Context setting

Glenn Page and Juliana Bohorquez started from an observation that seems obvious once you see it: the lines on our maps have almost nothing to do with how the living world actually works. City councils make decisions about watersheds they've never visited. County boundaries split ecosystems down the middle. Rivers don't stop at state lines, but governance does.

Through COBALT and Bosque Fractal, they tested whether storytelling could help people see place differently—not as residents of political jurisdictions, but as inhabitants of living systems. What if the stories communities tell about where they live could reveal connections that maps alone cannot show?

Why now

Environmental data can tell you a lot, but it can't capture what a farmer notices about changing soil, what an elder knows about seasonal water patterns, or what a community understands about the relationships that have sustained a landscape for generations. High-tech mapping creates useful visualizations, but it often misses what people who actually live in a place already know.

Technology now makes it possible for communities to create their own maps rather than just consuming maps made by experts. Climate change is forcing people to think beyond political boundaries—because the problems don't respect those lines. And there's growing recognition that Indigenous and local knowledge aren't optional additions to scientific data. They're essential.

What they tested

Glenn and Juliana tested whether bioregional storytelling could shift how people experience where they live and their relationship to the land.. When you approach a place with this kind of awareness, you don't just notice differences in architecture or accent between one jurisdiction and the next. You hear stories about rivers and species and history. You learn which landscapes are connected, which communities share the same watershed, whose decisions upstream affect whose lives downstream.

They developed a process that brings together people from across a bioregion—not to extract their stories, but to help them see their own system. The work unfolds over months: first looking back at how the place got to where it is today (sometimes looking back 1000s of years to how the land was literally and geologically shaped), then taking a hard look at current realities—ecological, social, financial, spiritual—and finally asking what governance would need to look like to match the changes coming.

In Colombia, they convened a community gathering organized around the creation story of that place. What emerged was a shared experience of connection to Place that became a launchpad for ongoing work. "It was like planting an acorn seed," Glenn says. "Immediately it germinated. Immediately it started connecting through mycelial tissue to everything else."

What's shifting

Communities separated by political boundaries are discovering they share the same watershed, the same ecosystem, the same fate. Isolated restoration projects are beginning to see themselves as part of larger bioregional movements. Scientists who once kept their distance from Indigenous knowledge are now reaching out, saying: We didn't feel ready to go in this direction. You're ahead of us.

Glenn and Juliana are also learning about embodiment. They're planning a seagrass restoration collaboration that will launch with a Ceilidh—a traditional community dance—held simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. Participants will become a seagrass meadow through dancing together. This is an unusual and unorthodox approach But everything they've learned suggests this kind of kinesthetic, ceremonial entry point may be exactly what the work requires.

According to Glenn, “Integrating spirituality, ceremony, and ritual into seagrass restoration grounds our work in reverence, reminding us that we are in relationship with a living system, not managing a resource. Ceremony slows us down enough to listen—to tides, seasons, and the cultural memory held in a place—allowing restoration to emerge from attunement rather than extraction. Ritual creates continuity across generations, helping communities root ecological repair in shared meaning, responsibility, and care. In this way, bioregional attunement to seagrass  restoration becomes not only a technical practice, but a lived devotion to place, reciprocity, and belonging.”

Open questions

• How do story-rich maps actually shift decision-making—from extraction toward regeneration?

• What is the role of system storytelling in supporting  communities to build genuine relationships and coordinate action across old boundaries at the scale of living systems?

• How do you meaningfully integrate high-tech tools with Indigenous wisdom without one colonizing the other?  Can system storytelling play a role in this?

Connected to these learnings

• The land is not scenery—it is witness and bears the wounds of careless extraction and feels the love of attempts at regeneration

• To understand a system, invite the system into the room

• Lived experience is systems knowledge

• Design for more than words