Bioregional Cosmolocalism

Description

Paddy Le Fluffy:

"The systemic basis of the new civilisation is also a combination of two parts. They are bioregionalism and cosmolocalism, and they combine to become bioregional cosmolocalism. To explain what this is, I will describe the two parts separately.

Bioregionalism is a paradigm in which societal systems, including political, economic and agricultural systems, are organised around bioregions, which Joe Brewer defines as ‘geographic areas defined by the intersection of ecosystem boundaries – typically things like watersheds, mountain ranges and so forth – with human systems that have a coherent cultural identity’. Bioregions are quite large areas – One Earth has mapped the entire world into 185 bioregions. There are smaller scale areas within the same paradigm, such as ecoregions and individual watersheds and ecosystems.

Organising society bioregionally enables us to align with the natural environment and so decrease our negative environmental impact and regenerate nature. For example, it helps us integrate our food systems into ecological cycles to create increased diversity, resilience and abundance of both agricultural production and local ecosystems.

Cosmolocalism is an economic system that’s equivalent to capitalism, because its structure creates a dynamic that drives forward development. Whereas capitalism has a competitive dynamic that drives economic growth, cosmolocalism has a collaborative dynamic and includes a set of features that means it can drive development in a truly positive direction.

The organisations at the heart of cosmolocalism are global networks that connect local nodes. The local nodes only serve their local area, for example their local bioregion, while the networks connect them with similar nodes in other areas. The global networks include information commons through which every member node can access the innovations and experience of every other node, while remaining free to choose how to apply it in order to serve their own local area. This is what creates the collaborative development dynamic.

The networks also have charters, which set out the ethos and rules of the network and by which member nodes must abide. The charters include a description of the goal of the network, but they can also include a set of guidelines that steer the network’s development in a good direction. For example, by including a stipulation that nodes should aim to ‘meet the needs of all within the means of the living planet’, a network can align itself with the Doughnut goal. This is what allows us to integrate the societal goal of getting into the Doughnut into the systemic basis of the new civilisation. With similar stipulations in their charters, combined with the institutional infrastructure to ensure they are enacted, networks can require their nodes to have democratic and community-based decision-making processes, give equal importance to the interests of each of their stakeholder groups, and strive for regional circularity.

This basic structure can be applied very widely, including to makerspaces, local-scale factories, community agriculture, food forests, permaculture, community hubs, bioregional learning centres & projects, and research & development labs. Two examples of successful cosmolocal networks are Fab Labs and Transition Network.

Cosmolocalism is designed to be applied to local nodes, which means it is very well-suited to local-scale factories that supply some or all of a single bioregion. These factories and the associated distribution channels can be designed to create regionally circular material flows, so that the materials used in products cycle around the bioregion again and again. This not only greatly decreases total environmental impact, it also creates a new dynamic of bioregional self-sufficiency.

If the materials keep cycling around the local economy, then once a factory is set up and enough raw materials are supplied to fill the materials cycle, few outside inputs are needed. There will be an ongoing need for energy and labour to keep the system running, but these can be provided locally. So long as the factory itself is kept in working condition and the materials continue to cycle around the economy, only small inputs of capital and materials will be necessary.

This dynamic of bioregional self-sufficiency makes it possible for the cosmolocal networks to have truly global inclusivity. Even in an area that is currently extremely poor, once a factory is set up, the initial raw materials supplied, and the people taught how to run the system and access the cosmolocal network, they can quickly catch up to the level of development embodied in the globally shared knowledge database. They will probably have different needs to places in the West, but such variety is incorporated into the model: they can use the network to find others in similar situations and share their experiences with them to collectively discover the best ways forward.

The combination of sharing developments globally and allowing different locales to apply them as appropriate to their own situations creates another possibility: a renewal of cultural diversity. In a cosmolocal system, individual bioregions can choose not only which material technologies they want to use, but also how they organise the work needed to manufacture them. This means that different bioregions can choose their own development paths independently of other bioregions, enabling new cultures to develop, and old cultures to be revitalised, around the world."

(https://paddyleflufy.substack.com/p/the-meta-solution-is-a-new-civilisation?)