Bioregion Clyde: The Gallus Bioregion
Bioregioning is understanding our place and caring for all those who live in it.
Mapping & Understanding the Natural & Cultural Systems
With the greatest density of population in Scotland, the region has had huge generational social and economic problems. Climate change has added new problems, meaning that all our communities currently face future environmental challenges.
Revealing the Problems and Challenges
But there are individuals and organizations who have already been working to make changes, to find solutions, and to develop regenerative cultures.
Identifying How and Where Communities Support Restoration, Regeneration & Reimagination of Life Ways
We are all part of different scales of community - from family, village, town, city to nation. We have more than one identity, more than one place, the Clyde Bioregion is your place too.
Supporting and Collaborating to nurture communities of the Clyde Bioregion
Bioregioning Clyde gets to the ‘heart of the matter’ to help address the many conditions that make life challenging and to explore potential solutions. We are exploring new ways of thinking, leading to creative solutions that work for everyone. We are building networks of people who are putting these ideas into action, building a brighter future together for all of us, and the generations to come.
VISION & MISSION
Bioregioning Clyde seeks to ‘dig from where we stand’ to get to the heart of what matters to people living and working here. We seek to work as a conduit between grass roots projects and higher level national and regional policies, cutting across political boundaries and practicing at a functional regional scale. There is no other entity practicing in this way at this landscape scale. This is the optimum time to build on existing synergies and practices, to learn together, and to support our good practices in the context of the climate and nature emergency and at a time when people need inspiration, collaboration and shared experiences (ICE) to build new levels of adaptive resilience going forward.
Vision
All communities of the Clyde Bioregion are flourishing and resilient, through regenerative systems, based on understanding of its ecology and culture, built through circular sustainable economies and care for place.
Mission
To grow a community of practice in the Clyde Bioregion’s, supporting them to collaborate, co-create and tackle its real world problems with shared long term vision and goals.
WHAT IS BIOREGION?
In The Bioregional Economy, Molly Scott Cato use the definition by Robert Thayer, that:
‘A bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’ – a unique region defined by natural (rather than political) boundaries with geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological character capable of supporting unique human and non-human living communities. Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related identifiable landforms and by unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region’
A fuller definition from the World Resources Institute also notes the importance of the geo-political dimensions of bioregioning:
‘Within this ecological and social framework, governmental, community, corporate, and other private interests share responsiblity for coordinating land-use planning for both public and private land and for defining and implementing development options that will ensure that human needs are met in a sustainable way. Innovative forms of institutional integration and social cooperation are needed to meet these needs. Dialogue among all interests, participatory planning, and great institutional flexibility are essential.’
John Thackera evokes the importance of grassroots action, stating
‘understanding that caring for the health of a place and persons who inhabit it are part of one story. With this care for place as their frame, communities are connecting the ‘what is’, with the ‘what if?’ across a range of activities…’
WHAT IS BIOREGIONING?
The Clyde Bioregion comprises a complex system of entangled human and more-than-human communities, a living landscape of dynamic inter-relationships, forces and pressures for change, realities and perceptions. But the process of bioregioning may be more akin to the tasks of care and kindness, developing a range of sensibilities and sensitivities, attentiveness to and respect for all kin within a shared bioregion.
Bioregioning recognises the significant problems we face, often relating to generational and landscape injustices, and that in some cases finding solutions will require systems change. Identifying and understanding the ‘problems’ and how they manifest specifically in the Clyde Bioregion is an important part of the process, whether these relate to over exploitation of marine fisheries, diffuse pollution, soil loss, food poverty, colonial legacies, discrimination, the climate crisis or so many other social and ecological challenges we currently face. One way we are framing this is trying to think in terms of ‘shifting the conditions that hold the problem in place’ : a phrase formulated by Social Innovation Canada.