What will LA, San Diego, and the Angeles Forest look like in 150 years? 

If your vision looks apocalyptic, we cannot blame you. Currently, the South Coast bioregion is in overshoot. Namely, the use of resources exceeds the capacity to regenerate. This places the region at risk not only for catastrophic fires and droughts, but it also leaves it susceptible to food, power, and supply chain shocks. As we’ve unfortunately seen too recently with the LA fires, “business as usual” is a fantasy with a high price tag. 

However, we’d like to invite you to consider a reality happening all across the region – organizations, groups, and local leaders are taking regenerative work into their own hands. We see plans for Rehydrating California, dozens of environmental groups,long-standing Indigenous stewardship programs,artistic and cultural endeavors that reorient our perspectives and help us remember our relationship to this place. There is a wealth of research, projects, and progress to build upon and amplify —- not just from this region, but from around the world  – from bioregional finance, to global learning networks, and design pathways. 

To the question - is this enough and is it happening in a coordinated and systemic fashion across the region? In short, not yet.  The challenge is animating a regional infrastructure to facilitate the flow of knowledge, strategic objectives, and financial resources. Our goal is to help co-ignite this process through the development of:

150 Year Strategy for Bioregional Regeneration

We are alive for a blink in geological time. However, our actions can ripple out for centuries. By creating a 150 year plan, we intend to create positive ripples, not only in our own lifetime, but for our children and grandchildren. There are already clear roadmaps for creating a bioregional plan, and evidence of their impact. The first step is mapping regional assets – both in terms of natural features as well as organizations, education programs, and cultural movements. From there we will create a living strategy, one that is nimble enough to respond to short-term priorities, while taking a systemic long-view. The biogeocultural features of the South Coast bioregion do not follow tight boundaries. By creating a living strategy, we will demonstrate how urban globalized areas might finally fit back into their own biosphere.  

A Bioregional Learning Center

Across the region, experts and citizens have spent their lives learning about the South Coast bioregion and how to care for it. We plan to create the infrastructure to share knowledge through in-person learning journeys, online gatherings, digital knowledge platforms, and, if called for, physical learning centers. We will partner with existing educational institutions to facilitate reciprocal webs of knowledge. As we consider how to bring our bioregional learning center to life, we will take cues from the work of Donella Meadows, godmother of systems thinking, who had a vision for bioregional learning centers, as well as living laboratories such as the Devon Bioregional Learning Center and Sinal do Vale in Brazil.

Bioregional Approaches to Funding

The flow of financial capital directly impacts the flow of biological and social capital in the region. We seek to raise funds to provide financial support for Indigenous voices to have an honored seat at the table, facilitate the much-needed in person gatherings of regional leaders, and begin the design of our Bioregional Funding Strategy and Bioregional Learning Center.  We plan to create funding structures that will direct capital towards both pressing mitigation efforts as well as the long-term work of ensuring our region’s viability over the span of that 150 year time horizon and beyond. We are currently working with the team at BioFi to consider innovative financial instruments best suited for the region.

We do not have the answers; we have a strategy for surfacing the collective knowledge, agency, and creativity throughout the bioregion. It is our mission to serve these goals while expanding our Bioregional Organizing Team and instituting an Indigenous-led process. The Tongva, Achjachemen, Chumash, and Kumeyaay have lived in balance with this land for millenia. There is no returning to this first way of relating to the land, but it is clear the second way of toxic runoff, runaway exploitation, and concrete funnels is not working. We believe in a third way, one which integrates traditional ecological knowledge in a living way that meets the present moment.

A common strategy for coaxing plants to survive in a harsh ecosystem is this: find a sheltered spot, mulch it as much as possible, plant nitrogen fixing pioneer trees, and eventually the fruit and nut trees which soar past the nurse plants to form the canopy. Duplicate small successes, grow by creating islands of life and coherence, and design for pathways that coalesce to become greater than a sum of their parts.  

We aim to nurture the conditions and relationships that make adaptation, evolution, and biospheric balance possible.