformations that enact living systems principles. Baue has worked with prominent organizations across the sustainability ecosystem, including Audubon, Cabot Creamery Coop, Ceres, GE, Harvard, several United Nations agencies (UNCTAD, UNEP, UNGC, UNRISD, etc…), Walmart, and Worldwatch Institute.
Ben Roberts is a convener, weaver, and group process artist who works in service to regeneration, restoration, reparations, justice, peace, and thriving for all beings, with a focus on supporting new, collaborative, and democratic paradigms for moving money. His work is informed by large group conversation methodologies--World Café, Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry-- and inspired by new possibilities for dialogue in a hybrid world. He is a co-founder of Co-creating Funding Ecosystems for Regeneration (CoFundEco), a member of the organizing circle for the CT River Valley Bioregioning Collaborative, a steward of Financing Ecosystems for Systemic Transformation (FEST), and a member of the Food Solutions New England steering committee.
May 3, 2024
Envisioning a Flourishing Future:
Right Relationship Stewardship
Given the need to understand and live within the carrying capacities of our place, the theme of the first workshop was considering right relationship with place using a bioregional lens. This cohort represents tremendous expertise in an array of spheres. The opportunity now is to reach across fields of practice towards weaving a holistic understanding of our bioregion and to realize shared goals.
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In our second workshop we started mapping, discussed how we might identify as a bioregion, and what the things are that matter to us in our area. We began to explore our resources as a group, as individuals, and in terms of our imaginative capacities for what we know needs to happen to create a flourishing future.
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“Because it is a cultural idea, the description of a specific bioregion is drawn using information from not only the natural sciences but also many other sources. It is a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness. Anthropological studies, historical accounts, social developments, customs, traditions, and arts can all play a part. Bioregionalism utilizes them to accomplish three main goals: 1) restore and maintain local natural systems; 2) practice sustainable ways to satisfy basic human needs such as food, water, energy, housing, and materials; and 3) support the work of reinhabitation. The latter is accomplished through proactive projects, employment and education, as well as by engaging in protests against the destruction of natural elements in a life-place.”
-Peter Berg
Carly Wanner-Hyde created this fabulous rendition of the beginning of our day.
The day before the workshop, members of the cohort, led by Kyra, had an immersive day of kitchen alchemy to prepare the lunch for our workshop. We connected with foraged, forest, and locally sources ingredients and played with creating the meal in an emergent/curiosity/kinship kitchen. This process highlighted some of the richness of the availability of nourishing food we already have around us, and the potential that needs to be developed in terms of regional manufacturing and processing, and supporting a development of a real food system. Kyra has been connecting us to place through nourishment in both the last workshops, and this is leading up to a more immersive experience in upcoming forest festival.
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April 3, 2024
Right Relationship: A Bioregional View
Prompt for the workshop: Humanity has destabilized key processes of the Earth to such an extent that our future is in peril. What will it take to restore living systems at the necessary scales so that it becomes possible to regenerate the entire planet? Such an ambitious question begins at home -- in our local landscapes where on-the-ground efforts can come together around shared goals. Joe Brewer of the Design School for Regenerating Earth shared insights and experiences about how to organize as bioregions and coordinate local efforts in service of restoring health to watersheds, coastal estuaries, mountain ranges, and other large-scale landscape systems.
This participatory workshop developed a shared understanding of bioregioning, to serve as a launch point for gathering around key priorities to develop common goals.
The term “bioregion” was coined by Allen Van Newkirk in 1972. The concept was developed by Raymond Dasmann and Peter Berg, founders of the Planet Drum Foundation in 1973. ​
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“A bioregion is a distinct area with coherent and interconnected 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 and injured.”
- Planet Drum website
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“The term [bioregion] refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness — to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.”
— Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann
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“Human activities need to be adapted and redirected on a fundamental level so that they can bring society into harmony with life-places (perhaps a more accessible term than bioregion).”
— Peter Berg
“The most difficult transition to make is from an anthropocentric to a biocentric norm of progress. If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress. Any progress of the human at the expense of the larger life community must ultimately lead to a diminishment of human life itself.”
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— Thomas Berry, “Bioregions: The Context for Reinhabiting the Earth,”
in The Dream of the Earth, 165​
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This cohort represents a forum for envisioning, for sharing knowledge for a holistic understanding of the region, for creating plans and partnerships, and harnessing our collective intelligence to address systemic challenges with solutions appropriate to our area. In this first meeting, we looked through a bioregional lens and considered right relationship, as a community, with the land whose ecosystems are the basis for life - human as well as beyond human. Joe and Penny masterfully guided us towards becoming a bioregional group. Kyra Kristof brought us into connection with many beings from southern New England, and shared a taste of what she is working towards in creating a bioregionally-sourced forest feast, which we will be featuring in the August forest festival. The beautiful menu she created of all the foods that were part of our lunch is attached. Many thanks to Stephen Kassel and Chanticleer Acres and Renée Giroux and Earth's Palate Farm for generously donating delicious greens and apples for our meal.
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Resources from the April 3 workshop:
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Paul Winter played “The Well-Tempered Wood-Thrush,” from Light of the Sun; and “River Run,” on Spanish Angel. The full story of “The Well-Tempered Wood Thrush” is in the description of this video>>.
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Joe’s book The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth.
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Wellspring Commons is part of the Design School for Regenerating Earth that Joe and Penny founded together, and the “Birthing Bioregional Learning Centers” journey. The Design School has an incredible wealth of information and resources for bioregioning.
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For more about what a bioregional learning center is, here is an 11-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5KFqi__ILc
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For an overview of the learning journey here is
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an introductory article by Joe: https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/a-learning-journey-to-regenerate-bioregions-1585197a29e5
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For a refresher on what a bioregion is, here is an article by Brandon Letsinger: https://brandonletsinger.com/watersheds-ecoregions-bioregions/what-is-a-bioregion/
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Kyra Kristof's beautiful menu from our lunchtime meal is below
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Joe Brewer
Joe Brewer is a transdisciplinary scholar and polymath with a unique background in physics, math, philosophy, atmospheric science, complexity research, and cognitive linguistics. Awakened to the reality of human-induced planetary collapse while pursuing a Ph.D. in atmospheric science, he switched fields and began to work with scholars in the behavioral and cognitive sciences with the hope of helping create large-scale behavior change at the global level. He has spoken at many global conferences on the science of social change and the human dimensions of planetary sustainability and has given workshops on four continents about the workings of the human mind and the strategic tools for designing and enacting positive change in the world.
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In his book, The Design Pathway for Regenerating Earth, Joe outlines the seriousness of the predicament we are in while also demonstrating that it really is possible to regenerate the Earth at the scales needed. The pathway he describes in his book is for us to organize ourselves around holistic, integrated landscapes known as bioregions, and connect those bioregions into a planetary network of learning exchanges.
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Joe is currently doing on-the-ground regeneration work in a 500,000-hectare (~1.5 million-acre) bioregion in the Northern Andes of Colombia and is a co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth, whose mission is to live out this vision at the planetary scale.
Penny Heiple
Penny Heiple has a passion for serving life and our beautiful planet Earth. She recently moved to Barichara, Colombia, to live out her dream of regenerating the earth alongside her life partner, Joe Brewer. Penny and Joe do on-the-ground regeneration work and are helping to create a local regenerative economy in their bioregion, located in the great turn of the Northern Andes mountain range. Together they also co-founded the Design School for Regenerating Earth and are working with people from all over the world to organize themselves around holistic, integrated landscapes connected into a planetary network of bioregional learning exchanges.
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A native of Boulder, Colorado, Penny is passionate about integrating and applying unified science, integral philosophy, regenerative practices, and biodynamic healing and trauma resolution to everything she does. These passions combined with her comprehensive background in operations, project management, accounting, and administration means that she brings a unique combination of heart and organizational expertise to the Design School and her work on the ground in Colombia.