COBALT is the Collaborative for Bioregional Action Learning & Transformation
Our Vision is A Deeper Sense of Place: Seeing, Connecting and Amplifying Change
COBALT is ALL About Co-Creating A Deeper Sense Of Place
Instead of asking ‘what’ is the place in which I live, the COBALT Team and the 30 remarkable Fellows are all about embarking on a process of discovering ‘who’ this remarkable land, air, and water is and how to create the right relationship. In order to share this process with others, COBALT hosts learning journeys. A COBALT Learning Journey can take place anywhere and features a process of learning how to see the patterns that regenerate life and allow for a better understanding of its potential. This opens up exploration, careful observation, and learning how to see together. We call this a “Learning Journey” as it is a journey of imagination and direct action, an opportunity to be together as part of a global movement and deepen our work in our own bioregions!
COBALT is based in the Casco Bay Bioregion, nested within the Gulf of Maine on the Western Shore of the Atlantic Ocean and the exploration of its identity requires a long view from many different perspectives. The Gulf of Maine is one of the most rapidly warming coastal seas on the planet and therefore our focus is on response to change through action-learning, adaptation, and transformation.
We are in collaboration with communities in many regions across the globe with a current focus on bioregions in Colombia, Scotland, Iceland, and Wales as well as two bioregions in the USA: Casco Bay Gulf of Maine and San Francisco Bay-Delta. Our vision is to provide navigation for journeys of guided imagination to build relationships between people and place. We work together to discover unique potential, identify and explore new possibilities for collective practice as well as experience the authentic wholeness of place. We will appreciate and learn how to better see, connect, and amplify the innovations already well underway related to our food, fiber, energy, water, waste, and tourism. This work is about love of place and stewardship of ecosystems that need attention like seagrass meadows and tidal wetlands in Casco Bay and Oak forests in the high Andes of Colombia. We are connecting to the wholeness and patterns of life. Join us in discovering these patterns, the essence, the unique nature of place.
Check out our 2024 Bioregional Learning Journey story map for more information about this year’s learning journey!
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
—T.S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets (Gardners Books; Main edition, April 30, 2001) Originally published 1943.
Listening with the Seagrass Meadows
In Casco Bay, Gulf of Maine, the COBALT Learning Journey begins underwater, deep within the seagrass meadows. The journey of guided imagination begins with us not just learning about seagrass meadows and their amazing benefits but also becoming them! To experience the wholeness of this bioregion, we begin the journey inside these stunning ecosystems to sense wider inter-relationships across systems such as food, fiber, waste and water and to start to experience the wholeness of this place. Join us in Team Zostera, (an initiative of COBALT) as we engage with scholars, indigenous leaders, creative artists, philosophers and more in transforming our world toward a more just, equitable and regenerative future.
January 10-12, 2024
1st Bioregional Data Lab a Major Success
The first Casco Bay Seagrass Mapping Workshop using R and GIS: Bioregional Data Lab was a big success and others will follow!
The event was located at and hosted by the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education, Forest Avenue, Portland, ME.
Some of our Partners :
Thank you to our SPONSORS for the support in the development of the Transformations 2023 Bioregional Workshop.
