We All Live in a Bioregion

Understanding the life place that connects us to the living systems of Earth

Bridgid Normand copy and photo credits. Additional photo credits to NASA

Date Published: 18 March 2026

We all make our homes within a particular place on our extraordinary planet. This is our life place – the place where we live and the place that gives us life. We drink its waters, we breathe its air, we mingle with the more-than-human beings that also call this place home — the trees, the animals, the insects, and the flowers. Some of our human food, and all of the food for our more-than-human relatives, is grown in its soils, or comes from its seas. And all of us living beings — whether we have roots or wings, mycelia or legs, depend on a healthy life place. We cannot live without it or without each other. And our life places are woven together into larger areas of land called bioregions.
NASA image - Wonder globe - looking at the Earth from space

To really understand what a bioregion is we need to start with our Earth. When photos of the Earth from space were first seen, we humans began to grasp not only the beauty and uniqueness of our Earth, but how it is truly a living, interconnected system. The Earth functions as a dynamic web of relationships.  

Clouds move with the wind across mountains. Rain falls from clouds onto land, gathers into rivers, and flows into seas. The seawater evaporates, becomes clouds again, and returns as rain, replenishing the soils and forests and supporting all life. No part of the Earth exists in isolation. Every part participates in the planetary patterns that make this Earth habitable.  

Seen from space, there are no nation states, political boundaries, or administrative zones. There is only a living system of vast complexity – and we have the miraculous gift of being alive within it, and an inextricable part of it. 

Physical features of Scottish landscape — Glen Dye. Photo credit Bridgid Normand

We experience our living Earth through the specific landscapes within which we live. Each landscape has its own physical features – mountains, bedrocks and landforms – its geology. These features shape the movement of water – its hydrology – forming river valleys, lakes, estuaries, and seas. Together they influence rainfall patterns, erosion, winds, and the movement of sediment. These physical features help define the boundaries of what we call a bioregion. Each bioregion is nested within larger regions and ultimately within the Earth, and its location determines its climate. 

But a bioregion is more than physical geography. It is also the ecosystems, the biomes, and the ecoregions that exist within these boundaries. It encompasses the unique soils and the native plant and animal communities that have evolved together within the bioregion. 

Importantly, a bioregion also includes us -human beings – and the ways our cultures and lifeways have co-evolved with our local ecosystems. Just as each bioregion is unique, human cultures have evolved to be unique as well. For most of human history, these place-based ways of being were deeply attuned to the bioregion. However, over the centuries of industrialisation and fossil fuel extraction, our ways of being have brought great change to our bioregions and our Earth. Humans have always impacted the land, the plants and animals around us, but the scale and speed of our impact in the last two hundred years has been deeply harmful.

Today we are experiencing increasing climate disruption and ongoing species extinction. Human activity is now threatening the nine critical interdependent global processes that regulate the stability of life on Earth. These processes are known as the planetary boundaries and scientists have estimated that seven of the nine have likely been crossed as of this year. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html
High tide and waves at Stonehaven. Photo credit Bridgid Normand

To address the unraveling of these planetary processes, a growing global movement is turning toward bioregionalism. Around the world people are choosing the bioregion as a foundation for climate action and Earth regeneration.  

Bioregions matter because although climate disruption and biodiversity loss are planetary in scale, their impacts are experienced locally – in the landscapes, watersheds, forests, rivers and coastlines that make up a bioregion. 

Bioregions themselves nest together to form continents and continents are surrounded by the planetary seas and oceans. All of it is connected through the great climate patterns that flow around the globe. 

This means that our responses to climate disruption and biodiversity loss must be rooted in the knowledge of and needs of our life places. Our efforts at regeneration, adaptation and resilience must be interconnected and in deep relationship with the bioregion. Our climate action must be rooted in care for the living systems of the planet – in the places where we live. 

When we truly understand that we belong to a place – and that our place is part of a larger living  landscape – it grounds us in the actions we need to take. This awareness weaves us together with all other people and actions that are taking place in our bioregion.  

And we can know that what we do in our bioregion can positively impact other bioregions around us and around the world. 

Burn of Elsick flowing into the North Sea at Newtonhill Bay. Photo credit Bridgid Normand

I myself moved to this bioregion only recently. I live in the water catchment of the Burn of Elsick. It is my new life place and I love it! I have been immersing myself in its landscape and connecting with other folks who are caring for it and the human and more-than-human communities that live here.  

Let us invite the living systems of our bioregion to shape our climate actions. Let us remember that what each of us does is a thread in the wider weaving of action in this place we call home.