These photographs of the Upper New River bioregion were captured by Benjamin Erlandson, founder of The Upper New. We are using them with his permission.
Welcome to our bioregion, The Upper New!
Founded and incorporated in 2024, The Upper New is an educational nonprofit organization focused on incidental learning through engaging multimedia experiences in service of systems wisdom, ecological literacy, and bioregional thinking, learning, planning, and building–as well as ecological stewardship across our bioregion, to serve as a model for bioregions across the biosphere.
Our Mission
The mission of The Upper New is to seek out and foster place-based work in the watersheds of the world as an avenue for humans’ continued individual and collective growth toward ecological literacy and increased practice of ecological stewardship in bioregional communities across the biosphere.
Our Vision
The Upper New is an educational nonprofit organization focused on incidental learning through engaging multimedia experiences in service of systems wisdom and ecological literacy as demonstrated through bioregionalism. As a learning focused organization, The Upper New is creating opportunities for people throughout the biosphere to challenge their conceptions and perceptions of reality (and our relationships with this reality), as a form of self-paced individual and collective ecological education. We define the Upper New River (USGS 05050001) as our home bioregion, a basis for demonstrating bioregional learning, planning, and building as a scalable example to be used in any bioregion anywhere in the biosphere.
We’ve got big plans for our bioregional approach, and we’ll be adding updates as these plans manifest.
Latest News From The Bioregion
What’s the latest news from our bioregion The Upper New? See our latest posts below, or click on through to see all the news.
- Upper New r3.0 Confluence 2026
Announcing the Upper New Confluence Here at the Upper New, we are pleased to announce that we will be hosting a local bioregional “confluence” in parallel with the global r3.0… Read more: Upper New r3.0 Confluence 2026 - Building The Darkway, Part OneProtecting the Night, Empowering Our Communities: Announcing “Building the Darkway, Part I” The Blue Ridge Parkway is globally celebrated for its breathtaking daytime vistas, drawing millions of visitors to our… Read more: Building The Darkway, Part One
- Helene, The Aftermath: Recovering Relationships with RiversWe’re seeking narratives about Hurricane Helene and the resulting floods and landslides, etc. that occurred across the Appalachian region: fiction and nonfiction, geolocated photo essays, documentary and fiction films as… Read more: Helene, The Aftermath: Recovering Relationships with Rivers
Watershed as Bioregion: The Upper New (05050001)
The Upper New River Subbasin, designated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) 05050001, represents the headwaters of the expansive Kanawha River Basin within the greater Ohio River Region. This subbasin initiates in the Appalachian Highlands of North Carolina and flows northward into Virginia before continuing into West Virginia.
Our bioregion HUC 05050001 encompasses a substantial area of approximately 2,948 square miles (7,620 km²). Its strategic location dictates the initial water quality and flow characteristics for the subsequent downstream subbasins (05050002 Middle New, 05050003 Greenbrier, and 05050004 Lower New). The basin’s topography is defined by the Blue Ridge physiographic province in North Carolina.
These are the specific USGS HUCs where The Upper New headquarters are located within our home bioregion:
- 12-Digit HUC: Glade Creek-Little River (050500010406)
- 10-Digit HUC: Little River-New River (0505000104)
- 8-Digit HUC: New River Basin (05050001)
We are lucky to have three universities housed within our home bioregion: Appalachian State University, Radford University, and Virginia Tech.
Our Projects
Over the long term, our big picture plan at The Upper New includes a variety of projects in service of ecological and bioregional learning experiences across the biosphere. We’ve already launched several concepts. Many of them are in nascent stages, poised for liftoff!
The Upper New Review
We intend for The Upper New Review to be a place-based socio-cultural archive for bioregionalism, ecological literacy, and sense of place headquartered in the Upper New River basin, as a model for the watershed communities of the world. We hope our curation and publication efforts serve as an entry portal to a much deeper understanding of our relationships with the natural world and its ecological complexities, wherever we may be on Earth.
The Upper New Review fosters Bioregional Expression Across The Biosphere. We accept long form prose submissions up to 20,000 words. Feel free to read the submission guidelines, or submit your work!
Create360
Create360 is a global geographical ecological space time perception project using a modular timelapse capture framework to generate footage and organize it (to curate footage in assembled sequences) for understanding and appreciating the biosphere and all its inhabitants.
The Ecotheater Initiative
Ecotheater, a project of The Upper New, is ecologically themed readers’ theater to encourage incidental learning, with a twist: multiple iterations of production with various art forms, leading to multimodal accretion from simple dialogue to performance arts and short films.
Local Watersheds
At face value, Local Watersheds (LW) is a web-based system where any person on the planet can geolocate themselves within their current watershed boundary, wherever they may be at the time. They can then access curated information about the watershed. At its core, LW is a tool for understanding bioregions and bioregionalism: bioregional learning, planning, building. Watersheds make excellent boundaries for bioregions: based on gravity and waterflow, existing as long as water has flowed on land surfaces on planet earth. Geologically and geographically, watershed boundaries are significantly more permanent than those drawn by humans.
As such, LW is an interactive global atlas accessing nested networks of watersheds as bioregions, identifying inventories of local, renewable, sustainable materials and services as bioregional catalogs in service of local communities and economies within limits. LW is a tool for local communities to build, curate, and update bioregional catalogs for their watersheds, and to share these catalogs with the world, in service of bioregional learning, planning, building, and stewardship.
