What are Communities of Practice?
Local Watersheds is a platform for engaging within an ecological community of practice, in bioregional communities of practice across the world. This is why Local Watersheds will consist of one large database of open educational resources for the whole biosphere (cross-referenced, searchable, geolocated, semantic tagging).
Communities of practice have three parts: domain, community, and practice. There are three three modes of belonging crucial to the formation of identity (and thus learning) within any community of practice: engagement, imagination and alignment.
Let’s walk through each component.
The Local Watersheds Domain
Our domain is the biosphere, or more specifically, the biosphere as a commons. Let’s call it the biospherical commons. Within the biospherical commons, our primary focus is ecological literacy with a goal of understanding and enacting posthumanism.
According to National Geographic, “The biosphere is made up of the parts of Earth where life exists. The biosphere extends from the deepest root systems of trees, to the dark environment of ocean trenches, to the lush rainforests and high mountaintops.”
According to NASA, “The Biosphere includes all life on Earth including life living on the Earth’s Geosphere and in Hydrosphere, including humans and all organic matter that has not yet decomposed. This important sphere distinguishes Earth from all other planets in our solar system as life evolved (and continues to evolve) since Earth’s early history between 4.5 and 3.8 billion years ago.”Within the Wikipedia entry about the biosphere, we can learn that “The term “biosphere” was coined in 1875 by geologist Eduard Suess, who defined it as the place on Earth’s surface where life dwells.”
The Local Watersheds Community
Our local bioregional community consists of the humans living in the Upper New River bioregion. Also, we humans must responsibly serve as representatives, as proxies, for all other species living in and passing through our bioregional community.
Who speaks for the trees and the bees, the bobcats and the bears, the fish, frogs, and fungi, the plants and the ants?We all have a lot to learn about the nonhuman members of our biospherical community, such as the flora, the fauna, and the fungi. As we all continue to learn, there is ongoing debate concerning the best way to “classify” all forms of life in the biosphere, including humans as one species among trillions.
The Local Watersheds Practice
This is the focus around which our community develops, shares, and maintains our core of knowledge. We are lifelong learners, and these are the topics we select for discussion and exchange: bioregional learning, planning, building.
We select stewardship and systems wisdom: defy the disciplines, get the beat of the system, expose our mental models to the light of day stay humble, stay a learner, locate responsibility within the system, expand time horizons, make feedback policies for feedback systems, etc.
Engaging with Local Watersheds
Within our community, mutual engagement creates a shared reality in which we can all act and construct an identity, a sense of place. This engagement can happen in person, and it can happen asynchronously, through digital platforms and communication systems, like the Local Watersheds platform.
In our community, we strive for mutual engagement that is topical and multigenerational. We must learn from each other, old and new. We are all part of an ongoing collective, where we are actively negotiating meaning through our engagement with each other and other species in our bioregion.
This is where bioregional learning, planning, and building (as supported by Local Watersheds as a platform) will feed on each other as forms of relevant mutual engagement. As multigenerational learners, planners, and builders interact within the bioregion, the bioregion itself will take a more refined and recognizable shape for all those engaged, creating a much more expansive bioregional sense of place for all humans involved as learners, planners, and builders.
Aligning with Local Watersheds
Members of our community align with each other (and the bioregion) through coordination of activities that contribute to broader structures and communities. This is where reciprocal reasoning can come into play, constantly navigating a path through our internal and external perspectives as we look outward toward the Upper New bioregion, to Turtle Island (North America), and to the biosphere.
We are in this bioregional community because we are actively becoming part of something exponentially bigger than mere human existence. As we look further and further outward, we will meet and align with other bioregional communities along the way.
Imagining with Local Watersheds
In every Local Watersheds bioregional community, across the global ecological community, we imagine by extrapolating our own experiences through time and space, reaching beyond direct engagement, creating relationships with identity anywhere throughout history, as well as thinking to imagined relationships in the future, even well beyond our own existences have metabolised into compost.
This is an example of Meadows’ advice to expand our time horizons, as well as continued practice of reciprocal reasoning over time: the internal and the external, over and over again.
Can you imagine our bioregion fifty years from now, long after most of us here today are long gone? One hundred years from now?
