Organizing Culturally to Regenerate Our Bioregion

As humanity grapples with an uncertain future, we feel the importance of dreaming new possibilities into being. Here in Barichara, Colombia, this includes how we educate our children and what we can do to manifest different economic pathways that work in harmony with the unique ecosystems of this place.

We walk the ancestral footpaths of the Northern Andes. It helps to know that Indigenous people lived here for thousands of years. They engaged in extensive trade along the camino real network of footpaths that span large areas of South America. In our case, it was the Guane people who lived in these canyons among the unique biodiversity of this High Andes Tropical Dry Forest.

When the colonizers came, they brought war and destruction. Their goal was to subjugate and extract from the local people. History was written by the survivors and if you visit Barichara today, you can find a plaque describing who the Europeans were that "founded" this lovely mountain town. Only when you journey into the territory itself, will you find remnants of the culture that came before. The Guane people were well respected for the quality of their textiles -- a testament to the knowledge and intimacy they had with local plant fibers.

It is no accident that cotton and fique are still grown today. Local people continue working with natural fibers and sell their wares to visiting tourists. Yet the work of creating an entire economy based on agroforestry practices is still a long way off. More than 95% of the tropical dry forest was cut down in the last 80 years to grow monoculture crops. This widespread deforestation caused erosion and desertification. Now the territory is on a path of water scarcity and ecological decline.

Those of us who care about restoring health to these ecosystems also know that we must regenerate the cultural patterns of gratitude and stewardship for local places. A sense of the sacred is important here. Lucky for us, the Colombian government has granted the status of national monument to Barichara and their ministry of culture provides support to local craft guilds that preserve some of this ancestral knowledge.

All of this is to say that we bring a bioregional lens to what we are doing here in Barichara. This means we acknowledge that human cultures are only able to become sustainable when they live in harmony with their life place. Each culture is adapted to local ecological, geological, and meteorological conditions. The Guane people lived within the uniqueness of this one-of-a-kind ecosystem. Their culture was adapted through trade with nearby tribes. It was constituted in deep relationship with this place.

I am a co-founder for both the Design School for Regenerating Earth that is hosting a learning journey called How to Organize Your Bioregion and a co-founder of Fundación Barichara Regenerativa that is organizing around the cultural and ecological regeneration of this territory.

We have much to learn from our own ancestral lineages and from those who came before us in the unique story of the place where we live. I feel that Barichara has chosen me to be one of her stewards. My daughter grows up here. We plant trees and care for the water. Our blood is spilled here in honest labor. And we aspire to bury our bones in this landscape when we die.

We are living bioregionally now. Part of the Story of Bioregional Earth that is happening in many parts of the world. And human culture is fundamental to it.

Onward, fellow humans.