Speakers & Facilitators

David Abram

Creative Director, Alliance for Wild Ethics | Author, The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

In contrast to the growing pervasiveness of digitally mediated knowledge, I honor the primary importance of sensory experience — which is also the primacy of earthly place, and of all the full-bodied relationships, human and more-than-human, that we sustain by being in and of a place.

David Abram – cultural ecologist and geophilosopher – is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of experience, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and imagination inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. He was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of indigenous “animism” as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview – a keen reassessment now underway in many disciplines. In his first book, David coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind, yet also necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up worldwide within the broad movement for ecological sanity. Dr. Abram has held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology in Norway, and was recently the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. In 2026 David is a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University.

Bill Baue

Senior Director, r3.0

Bioregional Regeneration is the most promising form of Collapse Resilience, as it not only mitigates the severity of current collapses, but it also adapts to emergent post-collapse scenarios, and, perhaps most importantly, it depatterns away from social dynamics that exacerbate collapse (such as competition for power), and repatterns toward alternative, prosocial dynamics that reinforce social & ecological integrity.

For more than a half-century, Bill Baue has lived up and down the Connecticut River Valley and throughout the Northeast Woodlands bioregion on Turtle Island. In that time, his exploration of myriad work environments exposed him to a wide diversity of social and cultural contexts. He has worked as a tree planter and truck driver; as a dj and music director of a pirate radio station and later host and producer of a nationally syndicated and globally podcasted radio show; as a Harvard Research Fellow, university professor, and published researcher; as a company co-founder; as a board member of a community energy cooperative, as well as co-founder and facilitator of a dairy cooperative board’s sustainable farms committee; he wrote the first-ever sustainability report for WalMart, and has written reports for several United Nations agencies. He helped instigate the founding of the Science Based Targets initiative (then became one of its fiercest critics).

He has lived in a number of communal living contexts – in a hippie community in Vermont that spawned a wilderness school, and a cohousing community in Massachusetts that spawned a world-leading Sociocracy initiative. He now lives with his wife on a permaculture homestead in Northeast Connecticut, where his children and grandchildren periodically visit. He now devotes his life to promoting bioregional reinhabitation in his home bioregion and globally. As Senior Director of r3.0 (Redesign for Resilience & Regeneration), he co-founded 3 bioregional initiatives: the Connecticut River Valley Bioregioning Collaborative, the Forests of the Northeast Bioregional Hub, and the Northeast Woodlands Bioregioning Collective.

Clare Brodeur

Co-Organizer, Turtle Island Bioregional Congress & Steward of Hylo

On the 50th anniversary of Planet Drum Foundation Founder Peter Berg’s seminal essay Amble Toward Continent Congress, I’m proud to play a role organizing the 11th Turtle Island Bioregional Congress, which revitalizes the practice of continental-scale convening after a 17-year hiatus and also helps weave the bioregional movement into a planetary tapestry as part of Global Bioregional Month.

Clare is a mother, land steward, technologist, and community organizer rooted in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, weaving systems and tools for a regenerative future. With a background in nonprofit communications and software engineering, she has spent over a decade using technology to mobilize communities for change. Clare leads product development for Hylo, an open-source platform purpose-built for bioregional organizing and community resilience, where she facilitates community co-design with partner groups across Turtle Island and beyond. Through this work, Clare has developed a specialization in participatory governance and community stewardship, guiding numerous groups to grow communities that are equitable and impactful. She is a core organizer for the Turtle Island Bioregional Congress and a ProSocial facilitator, and holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Virginia.

Dr. PennElys Droz

Partner in Rematriation and Governance, Salmon Returns. Senior Advisor, Jumpscale

Our children need us to make material changes now to build practical systems beyond capitalism. I see great transformational power in building intercultural, local, bioregional coalition together in service of life, and recognize that there is more potential now than ever before to do the intercultural healing, education, and restoration work that is the necessary first step.

Dr. PennElys Droz, Anishinaabe/European descendent, is a mother of 5 and grandmother who has worked in cultural and community-based Indigenous engineering, regenerative infrastructure, and economic development for over twenty years, serving to rebuild thriving Indigenous Nations. She currently works with Tribes, cities, organizations, businesses and grassroots communities to support communtiy coalition building and design, deepen the regenerative nature of their development strategies, and faciilitate the process of healing-centered relational governance design that is so critical for lasting, resilient change. She is a natural builder, bioremediator, plant medicine maker, and lover of children, water, dirt, moss, lichen, and fungi.

Arturo Escobar

Kenan Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill; Tapestry of Transitioners for the Cauca River in Cali, Colombia

Bioregionalism is the utmost expression of the dynamic ordering of the world out of the long history of an intelligent cosmos and the living Earth –something that indigenous peoples, as most human communities throughout history, understood well. Today, bioregioning emerges as a deeply historical, ontological, and political process, possibly the best option for us, moderns, to renew our awareness of belonging to, and caring for, the whole.

Arturo Escobar is a Colombian activist-researcher working on territorial struggles against extractivism, bioregional transitions, and ontological design. He was professor of anthropology and political ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, until 2018, and is currently affiliated with the Tapestry of Transitioners for the Cauca River and the PhD Program in Environmental Sciences (Universidad del Valle), both in Cali. Over the past thirty years, he has worked closely with Afro-descendant, environmental and feminist organizations in Colombia. His best-known book is Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995/2011). His most recent books are Designs for the Pluriverse (2018); Pluriversal Politics (2020); and Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human, with M. Osterweil and K. Sharma (2024). His research and practice have had a significant collective dimension. Since 2018, he co-directs a collective research and action project on bioregional transition design in Colombia. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2021.

Melanie Goodchild

Vice President Indigenous Knowledge, Scholarship & Research, Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig (SKG) Centre of Excellence in Anishinaabe Education; Senior Fellow, SKG/Anishinaabe Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab (IKS Lab)

Our Lore facilitates deep, collective, systemic analysis and design processes, to maintain commons of knowledge and resources held within (and across) boundary protocols. These protocols are fluid rather than defensive, protecting and nurturing relatedness in regenerative exchange across diverse biocultural systems, while maintaining the integrity of distinct identities. This process gives rise to shared meta-languages and macro-narratives, to allow for commonsing amongst compatible systems.

Boozhoo, aniin nindinawemaaganidog (greetings my relations). Melanie nindizhinkaaz zhaaganaashimong. I am called Melanie in English. Waabishki Ogichidaakwenz Anang indigo Anishinaabemong, idash Waaba-anang Ikwe nindizhinikaz. Those are my two spirit names, what I am called by the spirits in Anishinaabemowin (our original language). Mooz nindoodem, I am moose clan. Aapiji nimiwendaan gakenimag indoodem. Biigtigong Nishaabeg nindoonji. Ketegaunseebee nindoonji idash Bawating nindayendaa noongom. I come from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg and Ketegaunseebee (Garden River) First Nations. I also come from Aroland and Couchiching First Nations. I live in Bawating, at the rapids, known as Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario on Turtle Island (North America). Anishinaabekwe indaa. I am an Anishinaabe woman, I use she/her pronouns and I deeply respect LGBTQ2S+ peoples and communities.

Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig (SKG) indanokii. I work at Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig as the Vice President of Indigenous Knowledge, Scholarship & Research. I am the Founder and a Senior Fellow with the SKG/Anishinaabe Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab (IKS Lab). At SKG I am responsible for developing the undergraduate and graduate programming. We are a newly accredited Anishinaabe post secondary institution fulfilling Chief Shingwauk’s vision of a teaching lodge.

I am also work with the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning and the Presencing Institute. I regularly guest lecture at Yale University and MIT and I am the Systems-Changer-in-Residence with the Canadian Association of Science Centres.

I am humbled and honoured to collaborate with a number of wonderful organizations who share my deep curiosity about the nature of consciousness, systemic design, and the sacred space in between things. Through the revitalization of Anishinaabe gikendaasowin (our original ways of knowing) and Anishinaabemowin (our original ways of speaking) I am continually seeking Anishinaabe mino bimaadiziiwin (a good life). Miigwech for listening.

Eli Ingraham

Research Fellow, r3.0

Knowledge commons are vital for appropriately sharing regenerative practices and patterns within and across bioregions, with appropriate protocols for respecting knowledge sovereignty.

Eli Ingraham / Eli currently advises and was previously CEO of the Center for Partnership Systems founded by Riane Eisler to advance partnership-based transformation and the shift to a more inclusive Caring Economy. Eli was formerly CEO of the Sager Foundation managing their Science for Monks & Nuns project in partnership with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She also secured funding and facilitated the digitization and online cataloging of thousands of ancient Tibetan manuscripts with the Library for Tibetan Works & Archives. In addition, Eli oversaw the Sager Ganza microfinance project in Rwanda supporting 10,000 women-owned businesses out of the genocide. Previously, Eli led TIE Global Artisans, an initiative of PYXERA Global focused on alleviating poverty among African textile weavers. She was Chief Networks Officer at YPO serving 30,000+ global CEOs, overseeing their 50+ business and social impact member networks. She then founded The Impact Imperative to help portfolio advisors and companies align investments with impact goals. Eli also advised Fortune 50 companies on digital acceleration and worked for PBS/NPR developing digital media startups. Her early career in technology involved designing and building online platforms for work product and community management. Eli currently serves on the advisory boards of various global impact organizations including the Knowledge Impact Network, Center for Responsible Leadership, and the Interdisciplinary Journal for Partnership Studies. She has been deeply immersed in bioregional, regenerative, and indigenous knowledge systems since 2020.

Namrata Kabra

Environment and Climate Law Researcher; Programme Coordinator, South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group

With the rising impacts of climate change and ecological changes, working on these concerns can be exhausting and finding the ray of hope difficult. Gathering such as the Global Bioregional Month offers a space for solidarity and community beyond learning from inspiring efforts around the world. I am excited to share some efforts from South Asia and learn from the rest of the world and continue efforts with synergies.

Namrata is a legal researcher specialising in climate security from an intersectional gender, water and bioregionalism lens. She is a Visiting Fellow with Kubernein Initiative & Facilitator of South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group. Her work focuses on designing climate programmes, institutional learning, & cross-regional collaboration. She writes on advancing the public discourse on gender-responsive water and climate law, policy and diplomacy.

Ramson Karmushu

Founder, My Indigenous Knowledge In Action (MIKIA Kenya)

Indigenous knowledge is written into our brains, so for the bioregional movement to learn from Indigenous knowledge, we need to engage in reciprocal relationship to honor the sovereignty of Indigenous knowledge.

Ramson Karmushu, an Indigenous Maasai from Kenya, is the Founder of My Indigenous Knowledge In Action (MIKIA Kenya), an organization led and support Indigenous Peoples. Mr. Karmushu demonstrates a strong interest in Indigenous People’s knowledge and Indigenous Action Research. Furthermore, Karmushu serves as a member and co-lead of the Working Group on Direct Access to Funding within the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB). Ramson envisages a secure future where Indigenous Traditional Knowledge across all topics from the grassroots to the global level is recognized and used, Cultural diversity is respected and promoted, and Indigenous Peoples, as well as local communities embodying a traditional lifestyle, tenure rights, and natural resources are protected.

Ashish Kothari

Founding Member, Kalpavriksh; Initiator, Vikalp Sangam; Initiator, Global Tapestry of Alternatives

Bioregional governance requires envisioning how transformative futures towards justice in all its forms, can be actualized starting in the present. We in the South Asia Bioregionalism Working Group believe that bioculture-regional governance is one key alternative to currently dominant governance systems that are causing collapses of ecological and social systems.

Founder-member of Kalpavriksh

Member of many people’s movements

Taught at Indian Institute of Public Administration

Coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy & Action Plan

Served on boards of Greenpeace International and India, ICCA Consortium

Judge on International Tribunal on Rights of Nature

Helps coordinate Vikalp Sangam (www.vikalpsangam.org),
Global Tapestry of Alternatives (www.globaltapestryofalternatives.org) and
Radical Ecological Democracy (www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org)

Co-author/co-editor, Churning the Earth, Alternative Futures, and Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary

Benjamin Life

Co-Founder, SPIRIT of The Front Range

A commons is a garden, but commoning is gardening. The garden doesn’t maintain itself; it requires ongoing attention, seasonal adjustments, collective work, and shared learning.

Benjamin Life is an artist, civic innovator, and researcher working at the intersection of regenerative economics, bioregional coordination, and participatory systems design. His work explores the mythic and material dimensions of systemic transformation, cultivating anti-rivalrous infrastructures that empower communities to co-create shared abundance, resilience, and mutual care.

Michelle Maloney

Co-founder and National Convenor of Australian Earth Laws Alliance and Future Dreaming

Global Bioregional Month provides a valuable opportunity for people around the world to share and learn together, about the powerful way bioregioning can guide regenerative human communities. I’m excited to connect with events being offered, and to host a range of webinars and in-person events here in Australia.

Michelle Maloney (BA/LLB(Hons), PhD) is the Co-founder and National Convenor of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance (AELA), and a Director of Future Dreaming – an Indigenous and non-Indigenous partnership organisation. Michelle began her career as an environmental lawyer, and then broadened her work to include multi-disciplinary approaches to creating Earth-centred governance and systems change. She is a writer, educator and community project designer, and now manages social change initiatives that focus on creating bioregional stewardship and governance, reimagining law and economics, empowering communities, bridging different cultural approaches to ecological care, Earth-centred ethics and the arts. Her books, journal publications, podcasts and speaking events can be accessed on her profile page: www.earthlaws.org.au/michelle

Jennifer Menke

Co-Founder & Executive Director, Sacred Contract; Founder & Executive Director, Regenerative Earth

Bioregioning thrives on relational kinship, and the work of Sacred Contract translates this embodied orientation to the more-than-human world into legal legibility.

Jennifer Menke, founder and Executive Director of Regenerative Earth and co-founder of Sacred Contract, is: a former lecturer for the University of Colorado’s Masters of Environment program; guest lecturer at the University of International Cooperation (UCI); and a facilitator for the Bio-leadership Fellowship. She has throughout her career used systems-mapping, facilitation, and strategic design to help local communities, Indigenous tribes, governments, foundations, businesses, and organizations develop and implement collaborative strategies to meet conservation targets, give rights to nature, enhance community wellbeing, and stimulate regenerative economies.

Elyes Mkacher

Community Soil Tender, Design School for Regenerating Earth

Inspired and supported by the Design School for Regenerating Earth, the Mediterranean Bioregional Activation, which I’m co-hosting in Tunisia, puts bioregional organizing into practice by weaving regeneration seeds at a bioregional scale. It aims to spread bioregional thinking in a context of collapse and help activate bioregional organizing across the entire Mediterranean Bioregion.

Elyes is a regenerative farmer, holistic thinker, and professional permaculture designer and educator. He is the founder of Dar Emmima, a permaculture education center, and Long Term, a regenerative consulting company, both based in Tunisia. Elyes facilitates Permaculture Design Courses onsite and online since 2018. In 2025, he joined the leadership team of the Design School for Regenerating Earth, a global network that cultivates bioregional leaders and learning centers at nested scales, serving as Community Soil Tender.

Jennifer Dhyana Nucci

Founder/ Owner, Breath of Being

Creativity cycles, which abide in the heart of our living and collaborations, turn constantly. Like a water wheel, dipping under into the dark mysterious and knowing flow, scooping up life that is ever abundant in healthy water, rising up into the light and pouring forth. Again and again. I’m grateful to share in gentle restoration of our bodies in our creative learning habitats, in order to keep the wheels turning.

In over 30 years as a Yoga and Meditation Educator, Somatic/Trauma/Emotional Release Therapist, Non-Violent Communication Instructor, Facilitator, Herbalist, and Artist, Jennifer has learned to hold reverence and gratitude – for Earth, for Life, for community care and healing connection – at the center. She teaches Hatha, Prana, and Taoist Yoga Traditions; body, mind, spirit meditations for serenity, self-knowledge, and deep health; and Western and Eastern Herbal Medicine making and cultivation.

Sarah Queblatin

Founding Director, Living Story Landscapes

I look forward to sharing my work on bioregional regeneration and governance, both at the Asia-Pacific scale and at my own home island on a bioregional scale, where our work is to restore our watersheds as a form of ecosystem based disaster risk reduction and adaptation.

Sarah Queblatin is a regenerative design specialist weaving art, culture, and ecology. Drawing on her background in mental health, ecopsychology, and expressive arts, she applies a trauma-informed lens to Disaster Risk Reduction, reframing it as “Design from Resilience to Regeneration” for climate and conflict-vulnerable communities. Her global roles have included representing the Global Ecovillage Network at UN climate conferences, as juror for the LUSH Spring Prize, and serving as a founding member of Permaculture for Refugees and the UNDP-convened Conscious Food Systems Alliance.

In the Philippines, Sarah founded Green Releaf Initiative, focused on regenerative solutions in disaster and displacement contexts, and Living Story Landscapes, which explores how cultural memory and imagination can address today’s metacrisis. She currently works as a freelance consultant on bioregional governance and regeneration across Asia Pacific while stewarding the Handuraw Panaw project — a bioregional leadership initiative, learning journey, and living lab dedicated to watershed restoration for her island home, Cebu.

Abdul Semakula

Instigator, Regenar Development Initiative

We cannot evolve our relation with life on earth without evolving our relation with land, and we cannot evolve our relation with land without evolving our relation with money, and evolution cannot happen without learning by doing.

Semakula Abdul is the Instigator of the Regenar Development Initiative in Uganda. In Buganda culture, his name carries the spirit of the pangolin — a keystone species and guardian of the forest. Like the pangolin, which cannot thrive in captivity, Abdul has fed his mind on unconventional ways of knowing — intuition, systems thinking, and indigenous wisdoms — rediscovering himself as a guardian of Buganda’s biocultural consciousness and escaping the colonial, mechanistic narratives that keep communities captive to extraction.

That journey, from web developer to civic, social, and climate innovator, was always driven by one question: What is the root cause?The answer led him to studying Regenerative Development & Design, System Evolution, Value Adding Process, at the Regenesis Institute and Finance for a Regenerative Economy at the Capital Institute — and ultimately home, to Kiwaatule, a Kampala suburb where wetlands face extinction.

There, Kiwaatule-2030 is weaving land, stewardship, money, and wellbeing into one living governance system rooted in Obuntu by awakening bioregional consciousness one neighbourhood at a time.

Earlier he founded an IT agency serving customers in Uganda UAE and Europe after graduating with a BSc. Computer Science.

Ralph Thurm

Managing Director, r3.0

This years r3.0 conference feels like an arrival after slowly having moved into the collapse resilience space for a couple of years and finding the right formats that provide space for online content and decentralised work in Confluences covering six continents. The growing interest both in conference content and design re-enforce r3.0’s strategic shift, building necessary community and more visibility globally, while helping collapse resilience to become a central focus of human survival in a time of an ever-increasing and complex polycrisis.

Ralph Thurm is a leading professional in sustainable & regenerative innovation and strategy, operational sustainability and management, sustainability reporting, transformation and ThriveAbility. With more than 35 years of experience having worked for major corporates, industry federations, governments, NGOs and in advisory services globally, Ralph adds value as an advisor, trainer, facilitator, moderator and writer on a huge variety of sustainability topics. He is the Founder & Managing Director of A|HEAD|ahead, a management advisory focused on sustainable transformation and strategic positioning.

Ralph wrote blogs at www.aheadahead.wordpress.com, a very personal logbook on sustainable change, and has started ‘The Lighthouse Keeper’ Newsletter on Linkedin in April 2021 and ‘A Sunday Thought’ in 2022. He published ‘The Corona Chronicles – Envisioning a New Normal for Regeneration and Thriving’ in May 2021.

In 2012 Ralph co-founded Reporting 3.0, a non-profit that instigates change towards a decision-useful new reporting impetus for a green, inclusive & open economy. In 2019 this platform changed its name to just r3.0 for redesign, resilience and regeneration, to reflect the much broader and systemic work ecosystem approach for transformation. He was also appointed as the first Managing Director of OnCommons gGmbH, the not-for profit legal home of r3.0. r3.0 often blogs on Medium and communicates via Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. The r3.0 knowledge commons is available at www.r3-0.org.

Earlier, Ralph accepted roles as Director Engagement at GISR (2014-2017) and as senior advisor and Board member at various organizations and networks. Ralph was a co-founder of the ThriveAbility Foundation (2013 – 2016) and co-authored ‘A Leader’s Guide to ThriveAbility’. Before that he was the Head of the Sustainability Strategy Council at Siemens, CFO/COO of GRI and Director Sustainability and Innovation at Deloitte.

Brooke Waldron

Cultural & Creative Strategy Consultant, Natôquhsunônak Inter-Tribal Alliance | Founding Director, Cedar Nation | Artist, GrayHorseStudio

Building kinship across Native communities and bioregions requires navigating the ongoing traumas of colonization and the inequities faced by Native peoples. Efforts to heal our lands and waters that do not center Indigenous leadership will inevitably reproduce the same structural harms.

Throughout her career, Brooke Waldron — an enrolled citizen of Seaconke Wampanoag Tribe / Narragansett descent — has consistently challenged systems of exclusion that reduce Native American artistic and social expression to narrow or static representations. She has over 10 years of service for tribal advocacy and worked in urban Native social services under the U.S. Department of Labor Division of Indian and Native American Programs. She has also served on the National Native American Employment and Training advisory planning team and consulted under the National Congress of the American Indian. She is in collaboration with the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center expanding cultural representation and as a core member of the InterTribal Alliance.

Brooke is also a multidisciplinary Native artist whose work explores identity, land, and color, often centering animals as vital carriers of story, memory, and relationship. Her work resists one-dimensional narratives, instead asserting that creativity is dynamic and always evolving.

Alongside her studio practice, Brooke works to support other creatives by learning healthier, more connected ways of working together. Cedar Nation, a fiscally sponsored 501(c)(3), was founded from this intention to strengthen community across the Northeast. Waldron is the recipient of various arts & culture grants, invitational exhibits and special recognitions for her continued work in community based projects. She presented her first solo exhibition in November 2023, and is the lead curator for the current exhibit Ascending: The Liberation of Native Art at the University of Connecticut Avery Point campus.

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