Chapters

Chapters are the local groups of the Cascadia Movement, each rooted in its own watershed. They grow local capacity to solve important problems in ways consistent with the needs of their communities and the ecosystems around them.

Local groups move along a single ladder. A Circle is a starting group. A Chapter is an established group. A Hub is a regional anchor. Starting a Circle is how new local organizing enters the movement.

The group ladder

Circle

A Circle is a starting group. It forms when people in the same watershed begin meeting, learning their place, and representing the movement in their community. The path to starting one is described below.

Chapter

A Chapter is an established group and a movement hub for its local community. Each Chapter represents Cascadia and the Cascadia Movement where it lives, and forms a watershed council that researches and maintains bioregional maps, educational presentations and written material, an ecoregional encyclopedia, and a directory of bioregional organizations and organizers.

Chapters also take on the working questions of their place:

• Undertake and partner on local campaigns.
• Build bioregional identity in their communities.
• Define the carrying capacity of their ecoregion.
• Determine metrics for fighting climate change.
• Research strategies and technologies appropriate to their place.

Hub

A Hub is a regional anchor, an established group that supports the Circles and Chapters around it and helps coordinate work across a wider region.

A network of bioregional movements

The Department of Bioregion is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that educates about bioregionalism and works toward a network of interdependent bioregional movements around the world. We seek to build Departments of Bioregion in each bioregion and ecoregion. Each has an autonomous leadership team, grows a network of Members, and sponsors projects and groups to achieve the goals it sets for itself.

Why a Department of Bioregion?

Our theory of change

Symbols are powerful. Not by themselves, but because of the power and tradition people place in them.

Rather than a State Department, we are a Bioregion Department. We promote bioregionalism as a viable alternative to capitalism and the nation state, and as a place-based solution to contemporary problems facing our planet.

Bioregionalism is the idea of living in connection to a place and within its limits, sustainably and ethically, and stepping beyond those borders responsibly when needed. It has been the dominant way of living for most of human existence. Over the past several hundred years it was intentionally disrupted and erased to support the narratives of colonialism, nationalism, and capitalism.

Our goal is to build teams of grassroots cartographers, geographers, and organizers who replace harmful language, narratives, and symbols with healthier ones. We want bioregional movements all over the world, each responsible for a discrete bioregion and ecoregion, each holding its own information and models, and each accessible to everyone rather than walled off from ordinary people or from political realities. These movements carry no political or economic motive other than improving the well-being of our inhabitants and planet. They should be at home with farmers, miners, planners, and heads of government, able both to listen to and to talk with all of them.

We are all the experts we have been waiting for. By shifting the framework away from colonial narratives and into bioregional ones, we change the conversations we can have, the spaces we can occupy, and the way we think, act, and respond.

Every map we see is an imagined geography. What reality, what vision, do you want to share?

Governments and corporations promote specific economic and political agendas through the information they produce. Grassroots, citizen-led maps, information, and resources create effective counter-narratives. Nations are imagined communities; they replicate themselves through maps, symbols, visual media, and shared stories. By seizing and creating our own symbols and narratives, we begin deconstructing harmful systems and envisioning what true and just alternatives might look like.

Start a Circle

Starting a Circle is the entry path into the group ladder. If you want to organize the Cascadia Movement where you live, begin here.

1. Learn the terrain. Read about the Cascadia bioregion and explore the mapping resources.
2. Check the directory for existing groups in your watershed. If one is already active, join it before starting a new one.
3. To start a Circle, get in touch and we will help you begin.

If your focus is a shared interest rather than a place, see the Topic Groups.

Join the work

What is the planet and the future you would like to see? Join us in making it a reality. Become a Member or make a gift, or contact us with questions about starting a Circle.