COBALT: Collaborative for Bioregional Action, Learning, and Transformation

This remarkable team is based in the Gulf of Maine Bioregion, headquartered in Portland, Maine, unseeded Wabanaki Homeland, who blend western and indigenous ways of knowing to co-create activation energy for bioregional regeneration. They are led by Executive Director Glenn Page and supported by a world-class board of directors developing novel ways to see and amplify transformative change.

One area of focus is seagrass conservation and restoration in Casco Bay (land of the great blue heron) that integrates arts, ecological restoration, and traditional ecological wisdom with high quality collaboration and seemingly endless field-building efforts. They apply the direct on-the ground field work to shape a myriad of bioregional systems interconnections. No where else have we seen the ability to connect biosphere and carbon sequestration to grain production, craft beer distilling, wastewater treatment infrastructure and seagrass meadow health.

COBALT: Collaborative for Bioregional Action Learning and Transformation

COBALT is a virtuoso of nested systems, multiple perspectives, and dynamic boundaries that are full of “acupuncture points” for direct action that leads to transformative change. 

COBALT staff member Haley Fitzpatrick recently co-led a bioregional learning journey in Casco Bay applying principles she has recently published using embodied learning to better navigate the polycrisis at bioregional and global scales. COBALT developing their own bioregional pluriverse  (multiple perspectives and methodologies) and the BFI Design Lab is thrilled to be working alongside and actively supporting them in their remarkable comprehensive anticipatory design thinking!

They are developing what could be the world’s first Bioregional Digital Twin, marking phases of transformation for navigation of the polycrisis that weaves highly contextual strategic insight with decision-making frameworks and knowledge management systems. Their work is inspiring, rewarding, and visionary as they build agency and capacity for leadership. The Bioregional Digital Twin project is driven by COBALT and the UK-based geospatial visualization company Zedaxis Group. Starting with the Gulf of Maine and the River Tay watershed in Scotland, the project is creating new immersive visualizations – bioregional “digital twins” that can support community-driven transformative planning and action.

A Bioregional Digital Twin builds from the concept of a digital twin and focuses on patterns and processes that comprise the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. A Bioregional Digital Twin appreciates and weaves advances in social technology with those of digital technology, and emphasizes the critical importance of ethics, stewardship and bioregional governance. It is a vast, rich, living 3D model of the bioregion that people can explore and interact with, and which drives real world action through play mechanics to better see and grow a more regenerative approach to life in the Anthropocene.

The shifts needed are not easy, but individual and collective pathways can be navigated as we move from hyper-consumption to eco-stewardship, from gross domestic product to quality-of-life indicators that spreads open-source sharing of knowledge and appreciates the transitions from globalization to glocalization, moving towards to bioregional governance with support for citizen assemblies and distributed peerocracy.

The COBALT team is launching this concept of a Bioregional Digital Twin to draw together the knowledge and wisdom of a place into a single interface which can engage the widest range of stakeholders, offer deep understanding and inspire them to perform direct stewardship action in the real world. A Bioregional Digital Twin has several parts.

  • A sovereign and decentralized data collection about the place, scientific, cultural, economic, and geophysical.
  • A transformation of big data into knowledge through crowdsourcing and partnerships with leading academic, technology, AI and Earth observation organizations.
  • A unified interface to visualize, explore and understand the knowledge in a 3D immersive digital application.

In this Story Map, they explore a rough first draft at a “proto-bioregional digital twin,” bringing together data sets on the wider Casco Bay Bioregion’s governance, food systems, eelgrass beds, Wabanaki place-names, selected “Green Shoots of Change,” and more.

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