Writer, social entrepreneur and non-profit leader
November 2025
Pictured above: Haida Gwaii from outer space. Islands of coherence in a sea of chaos.
Nation states are failing before our eyes.
Convulsions in seemingly every corner of the globe appear to be beyond the design specifications of our national and international agencies and institutions to solve for.
Nation states are not just struggling but are manifestly refusing to acknowledge that we have overshot the planet’s ecological carrying capacity. Although unfettered global capitalism appears to be entering its terminal stage, it is doing so noisily, unwillingly, murderously and destructively. Our “inordinate obsession with wealth,” as Paul Hawken describes our addiction to capitalism’s imperative – endless economic growth – dooms us to wilfully abet the wrecking of the planet, imperilling nature, ourselves, and future generations.
Not just governments, but legacy institutions and industries of all stripes are fighting to maintain their relevance, their size, their power, their market share, their influence. In the face of disruptions to just about everything, they lack resilience – too large in their reach, too concentrated in their ownership and governance, too resistant to change.
New patterns, new forms of organization are needed that are more suited to the particularities of place, are more responsive to our rapidly changing needs (and threats), and are more sharply held to account by citizens.
Nature states are proposed as new units of social, cultural and economic organization and responsibility that can speed an urgent transition to systems of local and regional production, exchange, finance and governance that meet essential human needs without destroying the planet’s natural capital. Nature states are where democracy can be rescued from global capitalism, can recover its purpose, and give hope to millions of people who yearn to build a better, safer world.
“When a complex system is far from equilibrium,
small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos
have the capacity to shift the entire system
to a higher order.”
– Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist, Ilya Prigogine
In these times of gross disequilibrium and increasing chaos, it seems urgent that we identify, invest in, support, learn from and amplify “islands of coherence” that exemplify how it is we can swerve (the time for minor course corrections has long since passed) from the doomed course our species has set for ourselves.
If, after almost eight decades, Winston Churchill’s formulation still holds – that democracy is the least worst system of governance available to us – then it is high time we took our shopworn democracy back from the corporate freebooters who have poisoned its ideals and perverted its practice to the point that, in the hands of nation states, there is little daylight left between democracies and autocracies.[i]
Perhaps in nature states, with the consequences of climate change announcing themselves daily in communities far from the centres of power and capital and influence, it is possible to imagine a root and branch reordering of our species’ relationship to nature and to natural capital – and to each other – before the human experiment collapses under the weight of its manifest contradictions.
Where to start is at home.
In nature states, home is a watershed.
“Everyone lives in a watershed,” writes Robert Macfarlane.[ii] Watersheds can be as big as the Amazon basin or as small as my city of Vancouver’s recently daylit Canyon Creek. Alaska’s magnificent Prince William Sound is home to the Copper River watershed. The Los Angeles River is a watershed, too, albeit notable more for being lined with concrete than as a good place to snag a steelhead. The Hudson River Valley in New York state is nourished by hundreds of watersheds. New York City was once “a water-city,” Macfarlane writes. “West Broadway was once a wetland.”
And so on. Everywhere you look, everywhere you live, is a nature state – albeit, with distressing frequency, a place whose natural attributes and assets have been subduced and subsumed by rampant development or resource extraction.
Watersheds, in whatever condition, are the fractal tiles, the common denominators of nature states. They – unlike nations, federated states, provinces, municipalities – are unbounded by arbitrary lines on maps.
There are no straight lines in nature states. With their diverse ecologies, and among their diverse inhabitants, watersheds have distinctive natural, cultural, social, and financial capital reserves, which for millennia have attracted and nurtured various forms of human organization. Our daily lives, our homes, our workplaces, our families, our diets, our tastes, our mindsets are in large measure determined by the natural boundaries and bounties of our natal or adopted watersheds. They give shape to social organization and to unique ways of seeing and being in the world.
They, like we, are not equal, which is a strength.
Taken together, muralled, watersheds cohere as bioregions, distinguished by commonalities that owe much more to natural phenomena and ecosystem functions than to contrived or enforced allegiances to a Crown or an outdated Constitution.
Nature states draw on the learnings of bioregionalism which, dating back to the 1970s, has been seen by many scholars, activists and systems thinkers (and at least some philanthropists and investors) as a way to both reset human relationships with nature, and reframe our social and economic systems around abundance, stability, regeneration and shared equity. (Of course Indigenous communities have known this all along, they just never assigned it an “ism.”)
“The bioregional movement,” one paper posits, “is a diverse and evolving ecosystem of people, teams, organizations, and institutions working to realign human systems with ecological principles. While practices vary across contexts, the unifying thread is a commitment to relocalizing knowledge, governance, and economies based on the unique characteristics of each bioregion.”
Many if not most of these efforts originate from, or gravitate towards, ecological restoration or regeneration, or outright conservation.
To that end, bioregionalism – like environmentalism – suffers from a branding problem. It can sound niche, elitist, exclusive, aspirational, uninviting, sometimes almost cult-like and, well, damp. Little wonder that it is summarized, on Wikipedia at least, as “simply political localism with an ecological foundation.” That might be unfair, but it is not surprising given that, by definition, bioregionalism favors natural expressions (bioregions, ecoregions) over political or social ones (nations, states, provinces, cities, towns, districts, cantons, prefectures, länders, parishes et.al.).
If it’s not surprising that bioregionalism tills much of the same ground as environmentalism, it’s not particularly helpful either, because if we’ve learned anything in the past fifty years it’s that environmentalism suffers from a sort of pattern recognition that condemns it to remain at the margins of many peoples’ consciousness when our political lantern bearers preach the scriptures of everlasting economic growth and jobs and trinkets for all. In a world that has become almost reflexively polarized, bioregionalism’s “ecological foundation” risks pigeonholing it as just another form of environmentalism, or worse, utopianism.
I say “we” above because, for more than thirty years – first with Ecotrust and later with Salmon Nation – our mission progressed through what we first called “conservation-based development” to what one-time board member Jane Jacobs urged us to think of as a “conservation economy” to what we most recently have labelled “nature states.”
While never self-identifying as bioregionalists, we put in place many groundbreaking institutional pieces that closely resemble what people are advocating for now: revolving loan funds, environmental banks, conservation finance, local learning centres and physical hubs, endowed trusts, multiple investments in community development and cultural renewal, extensive mapping and data-driven sense making, leadership awards, collaborations (especially with First Nations), convenings, field trips, celebrations, and a steady stream of books and films and reports and all manner of storytelling that made the case for a conservation economy – bioregionalism by another name – at home and abroad.
And it wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.
In the realpolitik and realeconomik of global affairs right now, bioregionalism remains a rounding error in the way the world produces, trades and consumes pretty much everything. If now – in the search for answers to the global and national polycrises that confront us – there is indeed a resurgence of interest in bioregionalism, then it behooves us to do more than just more bioregionalism.
It is an error to think that doing more of the same the same way will save us from ourselves.
Remember the old adage – think globally, act locally? Well, bioregionalists may have done yeoman’s service in learning how to act locally, but we have missed the mark at thinking and acting globally. That’s where nature states come in.
***
“The global economy and global ecology speak with one voice in proclaiming
both the growing irrelevance of national sovereignty
and the inevitable emergence of much more organic global,
continental, regional and local forms of government.”
– Former director of the O’Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West, Daniel Kemmis (emphasis added)
It was a quarter of a century ago that Daniel Kemmis penned an essay – “Learning to think like a region” – in High Country News. His provocation was that the rectilinearity of nation states “runs counter to every impulse we have.” Devolution of powers to regions “is how America is beginning to experience the end of the nation-state.”
That his prescience wasn’t emphatically rewarded in the following 25 years speaks volumes about how tenaciously those who benefit from statist power refuse to surrender the field. Existing forms of government are the product of ingrained human habits and behaviors that are not easily overcome, especially through electoral systems that enforce a deficit of political courage, imagination and probity – and then a madman gets elected, in which case all bets are off.
But honestly, what better time to reinvigorate a movement towards local and regional development than right now, when the limitations of nation states are so luridly evident in just about every aspect of 21st century life?
If we allow ourselves for a moment to enter a state of what Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously called a “willing suspension of disbelief,” then it is possible to imagine a world, an economy, designed not to exploit nature – or subdue it, as the Book of Genesis urged us to do – but to wholly embrace the by-now obvious truism that our species is utterly dependent on nature for our continued existence on Earth.
Admittedly the word “designed” in the previous paragraph assigns a degree of anthropocentrism that is itself a barrier to imagining what nature states are. To that end, it is exciting to learn of efforts promoted by the Berggruen Institute to draft a “speculative constitution that includes humans and non-humans as political subjects. We want to create a language that centers multispecies mutualism rather than human exceptionalism, and collective intelligences rather than individualized human knowledge… Staging a new system of multispecies governance built upon planetary, rather than anthropocentric, principles, is difficult—even controversial. But it is precisely the aim of the project. We aim to spark acts of unorthodox imagination.”
So, disbelief suspended, imagine that – by organizing ourselves around the world into nature states – we are able to decouple democracy from capitalism. Because when it comes right down to it, that is the only way to save democracy.
Imagine that our governing elites actually took seriously the fact that the state of nature is the most important measure of the health and wealth of our human communities. Imagine a State of Nature address – delivered with an enforceable duty of candor – as an annual highlight of the political calendar, not just in Washington but in every nature state in the world. Imagine that our public trading floors took stock of the health of the planet via indices that measure environmental goals and that our markets punished poor performance against them. Imagine there were strict limits on wealth creation, or at least its accumulation. What if that capitalist trompe l’œil called philanthropy were to be redesigned not to serve up tax exemptions to the wealthy, but to comprehensively redistribute wealth to communities according to priorities determined by them. Globally, nature states could transact agreements to share wealth and knowledge at the United Natures. No-one would have to hold their hand to their heart at the sight or sound of “rockets’ red glare … bombs bursting in air,” not when another measure of nature states would be the size of their peace dividends. As for metrics, how about Gross Natural Fairness? How about an annual Word Fairness Forum, a kind of anti-Davos to the smug elixirs that annually trickle down off the Swiss alps where glacier melt used to flow.
Etcetera. Thank you Coleridge.
Back down near (rising) sea level, thank you John Cassidy for Capitalism and Its Critics, in which he writes. “There is no quick fix for 21st-century capitalism. The entire system needs a makeover.”
Cassidy surveys ideas from de-growth to making growth “greener” to “shrinking” capitalism to spaces where it can do less damage. He cites a 2019 essay, Economics After Neoliberalism, that offers an extensive list of policy ideas under the rubric of “inclusive prosperity.” They include, Cassidy writes, wage boards to rein in employers’ market power; expanding early childhood education programs; tackling tax avoidance by taxing multinational corporations where they make their sales; reforming the patent system to reduce the monopoly power of big pharma and other intellectual property holders; beefing up international financial regulation; and including labour standards in trade agreements.
One can add plenty more to that list of issues: food insecurity; unaffordability of shelter; gender and racial discrimination; growing misogyny; polarization and the erosion of social trust; excessive wealth accumulation; modern child labor; weakening environmental protections; employment precarity; monopolistic media; bad governance; gross subsidization of polluting industries … choose your poison, and capitalism will serve it up, for a price.
Around the world, there have been any number of efforts to re-imagine capitalism and financialization to curb their worst effects: wholesale re-designs like the New Green Deal, ReGen Villages, the Degrowth Manifesto and the Leap Manifesto; new exchange systems like mutual credit, LETSystem, crypto, OCUs, ledgers, smart contracts, CICs, tokens, TEQs; and broader constructs like glocalization, decroissance, limitarianism, and indeed, bioregionalism.
But to date, attempts to re-imagine capitalism have largely assumed that nation states remain the containers within which reforms must be designed and developed. By definition that means they run up against the rigidity and resistance to change that is the hallmark of modern political and financial institutions.
What is missing still is a gripping, exciting, attractive, well branded and wildly aspirational global recontouring of what our communities could look like – what life could be like – if we committed to putting nature, the state of nature, the nature state, at the center of everything we did in the world.
It is not a naïve premise to imagine that nature states can and must embody many of the reforms that the world is crying out for. For one thing, promoting nature states doesn’t require us to defeat nation states, which of course won’t surrender their power easily, any more than the holders of massive private wealth will surrender theirs.
The beauty of nature states is that they can grow within and without nations. They can effectively act in parallel as powerful vessels – strange attractors, if you will – for responsive and enlightened policy, investment, innovation, governance and public discourse that can bend the arc of human conduct to something more forgiving to each other and the Earth.
Ideally, they will become the default that creates what Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls a “decentralised economy with a rich ecology of institutions” that aren’t contorted by the search for growth and profit.
If, as in Cassidy’s formulation, the “entire system” of capitalism needs to be reformed, then it is fair to ask what systems thinkers might have to say about that. In fact they already have, long ago – in the 1970s actually, when Donella Meadows and her colleagues authored Limits to Growth. It is salutary to reflect on how the world might have turned out differently if we had heeded their advice.
Today, the world is jam-packed with soi-disant systems thinkers – the tidepools of bioregionalism are crowded with them – although it is hard to find examples of where systems thinking actually meets systems change in real communities in real time at a scale that matters.
If, in a world vastly more complex and contested than the 1970s, systems thinking can help us elevate our efforts well beyond localized aspirations to widespread applications that contribute meaningfully to global systems reforms, then systems thinkers (and bioregionalists) need to reframe their efforts not by how precocious they are, but by their ability to be replicated and scaled to meet the urgency and the complexity of the times.
And, not incidentally, that they are designed and offered up in co-creation with communities that are at the frontlines of where the ruination of the planet is felt most acutely; and that they are explicable in plain language; and that they can be translated into action. No small ask.
Where and how to get started? The Cascade Institute is one place where clear-eyed analysis of what ails nation states – the “extreme dangers” of “an irreversible shift to a new pathway that would radically degrade human well-being and civilization’s long-term prospects” – might also yield what it characterizes as “extreme opportunities” to get things right.
“The opportunities arise from the enormous leverage available in highly nonlinear systems, if the right intervention points can be found and exploited. In today’s complex, hyper-connected global systems, a series of precisely targeted and timed interventions could produce a virtuous cascade of change that helps flip humanity onto a far more positive path.” (emphasis added)
So what and where, precisely, are these precisely targeted and timed interventions to be found, or tried? Who gets to decide? And who will foot the very big bill for rousing our civil society out of its learned helplessness and onto a path of radical redesign of systems that, left unchecked, will kill or maim all but what Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta calls a “ruling minority of lustful sociopaths networked across the Earth.”
Happily, there are powerful examples to look to.
There are many expressions of and experiments in better forms of democracy, a fan favorite being deliberative democracy as practised through citizen’s panels, part of a “deliberative wave” in Europe that includes more than 300 different “reasons and routes for embedding deliberative activities into public institutions to give citizens a more permanent and meaningful role in shaping the policies affecting their lives.”
One the most popular distaff solutions for how to better live in symbiosis with nature is to seek guidance from First Nations, whose matrilineal societies survived for tens of thousands of years without recourse to materials arriving in a shipping container from China.
In Salmon Nation, we are privileged to witness with increasing and heartening frequency the once-outlawed phenomena of the potlatch, powerful gatherings in which laws are given force and authority, chieftainships are awarded and consecrated, names are conferred, slights and harms are forgiven, and gifts are given without expectation of compensatory rewards. The idea of a gift economy is central to what feminist scholar Genevieve Vaughn[iii] characterizes as women-centered societies in which mothering, not marketing, not money, dictates how exchanges take place. There are lessons to be learned from the potlatch.
There are lessons, too, to be taken from the frontlines of resistance, like the Haida Nation. If ever there were “islands of coherence” to steer our Magic Canoe[iv] towards, theirs are they: an archipelago of around 150 actual islands off the west coast of what some people call Canada, just south of the territorial waters of Alaska. There, the Haida people, with their own constitution, with their potlatching and feasting, with their monumental art, their matriarchal society, and with the wisdom of one of the world’s oldest living civilizations to fall back on, have in recent times won a long-running battle with British Columbia and Canada to be recognized as having title to their homelands. They have won the right, not that they ever surrendered it, to (re)build a society on their own terms.
“We had never ceded, surrendered or in any way given up our title to the land,” said Gaagwiis Jason Alsop, president of the Haida Nation, at the British Columbia Legislature in April 2024, when the Crown introduced legislation to recognize Aboriginal title throughout Haida Gwaii. “Our people have asserted our sovereignty against the threats to Haida Gwaii, against colonial occupation, since the very beginning of the Crown trying to assert their sovereignty upon us, to great sacrifice of many who put themselves on the line and risk themselves and their families.”
Gaagwiis envisioned building something new, learning “from the mistakes of this colonial experience together and to draw upon Haida culture and values to heal, to make things right, and take the best of what we all have to offer from our collective experience.
“With this (legislative) bill, we can face the truth head-on and instil hope that we can face the troubles of this world together based on respect and not fear, that we can heal our relationships with each other and the land and the waters, that we can change our behaviours as humans, change the systems that are harming this Earth and each other, and have hope, that as a result of our collective efforts, that these supernatural forces would take some pity on us.”
Another way in which nature states may become legible and liveable-inable (ed: new phrase alert!) is through formally honoring rights of nature – perhaps embedded in constitutions, as is the case in nation states like Ecuador, or by giving “personhood” to natural entities such as rivers, or to specific species, such as salmon. For instance, in Salmon Nation alone, the Yurok, Nez Perce and Sauk-Suiattle tribes have assigned rights of personhood to the Klamath River, Snake River and to wild salmon respectively. Just weeks ago in British Columbia, Nuu-Chah-nulth and other First Nations leaders rallied behind a declaration to remove open net pen fish farms from BC waters once and for all, just like what happened south of the “border” in what has recently been renamed the Salish Sea.
Rights of nature can and do nestle easily alongside human rights and Indigenous rights, adding more voices – per Berggruen, more non-human “collective intelligences” – to how we might answer the call to get back inside the limits of what the Potsdam Institute describes as a “safe operating space” for humanity.
Perhaps the Potsdam Institute’s work on planetary boundaries could be adapted to bioregional scales that are legible and actionable closer to home, to give local communities the tools they need to stay safe, and a framework – nature states – which, linked to each other, could reveal patterns around the world that could inspire action and investment to help shift the entire system to a higher order. Pieced together, strong and compelling narratives of the attributes and benefits of nature states could enable us to navigate to safer ground before it’s too late.
For eight decades, since the end of World War II, we have told ourselves that boundless economic growth, unchecked global capitalism and constant technological innovation would make our world safer, our citizens more secure, our societies fairer. In this current, disruptive global phase change, we need new stories, new narratives, new proofs of possibility and new institutions to pursue and manage the dramatic changes that our nation states have proven so incapable of making they’ve stopped trying.
“A broken planet lies before us,” writes Paul Hawken, “but there is also a buzzing, thrumming, living sphere imbued with imagination, mystery, and courage … life-giving communities (that) are smaller, submerged, and unnoticed by mega-institutions whose marketing, publicity, and social media dominate our lives. The actions of citizen-led and Indigenous communities are based on reciprocity, mutualism, and reconciliation with the natural world, qualities that do not lend themselves to the news cycle … the movement to regenerate the living world exists in thousands of organizations and millions of people.” (emphasis added)
I would love to think Hawken is right, that there is indeed a movement of millions that is flying under the radar, that bioregionalism is a safety net from our planetary overshoot that is hiding in plain sight. If our recovery from the current disorder demands that we build back bioregional (because the urge to build is one we will never shake) then a big part of what nature states can do is help surface the millions of points of light in a broad and peaceful sky (with apologies to George H.W. Bush, of all people), to identify the places and the people – and their non-human allies – who, collectively, can cohere around a vision, a mindset, a hierarchy of needs that is no longer corrupted by capitalism’s hierarchy of greeds.
We might start by alighting on islands of coherence, the better that we can help scale out, not up, how we humans can satisfy the modest expectation that people the world over should be free to lead decent lives by having access to a fair share of their natural capital, to have and to trade, and the right to protect themselves and their homes from government-enabled corporations that confuse profit with prosperity.
Let’s map nature states the world over. Let’s redraw the map of the world in the knowledge that in nature states, a better world is there, is here, for the making.
[i] If this sounds hyperbolic, consider that the The V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg questions whether the United States even qualifies any more as being a liberal democracy. https://www.v-dem.net/documents/61/v-dem-dr__2025_lowres_v2.pdf
[ii] Macfarlane, Robert. “Is A River Alive?” Random House Canada. 2025, p.23
[iii] Vaughn, Genevieve (ed). “Women and the Gift Economy – A Radically Different World View is Possible.” Inanna Publications, Toronto. 2007.
[iv] Magic Canoe is a storytelling platform created by Salmon Nation to help promote positive solutions in the bioregion.