BioRegional Data APIs
An OpenSource BioRegional Software Project
We are all well-aware of our bureaucratic address. The Town/City, County/District, State/Province, and Country in which we reside. But those lines and borders are starting to lose their usefulness and become enmeshed with the extortive and political systems that built them. We need a new way to identify our place in this world as we move towards a Regenerative future.
I was introduced to the term “BioRegional” when I attended my first Ozarks Area Community Congress. OACC is a beautiful gathering of loving people who care for the Ozarks BioRegion. It was a turning point in my life’s trajectory, and I have co-sponsored and attended every year since.
BioRegionalism is an answer to how we can relate to our place in this world without tying ourselves to the bureaucracy that holds us in extortive systems. It allows us to relate to our space by the environment/ecology/natural resources that we share, and the “borders” that nature has given us. OneEarth has created an awesome visual tool that allows us to explore these BioRegions.
The Federated Network of OpenSource Communities that I dream of uses BioRegions as a critical point of organization. I see BioRegional EcoCenters sprouting up, teaching and modeling how to live in BioHarmony with their local natural resources. They spawn sister villages, building a resilient local network and enabling us to build with localized Circular Systems.
But there is a lot of work to do to get BioRegionalism into the hearts and minds of more people. And that is why I have started the BioRegionalAPIs OpenSource Software project. It takes the data underlying the visual tool from OneEarth, and makes it easily accessible to other software projects.
Imagine signing up for the latest Regenerative Application (Tribes, ReVillager, RegenMatch, ReBe, etc). While you provide your other profile details, you can either provide your bureaucratic address or location data — and the application automatically populates your profile with your BioRegional categorizations. Not only are you now aware of your BioRegion/EcoRegion/Realm/SubRealm/Biome, but now you can easily find other people, organizations, or solutions that match.
I need this tool too, as a building block for OpenEcoBuilder. OpenEcoBuilder needs to organize the housing/food/energy solutions by the environments in which they are effective. For example, I wouldn’t want someone trying to build a standard EarthShip in my BioRegion. EarthShips are great for the Biome in which they originated, but here in the Ozarks, they fail.
Alosha from BioVeda is a BioArchitect that has been working on adapting EarthShip principles to his SubArctic BioRegion. Similarly, my Domesteading experiments are an attempt to adapt EarthShip principles to work in the Ozarks BioRegion. Because while the principles of an EarthShip are beautiful, their execution needs to be adapted to each BioRegion/Biome in order to be effective. This is the same for solutions to food and energy — they need to consider their natural environment to be the most effective.
If you like the sound of BioRegionalism and want to see these ideas spread to the next wave of Regenerative Applications, I am asking for support as an OpenSource Developer. The project is up on GitHub and has the basics working. Now I need to get it hosted publicly and start working with the projects that want to use it, expanding features/tests/documentation as I go.
From there, OpenEcoBuilder will be the next OpenSource project I am planning on tackling. A BioRegionally aware Village planner/simulator. More details for that project on GitHub as well.
Your support is welcome here on Substack, GitHub Sponsors, or GoFundMe.
Thank you!