How BEC Began

The Bioregional Explorers Club (BEC) began in 2024 with a series of questions:

What does bioregional consciousness and culture look like in our modern context?
Are we familiar with our own bioregion on a body level? Do we understand its rhythms? What happens when we stop relating to where we live as a backdrop, and start relating to it as a living community?

And because joy and humor are core to our ethos:

How do we throw the best party ever and invite all our friends to meet each other?

In a time of increasing isolation, social fragmentation, ecological uncertainty, and widening global instability, our small group of Bay Area friends began gathering to explore the landscapes, waterways, food systems, histories, and ecologies of the place we call home.

We were a motley crew of artists, ecologists, organizers, educators, outdoor enthusiasts, and place-curious people of all ages looking for more grounded forms of connection and participation.

Our first expedition brought 35 people to a little-known creek in the San Francisco Bay-Delta bioregion. We unloaded kayaks first thing in the morning, did box breathing together on the riverbanks, and framed the day with stories about the watershed we were standing in — including beaver restoration and contamination upstream — before paddling into places none of us had explored before.

At our second stop, we harvested seaweed with a local storyteller and ocean humanities researcher while learning about kelp forests, sea star die-offs, sea otters, and ocean warming. At our third stop, we cooked the harvest together at a friend’s farm and ended the day around a long communal table sharing stories, songs, poetry, and reflections.

Before the day was even over, people were asking:
“When is the next one?!”

What Happens at BEC

Participants described feeling more alive, hopeful, connected to one another, and more rooted in place. Some even started speaking as though they had developed new place-based identities:
“Back at my river…”

Since then, BEC has grown organically to nearly 300 participants across the Bay Area through expeditions, salons, shared meals, porching sessions, and collaborative organizing. Some participants regularly drive up to three hours to attend gatherings.

BEC is free and community-supported. It creates opportunities for connection outside ordinary transactional roles and routines. We believe spaces like this are vital for resilience, ecological participation, and social cohesion.

BEC also fills a subtle but important niche. It is not simply outdoor recreation or environmental education. Participants sometimes describe it as an “athletic sangha” — an evolving practice for cultivating bioregional consciousness through embodied experience, ecological literacy, shared inquiry, collaborative celebration, and direct relationship with place.

When BEC invites people to walk their watershed, learn seasonal rhythms, share stories of place, and build ongoing relationships with one another and the living world around them, we are not simply exchanging ecological knowledge. We are helping restore context, participation, relationship, and belonging.

Our Theory of Change

Our theory of change is simple.

Care follows perception.

We believe long-term ecological regeneration depends on people developing lived relationships with the places they inhabit and the human and more-than-human communities they are embedded within.

Through shared experience, movement across landscapes, ecological learning, and ongoing community participation, people develop deeper place-based literacy, stronger systems awareness, and a more felt sense of responsibility toward the ecosystems and communities around them. They become better able to recognize patterns, understand cause and effect in place, and participate more meaningfully in the stewardship efforts and collective decisions that shape the future of their bioregion.

Stewardship in Practice

Many BEC expeditions include habitat observation, watershed literacy, native plant propagation, invasive species removal, ecological storytelling, foraging ethics, and direct engagement with the specific challenges facing local ecosystems.

Over the past two years, BEC participants have collectively removed thousands of pounds of overpopulated purple sea urchins from Northern California kelp ecosystems to support kelp recovery efforts, participated in litter cleanups, soil remediation, and invasive plant removal projects, and begun propagating native Valley Oaks collected during BEC wild-tending expeditions for future planting efforts in the East Bay.

BEC gatherings often become catalysts for ongoing stewardship projects, restoration efforts, skill-sharing networks, and long-term community relationships that continue well beyond the expeditions themselves.

What Ma Earth Funding Will Support

With support from Ma Earth, we will continue developing and pilot a replicable “BEC Field Kit” to help small place-based BEC chapters emerge in other communities.

The Field Kit is already underway. Over the past two years, organizers have begun documenting the practices, structures, invitations, and cultural elements that have helped BEC grow organically. Interest from emerging groups has made it clear that a more complete and accessible Field Kit is needed, but progress has been limited by volunteer capacity and competing work commitments.

Rather than scaling up into a centralized organization, we aim to scale deep and wide: supporting many locally distinct BEC chapters adapted to their own landscapes, ecologies, communities, and ways of life.

Over the next 12 months, we will chronicle, refine, and expand the practices that have helped BEC grow organically, including:

lightweight digital infrastructure for decentralized organizing
expedition design and facilitation arcs
underlying philosophy and cultural ethos
hosting and decentralized organizing roles
invitation, onboarding, and threshold culture
learning, documentation, and iteration practices.

Funding will support organizer stipends, interviews, documentation, Field Kit development, mentorship for emerging organizers, pilot testing with new groups, and expanded storytelling capacity.

The upcoming Turtle Island Bioregional Congress near Portland, Oregon will provide an important opportunity for continent-wide relationship-building, feedback, and early pilot connections with organizers from other bioregions.

We are already in conversation with people interested in starting locally adapted chapters in neighboring regions and other bioregions beyond the Bay Area, including in Ohio and Oregon.

Feedback and lessons from these emerging groups will inform future editions of the Field Kit, helping us create a living resource that becomes more useful and adaptable over time.

Our Hope

We envision the re-emergence of bioregional cultures rooted in relationship, reciprocity, and belonging—communities that know their places, care for the living systems that sustain them, and build resilient local futures together.