The Kansas Area Watershed Council is one of the oldest bioregional groups on the continent. Our vision is to explore and celebrate the prairie ecosystem, and make community with each other, the land and sky.Many of us are active in continental bioregional organizing, local peace and justice work, ecofeminism, wetlands preservation, prairie restoration, holistic health and healing, consensus training, and many manner of enhancing and sustaining local culture. Contact us for more information on how you can get involved.

Welcome Home

A growing number of people are recognizing that in order to secure the clean air, water and food that we need to healthfully survive, we have to become guardians of the places where we live. People sense the loss in not knowing our neighbors and natural surroundings, and are discovering that the best way to take care of ourselves and to get to know our neighbors, is to protect and restore our region.

Bioregionalism recognizes, nurtures, sustains and celebrates our local connections with: Land, Plants and Animals, Springs, Rivers, Lakes, Groundwater and Oceans, Air, Community, Native Traditions, Indigenous Systems of Production and Trade

It is taking the time to learn the possibilities of place. It is a mindfulness of local environment, history, and community aspirations that leads to a sustainable future. It relies on safe and renewable sources of food and energy. It ensures employment by supplying a rich diversity of services within the community, by recycling our resources, and by exchanging prudent surpluses with other regions. Bioregionalism is working to satisfy basic needs locally, such as education, health care and self-governance. The bioregional perspective recreates a widely-shared sense of regional identity founded upon a renewed critical awareness of and respect for the integrity of our ecological communities.

People are joining with neighbors to discuss ways we can work together to:

1. Learn what our special local resources are
2. Plan how to best protect and use those natural and cultural resources
3. Exchange our time and energy to best meet our daily and long-term needs
4. Enrich our children’s local and planetary knowledge. Security begins by acting responsibly at home.

Welcome home!

This statement was adopted by the Continental Bioregional Congress (then called the North American Bioregional Congress) at its first gathering in 1984, and it has been affirmed by many organizations and congresses since that time, including our own KAW Council.