From Nation States to Nature States: The case for bioregioning, birthing new stories, and building the world we want to live in without delay
Like many of you, I woke up this morning with a great deal of grief about the path that the nation state of America — the place that has been my home and the home of my ancestors going back between 150–400 years — is on. But in that liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, I also felt a shift in my relationship to this country that feels hopeful and provocative. I will share it with you here and now.
America is a story. And one that is rapidly losing its power. A more beautiful and, I would argue, more true (from a scientific and anthropological perspective) story is gaining traction in its place. This is a story about a diverse tapestry of ‘nature states’ nested within the lands we have identified for nearly 250 years now as a ‘nation state.’ As the nation state and its systems show how brittle they are, as they continue to perpetuate harm and destruction beyond belief, as they stop short of meeting our most basic needs, as they fail to provide us with nourishing food and clean water, as they fail to inspire or connect us, and as they pull us more deeply into the myth of separation, many of us are feeling called to ‘reinhabit a separate country’ (as bioregional trailblazer Peter Berg laid out in his 1978 bioregional treatise).
What if I told you that the place your heart is longing for, the country where you belong, the community where your gifts are needed and your needs are honored, the land where more-than-human-life is treated as kin, the world where the true regenerative potential of life can be realized, is not in Costa Rica or New Zealand, but is right where you are? But your relationship to it is different. And you are different there.
There are many nations within the geographic area known as the United States and on the continent of North America — right beneath our feet. There are living and diverse geologies, hydrologies, ecologies, and cultures that form a rich tapestry of layers across this stunning continent. And from this tapestry, relationships, communities, identities, and ways of seeing and being emerge.
Before colonial settlers arrived on this continent, these various layers of intelligence informed the emergence, governance, and evolution of the more than 1,000 Native American nations across this land. Their ways of being were incredibly diverse, but they were deeply interwoven with the lands and waters they inhabited. And there were key values and practices tying these nations together, including: relationality, reciprocity, responsibility, respect, reverence, and critically, regeneration (credit to my Maori colleague Jan Hania who has taught me his perspective on the most important R words). And most of these Native nations are still here. And they have come to know a thing or two about resilience and resistance (areas we will all need to deepen our practice in in this moment).
Alongside, and together with, these bioculturally-derived Native nations, bioregional approaches to developing nature states have emerged — starting in the late 1970s when the modern bioregional movement began (with North America as its center of gravity). Some of these bioregional nature states (both established and emerging) include: Salmon Nation, Buffalo Nation, Redwood Nation, Cascadia, the Ozarks, the Driftless, the Bay Delta, the Dawnlands, Acadia, and many more. The non-profit One Earth lays out a geologically and ecologically-based map of bioregions for the world that is an excellent starting place for those seeking to organize bioregionally in their place.
Over the past several years, bioregionalism or ‘bioregioning’ has had a resurgence after a quiet period from the late 1990s to the early 2020s. And Native nations have been steadily continuing to build their economic and political power in the US — through long and hard-fought battles. And these movements are joining forces like never before. They are weaving together to create new, beautiful, hopeful stories. I believe that the braiding of these movements can pull us out of the slide towards fascism we are currently on in the United States. These movements provide an invitation to all of us to reinhabit and recreate the nature states and Native nations beneath our feet — as full and committed citizen stewards. Through this reinhabitation and recreation, we will begin to see the space for beauty to grow in the ruins of what is collapsing around us.
Through choosing to become citizens of nature states and Native nations, we can begin to embody a worldview that sees everything as alive, intelligent, and connected. And from this worldview, we can make commitments to take responsibility for being real stewards of ours places, thoughtful neighbors to the people in our watershed, and good ancestors to the generations to come. We can work towards better discerning our true needs — separating these out from the false desires generated by ad-fueled, late-stage capitalism and its ideologies rooted in scarcity and competition. We can listen more deeply to what the land, the waters, the wind and the fire of our places want to tell us. We can invite our friends and family into this process too. And, together, we can envision a future where the tapestry of nature states and Native nations across the continent is again vibrant, thriving, and interconnected. A future where no single person, centralized system, corporation, media company, or billionaire has influence over our own sovereign, sacred well-being.
We can take steps today and everyday to create and resurrect economies and governance systems that support the thriving of all people, all water, all soil, and all life. We can establish living systems principles and place-based Indigenous wisdom as foundational elements for the new systems we build. We can center our commitment to shifting power imbalances and supporting the decentralization of governance so that it better reflects to collective intelligence of a place — inclusive of human and more-than-human intelligence.
Finding the others and telling new stories is where we begin. We can then weave our efforts together and create a regenerative vision for our nature states and Native nations. Through this process, we can work on healing and reconciliation. We can learn to bridge class and cultural divides to develop solidarity in commitment to serving life. And from there, we can begin to develop institutions that serve our places. These Native nations and new nature states can operate in parallel to nation state institutions and can even receive federal grants. And the old, nation state level institutions will become less relevant over time.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”― Buckminster Fuller
At the BioFi Project, we are focused on developing financial institutions that shift nature states from dependence on a globally-embedded, extractive, brittle economy to more place-based, sovereign, circular, resilient economies that support the regeneration of cultures and ecologies. These regenerative economies strengthen the relational fabric in a place by acknowledging the existence of diverse forms of value and the relationships that inform that value. You can learn more about 14 incredible Bioregional Organizing Teams from around the world (including several in North America) working on creating regenerative economies driven by BioFi here.
There are a whole range of institutions at the nature state level we will all need to work together to create. And there are many platforms and tools that have been developed to serve exactly this type of decentralized coordi-nation work. Many of these are built on web3. The full potential of these tools has yet to be realized.
One of the most beautiful parts of this creation and rebuilding, is that there is no need to wait. No further collapse needed for us to begin our work. No need to ask for permission. Indeed, no one is coming to save us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. And so we can start today. The Earth is begging this of us. And the return of Donald J. Trump to the office of President of the United States may be just the catalyst we needed to start to take this work seriously.
So let us organize around nature states and Native nations across North America. Let us begin to carry out the return of the sacred to those places that have been desecrated across the continent. Let us bring back the buffalo — a keystone species and the largest mammal still existing on this continent and a powerful spiritual symbol for so many Native nations. Let us return to seeing the magic and the beauty of these lands that our Native allies have never forgotten.
There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and descreated places.
-Wendell Berry
If you are interested in joining the bioregional movement and learning and creating together, some communities to get started (where you can find others in your place) include:
- the BioFi Community of Practice (stewarded by the org I co-founded, the BioFi Project),
- the Design School for Regenerating Earth,
- and the Collaborative for Bioregional Action, Learning, & Transformation.
Please note, this list is not comprehensive. There are many resources available to learn more about how to embody a bioregional way of seeing and being. Many of which are referenced in the book Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet (published June 2024 by the BioFi Project, Dark Matter Capital, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute). Daniel Christian Wahl’s Medium page is an excellent source. Another resource that can support us in seeing the ways in which we will need to simplify our lives as we become better bioregional stewards is Nate Hagens’ Great Simplification podcast. If you are interested in learning more about regenerative economics, the Capital Institute has a range of courses on this topic.
If you would like to learn more about supporting the rebuilding of Native nations, some resources I recommend (that have been supportive to me and/or have been recommended by Native colleagues I trust) include:
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
- Indigenous Economics: Sustaining Peoples and Their Lands
- Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Development
- Cultural Survival Quarterly, published by the NDN Collective
- Courses and talks on the Bioneers Learning platform
Gatherings are a critical way to foster regenerative culture and solidarity that will serve as the foundation of nature states. For those who are so inspired, hosting an Inheritance Day celebration can be a beautiful way to catalyze bioregional envisioning. Celebrated annually on December 12th, Inheritance Day is a holiday (developed by the Terran Collective) on which we envision that we are 150 years in the future and humans have figured out how to live in harmony on Earth. You can also just host a dinner party any day where you invite your friends, family, and neighbors into an inquiry on what it might look like to live in a nature state where we live in reciprocity with all of life. Start small. But start!
Let us carry on. With a deep commitment to service, hope and revitalization of the sacred. With a commitment to nature states over nation states.
