BioHub
= for context, see the entry on the Bio-Revolution
Description
Michael Haupt:
"The BioHub is the physical anchor of the fourth node of coordination, and it’s the context that transcends the mainly ecological focus of most bioregional regeneration initiatives to include an economic focus. It does this by making promises and commitments to the parties who have externalized the costs of the Digi-node to rural communities, in exchange for economic rewards.
The BioHub name is fairly recent. The paper that formalized it was published by Metabolic in May of this year, building on work by Ernesto Van Peborgh, Samantha Power, Leon Seefeld, and others. The idea itself has been bubbling along below the surface of the regenerative movement for at least fifteen years, using different vocabularies.
A BioHub is a place-anchored coordination point that organizes activity around a defined watershed, in response to rapidly escalating externalized costs. It is the cradle that nurtures the land, water, biological cycles, and human creativity and ingenuity together as a single coordination node. It operates at the scale of the bioregion, which is the scale at which biological time is actually meaningful and measurable.
The BioHub includes the soil, and that inclusion completes the cycle of the evolution of coordination. Soil was the first coordination point; the BioHub is the first that can hold the soil inside a frame the farm alone couldn’t justify because the only service the farm priced was the provision of calories. Soil now becomes the substrate from which water and energy are priced. Stated differently, the provision of calories is now less profitable than the provision of kilowatt-hours (kWh). The land continues the same relationship to the Institution (state) and the Market (big tech) and the Digi-node, but this time on their pricing terms. The BioHub folds them all in by providing services no other coordination node can adequately provide. Data centers continue to run inside the BioHub’s energy and water budget, but what changes is which coordination node determines the prices for their services.
The BioHub coordinates living systems inside a defined watershed. It optimizes for the continued viability of the substrate it depends on. It externalizes nothing the previous three coordination nodes haven’t already exhausted."