Isabel Carlisle of the South Devon Bioregion in conversation with Scottish colleagues Elle Adams in the Findhorn Watershed and Clare Cooper of Bioregioning Tayside. Isabel describes the deep, bioregional story of South Devon and shares the ways its communities are taking action. Clare focuses on growing bioregioning through community science, and Elle reveals her ‘stealth bioregioning’ techniques. The conversation covers capacity building, learning processes and future directions.
The Bioregional Conversations are an action-learning initiative exploring how to help bioregions emerge and evolve. Coming together in a series of seven cutting-edge conversations to explore the different ways in which bioregioning is taking shape around the world, this small circle of leading bioregional practitioners intends deepen the learning culture developing around bioregions internationally.
right well okay we’re going to start well welcome to this first of the B Regional conversations it’s really lovely to see you all we’re all friends in different ways so it makes us very uh encouraged to see that you’re supporting of what we’re doing so for those of you who don’t know um Kate we’re going to admit people I’m going to leave that all to you now so I am Isabelle carile and I am sitting in the South Deon by region in England and I’m the host of session one and in this conversation I’m going to be speaking to Al Adams from the finor river in Scotland and CLA Cooper who’s based at aith on tayside in the catchment of the river tay we’re going to be discussing what Biore regening means to us what capacities we’ve had to grow to do this work how the Arts are a powerful Aid to measure human culture with natural ecosystems within the B region the challenges of communicating this work and how we’re managing multi-stakeholder collaboration every session will have a different host and your host will organize it in a somewhat different way and they will be diving into all sorts of different facets of bi regening the format for this evening is I’m going to outline the background to these conversations where they’ve come from and then talk about my own B region of South Devon I’m then going to ask CLA and then L to talk about who they who they are and what’s going on in their B regions and I will then facilitate a conversation between the three of us so in all that part will take about an hour in the last half hour I’m going to open up the floor to all of you for a discussion when it gets to that point please use the raised hand icon in Zoom to ask a question or make an observation then I’ll see who’s waiting to speak and we’d originally thought of continuing directly from this into a kind of debrief session for another hour but instead we’ve decided that any of you who would like help to help us in shaping the future course will be invited to a couple of online workshops in September and we’ll be following up each session with a Google form survey for you to fill in with feedback that we will email out which should be a fairly straightforward process won’t take very long each session is being recorded and will be available via the B Regional Learning Center website in due course we now have a page on that website which Kate can put in the chat which is going to be where you’ll be able to access the links from so if English is not your first language there’s a captions option that you will find at the bottom of your Zoom screen and you can choose which language you would like the captions in if you want any help with us this please place a message in the chat and Kate rod from the bi Regional Learning Center will help you sort out any glitches so I’m going to start by telling you where this initiative has come from so I’m one of a group of seven b Regional practitioners who make up the core team that is convening these conversations so core team I don’t know if um Kate you can pin us so that everybody can see Who We Are uh or maybe I can do that let me try and give that a go so Molina um I’m not able to get to the top of my screen it’s okay zelle I’m doing it don’t worry doing it fantastic thank you very much so there are seven of us and you will have seen our names in the invitation and we call ourselves the B Regional Learning Circle we’re happy to see all of you here sitting around us as part of the wider learning circle that we’re calling [Music] in and we came together after the B Regional regeneration Summit that I am my colleagues Molina anhel and Ben Ben Roberts hosted online in the Autumn of 2022 and there was a clear request for more guidance in how to start up new by regions at the end of that um Summit that lasted for two weeks online we um put a survey up and we asked what would people like to see happen next and the idea of a kind of bi reging 101 course shot to the top and so we’ve been um talking this over for about a year now and we decided the best way to move forward was simply to kind of launch these conversations to present all the things that we would like to talk about and to get your feedback we think bi reasoning is important because we believe that we need new landscape siiz structures to help us evolve our capacity to work with systems and by systems I mean geosystems human systems and ecosystems which I’ll talk more about later we also need a new story in response to climate change biodiversity collapse and faltering human governance bi regions and bi reging tell a powerful and very old story of possibility that brings all of us together in service to life itself as my learning cycle colleague Stuart Cowen puts it B Regional scale Landscapes are a natural unit of regenerating life large enough to build systemic resilience for the disruptions ahead small enough to fall in love with so these conversations are our first step into the open so that we can shape a course that is partly online and partly in person partly a design lab and partly an expanding community of practice and we would love your thoughts as to what you think the most effective way to teach this would be our core inquiry is what are the skills and capacities needed to do this work a b Regional scale and how do we grow these in people and places so that many more can join us we want to engage and support people who have the capacity to make change happen we think people need to get really practical about this and get their feet on the ground so we’re teaching the nuts and bolts of how to do this work especially to younger people we recognize that many would be Biore Regional practitioners are at first Bas and are looking for a different set of resources and employing different skills to the places that have been operating in this way for longer and we’re quite clear that this course will not be full of theory instead it will focus on practice around the world stories from the Grassroots and real world case studies our own experiences and the experiences of our colleagues and we’re clear that there is no Orthodoxy in bi regening every place does it differently with a different constellation of skills which makes coming up with a definition of what Biore reging is quite challenging however there are a few shared threads that run through all bional working I’m going to name a few here while others will become clear through the conversations we’re grounded in our places and we are working both at the human scale of face-to-face meetings and at the international scale of this network of practitioners we’re stretching our brains to think in systems but not getting lost in complexity in the narrative that is emerging around B regening human culture and the natural world go hand in hand we keep connecting things up from being just a load of actions into a coherent strategy the Belgian physical chemist Ilia prajin talked about the need to create islands of coherence and that’s more or less how we see bio regions we also think it’s very hard to do this work without a central organization or learning center that is committed to holding it longterm and for that reason we’re reaching out to existing centers of learning the smaller and more Innovative the better that would like to teach from their bi regions so we’re going to have a little pause and I am going to get up my slides and we’re going to go into 10 minutes while talked to you about South Devon let me just get that ready right I just need to unpin I’ve got Molina pinned on my screen and I just need to to unpin Molina before I get started me just do that Isabel I think that the pin should be in the participant section so yes I’m looking for your name in the participant section some reason it has vanished no it’s here got it very good okay I’ve done that and I’m going to share my screen yeah can you all see that full screen or not not the full screen not the full screen for some reason seem to want to go to full screen so let me just unshare perhaps for a second and then go back to full screen no it’s stubbornly not wanting to go to full screen that’s strange okay [Music] um think I may have got it let me just try that there we are how’s that is that working perfect excellent okay here we are so the B Regional conversations so this is um go back on so this is where the story starts it starts with uh neandertal people and the very early homonyms who lived on the earth in ways that are essentially bional so we’re not trying to romanticize Bing here we’re just saying it’s part of our our natural Human Experience our embedded Human Experience to live on the earth in such a way that we understand we live in systems we live in ecosystems we live in over overlapping sheds so what I mean by sheds are things like water sheds food sheds energy sh sheds and we live inside systems so systems to very early people would have meant things like the migration of animals or of course the changing seasons or or if you’re looking at the neander scale they’d be looking at how ice sheets um grew across the land and then retreated during warmer periods and they managed to adapt in order to live in that way and since we all have some neandertal DNA in this I keep holding um the uh the hope that we all can understand what it is like to relate to the land in that way and to shape our land but also be shaped by the land around so this is a a diagram a graphic that I’m sure all of you are very familiar with it comes from the Stockholm resilience Center um we’ve got the original one in 2009 which was updated last year and you can see from the latest update that while some of the segments the sectors were in 2015 were unclear or had not been yet measured by measuring uh new sectors and finding for instance novel entities which is top right the scientists were able to reveal that we have um profoundly transgressed planetary boundaries so in the B Regional Learning Center we use this graphic to talk about what we call geosystems on the move or Gaia on the move and by that we mean that there are these tipping points that we are crossing over uh probably most of the time without even realizing it and we are in a process where we are trying to understand what the impact of Crossing these tipping points for instance the slowing of the Atlantic meridianal overturning current otherwise known as the Gulf Stream or the melting of the ice caps or the depletion of the Amazonian rainforest we we come up with maps and models and uh scientific theories as to what actually the impact is going to be for people on the ground we have this experience of living within systems colliding so we have geosystems and the crossing of planetary boundaries colliding with quite fragile human systems like transport or food or human health and of course our ecosystems so in the B Regional Learning Center one of the things that we do is to try to make that visible to look at places where these systems are colliding and come up with strategies for adapting to that this is how we have been describing bi regions and you will see that uh well of course there are many descriptions of what a bio region is but we are prioritizing relationships so the ability to build relationships to create connective tissue in a bi region to understand natural boundaries and so on and in order to really understand the boundaries of our bi region and the character of our bi region we did a process called story of place which is a regenerative design process we looked at the geology of our biion and we layed up from that looking at um landscape and land use and rainfall patterns and soil types and but also looking at Human Social history and political history in order to find this coherence between um the natural aspects of our region the natural characteristics of our region but also human culture how has human culture been shaped by this region and how can we describe the key characteristics of human culture in this place so in this particular place in South Devon we’re a place that has many river valleys and we live in multiple river valleys so you’ll see here on the left hand side the South Devon by region so it’s located um if you can see Plymouth on the larger map to the right hand side we are we include pouth in our bio region and we are just to the right of that I.E to the east of that and you may not be able to see but there are five rivers in our B region we Define ourselves by water on the west we’ve got the river Tamar which from very early on from about the 7th Century has been the boundary between Cornwall and Devon political boundary in the East we’ve got the river teen which separates us from the East Deen by region in the north we’ve got where all our Rivers rise on dartmore and in the South we’ve got the sea we can also describe ourselves as part of the channel by region so if there was no water in the English Channel we’d be very obviously a b region we probably have more in common with places in France than places north of us we haven’t yet explored the channel by region maybe one day we’ll do that so what have we been doing in I’m going to um present to you some of the projects we’ve been doing so you can understand how we have brought thinking around bi regening to our projects and how in turn the projects have been shaping how we bu a region in this place so in 2020 we um by Regional Learning Center LED uh a collective we helped to form a collective of people who’d come to an event earlier in 2020 and we’re very excited about donut economics and we start started a countywide um action learning design process so our Collective Grew From about seven people over a year to about 170 people all of whom represented some kind of network or organization which ranged from NOS to governance to Academia to community groups to all sorts of different um facets of life here we invited people in who are experts working on the ground in different sectors of of the donuts so any of you who know the donut will know that it’s divided up into sectors which to do with um human human ecosystems and also natural ecosystems so we had experts on postal Marine health we had experts in livelihood and work for instance experts in political voice and we dived into each domain and what we emerged with from that is a way of thinking about what it’s like to move a process of change along that is Led both by citizens and by policy makers so you can see in this slide we have come up with twined indicators to create paths for Citizens and policy makers working side by side we came up with this um realization that we needed to um separate out these two constituencies partly because in South Devon our bior regening very much put citizens and Community groups at the center of what we’re doing um we work with policy makers quite closely and I’ll come on to that in a minute but we really want to empower local people and to skill local people up and increase their capacities to lead this work so we came up with this um concept I suppose um that we would have a boundary above which we knew we were gaining a below which we knew we were failing to regenerate our place and we started to invent um metrics in order to be able to measure what we considered to be the right indicators but the way we started to do this is that in each domain we had um conversations on our coffee and donut Zoom sessions in order to figure out if there was one particular scenario in that domain that if we could shift the needle on that scenario was shift the whole domain and that’s really how we landed on the the key Pathways to action for each domain we can talk about that later if you’re interested I’m going to move on now so what are we doing now so we have been doing a lot of projects particularly on our River and rivers to engage local people in thinking about what happens if the drought how do we save water or how do we restore our salt marshes or how do we make a charter for our river that gives our River moral rights and names local people in community groups as being the upholders of th those rights but now we are seeing um increasingly that what we need to do is to put a kind of platform or pillows underneath our work and the pillows that we’re putting under our work in order to sustain it long term are four in total so we are putting in place a pillar of Finance so what does the F funding ecosystem look like for a b region we’re putting in place of to do with um data and metrics which relates very closely to how we’ve worked with the uh the Devon donut so again using this concept of scenarios and indicators and uh Pathways to action and we’re thinking about how do citizens collect use access and share and interrogate data how do we create a kind of Citizen Learning Network we’re also working into ideas about governance we know that anything to do with governance that involves Community groups needs to be backed up by really solid information so Community groups need to be able to represent themselves in a very coherent way pointing to examples and to data in order to make their case but we also want to work into what we call regenerative metrics so metrics of V Vitality viability and capacity to evolve so thank you to Regenesis for inspiring us to do this but we want to be able to measure success in this way so how is our bi regening practice enhancing the life of our bi region in every possible way both the life of communities the life of ecosystems the life of our politics the our ability to work collaboratively and so on so we also have um we have capacity and expertise in our B region to work with the the arts and arts of all kinds so what you’re looking at on the screen right now are um two uh extraordinary dancers who are part of our community who are dancing in the salt marsh and they’re wearing these beautiful um costumes and they got into some very muddy water back I think it was in February and there’s a film about this on our website so why why did we do this so we are leading uh an ecology project which is on our River the river Dart to restore the salt marshes and most of the team in that project are environmentalists uh the environment agency our Wildlife trust and so on but the role of the Biore reging bi Regional Learning Center was to connect communities to the Salt marshes to help them fall in love with salt marshes without ever actually visiting the salt marshes because the salt marshes are too fragile to visit and so um my colleague Jane and emelo Müller who’s our filmmaker worked with five artists and together they created an extraordinary um Suite of work which you can see on the salt marsh page on our website and when it comes to the conversation with CLA and L we’ll be diving further into the um the real power of the Arts to engage people in thinking about local culture and also getting them deep into really caring about place and this is what we’re doing uh also at the moment we have funding from our local District Council which is enabling us to um pay or to put together a Learning Journey which will take place in the first week of June around our B region which is all about climate adaptation so over five days we go to multiple different places we are going to be um visiting Farms we’re going to be looking at places that have experienced coastal flooding we are going to be um talking to communities that have um riverine flooding we’re going to be looking at Water quantity and water quality we’re going to be visiting communities that are mending their own potholes because they’re fed up with waiting for the government to come along and do it we’re going to be looking at all the ways in which communities are already taking action on climate adaptation so the main purpose of this is to upskill local communities in becoming First Responders for their places but it’s also to work with counselors to help ccors elected representatives to understand uh how they can support these communities and how we can make a strategy for climate adaptation together so I’m pretty sure that is now the end of my I’m going to exit this and I’m going to stop screen sharing give me a minute to do that so that is is what’s happening here in South Devon and I’m now going to hand over to CLA Cooper say CLA very good CLA welcome so CLA is from um the tside by region I’ll let her introduce herself she’s going to give us is showing okay I hope yep showing very well okay very expert so thank you very much uh Isabelle and everyone for inviting me along uh just a first slide about me um I’m CLA I am from the t region uh on the left of this slide is where I grew up which is the uru mountains in Tanzania which is part of the Eastern Ark rainforests um and the Wy ruu River catchment and on the right um that’s where I live now in eastern perire in tayside which is part of the Tay catchment um hence the name of the T bio region um I worked primarily in the world of arts and culture for the best part of 30 odd years um mostly in London uh and moved to Scotland about 12 years ago and started to work on landscape scale cultural projects including setting up a museum in the landscape which is called the catatan echo Museum and I think that really primed me um for my interest in uh the idea of bioring which I first came AC across through Dear John thakura who is on this call today um and was then invited to join the UK B Regional Community of practice by Isabelle um and I was personally very drawn to biing B reging Because of its non-anthropocentric focus I think um it was the first idea that I had found where that was permissible um and it made me very excited um the place-based way of bringing these biophysical realities to the four um was also uh extremely interesting to me and um the the way that Biore reging seems to be able to work across all sorts of different kinds of scales and this immense possibility for tangible contribution contributions and personal agency wherever you are in that place so there’s loads of um stuff very um common I’m sure to all of us but very much that anth non-anthropocentric Focus that attracted me and meeting um Isabelle um and well actually we kind of vaguely knew each other way back in the midsts of time in the Arts but uh becoming part of the bi Regional Community of practice led to this timeline which took a while to get off the ground as they often do um but I think uh by about 2021 when we’d actually had the courage to set up a website which John and Isabelle helped me write um we became more visible and then we started to collect people to help us um uh tell stories and start projects off and Ella is one of those people who and she’s on that call this call today too um and really in the last couple of years it’s started to take off um much more quickly and we’ve started to get funding to do um various projects um we like to use this phrase change the frame change the story because we think that that’s what Biore regening does it enables you to tell a new story of place um it’s a can I just say it’s just amazing to see that Pamela mang is on this call um on rever so much of what you’ve written Pamela and use some of your quotes a lot so I’m delighted to be in the same space as you all be virtually um so uh the way we tell our story now is that biasing is a biasing tast side is a relatively new platform our purpose is to bring people together to build community resilience in the face of global heating collapsing biodiversity and a broken economic model here’s the boundary of our bi region um that’s right in the middle of Scotland um and it goes right through to the T estery on the Eastern side there and it’s a pretty big chunk of geography um and this is how we uh kind of describe the agenda that we’re interested in and I’m just going to flick through these we can share this slide deck um afterwards if you’re interested uh but again I’m sure a lot of the titles are very Sim uh familiar to you um and of course there are many many different things that we could do uh in this agenda and we’ve only just got started but um they seem to make sense as an agenda to people this one uh the whole reinhabitation idea that is Central to bi regening is very um powerful to me because of my background in the Arts um and we hope we haven’t done huge amounts in the cultural side of things yet in the T bio region this uh photograph is actually of something the catatan echo Museum which I’m also uh still involved with commissioned in 2019 which is a giant portrait made out of jute pinned to the side of a hill um in the B region of a very very famous and revered poet called heh Henderson and it was made for the 100th anniversary of his birth and there’s a wonderful film that tells the story about that but for me that sort of big landscape scale art can really um help drive that reinhabitation message home um and then uh the technology side so uh we got three projects in play at the moment we weren’t we didn’t sit down and say these are the three projects we’re going to start uh um and have a kind of big strategy around them they just kind of happened we attracted money uh to them and uh they’re kind of up and running um the first one which Ella as you can see from I haven’t put Dr Ella hubard on there yet sorry Ella I will do just got her PhD um the first one is about Community science um and uh it’s a project that’s being funded by Nature Scott and it’s part of a group of five pilots in Scotland that are uh looking at how communities can help monitor landscape changes um in ways that Foster and enhance resilience and regeneration um we particularly wanted to take this um focus of community science because it’s different from citizen science uh it’s much more in the control of uh the communities themselves um it’s characterized by place-based knowledge social learning Collective action and empowerment um and uh it’s a great fit for us because it embodies this kind of multi-stakeholder approach that bi region encourages we started the project off with a mapping exercise that um Ella did a huge amount of work on um and whilst it’s not exhaustive um what it started to enable us to do as mapping often does um is start to tell uh a different story about what’s going on uh where the power lies uh what patterns there are um and of course the sorts of um things that we’re finding out is that it’s a big mess um everyone’s using different methodologies to to do their participatory science uh they’re often not linked to relevant or Regional National strategies all that kind of thing um and you know despite the fact that Community members are doing huge amounts of work collecting this data very often they don’t actually benefit from it um and so this starts to enable us to look at how we might organize and make decisions differently and that comes back then to the issue of governance that um Isabelle talked about and we’re going to very much focus on what this concept of adaptive governance might mean to these projects that are looking at how communities might monitor landscape change and maybe we can kind of talk about a bit more about that in the um in the chat but uh I think most people are realizing that the governance structures we have at the moment aren’t fit for purpose and we need to evolve them for these complex nature restoration projects um so uh we’re also documenting uh a whole bunch of live projects that are using Community science approaches um and they range from a flood monitoring project through to uh big Heritage projects at looking at looking at how humans have um messed around with a landscape on my doorstep in Strathmore and what that has done to how the water flows through that um landscape uh and then we’re also involved in this very big uh Riverwood River C Eric catchment Restoration in initiative which I’m just going to touch on now which came uh into view at the end of last year um this is one of the biggest catchments in the Tay system um there there it is you can see uh in that map that I showed you earlier uh is being um undertaken under this Riverwoods Banner in Scotland there’s a huge amount of focus on how we can restore riparian Woodland there’s a a lot of policy and money around it and there was a competition that asked people to see how they might bring Blended Finance into nature restoration and um somehow we managed to win one of the two uh places and a group of us mostly Community organizations uh are now um moving forward trying to restore or trying to design a restoration project for this catchment um it’s one of the most important spawning grounds in uh for Atlantic salmon in Europe uh a whole heap of um uh things that are uh issues which again very common also to L and she’ll no doubt speak to a lot of them um as well um but the national context is very much that there’s this huge Finance gap for nature restoration how are we going to fill it we can’t expect the public purse to finance it all um we’ve got to deal with this nature crisis urgently and there are whole bunch of new policy Frameworks that are coming in behind trying to work out how to um um resource this nature uh restoration and that’s what our project is all about we’re looking at Woodland creation and Petland restoration but we’re also looking at how we might help um enable the Atlantic salmon to survive and of course lots of people say that they’re not going to be able to but we’re going to do our best to see what we can do and habitat restoration I’m I’m told is the most important thing you can do to help the Atlantic salmon still be there in our Rivers um the uh third third big project is all about food uh we started off with a whole bunch of other amazing people in the food system in tayside talking about how we could feed teeside through the climate crisis about a year ago um and we did a big conference and came up with this rather not beautifully graphically designed um intervention wheel as I call it um and we stuck our hands up to uh start the bottom one off which you can’t read very well actually called um mapping mapping what we have now um and we started off by raising some money to look at how we could map community-led food growing in tside and how that might be quite an important part of our food security response um as as you know um this is all going to be very relevant to all of us wherever we are in the world uh so this is where we’ve just done a report on that um and we’re working out where to go next from that there’s a whole bunch of other projects in development which aren’t funded we want to do load more mapping we’re really interested in that um particularly for example things like uh trying to find out what the um uh best way of dealing with carbon sequestration in the bi region might be that’s a huge exercise um probably quite expensive but other parts of Scotland are beginning to do that we want to try and create a nature Finance aggregation platform to enable all sorts of different sizes of nature restoration projects to plug into it and all sorts of different kinds of money to plug in the other way regenerative tour tourism is a big interest of ours we all know how tourism has got to change how can we start developing regenerative tourism destinations uh what’s that look like on the ground there’s a whole agenda around digital care what digital systems we’re using and platforms um and what we can do to um choose mindfully and wisely around that and there’s this whole issue of skills development that Isabelle has touched on and again this governance issue um challenges finally uh for me uh this is a list I shared with John and L A few weeks ago um and again I’m sure they’re very common to many of you on the call uh actually getting people to see the system in the first place that’s pretty hard um in Scotland there are very old and very entrenched power dynamics especially around land ownership that prevent change from happening very quickly um and there are the traditional government approaches that enable those power dynamics um there’s insufficient investment in building relationships um it’s much more focused on how we going to make the money work rather than how we going to build the relationships on on which everything is going to happen um we don’t have enough people with the competencies qualities and attributes to drive nature restoration at PACE and scale how are we going to grow those people fast uh Behavior change isn’t fast enough there’s lots of dorm and burnout and there’s of course the massive complexity of nature restoration itself um so that’s a bit of a rattle through mine I hope I’ve stuck in my 10 minutes but thank you very much and happy to share that slide deck afterwards there thank you that was brilliant and yes you stuck your to your 10 minutes brilliantly so L it’s over to you now M can you see my gift I made this especially for the global audience yes it’s working well um hi folks uh I’m El Adams and I am dialing in from uh Fon Village here right on the edge of the maray F which is um in the Finton Waters shed set within the M fth bio region Scotland planet Earth um um where to begin I think to give a little context about um this bio region or in in my case the project I’m working on is very much focused within the Finton Watershed so are sort of a part of the wider marur bio region um I live in the traditional fishing Village on the edge of Fenton Bay um which is one mile down the road from a very famous Eco Village that many of you might have heard of Fon Eco Village um which sits alongside uh multiple military bases along the coast here um due to the whether there’s um a royal Air Force base and a uh Army Engineers um which is just down the road from a very kind of conservative town and a very kind of um Rich uh like agricultural area that then kind of goes Upstream into forestry and then quite quickly into sporting Estates um and cla referen a little bit the sort of uh quite traditional um upload and uh land ownership and Land Management culture that we have here in Scotland so kind of a really an interesting mix from source to see um of the river Fenton’s kind of cultural context um we’re on the edge of space side Whiskey country our neighboring catchment is is the spay catchment um and set between kind of the oil and gash of of abedine on the east coast and then like right on the cusp of um G speaking Highlands and you actually really feel that in the fentor river um down on the coast the kind of indigenous language is Scots and then up on the headwaters as GIC so it’s a a sort of threshold Between Worlds I would say I’m finding the more I get deeper into working in this Watershed um I came to Biore regening um through being a systems thinker in life generally always um through just my worldview cultivating a kind of planetary perspective and uh a motivation to do what I can for my love of life on Earth um I did trained as a designer um I’ve worked in sustainability for years um I have been working in Scotland on a um Scottish government funded project which is around um economic policy and the bourt movement so kind of court corate social responsibility um and I was doing that through the pandemic and just had this real yearning to do something which was less kind of high level um online and remote and so this yearning to do something close to home which really gave me a tangible sense of of the impact that I was having and I dabbled in um exploring local food systems and then put my toe in the water on on fiber sheds and and quickly um found bio regening as a concept that’s totally kind of met that yearning for for systemic thinking rooted in place um and and then I Googled it and found CLA and wrote her an email in 2021 and then um quickly got introduced to the UK Network that Isabelle host which was just a real um like Lifeline of inspiration I think for for something that I’ve been just daating a long time and needed to land in place um so what did I do well I basically put my thinking cap on to find a like a local organization that I thought would be a good vehicle for a bi Regional project and I’ve been watching this um organization the fto Nasi Rivers trust our local Rivers trust here undergo an evolution I’m sort of the type of person that will stalk an organization on the internet and read all the minutes from their meetings and they undergone this change from a Fisheries trust to a river trust like taking away the focus from just counting salmon and TR to looking more holistically at the the responsibility for catchment management and habitat restoration and and The Wider impact that has on the wildlife in the river um and had seen a management plan come out but not really a kind of um an action plan to go with the with the vision that they were kind of um putting out through the the change in in the Articles of the organization um I also saw it as an organization because there are a network of rivers trusts Scot around Scotland that’s what this map is is all the different Rivers trusts that it was something I could work locally um that would actually also provide a platform for replication and scale around the country if it was something that um the river trust latched on to and credit to him Bob here in the middle um was really trusting I sort of knocked on his door with my slightly hairbrained idea about um launching a catchment restoration project and he was really trusting and let me loose to kind of build out a vision and fundraise for the project um so salmon have very much been the entry point because of the existing kind of stakeholder base that the rivers trust has and the decline of salmon numbers this isn’t unique to the river finor this is across Scotland um and then as Claire has also mentioned there was a kind of a movement around Riverwoods or riparian Woodland restoration um that was very timely just as I was getting in touch with the river trust so it gave a real hook that linked the plate of the salmon that all of the kind of angling community and and rich land owners cared about with the climate crisis um and and gave us something to to work with there so I’m about 18 months into this project which is called the Fon wat initiative um and I’ve designed it from the outset as a kind of really integrated approach weaving between ecology culture and and the economy um and so we have the entry point of the river Woodlands but we’re not you know interested in strips of trees along rivers we want you know healthy biodiverse Landscapes and and um ecosystems we also have quite a lot of flood risk issues on the river Finton so whilst we need cooler and cleaner Waters also climate resilient Rivers um is a focus and then how can the Watershed um fulfill its carbon storing potential so all the way from the degraded Peaks that need a lot of care in their Headwaters to the salt marsh and seagrass of Finton Bay um my personal wellview and and I’m sure shared with most in the room is definitely that um nature recovery is as much about human relationships with the natural world as it is is about planting trees or restoring Petland so we’ve kind of got a three step process or theory of change around um increasing a culture of nature connectedness in the Watershed deepening people’s sense of belonging a relationship to place and um out of that fostering a spirit of stewardship and interdependent um mindsets and behaviors and then the funding that I um raised for this pilot phase came from um the Scottish government climate change divisions just transition fund um which has been an actual really helpful um frame for me to lean on in with my kind of policy hat on um to bring in this kind of wider set of human outcomes alongside the nature restoration work of the river trust so um whether that’s developing or building capacity essentially for nature Restoration in the region with through jobs and training and apprenticeships but also the things that don’t get to the top of the list like housing you can create rural jobs but we also need to House people um those sorts of things um I’ll touch on this a little bit just at the end around challenges but we stumbled inadvertently into in a rapidly emerging nature Finance natural capital investment Market that’s opening up in Scotland and all of the um scary stuff that comes with that but I have again kind of stealthily got the wording in there around benefiting all inhabitants so human and non-human um will benefit from any finance that is leveraged through these kind of marketplaces into our Watershed um and then making a really explicit commitment to this kind of blueprint of how can we Inspire others to follow um in this way um maybe just before giving a little sense of the it in action I think what’s very um intentional from my mindset if you know the three Horizons framework is that this project is a sort of a an H2 positive intervention we working with existing um concentrated and in inequitable land patent patents of land ownership in Scotland and I’m basically leveraging the pre-existing relationships of the rivers who who know all of the land owners and land managers Up and Down the River and it’s opened the door very quickly and we’ve got a lot of traction very quickly um but I’m not necessarily saying that I don’t advocate for land reform um it’s yeah it’s starting you know based on the urgency of the poly crisis that we are living through like how can we start with what we have now um so yeah to bring that to life a little bit we’ve been out doing seedling surveys and Petland surveys and here this is Fenton Bay on the top right um mapping our seagrass and um discovering a previously unknown population of freshwater pear muscles in the river we’ve been doing all sorts um we also did a pilot program of community engagement where we tested different um ways to engage the people that live and work in this place so um and this we’ll get into I think in the conversation around the role of the Arts but we we worked with a local Arts organization on Purely kind of um arts and creative practice we work with a local Environmental Education charity on kind of um nature-based experiences for people and schools but then the piece that I think has been the most impactful was um we commissioned a human ecology research residency with these two incredible G speaking women in the upper catchment um ranish sandland and Mary mcfadin this is Mary here um who basically re resarch the um songs and stories and GIC names of the landscape that have kind of been forgotten over time and resurfaced them they went down to the archives in Edinburgh and found these songs that literally haven’t been played for hundreds of years um and we brought them home this is the Village Hall in tattin in the upper catchman and brought them back to life and had an incredible group of um traditional Scottish musicians including Julie fallis who’s a famous G singer um bring them back to life for the community and and ran and Mari described their work as cultural darning and mending which I just think is an Exquisite way of talking about what was palpable in the room this kind of real sense of reconnecting and re rekindling a sense of belonging um so that was super powerful the week after next we’re launching a catchment deer Forum I mean who knew that I as a non-scientist and us as a Rivers trust would be launching a catch dear for them but we are and it shows I think the kind of ways that this kind coordinated landscape scale way of getting different stakeholders talking to each other is um manifesting so that will get all of the land managers so all the stalkers and gamekeepers together to talk about practically how many how many deer they’re going to call to make sure the trees can grow but also um get people really excited about eating more Venison and making sure venison stays in the local food supply so it’s quite a kind of cross cutting theme and who knew that I would learn so much about deer um in terms of a few challenges that we’re kind of sitting with at this point there’s a few overlaps with Claire’s too but um this emerging nature Finance natural Capital thing is um perplexing in in in that it almost like guidance and best practice emerges every week it feels like to me at the moment anyway having followed it over the last year or so um and I’m just not really convinced that kind of community benef benefit is good enough and so what what really constitutes um kind of a reciprocal relationship from from this type of um Capital coming in and I’m going to be doing a bit of work with on this with um the good Folks at dark matter Labs if anyone’s heard of them over the coming months um also the piece around shifts in worldview and values and behaviors are really like this from the ipbs report around moving to more kind of Ecentric um living as part of the river worldviews and whilst we can do that with a group of eight people sitting around a campfire next to the river um with you know sensitive facilitation how do you actually scale that um and how do you maybe reach the mindsets of people that are potentially less willing to show up and do something like that um yeah I will pause there because we’ll get into more in the discussion but that’s a little sense of where we are in the Finton wased thank you very much El so we’re getting close to the top of the hour we don’t want to take up too much more time because we’d love to hear from everybody here in the room but we’re going to open I’m going to open up a conversation between myself and CLA and L and one of the key things that we’re inquiring into is what capacities are we using in this work so working at B Regional scale working as a what you might call a systems leader um certainly in my experience is pulling on all sorts of skills that I either didn’t know I had or I’ve had to grow or I thought were kind of long discarded but I brought them back again into use and because we’re thinking about um how do you grow this work how do you grow capacities in people who want to lead this work or start this work or continue this work I thought it’d be really useful just to um if we could between us kind of mul over what skills we’re growing I mean this is not a kind of established profession these the set of skills is not necessarily recognized as something that that we need in order to do systemic change work but I I think be just great to try and name some of them so CLA what do you think I know we’ve had great conversations about um being Alchemists of the impossible going back to our Arts production days I think that’s one of the skills that everybody probably needs but what skills do you find yourself drawing on I think um both yourself and L have have touched on something that I hadn’t quite brought into the four until I was listening um which is this cap I’m not sure I want to even use the word skills actually when I was running this Think Tank way back um for the Arts called Mission Models and money we did a big piece of work on what we call the people theme and we decided not to use the word skills um and we decided to use the phrase competencies qualities and attributes is a bit of a mouthful but somehow it’s kind of richer and deeper than skills um and both of you have uh sort of touched on this incredibly kind of proactive way of starting things off that I think all three of us have we’re not waiting to be asked to do something we are seeing an opportunity and going for it um and I do think that links back in certainly to me into the world of the Arts which somehow always created possibility um and this kind of art of the possible is something I don’t think about very often but I’m sure that that’s where my proactivity has come from from being around incredibly creative people for um you know 30 40 years or so um uh so that’s kind of one thing being really curious and proactive but also being able to see the big picture as well as being able to sweat the small stuff because when you’re in that startup phase you haven’t got millions of people to help you you have to do everything from writing a website to trying to work out how to debug it to go and going and having incredibly influential meeting things with important people so yeah this kind of massive scope this micro and macro which is often talked about I think um comes into it as well I’m going to stop there because I’ll let L come in but those are two immediate thoughts yeah L what do you think I know I you said you’ve got design background does that help you yeah I think so um I’d resonate with all that cla’s said really and and I do think that the just design thinking the kind of there’s a lot of connections with systems thinking really in terms of design thinking um I’d say that where whereas you two both are like wearing the word bioring on Our Sleeve I’m doing like stealth Biore regening and sort of persuading like a pretty like pale male stale Board of of rivers trust Dees um to to come with me on this journey is it’s by it’s being quite stous um helped in no small part by Landing quite a lot of money quite quickly I think that gave credibility in a way that um you know sadly does get that that certain system that exists to take you more seriously um so yeah and then linked to that I’ve been using the word shapeshifting but this kind of being able to like meet a bunch of local villagers and persuade them that mapping their seagrass might be a cool thing to then going to like tea at the lodge in the estate in the upper catchment and persuading them that they might want to plant some you know there’s a real kind of um wearing multiple hats and and shifting between different contexts um and also yeah being able to kind of communicate with people in a way that doesn’t get their backs up um is it’s an interesting one and yeah and I don’t know like it doesn’t feel um it feels a little self-conscious because it’s not a fair thing but there’s there’s definitely a part of me that can appreciate that I can I can get I can access certain number of these landowning people because of my education the way I talk I talk like them I’m not threatening you know and like there’s some discomfort in that but I’m also riding on it I’m like using the fact that I can fit into that world and so yeah like when it comes to kind of how do we cultivate these capacities or like find other people that can launch these projects you know it’s a it’s a really interesting conundrum because yeah the people that I’ve come across just all have this kind of unique constellation of things that they’re bringing that work in their unique context but that’s good I’m going to add in the ability to make meaning and tell stories I think what the bioring story does does is it kind of it throws a um a container if you like around a region it helps you see a region in a different way and see the systems in the region and the human culture in the region and the ecosystems and so on so I think the ability to kind of be able to pull different threads together and make sense of them and make a kind of coherent story is inter is really important so I wanted to move on to a question which is about how do you tell the story in your place how do you bring more people into um the space of uh acting in a bional way or doing B region in it depends who I’m talking to good go go ahead and say more about that I think there’s quite it’s a very timely convergence of different levers like whether there’s the moral imperative around climate nature crisis or whether there’s The Economic Opportunity around the nature Finance stuff um or actually policy levers like policy is applying more pressure in Scotland and there’s some really interesting consultation out at the moment around Land Reform or biodiversity or deer management um and so stakeholders looking to get ahead of of those policy changes um yeah so so read the roomors to where which one’s going to land basically yeah yeah I agree that’s a key skill you need to be able to read the field and see where the energy is and who’s telling what story and which story is kind of yes kind of gaining traction on the other stories CL what do you think yeah I think um I think what’s happening again you know please don’t anyone think that we’re incredibly organized about the way things are happening in the tby region because they’re not but I think what’s happening with us at the moment is that we’re creating spaces for people to come and tell stories about themselves and what they’re wanting to see happen which hasn’t happened before uh and that’s that’s where the energy for some of these projects are coming from so um this pilot group of uh organizations and projects that are looking at how communities can help monitor landscape change there are some incredibly articulate Community activists with a small a involved in that and what’s happening is that this space has been created for them to start to talk about things that nobody else is listening to them about and I think that for me is I’ve got I’d like to get really good at that intentionally good at it it’s I’m just kind of like happening into it at the moment and CLA I know in the early days of working on tside you Trot off to um your local big cities to talk to people in government who looked slightly kind of a scance at what you were doing didn’t really understand it but I think that they’re coming around to it but I know through being in in many conversations and meetings like that you were able to kind of um get a feeling for how government works and how to speak to government do you still find that quite challenging or are you finding it getting easier as time goes by I think again interestingly and you know John will know this too because we’ve known each other a while now is is for me the truth always lies in the projects so if you can get your project up and running and manifesting itself in some successful ways then all sorts of different people start to notice what you do so the river Eric catchment restoration initiative is enabling us to have conversations with people throughout all the different layers of regional and national government because of because of what the subject matter is and because of the importance of that subject matter so I think but it’s the project that has enabled those conversations to happen rather than you know me or any of my other bir Regional colleagues I’m not saying we’re not you know irrelevant that we’re irrelevant but I think it’s the the truth lies in the project the project happens to be absolutely on the button and everyone is looking for projects to have solutions to you know policy x y and Zed that’s just popping out of the woodwork all the time so Al I’m going to turn to you with a slightly different question which is that um what we’re trying to do here in South Devon we see more and more as um instituting and supporting and leading a kind of societal wide learning process so do you see what you’re doing in the thorn Watershed as being a kind of a learning process for the people that are there not just the the people who are in the community groups but the people um the Gillies that you meet for instance or the people in the environmental organizations and is are you do find that you’re kind of educating them or taking them on a bit of a Learning Journey to understand what it means to work with whole systems um I think it’s probably still stealthier than that I think you know we I’ll go out with our project officer with the land owner and their keeper or whoever on a walk over on one of the Estates and will sort of lightly suggests that maybe there could be some trees here or you know that kind of thing and that then opens up a conversation about why and and I’m always looking for opportunities to like like Drop That seed of remembering their interdependence and the river and the salmon are such an amazing symbol for that you know the source and sea and the journey that the salmon make through their life cycle is that’s a really kind of tangible way for people to see that they they places and isolated it as part of a wider system but it’s very um like literal I think the way that we’re we help those messages come through rather than than conceptual um and again you know it depends on the people I think that the local communities and maybe there’s some Hunger for um like feeling agency in the urgency around the changes that needed whereas with land owners and land managers they’re they’re normally quite kind of inward focused on their place and so yeah different different yeah thank you so I’m going to open up the floor to questions I you’re very welcome to make observations as well as questions so anything that you feel or something that you’ve heard that you would like just explore in more depth or observations about how we’re going to kind of grow this field of bioring through communicating from our case studies from our projects on the ground from our own personal experience you’ll have to use the raise hand icon because I won’t be able to see all of you [Music] Lara I can see you go ahead hello um yeah thank you very much um to to all of the speakers for um being able to describe three very different approaches to to to what they’re doing I think it was very very rich um l in particular you kind of resonated with me and it just kind of leads me on to possibly a lever point is cabba the catch based approach it’s something that I’m investigating in um because it’s already kind of organizing and kind of water governance um around a catchment uh and there’s a lot of I would say lip service in community engagement or participation I’m just sort of trying to sort of figure out how to bring that um into reality and and make it a lot more Ecentric it’s not just um you know looking at things from a a community and a um yeah Community value is is is is is a thing but um yeah sort of the the the deeper how can we be with um in a multi-species um world um so Clara you’re on the River cam yeah which flows through Cambridge and I think you’re quite hot on rights of nature that right rights of rivers yeah yeah very good I just wanted to give a background so handing over to El and then maybe also to CLA to talk about that working with a whole catchment it’s challenging you’ve got to do you’ve got to work with so many different people yeah thanks claraa it’s um I get the Caba newsletters but I haven’t really dealt further than that there’s a funny distinction between the kind of the river trust stuff that happens in England and Wales and then Scotland everything Everyone likes to be separate it’s interesting um the thing that we’re doing is a next step on this conundrum around you know what what is community benefit and I think we’re going to ditch that term as soon as we can um actually mean to this project and and through the lens of all inhabitants and the more than human world as well um is this piece of work with Dark Matters Labs that we’re going to do um they did a paper with the Scottish Lang commission last year and there was one of the provocations in that was around a relationships register so like how do you make visible not only all of the relationships human and nonhuman within the Watershed but then also map the value flows and exchanges um between them all and then like the trajectory there definitely is is towards things like nature rights um whether they know it’s coming for them or not on the river trust but um yeah I think there’s there’s something to be done to like make visible all the stuff Beyond you know currently the the existing model in Scotland with Community benefit is wind farms and you get given x th000 per megawatt and that is just so limited in in its sort of impact in its worldview and like how can we do something more imaginative and more inclusive and um multispecies great CLA would you like to add that yeah just very quickly a very kind of practical point which is that um in order to do public engagement really well it needs a lot of money um and I think one of the things that it seems very obvious but you know that our project which has got funding from a very different Source than El’s to start up with we got a design Grant from the esm Fairburn Foundation um which was 125 Grand which is not an insignificant amount of money but half of that has gone on to the financial modeling baselining of um the habitats um and virtually none of it has gone on public engagement it’s kind of completely the wrong way around um so I think that message is beginning well that conversation is beginning to be had in Scotland in a more public way and that people are beginning to recognize that investment in public engagement is absolutely critical to get any of this to happen well and quickly so and we’ve got but we’ve got to crack that um resource issue H thank you Simon tiur you’ve raised your hand you may be muted you are muted thanks thanks Isabelle thanks for the invitation SIM from the wellbeing economy Alliance and yeah great to be part of this conversation and I I have a couple of sort of questions we might not be able to get to it today and but hopefully in future conversations but the first one building on the the financial question um you know and well the financial and economic systems and the weight of a dominant sort of financial economic system on all of this and how much that plays out and how much you taking that into consideration and the need to flip not just the narrative but the economic systems themselves one data point that I was struck by at a an event last year that Edward Müller say hi hi to Edward uh in in in montere in in Mexico was the mismatch between Financial flows and the real impact of um different activities to um reducing emissions net emissions so uh ecosystem restoration by a long long way has a much greater impact in reducing net emissions than anything else and yet all the money is going somewhere else in fact the least amount of venture capital is going into economic system restoration so H how do we sort of how do we correct that mismatch between Financial economic systems that still reproduce an extractive Dynamic and that you know the swimming against the current literally as as the salmon does um you know so um that’s the first question the second was the weight that you see um the importance you’re giving to Educational Systems as a way of correcting long-term you know that how do we address this in our Educational Systems we work closely with Earth Charter and planetary Health Alliance that see education as a key long-term way of addressing you know from schools through to Universities related to the resourcing and the skills and the value systems needed to to make a such a shift well I can speak to uh the second question about learning so what we’re trying to do here with this kind of the brain power that we’ve got collectively in this room all of you and all of us in the in the B Regional Learning C circle is to think about how do we take learning out into the B region how do we take it onto the land how do we teach from the place itself and from the people of the place uh I think we can do that at school level at um university level at the level of continuing professional development and I know that there are some places for instance Black Mountain College which is very consciously in their B region well they’re not necessarily calling at that that they are training up um groups of people in their place who work for instance in the national park or work in the environment agency or or work in local schools to be able to teach from the land to learn from the land and to collectively um design into what is needed for a systemic response for climate adaptation so I think there’s that aspect to learning but I also what we’re doing here in South Devon the societal wide learning process is to really skill people up in what um what is happening to our climate and what climate adaptation means so I think learning is a is a hugely broad field I think it’s really exciting my instinct is that we don’t focus on universities we probably don’t focus on existing training programs that what we need is something new so I’ve left open the question about how we change our economic systems in our by regions I don’t know CLA and L if you want to pick that up was quite a big one I don’t know I just that that wonderful um uh you know islands of coherence thing I mean that seems to be one of the best places to try and go to how can we connect those islands of I mean the well-being economy Alliance is really good at that you’ve got chapters all over the world haven’t you um and I’ve I’ve been watching and participating from time to time in in your story um and your organizational capacity to get the same conversation happening and then joining it all up across the world world has to be a tactic that we need to deploy in BIO regening yes I’ve got a question for you CLA in particular um I think the River Woods film is extraordinary and I put the link in the chat if anyone wants to watch it because it seemed to have sparked a whole lot of activity around Rivers it kind of gave it’s almost like a kind of um a Battle Cry if you like for what is needed to be done on particularly rivers in Scotland but of course were if there was some similar film about B regions and bi region name do you think that would make a difference to what we’re trying to do uh that’s a really interesting question I I don’t know I’m not sure where mainstreamed enough uh for that impact to happen right now I think it would be something to work towards but I think the Riverwoods message somehow covered so many common experiences that people have whether it was the story of the salmon or being in the landscape especially in Scotland um that somehow it probably landed quickly with much more many more people than we would be able to right now maybe in a year or so and I think the the focus would need to be really carefully thought about too yeah thank you would any of my colleagues in the um the learning circle like to take on Simon’s question about changing economic systems at bi Regional scale thanks Isabel this is Stuart Ken with the Buckminster Fuller Institute it’s just wonderful to be with everybody um we’re about to co-publish a paper on B Regional financing facilities alongside Dark Matter Labs uh which is doing great work amazing to hear that you’re working with theml and finance for Gaia and uh it’s written by samat the power and Leon zfi and I think it’s quite an important contribution a very deep dive into the design of new types of uh financing facilities that are attuned to place that have a systems lens a regenerative lens and conserv as a bridge they are readable legible if you will to Current financial institutions so money can flow right now including allocations for nature-based Solutions and so forth but they are a bridge they can be continually adapted so over time these facilities can have mountains and rivers and other species as part of the governance uh they can have nature-based currencies flowing through them so we’ve got to design these Bridges and tunnels because um we’re we’re facing these early signs of of severe challenges to our bi regions and we’ll need ways to respond now while we still have more or less functional macroeconomic systems we need every every dollar you know every pound we can that can actually work within those systems but they may start to actually not function very well within five to seven years so we’ll need these Biore Regional Alternatives we’ll need other ways to flow both National currencies and emerging nature-based and other currencies thank you John I realized the other day I’ve been following as a kind of pedant this whole financialization of nature story for since 2012 which was when there was this economics ecosystems and biodiversity report and part of me is just horrified by the sheer amount of money or the promise of money that’s coming into what they describe as the nature Finance space but the positive memory that I have is that that whole thing started because the Financial system starts to get scared of two things one is the risk of genuine losses and the second is the the this the change of culture of people demanding that this had to something had to change I don’t have any simple answers to the first question about how you get capitalism to stop being so fixated on risk management how you get it to change its Behavior but the second part of changing uh the way that people feel about the way the world should be I think that it’s happening anyway so this boom of nature Finance is a response to cultural change as well as to you know Financial Gamers and so the what people have here said variously about how do we change the culture more quickly I think that’s something that I think we can the skills in this room have that capacity it’s not about starting things from scratch but I just want to say you know two weeks ago I heard El give this talk in Scotland about that um uh concert in a in a small Hall in a in the upper fin torn where people had actually gone into the history of the culture they connected the history to place they connected to the place to music and they connected the music to embodied experience I don’t know how you do that on a massive scale where just hearing at second hand was such a moving thing and there’s lots of that happening so I just don’t since we started off today talking about the role of the art I think the Arts in terms of multiplying this latent desire for change is one of the most important ways of fighting up against capitalism in the financial Drive I don’t think they’re two separate parts of the story very good we’ve got time for one last question and then I’m going to hand over to Molina to tell us about the next [Music] session not seeing anyone put their hand up would any of my my colleagues like to say anything in the last few minutes Alias hooray ask a question pleasure such a work thank you for everything I’m I hearing you I’m listening on a very high leverage Point that’s happening in Paris and in other cities on school streets so if we could manage School streets with Watershed in mind or I like I like to say in Spanish cesena so you do a School Street obviously you get to work with a school with their own harvesting treatment reuse Edible Garden and whatnot but then you take it out into the public space Paris has done over 400 you know of these because you know you don’t take people by cars anymore and this enables a whole Mobility transformation for parents and kids and bike bus and really experience having a very direct manage these School streets to have nature-based Solutions ands and then you know sustainable Urban drainage management and the sorts of green infrastructures these these could be very high leverage points of transformation for the kids the schools and hopefully their parents that’s great Luis kago I think you might be involved a bit in that do you want to say something about that um sure thanks a lot Isabelle and you know I have to applaud everything I’ve heard I think it’s beautiful work you guys are doing and very inspiring for all the bi regions in the world just because you’ve been able to really connect from many perspectives and points and start working very integrally um I really loved what I saw in terms of education and as you said there’s different levels in approaching education for regeneration um I do think there’s one common element um that we might oversee and it has to do with focusing on being able to really connect deeply with territory you know build that sense of belonging and activate the capacity to sense the invisible because we’re usually sensing the visible and as I heard this talking you know we’re looking at uh a lot of the things that are happening but in education we forget to look at relationships from the interactions and the flows the energy flows the capacities to sustain vitality and and to bring you know positive influence or regenerative influence into relations uh and I’m talking not only relations uh uh between elements in an ecosystem but also the three levels of relation we’ve been focusing on which is you know self to self self to others self to Nature and how that can within an educational process activate the regenerative capacity in individuals and this goes to all levels because even though working with children which is one of the areas I really focus on I realize you know connecting deeply Awakening that naturalist capacity and or you know the the naturalist spirit in individuals can really lead to acting regeneratively I think when we work with adults we really need to Anchor into the emotional connections because we usually keep our thinking on our mind level very you know very high level a conceptual and only when we break down into ER falling back in love with nature is when you start breaking down maybe the threads of understanding of regeneration so regeneration I feel it’s understood when you can sense that invisible component and quality in nature where your heart can really bleed open into becoming nature and and realizing your inter beinging so from that perspective I think you know moving towards High School University also and in public sector and other actors we really need to understand how to bring those Transcendent experiences that allow them to bridge from the visible to the invisible from the objective to the subtle uh in order to awaken you know the the doors or to open the doors uh to be able to sense the regenerative capacity of our territories and our communities Lis that’s very profound that’s a great way to end this session thank you very much so um we will send you all a link to a Google form to fill in after this call we’d love to get your feedback as to what worked what didn’t work what would you like to hear more about and so on um but I’m going to hand over now to Molina to say just a few words about what’s coming up in a fortnight’s Time thank you very much Isabella thank you El and Claire and all of you for coming I um I will be holding hosting a a um Gathering between two bi regions one is the wapu amuchi um uh region in the center of Chile and Andes and the other one is the bosu in Colombia Caribbean Ian and they are very similar in terms of how a very oppressed Community can reorganize itself and innovate and create shapes of relationship um between themselves to really get into a um bio region in a deep belonging of the territory and um and and an economic arousing from from the scratches let’s say and um so it’s very very amazing to have them um so you are very very welcome I will be also presenting Colombia regenerativa initiative we have been networking seven bio regions in Colombia and uh and how we are kind of getting into a Biore reging process for 200 initiatives in Colombia so kind of this is part of the fitting for that process so really really amazing process with all of you so welcome to the next meeting they will be the 21st of May and we will have um translator uh translation like simultaneous translation interpretation for everybody to be able to join and ask questions and understanding your our language so thank you very much for for coming and um see you next yeah thank you thank you very much everybody for coming that was a really great session and we hope to see you at Future sessions you’re very welcome to come to whatever you can come to um no pressure at all but we’d love to see you there so I’m going to bring this session to an end and say look forward to seeing you next time take care bye