The Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed becomes member of Bioregional Organizing Team for the Forests of the Northeast Bioregion.
Regenerative design thinking has been at the core of what Alliance co-founder and Executive Director Maggie Favretti has been teaching for over 25 years. The idea that the human relationship with nature is continuously evolving - and that our infrastructures and relationships with land must embrace this fundamental inter-dependence for their mutual well being - has been at the core of our Associate Director, Z Grabowski’s research and writing. And yet these ideas are ancient, and underly many Indigenous knowledge systems and practices worldwide and right here at home on Pequot lands.
The Alliance seeks to apply regenerative design and thinking to address our intersecting needs for housing, climate resilience, ecological vitality, justice, and economic sustainability through holistic planning and projects in our ongoing Watershed Resilience Action Plan.
The idea that design can be used to regenerate people, ecosystems, and the human relationship with Earth has been taken up by hundreds of institutions, organizations, and individuals as an antidote to the narratives of decline and catastrophe invoked by our current experience of climate change and ecological collapse.
But what exactly is regeneration? How can regenerative thinking and design lead to new forms of social – ecological – and technological organization and structures?
At the core of the regenerative idea is cyclicity. Cyclicity is inherent in nature due to its fundamental duality. Birth is balanced by death; growth, by decay. Even maintenance requires cycles – each day we eat and excrete, we breathe in, we breathe out, wax on, wax off. By harnessing these cycles of activity and rest, building and decomposing, Nature has a deep capacity to regenerate itself.
The forests of the Northeast are a prime example – having been largely clearcut through the 19th century, the Northeastern Forest bioregion, stretching from New Jersey to the Maritime provinces – is now over 70% forested once again. Through this natural regeneration, soil is being regrown, biodiversity regained, carbon is stored in soils and plant tissues.
Another example comes from our own body, where the vast majority of our body’s cells will replace themselves within our life time. Supporting their healthy maintenance, replication, and capacity for self healing can heal, rather than treat the symptoms of, many chronic health conditions such as osteo-arthritis, muscle, bone, and joint injuries, cancers, and crucially, auto-immune and inflammatory disorders which are the fastest growing health problems in the United States. At the core of these approaches is eliminating the stressors that hinder our bodies capacity for regeneration (e.g. eliminating toxins from our diet and environment), and supporting its inherent capacity for healing (e.g. getting sufficient sleep and exercise and having healthy relationships).
Regenerative thinking and design treats humans as beings that can work in partnership natural systems to restore our mutual health and well-being. While approaches towards regenerative thinking have proliferated, and often conflict with one another, the idea is gaining ground in diverse fields, including medicine, urban planning and re-development, ecological regeneration, and regenerative agriculture and agro-forestry systems.
As part of this broader movement, the Alliance is working alongside partner regenerative thinking organizations including Capital Institute, CT River Valley Bioregional Collaborative and Regenerative Communities Network, the Center for an Ecology Based Economy, the Bio-Based Materials Collective, Wellspring Commons, CoFundEco, The Northeast Healthy Soils Network, and the Design School for Regenerating Earth, to propose a Bioregional Financing Facility for the Northeastern Bio-Region.
Working alongside our Mashantucket Pequot and Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation Allies, a key element of this facility would be a governance process that centers Tribal governance and philosophies of right relations to guide investments in a portfolio of regenerative projects. We will be participating in a workshop hosted by Foundation House on Friday September 20th, 2024, to build coherence in the Bioregional Organizing Team and start to brainstorm portfolios of projects and governance needs in sub-regional hubs and across the broader bio-region. Aided by the BioFi project’s Samantha Power and Edward West we are working collaboratively to accelerate regenerative financing and design in our bio-region.
Our little watershed cradling the Missi-tuck/Mystic River serves as a local hub for this broader regional organizing effort, and we hope to have a scaled approach where we further refine our place based model of collaboration in relation to regional Inter-tribal and non-Tribal-Tribal alliances. This effort builds off of and supports our regular Planners’ convenings, where the need for regenerative housing, economic development, water quality improvement, and ecological regeneration have emerged as cross cutting needs for all of our allies.
If you haven’t already, join the Alliance to receive our email newsletter and stay in the loop on this exciting and fast moving initiative along with our other program areas.
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Leave a comment below or send us an email at info@alliancemrw.org
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