BioFi Design Principles
Principles for designing Bioregional Financing Facilities, eco-credits, complementary currencies, and other BioFi mechanisms, informed by a range of trans-disciplinary sets of principles.
Why these principles
These principles were developed to guide the BioFi Project team, bioregional organizing teams, Indigenous communities and coalitions, and other collaborating organizations to effectively design Bioregional Financing Facilities (BFFs) or other BioFi-aligned mechanisms such as eco-credit programs, bioregional tithing (or other crowdfunding) programs, complementary currencies, mutual credit programs, or commitment pooling programs.
Like everything bioregional, BFFs and other BioFi mechanisms should be designed to serve each unique Bioregional Regeneration Strategy. Therefore, their structures will be diverse. Diverse, decentralized organizations can support increased systemic resilience and improve the efficacy of BFFs and other BioFi mechanisms as connective tissue. Therefore, these principles should be implemented within context.
We drew on Permaculture Design Principles, Rainwater Harvesting Principles, Life Principles, Indigenous Economics, and on-land observation and tending to develop this set of BioFi Principles. Permaculture and Rainwater Harvesting Principles are based on Indigenous land and water stewardship practices that were developed over millennia. Fritjof Capra’s Life Principles are informed both by physics and Eastern mystical traditions developed by indigenous peoples. The BioFi Project acknowledges indigenous wisdom as foundational for this work.
The sixteen principles
- 01Assess BioFi readiness
- 02Receive, recharge, retain, and release financial capital flows
- 03Apply a living systems approach
- 04Start small and then expand
- 05Work from pattern to detail
- 06Work at nested geographic and systemic scales
- 07Source elements from place
- 08Compose rather than impose upon
- 09Design for relationality
- 10Design for synergies and function stacking
- 11Design for resilience and planned redundancy
- 12Design for cycles – composting, emergence, and evolution
- 13Design for long-term and large-scale regeneration
- 14Work with the elements flowing through ecotones (ecological and economic)
- 15Money is a tool, not a need – use it strategically
- 16Facilitate gift and gentle reciprocity
Gary Snyder said of its present anti-natural state: “Money floats upstream.”
“The BioFi Principles instruct for the reversal of the current flow of finance – toroidally from and into Nature – so that these essences extracted from the Earth flow downstream to water the regeneration of our home.”