Bioregional Coordination: Sacred Work in a Time Between Worlds

A Presentation for r3.0 Bioregional Confluence

What follows is a presentation given yesterday for the r3.0 Bioregional Confluence event series. The talk is based off of my recent report: Bioregional Coordination: A Hybrid Framework for Network Commons Governance. I was honored to present following Liz Barry, MetaGov’s Executive Director, as she shared real world case studies creating new forms of participatory democracy.

I look forward to exploring the inquiries in the talk and the corresponding paper with bioregional organizers from around the world.

Core Thesis

We stand at the threshold between worlds. The old empire is composting itself. In this sacred transition, bioregional coordination offers a path toward life-affirming civilization—but only if we learn to weave traditional institutions and emergent network commons into a new form of governance that honors the living world.

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The Sacred Threshold

I want to begin with gratitude — to r3.0 for this invitation, and to all of you who are here because you feel, as I do, that we're living through something unprecedented.

I don't know about you, but I feel this acceleration—things breaking down, making less sense, a feeling that there's not enough time to catch up with the rate at which everything is changing and dissolving.

This churning is — to my best sensing — what it feels like to live between worlds. The old world, the world of empire and extraction, is dying. The new world, the world our hearts know is possible, hasn't fully been born yet.

Joanna Macy calls this the Great Turning. This phase transition isn't just happening "out there" in our systems and structures. It's happening inside each one of us. We are the threshold. We are the space between worlds.

And we're not going through this alone. We're going through it together. I'm here with you — not as someone with answers, but as someone feeling their way forward in the dark alongside you, following the whispers of what wants to emerge.

The 250-Year Cycle

History teaches us that empires have lifecycles. They typically last about 250 years — ten generations or so. Long enough for the founding traumas to be forgotten, for the original energy to dissipate, for the internal contradictions to become unsustainable.

In 2026 — next year — the United States of America, arguably the first truly planetary empire, reaches that 250-year threshold. We are living through the twilight of empire.

But here's what gives me hope: these thresholds are also birthplaces.

Think back 250 years. The idea that colonies could declare independence from empire was absurd, unthinkable—until suddenly it wasn't. Democracy in its modern form was basically impossible to imagine — until it emerged. The phase transition created space for something genuinely new.

We're in such a moment now. The question that keeps me awake at night, the question I believe we're all here to explore together is: What wants to be born? What form of governance, what way of being together, what relationship with the living world is trying to emerge through us? What forms of decolonization are required to even begin to imagine a social contract aligned with life itself?

Coming Home to Life

For me, the answer feels like a coming home to life — a great remembering of what we've always known but some of us forgot.

I need to honor Joanna Macy here, because for those of us from colonizer lineages, cut off from our own indigenous roots, she has been a guide home. She's shown us that this isn't just about fixing environmental problems. This is about remembering that we ARE the living world.

We've come so close to destroying everything — ourselves, our children's future, the web of life itself — that we're being forced through an initiation. We're remembering that thriving only happens through healthy relationships. That abundance emerges from reciprocity.

This is what philosophers call an ontological shift — a change at the very root of how we understand reality. And once you feel it, once you really feel it in your bones, you can't go back. You can't unsee the living world. You can't pretend you're separate anymore.

The Colonial DNA

To understand where we're going, we need to understand how we got here.

In 1602, Dutch merchants created something unprecedented: the Dutch East India Company, the world's first joint-stock corporation. This wasn't just a business innovation — it was a technology for colonial extraction. It let investors pool capital for overseas ventures while limiting their liability. They could profit from pillage without personal risk.

Forty-six years later, in 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia created the modern state system. The world was divided into territories, each controlled by a sovereign power with exclusive right to violence within its borders. This wasn't just political organization—it was a technology for enclosing the commons, for turning the living world into owned property.

Both innovations emerged from the same worldview: that some humans have the right to dominate others, that the living world exists to be extracted from, that power comes from control rather than relationship. The enclosure of the commons — the violent transformation of shared abundance into private property — was foundational to both.

This is the DNA we've inherited. These are the organizational forms that still shape how we coordinate today.

The Sacred Paradox of Bioregional Organizing

Here's the sacred paradox: these forms carry a virus in their DNA —the virus of supremacy and separation. They assume competition rather than cooperation, scarcity rather than abundance, domination rather than partnership.

So we face an almost impossible challenge: we need to transcend a paradigm while still operating within it. We need to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house — or at least to build something new while the old house crumbles around us.

The infrastructure we use shapes how we think. When everything is organized through hierarchy and ownership, we start seeing the world that way. The challenge is to work skillfully within these systems without letting them colonize our imagination. To be IN the systems but not OF them.

This requires what mystics have always known: the ability to dance between worlds without losing our center, without forgetting who we really are.

The Forest as Teacher

So where do we look for models? I suggest we look to those who've been self-governing successfully for millions of years: the forests.

There's no CEO of the forest. No board of directors. No strategic plan. No performance reviews.

Yet the coordination happening there is exquisite. Through mycorrhizal networks — fungal threads finer than spider silk — trees share nutrients, water, and information. When one tree is attacked by insects, it sends chemical signals through the network, and other trees begin producing defensive compounds. When a mother tree is dying, she sends her resources into the network to feed her young.

This is governance without government. Coordination without control. Abundance without ownership.

The forest knows how and we — we who are also nature — are remembering.

From Commons to Commoning

But let me be precise about what we mean by "commons," because there's a great deal of confusion about what it means to common.

You've probably heard of the "tragedy of the commons" — this idea that shared resources inevitably get destroyed. But Garrett Hardin wasn't describing actual commons. He was describing open access—resources with no boundaries, no rules, no community governance.

Real commons are different. They're shared resources with clear boundaries, community agreements, and accountability mechanisms. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for documenting hundreds of commons that have thrived for centuries — forests in Japan, irrigation systems in Spain, fisheries in Maine.

She found eight principles that successful commons share: defined boundaries, rules that match local conditions, collective decision-making, monitoring, graduated sanctions, conflict resolution, recognition of rights, and nested governance.

The bioregion itself is a commons — a shared ecological context that supports all life within its watersheds. But it's a commons that needs active governance to stay healthy. Not ownership — stewardship. Not control — care.

This brings us to a crucial distinction: commons as a noun versus commoning as a verb.

Think of it this way: a commons is a garden, but commoning is gardening. The garden doesn't maintain itself. It requires ongoing attention, seasonal adjustments, collective work, shared learning.

Traditional commoning meant regular gatherings where people made decisions together, monitored the health of their shared resources, held each other accountable, celebrated the harvest. The commons thrived through the practice of commoning.

Now here's where it gets exciting: digital networks enable commoning at bioregional scale. We can practice collective governance across entire watersheds, with thousands of participants, in ways our ancestors couldn't imagine. Networks become the soil in which bioregional commoning can grow.

I also want to honor David Henke and the early leaders of the bioregional movement who, starting in the 1980s, began exploring what governance could look like if it emerged from the land itself rather than being imposed upon it. The bioregional congresses of that era weren't just gatherings—they were laboratories for reimagining democracy from the ground up, asking: "What if governance grew from watersheds instead of arbitrary political boundaries?"

But here's what the bioregional congresses of the 1980s and 90s taught us: this can't just be something we do at annual gatherings. The praxis — the daily practice of bioregioning, of commoning — is what matters. Bioregional governance needs to be embedded in every organization we're part of, every network we participate in, every project we undertake.

This means your food co-op starts making decisions based on watershed health. Your community land trust considers itself accountable to seeking advice and consent from the local watershed council. Your transition town initiative coordinates with your local regenerative farmers network. Every organization and relationship becomes a site of practice for bioregional commoning.

We're taking ancient wisdom about how to share and govern together, and we're applying it with modern tools at the scale of living systems. But most importantly, we're making it real through daily practice, not just annual convening. This is how we govern like the forest — not through one time events, but through the ongoing, embedded practice of caring for place.

Core Design Principles

So what are our design principles for bioregional coordination?

First and foremost: a bioregion cannot be owned. Any attempt to claim authority over a bioregion reproduces colonial logic. A bioregion is a living system that exists before and beyond any human organization. We can be in relationship with it, we can serve it, but we cannot control it.

Second: we need polycentric governance — many centers of decision-making, like organs in a body. Each watershed council, each neighborhood assembly, each working group has its own sovereignty while being part of the larger whole.

Third: we need BOTH traditional institutions AND network commons. This isn't either/or—it's both/and. Like a body needs both bones and blood, bioregional coordination needs structure AND flow. Each offers gifts the other lacks.

Institutional and Network Affordances

Let's talk about what bioregional backbone organizations can uniquely provide. These are traditional nonprofits, but with a radically different purpose.

Think of them as translation membranes — interfaces between the dying world of empire and the emerging world of bioregional commons. They speak the old language when necessary: receiving grants, signing contracts, interfacing with government agencies, providing tax receipts.

But here's what makes them revolutionary: they practice institutional self-negation. They explicitly recognize their own limitations. They refuse to claim authority over the bioregion. They commit to flowing significant resources directly to network-governed allocation. They implement rotating leadership with clear term limits. They make their decision-making and resource flows transparent.

They exist to serve, not to control. To enable, not to direct. This institutional humility is a spiritual practice — an ongoing recognition that the institution is always servant to the living commons, never its master.

Networks, on the other hand, can do things institutions simply cannot.

Networks can see and coordinate across all eight forms of capital—financial, material, living, intellectual, experiential, social, cultural, and spiritual. Colonial institutions only recognize two of these as "real." But networks can operate in the full spectrum of value by creating alternative social and economic mechanisms to track and reward social credibility, ecological health, knowledge sharing, and rituals.

Networks enable collective intelligence through transparent, credibly neutral mechanisms. Quadratic funding lets small donors have outsized impact on funding decisions. Reputation systems create accountability without hierarchy. Sense-making processes turn collective input into coordinated action.

Networks are how life actually coordinates — through distributed intelligence, peer-to-peer communication, adaptive response. They're not less sophisticated than institutions. They're just sophisticated in ways our current systems can't recognize or measure.

Preventing Capture, Ensuring Flow

But here's the critical piece: preventing institutional capture. History shows that institutions tend to accumulate power over time, gradually asserting control over what they're meant to serve.

So we build in protection mechanisms. The network could retains veto power over certain institutional decisions. Every leadership position has term limits. Every resource flow is visible in real-time.

Think of this as an immune system against the re-colonization of the commons. Power must serve life, or power dissolves. The institution must continuously earn its legitimacy through service.

This dynamic balance — institution and network checking each other's power while enabling each other's gifts— this is how we maintain integrity while operating across both worlds.

The Emerging Language of Bioregional Governance

What's emerging now is truly beautiful: a new language for coordination, a pattern library for the future.

Groups around the world are documenting what works — facilitation methods, decision processes, conflict resolution protocols, resource sharing agreements. These become like genetic code that can be shared, adapted, recombined.

Each bioregion becomes a learning laboratory. What works in Cascadia might inspire innovations in Appalachia. What emerges in the Great Lakes might solve problems in the Amazon. We’re working with our friends at Commoning Standard and MetaGov to create a commons of commons governance — freely sharing the patterns that enable self-organization.

This isn't about imposing one model everywhere. It's about cross-pollinating wisdom, about learning from each other's experiments, about encoding successful patterns in forms that can travel and adapt.

We're co-learning and co-evolving new ways of being together.

Composting Empire

So where does this leave us?

We're not trying to destroy empire — we're composting it. Using its concentrated resources to grow something new. Taking its legal and financial tools and repurposing them for life. This is aikido, not warfare — using empire's own momentum to transform it.

This is necessarily pluralistic work. It will take thousands of experiments, millions of participants, countless failures and breakthroughs. We're all apprentices to the same mystery: how do we coordinate as a species in ways that serve life?

Every one of us has a piece of this puzzle. Every bioregion has teachings to offer. Every experiment, whether it succeeds or fails, advances our collective learning.

The future of democracy isn't going to look like anything we can currently imagine. It's going to emerge from our willingness to practice together, to share what we learn, to keep choosing life even when the path is unclear.

This is perhaps the sacred work of our time: learning to coordinate in ways that honor the living world that we are. Composting the legacy of separation that brought us to this threshold. Midwifing new forms of governance that our children's children will inherit.

From Vision to Praxis

Now, I know some of you are thinking: "This is beautiful, but how do we actually start?"

Let me offer some practical guidance for those ready to begin this work in your own bioregion.

For creating network commons, start with what we call "fields of agreement." Gather the people who are already doing this work—the watershed councils, the permaculture guilds, the indigenous solidarity groups, the transition towns. Don't wait for everyone; start with whoever's ready.

Begin by articulating shared principles. What values unite you across difference? What does it mean to serve the bioregion as sacred commons? What decisions need collective governance versus institutional handling? Document these agreements transparently—they become your constitution, your initial DNA.

For networks, consider questions like: How will resources be allocated? How will decisions be made? What constitutes membership? How will conflicts be resolved? What are the boundaries of your bioregional commons? These agreements can evolve, but you need to start somewhere.

For backbone institutions, the key is encoding self-negation from the very beginning — in your articles of incorporation, in your bylaws, in your founding documents. This isn't something you can add later after power has consolidated. It needs to be there from day one.

Specific provisions to consider: Design resource flows that prioritize network-governed allocation over institutional control. Build in term limits and rotation requirements appropriate to your context. Require meaningful network representation in governance. Create transparency mechanisms for financial flows and decision-making. Include accountability measures that ensure the institution serves rather than directs the network.

Most importantly, include an explicit acknowledgment that the organization does not and cannot represent the bioregion itself—that it exists to serve the broader bioregional network and remains accountable to it.

The beautiful thing is, you don't have to invent this from scratch. Templates are emerging. We're building a library of patterns that you can adapt to your place.

Connect with other bioregions early. Form peer learning relationships. Share what works and what doesn't. Remember: every experiment advances the whole. Your failures are as valuable as your successes if you share them generously.

Start small. Start where you are. Start with what you have. But start. Because the infrastructure for life-affirming governance begins with the first agreement between people who say: "We're ready to govern ourselves in service to life."

The bioregional congresses of the 1980s and 90s gave us the vision—David Henke and those early visionaries showed us that governance could emerge from the land itself. They asked the right questions: What if political boundaries followed watersheds? What if economic decisions were accountable to ecological systems? What if democracy meant the whole community of life having a voice?

Now we're called to the praxis — making this real not through our through daily practice of new organizational forms. This means embedding bioregional principles in the organizations where we already show up.

This is how bioregional governance becomes real — not as something special we do just once a year at a congress, but as something we practice every day in every organization we touch. We systematize it through the networks we're already part of. We embed it in the bylaws, the decision-making processes, the evaluation criteria of existing organizations.

The revolution isn't in the rhetoric — it's in the routine. It's in the mundane moments where we choose to act as if the bioregion matters, as if we're accountable to the salmon and the soil, as if future generations are watching.

Every organization in your bioregion can become a node in this emerging network. Every decision can be practice for the world we're building. This is praxis—where vision meets daily life, where the sacred work happens in ordinary moments.

The old world is ending. A new world is waiting to be born. And we—all of us together—are the threshold between them.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for saying yes to this work. Thank you for being willing to feel your way forward in the dark alongside the rest of us.

The path appears beneath our feet as we walk it together.

Keep going.