Portland is located roughly 100 miles upstream of the mouth of the largest watershed in the Cascadia Bioregion. The Portland Metro area rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. The city has often been characterized as a forward-thinking or even radical city and the people here have fought for many environmental and social victories over the decades. Especially recently, our political systems have been plagued by capture and a resistance to meeting the challenges of our time head on.
Luckily, our culture continuously produces a mindset primed for decentralized thinking. We anticipate the adoption of ReFi as an inevitable part of the regenerative transition of our city.
One contributor is the founder of Cascadia Carbon, a ReFi project minting NFTrees backed by real trees. The usage of tools like Cascadia Carbon’s CODEX is crucial in lowering the barrier to positively impactful ecological work, and aligning economic and ecological benefit. This deep experience in the ReFi space will be a big resource to our local node.
Another one of our contributors is a part of Ethereal Forest, a working group building PDX DAO, an ecosystem of DAOs local to Portland. The vision of the Regen Coordi-Nation fits well with Ethereal Forest’s hopes for City DAOs, with DAOs of every shape, purpose and flavor forming a web of local solidarity and mutuality. Each of them connected to their global networks of alignment, similar to ours the Regen Coordi-Nation.
Utilizing emerging tools like CODEX and Silvi, we hope to bolster native species biodiversity in our region though creating more access to the knowledge, materials and funding needed to revitalize the ecology of our urban landscape. Over the years, we see these technologies progressing towards an augmented reality game similar to Pokemon Go, where people of all walks of life can participate in the rewilding of their neighborhood. Ideally we help empower people with low income and access to receive funding for this work through partnerships with local, ethical, small businesses looking to invest in the city’s ecological well being.
The Portland area is already home to a large and growing community of small scale, local, regenerative farmers and urban gardeners. We hope to eventually collaborate with these producers to build a decentralized network of food production that can support each neighborhood in the city through the increasing acute and chronic stressors they experience. Coordinating the production and distribution of food in a local setting will be challenging, but bringing web3 and adjacent tools to these communities that are already engaging in this work can help growers understand what the needs are and allows consumers to have easier access to the foods grown closest to them.
Lots of organizations and people in Portland are already interested in and building circular economies and participatory budgeting systems for their communities. As the capabilities of web3 tools progresses, we will be collaborating with these organizations and communities to boost the ability to allocate resources to the regenerative projects already doing good work. This will increase the flywheel of regenerative actions in the city and enable more people to engage in this work. Experiments in Circular Economy, Participatory Budgeting, Mutual Credit, Gift Economies and more will further empower existing networks and communities in Portland to build their own social support systems and give more autonomy back through increased access to collective action tools.
Although people in Portland are already very aware of the interconnected issues that we all face. Recognizing our role as American consumers participating in Imperialism, Capitalism and other systems of extraction, we hope to show Portlanders the power that local peer to peer networks can have in decreasing our contributions to these systems that take resources from and harm humans and the non-human on Earth. Education and community building will begin as meetups and transition towards programming for people interested in the applications of web3 in building local regenerative systems of production. Presentations and events focused on ReFi, web3 and related topics will be held with interested local organizations and individuals.