The BioFi Book

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What People Are Saying

“Our institutions are no longer serving us. We must give birth to institutions that support a new kind of economy, a new kind of philosophy, a new kind of ontology, a new way of being on this planet. And Bioregional Financing Facilities can play a critical role in supporting that transition.”
‍- Lynne Twist, Founder: Pachamama Alliance

“A comprehensive articulation of some of the many possibilities to re-align financial capital with social and natural capital. It is rich with working examples from around the world that follow Jane Jacobs’s observation that economic development that mimics ecological development, a constant process of “differentiation emerging from generality,” offers hope of a more reliable prosperity.”
- Spencer Beebe, Founder: Ecotrust

“The regenerative economy I imagine MUST be built on a foundation of bioregionally adapted, landscape scale regeneration. Bioregional Financing Facilities are the critical missing infrastructure. A brilliant and timely clarion call!” 
- John Fullerton, Author: Regenerative Capitalism

Bioregional Financing Facilities provide a specific, fully integrated, comprehensive pathway for taking ecological economics and bioregionalism from the realm of the theoretical and visionary to operational implementation. In this astonishing work the epochal spiral comes around again in a living architecture of manifestation."
- David Haenke, Author: Ecological Politics and Bioregionalism

“We’re out of time to wait for governments, multilateral financial institutions, banks, donors, and others to get it right. They won’t. Creating locally based, Bioregional Financing Facilities is an approach too long ignored. By spelling out how to do this, the authors have done all of us who seek a finer future a great service. This is an idea that just might work and make a real difference.”
- Hunter Lovins, Author: Natural Capitalism

"This book opens the vitally important discourse about what kind of Bioregional Financing Facilities need to be established urgently to enable divestment from globalized patterns of degeneration and reinvest in bioregional regeneration."
- Daniel Christian Wahl, Author: Designing Regenerative Cultures

“Bioregional Finance Facilities are an aikido move to bring finance into right relationship with place, people and planet. Samantha and Leon have drawn a roadmap to shift the relationship between financial institutions and mechanisms from extractive and degenerative, to reciprocal and regenerative.” 
- Gregory Landua, Founder: Regen Network

Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet  was published in June 2024 and has since become an international bestseller and been translated into Spanish.

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What’s inside

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  • Why we are at a turning point for the Earth and the financial sector
  • The necessity of moving beyond “closing the nature finance gap”
  • How we get financial resources to synergistic portfolios of bioregional regeneration projects
  • An overview of Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) and their transformative potential
  • Templates for four types of BFFs: the Bioregional Trust, Bioregional Venture Studio, Bioregional Investment Company, and Bioregional Bank
  • Innovative approaches for capitalizing BFFs
  • 12 inspiring case studies showcasing bioregional initiatives around the world
  • A provocative call to action for a wide range of stakeholders

Key Messages from the Book

⚠️ Policymakers, institutional and individual wealth holders, and the general public are increasingly recognizing the severity of the current ecological collapse and the risk of further collapse cascading across our interdependent economic, political, and social systems.

💸 Large pools of capital have been committed to ‘nature’ to respond to this crisis. However both traditional and novel institutional financing mechanisms and methodologies risk perpetuating the same extractive processes and power structures driving the crisis.

🏞 Many important regenerative projects and initiatives are led by people with deep relationships to place who are best positioned to both utilize this capital and support the design of contextually-sensitive financing practices more likely to produce regenerative outcomes.

🔎 However, these projects and initiatives, many of which are small scale and informal, are often structurally excluded from capital sources or considered illegible to capital holders.

🤝 Communities around the globe are building networks of bioregional collaboration and solidarity, creating Bioregional Learning Centers and Bioregional Hubs that grow capacity for place-based learning and coordination towards regenerative economies.

🌳 We propose “Bioregional Financing Facilities” (BFFs) as an institutional template to empower these networks by connecting pools of capital to regenerative projects and initiatives, and structuring these capital flows in alignment with living systems principles and Indigenous wisdom.

Bioregional Financing Facilities drive:
➡️ the decentralization of financial resource governance
➡️ the design of project portfolios for systemic change
➡️ and the transition to a regenerative economy. 

They become the connective tissue between:
💰 centralized financial resources
🍄 and the mycelial network of regeneration.

🌎 BFFs can enable financial capital to support the strengthening of relationships between community members, between stewards and the lands and waters they tend, and amongst all of the more-than-human life and living processes in those lands and waters. 

🌻 The warning signs from the Earth we are experiencing can be seen as an invitation to remember our interconnectedness with all life on the planet and begin embedding relationality, reciprocity, responsibility, respect, reverence, redistribution, reconnection, and critically, regeneration, in all that we design and build at this juncture – including our financial systems.