The first part of the term (eco) refers to bioregions' natural and social ecologies – or "geographic terrains" and "terrains of consciousness" in the words of fellow bioregional progenitor Peter Berg – which applies at the scale of specific bioregions.
The second and third parts of the term refer respectively to bioregions' holonic (simultaneously self-contained and a part of larger systems) and fractal (self-similar across scales) natures, applying both at and beyond the scale of specific bioregions.
In other words, holonic, fractal, and ecologies apply to bioregions within the borders of their own terrains. More significantly, the holonic and fractal framings understand these borders also serve as bridges, interconnecting bioregions to lower and higher scales – particularly the latter, as bioregions are holonically "a part of larger systems."
This final point carries significant implications: namely, that bioregions function at the self-contained scale while simultaneously interweaving into a global tapestry of a bioregional Earth.
These implications are so significant as to warrant spelling them out more explicitly: a bioregional approach toward regeneration of the entire Earth requires practitioners to adopt what we might call fractal consciousness – working synchronously at specific bioregional and cross-bioregional scales (all the way to the planetary or even cosmic scales).
This fractal consciousness becomes increasingly important to stewarding the coherence and sustaining the integrity of a bioregional approach as its profile rises, and thereby necessarily contends with co-optation and dilution. For example, far-right factions embrace bioregional isolationism (for example in the northwest US), which contravenes the fractal consciousness that defines authentic bioregionalism (which Regenerate Cascadia upholds).
We at r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration) embrace this fractal consciousness (or more precisely eco-holo-fractal consciousness, but we'll keep things simple here to explore just this one aspect) through how we enact our work on bioregional coherence stewarding. To provide specific examples of this interweaving in the context of the story of Bioregional Earth, I share three elements of our work: Bioregional Convening, Bioregional Knowledge Commoning, and Bioregional Co-Governance.
We at r3.0 curate three main forms of Bioregional Convenings: Dialoguing, Conferencing, and Confluencing. Each of these plays a conscious role in weaving Bioregional Earth coherence.
After a year of hosting Open Dialogues on a diversity of issues, we entered 2025 devoting all our work – including our Open Dialogues – to what we call "bioregioning." In curating the focal issues of these sessions, which mix presentations with participant engagement, we consciously seek to engage globally, in particular with initiatives that may be lesser known.
For example, our Third Open Dialogue spotlighted the work of the South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group, exploring several angles of bioregional mapping in India and cross-border bioregional governance in the Himalayas, while the Fourth Open Dialogue shifted attention eastward to Australia to apply an Indigenous Relational Ethos to a bioregion approach before downscaling to the municipal context in Sydney and even the neighborhood lens in Waverly. The Second Open Dialogue on Permaculture & Bioregioning not only features speakers from Africa (Tunisia and Uganda), but also explores permaculture application in a refugee settlement, introducing the issue of forced displacement as a bioregional question.
We're also hosting a parallel series of monthly dialogues on Bioregional Carrying Capacities in collaboration with the Design School for Regenerating Earth, introducing theoretical, conceptual, and methodological dimensions at diverse scales as precursors to piloting applications in specific bioregions.
As we enter our second decade of convening our annual conference, we're focusing this year's online r3.0 Conference exclusively on the bioregional context. The theme, Braiding Bioregional Resilience & Regeneration: Learning to Reinhabit Earth Together, encapsulates our focal exploration of fractal consciousness and interweaving into a global bioregional tapestry.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the first session, Bioregional Earth: Braiding Bioregions Globally Across 3 Horizons, which features representation from four continents (North America, South America, Asia, Australia) to consider how bioregional efforts interweave globally. As well, the session features United Nations representation to consider how to evolve our legacy nation-state context into the emergent Bioregional Earth context – or in the terms of the Three Horizons framework, from Horizon 1 to Horizon 3.
Given the virtual nature of the Conference, we're expanding on the Confluence model prototyped last year by r3.0 Advocation Partner And Now What. A Confluence is an in-person opporunity to both experience and process the online Conference content in community.
This year, we're inviting bioregions to convene autonomous in-person Confluences concurrent with our Conference, enabling them to both benefit from global perspectives on "bioregioning" and also set their own bioregion-specific priorities outside the Conference times.
In the lead-up to the Conference, the Design School for Regenerating Earth and r3.0 are collaborating to integrate the Confluence organizing process into the Design School's How to Organize Your Bioregion learning journey, for cross-organizational reinforcement.
The third day of the Conference is devoted to a Global Confluence Debrief, enabling the 40+ bioregions that have already registered to reflect on how the Conference content informs and intersects with their own unique bioregional contexts, thus inviting in-depth cross-pollination of learnings (reinforcing the fractal Bioregional Earth consciousness). To respect bioregions in time zones that don't align with the Conference timing, we'll host a second Global Confluence Debrief a week later, enabling them to experience the Conference recordings at their leisure.
The tagline of our Bioregional Confluencing is Ambling Toward Planetary Bioregional Congressing, with David Haenke keynoting the Debriefs to share his half-century experience convening bioregional congresses in the Ozarks and at the continental scale. Joining him will be Laura Kuri, of the Bosque de Agua bioregional initiative in central Mexico, who will share her experience with bioregional congressing as a co-host of the first continental bioregional congress convened in the global south – in Cuahunahuac, Mexico in 1996. The Bioregional Confluencing tagline also echoes Peter Berg's 1976 essay Amble Toward Continent Congress, which first planted the seeds for the practice of bioregional congressing that merges gathering with governance.
In the months following the Conference and Confluences, we'll convene further Confluence Debriefs on a continental basis, inviting more interweaving amongst bioregions while supporting them to convene their own Congresses at fractal scale – from bioregional to continental to planetary – over the coming years.
We at r3.0 are working on creating and supporting Bioregional Knowledge Commons.
A knowledge commons is only a knowledge commons, according to Simon Grant, "if people are using the knowledge that they are curating, just as a genuine physical commons implies that people are using the shared resource." In other words, knowledge commons are neither information sitting on a shelf untouched, nor mindless practice, but rather, knowledge commons fuse understanding and action in mutually-reinforcing positive feedback loops.
Clearly, a bioregional approach requires Bioregional Knowledge Commons.
Rodger Mattlage has produced a useful visualization of David Bollier and Silke Helfrich's Triad of Commoning Patterns, from which he and I conceptualized a fractal relationship between scales of Bioregional Knowledge Commoning. Rodger and I see a global meta-layer of Bioregional Knowledge Commoning focused on documenting the patterns of bioregions, complemented by a layer comprising knowledge commons specific to each bioregion, documenting the regenerative practices unique to the bioregional context – pattern and practice, interlinked fractally.
r3.0 Research Fellow Andrea Farias and I are stewarding the launch of a Bioregional Knowledge Commoning (BKC) Community of Inquiry & Practice (CoIP), with preliminary involvement from all six inhabited continents planting seeds for this global meta-layer of Bioregional Knowledge Commoning through preliminary identification of use cases and experiments. We've just released Bioregional Knowledge Commons – A Meta Perspective.
r3.0 is co-creating some of the knowledge to populate a Bioregional Knowledge Commons. We just released the first volume in our Seeds Series, entitled Our Predicament: The Fundamental Flaws of Predominant Economic Systems — the Cultures Scaffolding Them. Future volumes in the series will explore the fundamental imperatives of regenerative economies and cultures; the necessary elements of just transitions to regenerative economies and cultures; and the role of bioregions in transforming to regenerative economies and cultures.
Convening and Knowledge Commoning are the two pillars of r3.0's bioregional work, with Bioregional Co-Governance bridging the two. As mentioned above, Bioregional Congressing melds gathering and governance, while governance will also be a key content area of Bioregional Knowledge Commons.
Inspired by the work of the Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed, a participating organization in the Northeast Woodlands Bioregional Collective (where I live), r3.0 is focusing significant attention on the notion of Co-Governance that the Alliance is advancing.
Specifically, Co-Governance entails shared co-leadership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities as a conscious act of decoloniality that disrupts patterns of hegemonic Western power usurpation. Indigenous co-leadership is particularly important in a bioregional context given the millennial-long history of bioregional-scale Indigenous Regenerative Ecosystem Design (IRED) and management that Diné scholar Lyla June Johnston documents in her research.
We will explore this Bioregional Co-Governance model in a session at the r3.0 Conference titled Bioregional Co-Governance – Pluriversal Self-Determination. Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Elder Mike Thomas and Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed Co-Founder Maggie Favretti will share stories of their work together – which also encompasses the creation of an Intertribal Alliance to help heal the fragmentation of centuries of colonization.
Such reintegration across Indigenous communities, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, represents yet another means of expressing bioregional fractal consciousness in action, as the scaling out of such harmonization can potentially reach around the globe.
Fractal consciousness isn't necessarily a novel development. One could argue that the formation of the League of Nations (1919) and United Nations (1945) introduced a degree of globalized governance, scale-linked to the nation-state level. This is, of course, the core of the problem: the nation-state model is predicated on colonialism that is inherently contrary to ecological and cultural coherence (think of imperially imposed boundaries), thereby cementing dysfunctionality into the mix.
Bioregional fractal consciousness invites us into a decolonizing dynamic that also harmonizes ecological and cultural holonic integrity.
Current bioregional work is well-positioned to actualize bioregional fractal consciousness – but it requires a critical mass of humanity to embrace working synchronously at the local bioregional and global cross-bioregional scales.
Consider this your invitation.
