Credits

Doug Bierend is a writer, author and freelance journalist based in Troy, New York. His first book, “In Search of Mycotopia: Citizen Science, Fungi Fanatics, and the Untapped Potential of Mushrooms,” was published in 2021.

During a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in May, President Donald Trump commented on the arbitrary nature of their nations’ shared border. “Somebody drew that line many years ago with, like, a ruler,” he mused. “Just a straight line right across the top of the country.”

Trump was hinting at his desire to annex Canada, an ambition some have dismissed as a joke, but his words were incidentally insightful.

Borders represent a conceptual distinction between the living world as it actually exists and the myriad ways it can be demarcated for particular, often extractive purposes. Astronauts and astronomers have observed how, from above, one sees no lines around states or territories dividing the Earth, only a majestic, unified whole.

This** **abstraction of the landscapes upon which we all depend, and of which we are part, has contributed to their systematic destruction. In reaction to the unchecked metabolism of modern industrial civilization, the Earth is reasserting its primacy. Extreme weather, biodiversity loss and other mounting calamities promise to undermine our economic and territorial integrity. Humanity now faces the urgent question of how to operate in a more sustainable, reciprocal relationship with our environments.

A growing ecological movement sees the solution in bioregionalism: the idea of reorganizing social and economic life around the natural boundaries of the ecosystems that host and sustain us. Rather than accepting the abstract placemaking of property or state, bioregionalists look to watersheds, biodiversity, human culture and other aspects of physical and social geography. Well-known bioregions in North America include Cascadia (reaching roughly from the southern tip of Alaska to northern California) and the Ozarks** **(primarily encompassing southern Missouri and northern Arkansas).

After emerging some 50 years ago, bioregionalism lost steam around the turn of the century. Today, however, it is in the midst of a resurgence. In light of the escalating pressures of the Anthropocene, many in the movement are now embracing bioregional finance (BioFi) — new financial systems and decentralized technologies to establish the technical, institutional and cultural bases for bioregional forms of economics and governance.

It’s a grand vision with ideas that may sound naively ambitious or even controversial, like using cryptocurrency to tokenize protected forest lands and incentivize their conservation. Proponents argue that such approaches can provide a means of affording visibility and value to ecosystems too often ignored by mainstream economics. The mission is to leverage existing economic systems in ways that prioritize bioregional regeneration over extraction.

“There’s a kind of dual edge to bioregionalism,” Brandon** **Letsinger, a leader in the Cascadian movement, told me. “One is short-term and pragmatic, working within existing systems, and the other is long-term and utopian — really working to outgrow, overgrow and build institutions that we don’t currently have, but that we need.”

**A Meeting By The River **

It was a cold, rainy weekend outside the Georgetown Steam Plant in late spring 2025; inside was damp and somehow even colder. The loading area of a decommissioned power station would make an unusual venue for most gatherings, but for the inaugural Cascadia BioFi Conference, it was an appropriate setting.

The towering power plant was built in 1906, just south of Seattle. About a mile to the west is the Duwamish River, where for millennia the Duwamish, Coast Salish and other Indigenous peoples practiced sustainable ways of life. The Duwamish flows into the Salish Sea, a sprawling system of waterways and watersheds connected to the Pacific Ocean by the broad-shouldered Strait of Juan de Fuca.

As industry insinuated itself around Seattle in the early 20th century, the river was straightened, its mud flats drained, its banks paved over and its biodiversity devastated. The Duwamish is now a registered superfund site. Efforts are underway to restore the life of the river and the areas around it, including the steam plant.

“When we talk about regeneration, that conversation has to start here,” Letsinger, who helped organize the conference, said in his opening remarks. He wore a baseball cap emblazoned with the silhouette of a Douglas fir tree framed by a rainbow, an inclusive variation on the popular symbol of Cascadia known as the “Doug flag,” which was ubiquitous throughout the drafty power plant.

Letsinger made the case for how, if properly organized and mobilized, the Cascadian bioregion could leverage significant resources and influence. Home to many leading technology companies as well as a significant proportion of the logging industry, it is also host to an outsized concentration of carbon-storing forests and some of the scarce remaining old growth on Earth. Washington state alone boasts one of the largest economies in the country.

“Borders represent a conceptual distinction between the living world as it actually exists and the myriad ways it can be demarcated for particular, often extractive purposes.”

Despite this bounty, a persistent problem facing the bioregionalist agenda — in Cascadia and beyond — is a lack of funding. On the lips of many of the 200 people in attendance was the impending “great wealth transfer,” a reference to the investments and financial holdings of baby boomers that will be redirected over the coming years. The hope is to establish the means of directing those funds to bioregional ends, and to leverage various new and innovative funding models for the cause. **

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**Punctuated by the occasional roar of nearby jets, presentations were held in different chambers of the power plant. Visitors tucked away plates from a Thai food truck while perusing the booths of bioregion-aligned organizations, and peered at large Cascadian maps and artworks displayed throughout the cavernous space.

The gathering was fairly diverse, though mostly white, with a small degree of Indigenous representation alongside Cascadian elders, Bay Area finance professionals and digital developers. The crypto contingent were especially easy to spot, with their distinct fashion sense and laconic vibe. The scene put into perspective bioregionalism’s renewed momentum — and its considerable evolution over the decades.

Bioregionalism’s First Wave

Rooted in environmentalist counterculture, bioregionalism was popularized in the 1970s by activists and writers such as Peter Berg. It emerged from nascent ecological and permaculture research, back-to-the-land movements, appropriate technology, localism, forest defense and other activist communities.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a network of grassroots bioregionalism groups flourished across North America. With hubs in places such as the Ozarks, the Great Lakes, Maine, the Ohio River Valley, South and Central America as well as Cascadia, they agitated for and organized around principles of environmental restoration and defense, Indigenous sovereignty and a regenerative relationship between planet and people.

Berg described the idea of the bioregion as “a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness.” It has also been called a “two-eyed” approach, meaning it is compatible with both western science and Indigenous ways of knowing.

Bioregionalists believe that communities with the most direct and deepest connections to the land — in particular, Indigenous communities — know best what is needed within a region. They therefore encourage communities to map their own bioregions, highlighting which aspects they find most important to recognize and protect. In this way, a bioregion is said to define itself, as the people living there identify with and organize around it.

“Bioregional boundaries stand forth as ‘convergent thresholds’ where many dynamics converge and contexts change,” David McCloskey, a former sociology professor credited with coining the term Cascadia, told me via email.

There are numerous active bioregional communities around the world. The Ozarks have been a hub of bioregional organizing for decades. The Amazon Sacred Headwaters Alliance is leveraging a range of bioregional organizing and funding strategies to protect 86 million acres of rainforest from extraction. A nongovernmental organization called Ashoka is supporting bioregional projects in Europe and the U.S. The Design School for Regenerating Earth, led by author and researcher Joe Brewer, is spearheading bioregional organizing in Colombia and elsewhere.

The Cascadian movement has long been one of the most visible expressions of bioregionalism. Historically, Cascadia has also been the center of a marginal secessionist effort, though there is little apparent overlap with Cascadian bioregionalism, which is defined by broader environmental and community-based goals that have persisted and evolved for decades.

“The true Cascadia seems to sing itself over and over in different ways in different contexts over generations,” McCloskey said.

Bioregionalism initially gained traction through independent publications such as Planet Drum and Rain Magazine. It also formed communities through a series of congresses beginning in the early 1980s. These gatherings brought together bioregional activists from around North America, who debated and voted on collective vision statements that guided each cohort in their own regional agendas.

In the summer of 1986, the first Cascadian Bioregional Congress took place in Olympia, the Washington state capital and countercultural epicenter. The gatherings generated a great deal of discourse and energy, but ultimately quieted down in the late 1990s as the people involved aged and transitioned.

“It just kind of had a natural life cycle,” said Lansing Scott, a former editor at Rain Magazine who was heavily involved in the early congresses. “There’s only so many times you can come together and craft a vision statement and change this sentence to that or whatever before it gets a little boring.”

“Humanity now faces the urgent question of how to operate in a more sustainable, reciprocal relationship with our environments.”

While the larger bioregionalism movement has waxed and waned, it has never vanished. Scott describes its last couple decades as a “mycelial stage,” growing and forming connections in an underground fashion, largely unseen until recently.

As bioregionalism has experienced its recent flush of renewed interest, it has also embraced new financial and technical concepts that show a potential path to building impactful, sustainable social infrastructure according to bioregional principles.

The BioFi Era Begins

The current wave of activity and enthusiasm around bioregional organizing was largely catalyzed by the adoption of bioregional finance. Launched by an organization called the BioFi Project, it is a framework that “organizes the flow of financial capital and other multi-capital resources to the regeneration of ecosystems, culture, and communities in bioregions.”

In 2024, the BioFi Project published “The BioFi Book,” which argues for prioritizing the regeneration of damaged ecosystems in economics, introducing various innovative financial instruments designed to reorient the systems of capital that undermine them. The book also offers a range of strategies and case studies demonstrating the principles in practice.

Though still nascent as a concept and community of practice, BioFi has garnered a great deal of excitement around bioregionalism, bringing into play an array of financial tools and innovations. At the core of the BioFi concept are bioregional finance facilities (BFFs). In essence, these are grassroots financial institutions emerging from bioregional organizing to make a community’s projects and priorities legible to larger financial systems and sources of investment.

“If we’re going to protect these ecosystems that are highly endangered, we need to set up financing facilities that are governed by local people, and we need to get money to them quickly,” said BioFi Project director and former World Bank sustainable finance consultant Samantha Power (no relation to the famous diplomat).

“In our theory of change, we really believe that people living in relationship to place — who know that place, are paying attention to the ecological changes of that place, are connected to the culture of that place — these are the people that are best positioned to implement regenerative programs.”

Regenerate Cascadia, a nonprofit co-founded by Letsinger, British Columbia-based artist Clare Attwell and development consultant Taya Seidler, is a clear example of what a BFF could look like. The trio and their partners have been developing the organization to eventually incubate, fund and coordinate projects throughout Cascadia. This could include riverkeeping organizations, watershed or forest restoration and preservation, regenerative farms, banking cooperatives or bioregional learning centers.

Regenerate Cascadia is structured as a framework for flowing money to landscapes from larger sources of capital — primarily philanthropic funds — through various nonprofit services meant to support decentralized, on-the-ground regeneration work.

Such a project may be the acquisition and stewardship of land, the launching of a regional bank or other place-based initiatives. A BFF like Regenerate Cascadia could gather these projects into a portfolio of regenerative assets and bring them into the reach of fund managers with growing interest in allocating investments to regenerative ends.

Regenerate Cascadia is already fielding applications for its own nascent BioFi program, with plans to launch in 2026 with a group of projects operating under three tiers of resourcing and commitment: seed groups, landscape groups and landscape hubs. Each tier would determine how much money a project could independently raise and the amount of support it would receive from the nonprofit.

The organizing principle of a BFF requires that decision-making be maintained locally. To curb the tendency toward gridlock among groups of opinionated, highly engaged stakeholders — a problem common to activist spaces — Cascadian organizers employ various conflict aversion strategies, such as sociocracy, a non-hierarchical democratic consensus structure.

“What became quickly apparent is that there are people out there doing the work, but they are not being supported to do it,” said Seidler. While there are many potential approaches to attracting and directing capital into bioregional organizing, Regenerate Cascadia is currently geared toward philanthropic investment. Investment capital, however, is the largest source of potential funding.

“Only 3% of global capital is philanthropic funds,” said Cheryl Chen, CEO of Salmon Returns, a finance ecosystem for the Salmon Nation bioregion. “If we’re going to really try and change the course of humanity, or create an economy based on regeneration, we have to unlock the other kinds of capital.”

New Tech, Old Growth

In recent years, the bioregionalism movement has been experimenting with cryptocurrencies, blockchains and other financial technologies. One example is Kwaxala, an initiative of the Kwiakah First Nation in British Columbia. In May 2024, the Kwiakah First Nation announced the establishment of the M̓ac̓inuxʷ Special Forest Management Area, a 140,000 acre section of forest secured not through purchase — the land is owned by the Canadian Crown — but rather through logging rights.

“Bioregionalism has embraced new financial and technical concepts that show a potential path to building impactful, sustainable social infrastructure.”

Since securing these rights, Kwaxala has worked with the provincial government to designate the region as a special forest management conservation area, and has converted the license from a right to extraction to a right to regeneration. Held by a recognized, Indigenous land title holder, it is effectively an asset whose value is pinned to the prevention of extraction.

“Essentially we’re creating an anti-logging company,” said Gavin Woodburn, Indigenous science advisor to Kwaxala and a member of its board. At the Cascadia BioFi conference, Woodburn explained that the forest under Kwaxala’s management is now the basis of an “eco credit” called a Centree. This digital cryptocurrency token is issued for every 100 acres protected under the program. Should more acres be added to the protected territory, more coins will be issued, with their value underwritten by the health of the forest.

Within the territory that makes up Kwaxala’s Living Forest Fund, local Forest Partners — communities positioned to steward a portion of the total forest — are majority equity holders and contractual partners who carry out the day-to-day work of overseeing the protected forest. In essence, Kwaxala coordinates offset sales and fund investments, supporting the Forest Partners by building and maintaining underlying systems and services. Akin to Regenerate Cascadia’s distributed structure, the revenue from investment goes to paying for these operations, but 90% is retained by the smaller partner groups.

Centree value is currently assessed by way of the narrow metric of carbon sequestration, playing into the existing carbon credit market, but the hope is for more holistic and bioregion-specific measures of health and value to be introduced as bioregional financing concepts are further established and tested.

“Over time, the idea is that we can create more and more of these opportunities, whether it’s attached to forests or to watersheds, or to regenerative agricultural lands so that people can invest in regeneration,” said Chen of Salmon Returns, which is working directly with Kwaxala. “Carbon credits were once just like an idea, and now it’s a big thing, a tens of billions of dollars market. Kwaxala is a good, living example of what we could do if we were able to propagate that model to local conditions and terms.”

Many in the regenerative economics space also advocate for a kind of distributed, sovereign, public infrastructure managed as a commons. The technological architecture most often cited to achieve this is the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).

A DAO is essentially a system of encoded contracts that “live” among networked computers through a blockchain registry, rather than by way of state-enforced systems of law — a contract that runs itself, in essence, as long as the power stays on. Such a system could theoretically integrate with the overarching system or operate independently and even in its absence.

Legal logics such as the rights of nature, and of course the millennia of Indigenous tradition and practice, offer the basis and precedent for envisioning how such perspectives can be developed into existing and emerging systems.

Making Nature’s Value Legible

There are obvious questions as to whether cryptocurrencies and even finance at large are compatible with nature. Capital and innovative technologies tend to extract and to abstract, after all — the very things bioregionalism seeks to counteract.

In using these technologies, the goal is to design systems that can help to bootstrap the beginnings of bioregional self-governance, separate from the detrimental proclivities of capital. The basic reasoning is this: Modern society is governed and organized through systems of technology and finance. However, neither meaningfully prioritizes the well-being of the living world, and so the choice is between renouncing such systems or finding ways of making the living world legible to them.

The question of how to value any aspect of a living ecosystem is also thorny and complicated. No less tricky is the question of representing and organizing that value through complex technologies such as blockchains, which in addition to being known as environmentally deleterious, are strongly associated with speculative finance.

“We’re so habituated into auditing things into discrete boundaries that we lack resources to understand from an economic perspective how to define value as anything other than a commodity,” said Austin Wade Smith, executive director of the Regen Foundation.

Smith carries the air of a visionary, seeing ways that emerging technologies could encode fundamental values of human-nature reciprocity into the systems we use. At the BioFi conference, they delivered a presentation on the possibility of leveraging DAOs as the basis of new commons. They described these systems as “living covenants” enacted as public infrastructure that inherently incentivize stewardship of landscapes and ecosystems.

“Our infrastructure can also be recast and understood as living systems if we understand that there isn’t a separation between nature and people.”

“People get really frustrated with regenerative economics or credit systems,” Smith said, “which is understandable, because in a way it just seems like it’s an on-ramp to the commodification of the living world, but that is not what we’re trying to do.” Sitting on the staircase outside the power plant after their presentation, they explained the importance of bringing economics and other human systems into alignment with the living planet.

Blockchains, in their view, are “addressing” technologies that make it possible to represent anything from a tree to a watershed in systems of valuation and verification. This is a first step toward affording nonhuman beings and ecosystems a degree of rights and protections of the sort already granted to abstractions such as states and corporations.

“By seeing it, you can’t ignore it, and you make it a necessary part of the balance sheet in a way,” Smith said. “So** **legibility is a kind of core question around how might we make our socio-technical systems — law, economics, technology, politics — work in service to not just us, but an expanded definition of the so-called social, which might include animals, forests or even waterways, lakes, rivers.”

Indeed, an oft-mentioned aspect of the Cascadia movement and broader bioregional projects that can be difficult to grasp is one of enfranchising the more-than-human in decision-making as well as in the economic life of a region. As Smith notes, if we valued something like chlorophyll for its scarcity the way we do something like gold, then the former would be far more valuable, and the protection of forests would be something that any system of valuation should reward.

“If I say a Douglas fir has a treasury and has an endpoint in a digital addressing system, that’s possible, and we don’t have to inherit whether or not Chase Bank allows you to open an account for nonhuman entities,” said Smith. “Many of the systems that people have built are also inherently ecological and living systems, too. It’s not just ourselves, but socio-technical systems; our infrastructure can also be recast and understood as living systems if we understand that there isn’t a separation between nature and people.”

Technology has profoundly shaped how humans relate to the Earth and to one another. Systems of commerce and governance have run for centuries on paper and word of mouth, on trust and on the threat of violence. The basic pitch for DAOs in this context is that the blockchain may enable sensing, consensus generation and other complex functions to be encoded into systems that inherently value and uphold the well-being of ecosystems and the people who rely upon them, running constantly and in real-time.

Technology and industry have deepened abstraction from the living systems upon which all humans depend, from which we emerge and within which we are inescapably interwoven. Bioregionalists are now leveraging novel technologies to reorganize social and economic life into alignment with nature, and to reverse the immense damage done by traditional forms of capital.

This may seem counterintuitive; however, culture, tradition, law and other systems that profoundly impact nature have long operated as technologies in and of themselves. Through a bioregional lens, perhaps better technologies are possible.