Technology in Service to Life: Tools for Bioregional Coordination
Terran Collective is a community of care and practice in California’s Bay Area building systems and technology tools for regenerating bioregions. Our mission is to amplify cooperation among people restoring our communities and our land.
In October 2019, Terran Collective held a gathering called Terran Cospiracy with 150+ local leaders. During the weekend, guilds formed around topics like regenerative agriculture and bioregional stewardship, sparking inspiration and ideas for post-event collaboration. After the event, we heard from participants that it was hard to coordinate remotely without good tools. Most of the guilds fizzled out within the first month, and when covid lockdowns halted in-person gatherings a few months later, progress slowed even more. We realized we needed better online tools if we wanted to see successful collaboration.
Soon after that event, we were approached by the creators of Hylo, a free and open-source digital community platform. Hylo is an organizing tool for purpose-driven groups, with web and mobile apps that enable discussions, requests, offers, resources, projects, events, and features geographic maps, rich member directories, and direct messaging. Hylo was built with values we share, and the creators of the platform were looking for new stewards. We adopted Hylo in early 2020 with the intention of crafting it into the coordination tool we desired following Cospiracy. For two years now, we’ve been shaping Hylo to support the development of resilient bioregions, starting in our own backyard.
Our home bioregion is the San Francisco Bay/Delta watershed, originally Ohlone and Miwok land, which contains some of the most abundant agricultural areas in the United States. Hylo helps connect folks within this landscape who care about regenerative agriculture and ecosystem restoration. Success looks like groups sharing relevant information about the bioregion, including land management techniques like riparian restoration or controlled burns, while building networks between land stewards and urban dwellers who recognize our interdependence with the living health of the land. We’re building these tools to support patterns in place-based organizing, so they can be used by bioregions in any location.
Tools for Thriving Bioregions
We understand that technology alone is not enough and that we must nurture actual local relationships and grow real-life trust in order to germinate collective sensemaking, decision-making, and action. However, technology can help us coordinate at scale to bring our ecosystems back into balance. The proper place for these tools is to enhance in-person experiences and strengthen face-to-face relationships, not replace them. Technologies built to capture attention or to generate ad clicks have not worked; we need technologies built explicitly for regenerative purposes which is exactly the intention behind Hylo. We see this tool as a prosthesis for reconnecting individuals to community and purpose within their local landscape.
Here’s the set of tools for bioregional coordination we’re creating on Hylo:
Place-Based Communities
Every group of people exists at the intersection of many living systems, and each individual has a unique map of their landscape and the outlines of their community. We’re creating the capacity for place-based groups on Hylo to outline their territories on a shared map, allowing coordination to emerge within the living boundaries that are expressed by each bioregion, group, and person.
Bioregional Intelligence
To be good stewards, we need high quality information about the land we live on. The best information comes from direct contact with the land and an ongoing relationship with the more-than-human world. This relational knowledge can be supported by geospatial data at the landscape level: soil type, flora and fauna populations, hydrology, fire data, carrying capacity, traditional Indigenous territories. We will incorporate these layers into the Hylo map to add dimension to our understanding of the land we call home. These maps and the information people share on them will constitute crowd-sourced reinhabitation education for each bioregion, guiding residents through a process of learning about their landscape.
Collective Governance
We are building tools so that groups can engage in collective governance and finance. Residents within a bioregion could make proposals for regenerative projects and vote on which proposals they want to support and how to allocate resources among them. These are the building blocks of a participatory democracy.
Bioregional Collectives & Funding Pools
This set of tools could create bioregional collectives — place-based and participatory organizations where members decide how to govern the bioregion as a commons. The members of the collective, hopefully everyone in a bioregion, could participate in governance decisions to increase the wellbeing of people and land–making land management agreements, nurturing local production and economies, restoring biodiversity, and creating systems to support reparations and the thriving of historically oppressed populations.
These collectives could be the basis for local economic engines powered by a funding pool for investing in projects, which then generates ecological, social, and financial returns. This funding pool could come at first from donations from residents, but later be fed by local currencies backed by the living health of the land.
Land Identity & Rights of Nature
Ultimately, we recognize that the land is our kin and should be honored with legal protections, not treated as a commodity. We are trying to give the land, non-human inhabitants, and living systems a voice on Hylo. We are involving our partners, including Indigenous leaders and Rights of Nature advocates, in discussing what this will entail. Here are our some of our current inquiries:
- How might we give land a voice through technology?
- How does land participate in governance?
- How might we handle the complexities of land tenure and honoring Indigenous stewardship?
- How can Hylo help people be in right relationship with the land around them?
Bioregional Technology in Action
Hylo is already home to hundreds of impactful communities. We are developing this new functionality in partnership with a multi-stakeholder coalition dedicated to planetary regeneration, who are piloting these tools with their own communities.
One example is our partner OpenTEAM (Open Tech Ecosystem for Agricultural Management), a non-profit with 45+ member organizations and 15 farm and ranch networks developing open source technology to improve soil health and advance regenerative agriculture. OpenTEAM will use Hylo to promote farmer-to-farmer relationships for collaborative learning, and to practice participatory governance to allocate funding to projects in these networks.
Another partner is Salmon Nation, a “nature state” that defines their landscape as the historical territory of Pacific salmon, from the North Slope of Alaska to Northern California. In 2022, we will welcome their network onto Hylo and work together to develop and test these tools to support their goals for bioregional thriving.
A Call to Action
Terran Collective is dedicated to this work to fulfill our responsibility to future generations to deliver a thriving world to them, during the brief moment it is ours to steward.
We can’t do this just as one small team and community. To bring this vision to life, we are weaving many voices and perspectives into one beautiful tapestry. Our desire is to listen to and co-create with many voices — the elders of the bioregional movement, Indigenous leaders, land stewards, community organizers — who hold a vision for a world where each bioregion, and every being, can thrive.
We envision a future where people come together to care for a bioregion which crosses the arbitrary boundaries of county, state, and border, and the identities and polarities that are used to divide us. When we have the cultural will and proper tools to coordinate beyond these boundaries, then we have a foundation for resilience amidst climate chaos and a pathway for a bioregion to thrive.
We invite you to be part of this conversation. Terran Collective is hosting a group on Hylo for people committed to living in place, where people can connect with a group in their area, or start one for their bioregion. To join the Bioregional Commons, visit https://www.hylo.com/groups/bioregional-commons
“Technology in Service to Life” by Clare Politano was first published the Winter 2022 issue of Planet Drum Foundation’s PULSE newsletter, © Planet Drum Foundation, all rights reserved. It is reprinted with permission from Planet Drum Foundation: www.planetdrum.org ; P.O. Box 31251, San Francisco, CA 94131, USA; or mail@planetdrum.org
