[Ccpg] The Ecologist Article: THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME... The benefits of "bioregionalism"

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

  The
Ecologist website (http://www.theecologist.org/).

Title: THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME... The benefits of "bioregionalism"
Author: Kirkpatrick Sale
Article Name: 31-2-KirkpatrickSale
Introduction:
Could ‘bioregionalism’ be the way out of our environmental crisis?
Kirkpatrick Sale puts the case for the political philosophy he helped to
develop.

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A few years ago, writing a biography of Christopher Columbus for the
quincentenary of his discoveries, I came across a wonderful Spanish term ­
querencia ­ usually translated as ‘love of home’. It is that, to be sure,
but colloquially it means much more than that too, as I came to learn.
Querencia is the deep sense of inner well-being that comes from knowing a
particular place on the Earth; its daily and seasonal patterns, its fruits
and scents, its soils and birdsongs. A place where, whenever you return to
it, your soul releases an inner sigh of recognition and realisation.

That is pretty much what bioregionalism is.

There’s more to it, of course, and I’ll get to that, and why it matters.
But it is useful to look at Columbus for a bit, for he is a part of the
problem (as well as carrier of the problem) for which querencia ­ and
bioregionalism itself ­ is the solution.

EXAMINING THE PROBLEM
Columbus never knew a home in all his travels, never experienced a love of
place, much less a deep fellowship with any particular part of land or sea.
He was in that sense tragically symbolic of the culture from which he
sprang, the culture he was to implant in the New World. Europe was a
society of restless and rootless people, many repeatedly forced to move to
try to escape the ravages of the Plague, others regularly conscripted for
far-off wars, some in constant motion like the peripatetic court of Spain.
Even peasants were constantly displaced by famine, war, pestilence, crop
failure and Lordly whim. In this maelstrom, in which the migrant soul had
no way to learn or value nature, the only groundings were those of wealth,
materialism, humanism, violence and conquest. It was those that became
Europe’s gift to the world.

And nowhere more so than in the Americas, especially the part settled by
successive waves of European immigrants, pushing on from one ocean to the
other for three centuries and creating a United States in which mobility,
upward and outward, has always been its most treasured characteristic. And
if today 20 per cent of its population changes residence every year (as
against 8 per cent in the UK, for example), where social cohesion is so
thin that its murder and incarceration rates are the highest in the world,
and the barest minimum of civic participation (ie voting) engages less than
half the population at best, and then but once every four years, that is
the inevitable result of being what historian Samuel Morison has called a
‘tenacious but restless race’ ­ never knowing, except in rarest incidences,
the comfort of querencia.

Surely that is why this nation, and the industrialised system it has
spawned, has so little regard for the natural world. We don’t live on any
one part of the land long enough to know very much about it, and it enters
our consciousness mostly only when we wish to exploit it. In that sense
Americans today are the true inheritors of the early settlers whom Alexis
de Tocqueville described as ‘insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature’
and ‘unable to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they
fall beneath the hatchet’. And for all our efforts here in America to
establish a huge park system and protect wilderness areas, our truest
character is revealed in our unabated urban-suburban sprawl, a paving over
of three million acres of US farmland by 1995 and now gobbling up more than
twice as much land as just 15 years ago.

WHAT IS BIOREGIONALISM?
Given the consequences today of living in a system devoted to the rapidest
exploitation of the natural world for the rapidest accumulation of junk,
surely it is not fanciful to feel that some such identification with place
as querencia implies is a necessary antidote; and the sooner the better.
Surely it makes sense to imagine a society divided into territories and
communities where love of place is an inevitable byproduct of a life
mindful of natural systems and patterns experienced daily ­ however far
removed this may seem just now for the gigantic, destructive society around
us.

This is what bioregionalism offers ­ and why it matters. It is a way of
living and thinking which views the world in terms of the actual contours
and life-forms of the Earth ­ measured by the distinct flora and fauna, the
climate and soils, the topology and hydrology, and how all these work
together: regions defined by nature, not by legislature. But it does more:
it pays respect to these natural ecosystems by seeing them as coherent and
empowered social and political entities as well, necessarily living by
ecological principles of sustainability dictated by the limits of the land
itself.

In the United States, it is easiest to think of watersheds as the defining
bioregional unit ­ the Hudson Valley, for example, where I live, or the
Potomoc estuary, or the Kansas River area. But there are myriads of other
discrete territories, such as deserts, mountain ranges, peninsulas, and
islands, that function as bioregions. What gives particular weight and
authenticity to viewing America this way is that it conforms remarkably to
the way that the original people lived here before the European invasion.

A map of Indian settlement areas when treaties were signed with the US
government in the 19th century shows that the lands the tribes claimed
coincide to a great degree with what we now call bioregions ­ the Kaw along
the Kansas River, for example, the Pawnee in the Platte watershed, the
Osage on the Ozark plateau ­ indicating that people living in close harmony
with the land naturally patterned themselves in bioregional ways.

Much the same is true of the traditional cultural regions of Europe, too,
which to a large degree are shaped by geography ­ Brittany, for example, is
a distinct peninsular plateau, Catalonia follows the Ebro watershed, Wales
is the land of the Cambrian Mountains, and so on. A map of Europe’s ancient
regional divisions ­ such as Leopold Kohr produced for his wonderful
Breakdown of Nations (though incomplete) ­ shows most of them to have clear
geographical foundations, even if a few, like Scotland, actually comprise
several bioregions. It is this patterning that reaffirms the bioregional
idea as the natural, and once obviously successful, principle for human
organisation.

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that since this was the way that humans
lived for several million years in their ancient tribal societies, this way
of life has become embedded in our very genetic makeup and remains always
in our souls as the true, desirable configuration of people even when
modern experience tries to deny it.

Now for a few basics.

HOW COULD IT WORK?
Obviously the institutions and processes within bioregions would vary as
the lands and human experiences on them vary. But inherent in the
bioregional vision are several fundamental precepts, rooted in an
essentially ecological worldview, that would inform any kind of human
settlement.

First, an economy guided by what Edward Goldsmith has called the ‘laws of
ecodynamics’ ­ principally conservation as the ‘basic goal of behaviour’
and stability as the optimum norm in nature, but including also economic
interactions based on co-operation rather than competition, and enterprises
governed by regardful self-sufficiency rather than imperialism or
globalism. It would have to be careful about drawing down resources,
processing, using, and recycling them, and it would follow the general rule
of nature that all processes are circular. The goals would be potlatch
distribution rather than private accumulation (both within and between
communities) and general apportionment of resources rather than individual
ownership.

Second, a governance based on the ecological law of decentralisation,
establishing empowered communities within the empowered bioregion, and
eliminating any form of government interference beyond that. Diversity and
complementarity, two important ecological values, would guide political
forms, encouraging a variety of human settlements and governments that
would play distinct roles, all on an equal footing and none superior to any
other. Given coherent and limited populations, some forms of democracy
would be possible, and even consensus might be a goal, but neither would be
necessary as long as political arrangements were voluntary and
place-specific.

Third, a society following such ecological principles as symbiosis and
division, the first directing co-operation among groups and communities
within a bioregion ­ between countryside and town, for example ­ and the
second assuring that none became too large or overbearing. The optimum
population of community and region would be easy to determine, knowing that
the human community could not grow so large as to harm or dislodge any
other floral or faunal community or the air and water shared among them,
and groups would need to limit their size or break off and form new
settlements if they grew too big.

That, at any rate, is the bioregional vision. Yes, it may all seem a bit
too, well, capricious; utopian. But what keeps it from being just
cloud-cuckoo-land is the fact that it is based not only on the eternal laws
and systems of nature, but on the ways of tribal and ancient peoples who
knew and followed those laws and systems. And one thing more: it is a
vision, a goal, that inspires people even now, today, and all over the
world.

Not that they are all consciously bioregional ­ far from it. But on every
continent for the last 50 years there have been ­ and still are ­ movements
fighting in one way or another against the nation-state paradigm in the
name of smaller, regional identities, seeking to run their own affairs
their own way. That is very much the bioregional cause, and if most such
movements have not marched under an ecological banner and have no
particular sense of environmental ethics, they usually battle in the name
of a territory recognisably defined by natural systems and a love of them.

THE REBIRTH OF REGIONALISM
In Europe alone, there are movements in more than three dozen regions
seeking to assert their identities (besides the Maastricht Treaty’s
Committee of the Regions), from Wales and Cornwall to the Basque country
and Catalonia, from Lapland and Scania to Pandania and Corsica. Some have
ancient roots and some are modern responses to modern problems ­ as, for
example, the Alpine Diamond in the Pennine Alps ­ but everywhere, as the
diplomatic correspondent John Newhouse has written, ‘regionalism appears to
be Europe’s current and future dynamic’. Certainly with what Vaclav Havel
has called ‘the end of the nation state,’ the prospect of a devolution of
power to these regions, whether or not supranational forms like the
European Union continue to exist, is very real.

It was this dynamic that, more than anything else, led to the breakup of
Yugoslavia, and, though the results at the moment don’t seem to present a
very pretty picture, (quite apart from the ugly means of achieving them),
the underlying truth of the matter is that ‘Yugoslavia’ was a made-up
patchwork of ethnic bioregions (Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo,
Macedonia, and Montenegro were all ancient geographically divided regions)
that could not possibly last. That, too, is what the break-up of the Soviet
Union was all about: the resurgence of a plethora of regional realities
that not even the heavy hammer of Communist conformity could do away with.
The three Baltic states, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and a host
of various ‘-istans’ from the Caspian to Baikal, as well as a hundred other
ethnic groups (and languages) with place-based identities ­ this is the
eternal verity of this part of the world, for this is what its geography
(and human development within that geography) has fashioned.

The revival of regionalism is to be seen everywhere, usually driven by
ethnic attachments but always with geographical roots: in Turkey and the
Middle East, in the Indian subcontinent, along the Indonesian archipelago
and the Philippine chain, in China, everywhere in Africa, in Central and
South America. It has been estimated, in fact, that there are 75 regional
military forces in existence today, fighting against one nation state or
another ­ some of them well-known (as in East Timor, Irian Jiya, Kurdistan,
Chiapas, Kashmir, Somalia, Ethiopia, Colombia and Peru) but most of them
out of the limelight and ignored by the internationalist media.

And in the land where bioregionalism started as a movement some 20 years
ago, there are unmistakable signs of a resurgent regionalism, though none
has taken up arms.

BIOREGIONALISM IN AMERICA
I suppose it is not news to say that there are, as yet, no actual
self-empowered bioregions in the United States, nor are there likely to be
in the near future. Nonetheless, according to Alan Ehrenblat, executive
editor of Governing magazine, the US Congress ‘has ceased to be the primary
political instrument for resolving the difficulties of modern American
capitalism’, and ‘people have discovered that the governmental units
created long ago are too clumsy to serve them very well’.

Thus, there are now more than 30,000 ‘special district governments’
operating at regional and local levels for such things as transportation,
energy, water, land use, and education, and the Federal government has
decentralised itself for day-to-day functioning into 600 regional councils,
488 substate planning districts, and at last count, some 1,932 regional
boards, committees, and offices to plan and carry out nationally-funded
services.

There are even regional secession movements these days. There is an active
group in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles trying to take that
bioregion out of that city’s unwanted reach. There is an organisation in
Maine, including a State legislator, pushing to make the northern
mountainous section of the state, so different from the coastal region,
into the 51st state. Hawaii actually voted for secession and the right to
become an independent nation in a non-binding referendum in 1996, and
Alaska has an Independence Party seeking to put the question of nationhood
status on the ballot there.

As for the bioregional movement itself, there are now more than 200
self-proclaimed bioregional organisations in the United States, and several
in Central America and Canada as well. The concept of bioregionalism has
been recognised by the Professional Geographers Association and the
American Society of Landscape Architects, and has been used by the
Government of California to shape 11 watershed organisations in order to
develop policies on land use and natural resources. The idea has been
quietly co-opted too by the Interior Department of the Federal government,
which has created Resource Advisory councils and Ecosystem Projects ­ on
bioregional grounds ­ in a number of Western states, and by the US Forest
Service, which has created an Ecosystem Management Division in Fort
Collins, Colorado, complete with a map of North American ‘ecoregion
divisions’ that is nothing more than a bioregional blueprint.

CAN IT EVER HAPPEN?
What it would take for the bioregional movement to go from theory to
practice, from scattered environmental organisations to shadow (or even
recognised) bioregional governments, is difficult to say. It is not likely
to happen soon, even in those parts of the world where the regional passion
has taken up arms.

Nonetheless, as national governments show themselves increasingly powerless
and irrelevant to most people’s real needs and passions, alternative forms
will be developed and gradually empowered as they provide ground-level
solutions to problems that seem to fly beneath the radar of the nation
state.

Inevitably, I would suggest, those forms will be bioregional in setting,
and eventually, given our genetic need for querencia and our historical
experience as land-based people, they will be bioregional in outlook.

In The Interpreters, a book written at the height of the Irish Revolution
by the author known only as AE, there is a passage in which a group of
prisoners sit around discussing what the ideal new world should look like
after the revolution. One of them, a philosopher, advances the vision of a
unitary world order with a global, scientific, cosmopolitan culture; the
sort of justification often put forth nowadays in the name of globalism.
Another, the poet Lavelle, argues fervently against this conception, trying
to show that the more the world develops its technological superstructure
for global commerce and opinion, the farther it gets from its natural
roots.

‘If all wisdom was acquired from without,’ Lavelle says, ‘it might be
politic for us to make our culture cosmopolitan. But I believe our best
wisdom does not come from without but arises in the soul and is an
emanation of the Earth spirit, a voice speaking directly to us as dwellers
in this land.’

That is the voice of bioregionalism, the truest, more eternal voice of
nature. And it directs us to become, as bioregionalists, dwellers in the
land. Nothing more, and nothing less will do.


Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of nine books, including Dwellers in the
Land: The Bioregional Vision, recently reissued, with a new introduction,
by the University of Georgia Press.


UTOPIAN? DON’T THINK SO: WHERE CHELLIS GLENDINNING LIVES, BIOREGIONALISM IS
ALREADY SHOWING ITS FACE

The question is: How do we become bioregional? The answer: remembrance and
invention.

Let’s look at a place that has both. The Rio Grande Bioregion, otherwise
known as northern New Mexico, USA, is a region where the coincidence of
memory and creativity is very much alive. Pueblo, nomadic tribal, and
Chicano cultures interweave their languages and livelihoods with the land
and water in a rare remembrance of humanity’s potential. Meanwhile, the
region is also a haven for newcomers, called ‘Anglos,’ many of them
renegades in flight from urban areas, who are creating a bioregional
renaissance.

Until the arrival of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s, the
area was isolated from American society. Having survived solely in
traditional ways until then, local land-based communities are still
propelled by the old ways. These are not thought of as ‘bioregional’ ­ they
are simply called ‘la cultura’ and ‘how we live’ ­ and yet they are infused
with the same spirit that informs today’s bioregionalist movement.

In the Rio Grande region, Native and Chicano people do not define who they
are by job descriptions. They define identity by community of origin
(Chimayo, Okey Owinge), family line (Martinez, Tso), and responsibility to
the land (mountain, river). In these parts, people fish, hunt for elk,
deer, and turkey, dig the acequias, or ancient irrigation ditches, grow
corn, raise sheep and cows, and gather firewood in the forest. They also
weave, practice tinwork, carve wood, and engage in traditional ceremonies
and pilgrimages that honour the miracle of nature.

With production so close to home, the practice of trade is not top-down,
mass-market, and imposed by corporate distribution systems. It is lateral.
Veralde is known for apples. Chimay has the best chilli. Cordova spawns
wood carvers.

As if springing from a bioregional dream, local villagers play the music
heard on the radio, and they play at the dancehall on Saturday night. The
history of people and land is taught in their corridos and rancheros, and
the narrative of everyday life ­ alive, human-scale, often humorous ­ holds
the community together.

In towns like Santa Fe and Taos, where Anglo newcomers congregate, and many
place-based lifeways have been lost to urban commerce, bioregional
invention is still ripe. There are permaculture institutes, co-housing
communities, recycled tyre and straw bale building, community gardens, and
poetry readings. Each year Earth festivals, like All Species Day in Santa
Fe, spread ecological awareness and love for the natural world. There is
travel too, not along the lines of Club Med and Princess Cruises, but
individuals and small groups making their way to other places to teach,
learn, and trade. Bioregionalists from New Mexico travel to Ecuador, Peru
and Cuba, bringing back news of spiritual practices, dances, and political
forms.

The farmers’ market is the place where these parallel efforts meet. Once a
week in summer and fall, farmers from the villages and pueblos set up card
tables to sell corn, lettuce, squash, herbs, elk, and mutton ­ right next
to Anglos at their card tables selling corn, lettuce, squash, herbs, elk,
and mutton. A Chicano band plays guitarras in one aisle. A cowboy trio
plays fiddles in another. A European-American magician performs his
tai-chi-like moves in the parking lot, and a Pueblo flautist lights up the
crowd with crystalline notes.

Such examples of human endeavour are marvellous. And yet, of course, the
global economy is fast arriving. What does it look like in northern New
Mexico? Just as it looks everywhere else. Cellphone towers spewing
microwaves on the highway. Uncontrolled sprawl. Cars, trucks, and freeways.
TV advertising more engaging than regular programming. Cyberscreens
outnumbering books at the library. Increasing availability of illegal drugs
heroin and cocaine. Increasing use of legal drugs Prozac and Viagra. The
inability of family stores to survive and community projects to find
funding. What does it feel like? A glittery, agonising assault.

Whether via remembrance or via invention, the thriving of place-based
lifeways, as exemplified in the Rio Grande Bioregion, must be the basis for
hope for the future.


Chellis Glendinning’s books include Off the Map (An Expedition Deep into
Imperialism, the Global Economy and Other Earthly Whereabouts), and My Name
is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilisation. She lives in
Chimayo.