We simply will not regenerate the Earth without creating a planetary network of integrated landscapes… this is a sobering truth for all of us.
A few months ago, the founder of Commonland Foundation came to visit us in Barichara. His name is Willem Ferwerda and he has figured out how to translate large-scale infrastructure projects into a language for regenerating entire landscapes.
The diagram you see above is something I created after sitting with Willem on the final day of his visit. It is the model for a landscape fund at the scale of at least 100,000 hectares for a duration of more than 20 years. What you can see in the orange is that a core team is needed to hold the landscape process for the long period of time that regeneration takes place.
Also note how significant funding is needed to support regenerative projects so that an ecosystem of “public goods” infrastructure can come into being. This is the basis of the regenerative economy that takes off 8–10 years into the process. And only then do local governments understand what is going on sufficiently well to play a supportive role.
What I want to ask you here is this:
How do we activate landscape funds like this for bioregions around the world?
If we are to earn the name Bioregional Activators, we are going to need to find very practical answers to this question. Just imagine what it would take to gather $500,000 US for the Barichara bioregion. Then continue to explore how funds might be pooled to activate a sequence of bioregions that spread all across the planet.
We have all experienced the power of Barichara for holding a territorial process during the last few years. What becomes possible if a core team were to be supported for twenty years or longer to accumulate capacities and build infrastructure for the long haul? How might we learn from this experience to activate other bioregions? Questions like these will guide us here in Bioregional Activators as we learn how to create frameworks of collaboration for funding and governance at large scales.
Just like how Bioparque Móncora needs sustained capacity alongside Casa Común, we will need to find ways to support the development of individual projects AND at the same time help them weave into territorial patterns of regeneration.
The role of a landscape fund is to catalyze patterns of territorial development… holistically at the landscape scale.
We can begin thinking about this in very practical terms with our shared experience of what happened at ReFi Barichara on October 3–7th, 2022. When sixty people came together for five days, we held a flow of immersive experiences and emergent design sessions that continually wove themselves into patterns of territorial development.
This is visible in the way money moved into the bioregion as participants purchased tickets or made donations. Consider the graphic below. Nearly $6000 came in to the territory and all of it was distributed to support on-the-ground projects and operational costs for transformational learning experiences.
What we can learn from this is that even a focused event like ReFi Barichara can function as part of a landscape fund — mobilizing $6000 and putting it into dynamic circulation that supports bioregional regeneration. I would like to invite you to hold this subtlety as we add other elements of complexity to the context.
In addition to the money flowing through the event itself, another $21,000 was raised in the recent Gitcoin matching round during the month of September. Previously a donation of $20,000 was made to support the learning center in syntropic agroforestry. This took place in May of 2022. And another $18,000 was raised via crowdfunding in January to support Margarita Higueras as she carried the community weaving work that gave birth to Casa Común.
These funds combine to make $65,000 in “value flow” that has helped the landscape integrations to occur throughout the last ten months. Some of the money was allocated to core team members who carry the process. Think of Cecy and Tannia as organizers of syntropic agriculture workshops or Natalia Ortiz guiding the formation of the territorial foundation.
What I want to stress here is that this is VERY different from the mindset of funding individual projects. Yes, we need to secure the $23,000 requested for two years of activities in Bioparque Móncora. And we need something close to $100,000 more for the next two years of syntropic agriculture. But these projects in isolation will not get us to the bioregional scale. Only the focused weaving among them — as functions of integrated landscapes — can achieve this.
This seems like a good place to stop for the moment and let the idea of a landscape fund for bioregional regeneration sit in your thoughts. Please share any reflections you have in the comment thread below.
Onward, fellow humans.
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