Bioregionalism
Description
Gaia Education:
"Bioregionalism is a comprehensive way of defining and understanding the place where we live, in the aim to live in that place sustainably and respectfully. While the term “bioregionalism” is a new way of representing and identifying with a place and its history and culture and living within the laws of nature, the concept is new only for people who come out of the Western industrial-technological heritage. The essence of bioregionalism has been a reality and common sense for native people living close to the land for thousands of years, and remains so for most human beings today.
Bioregionalism re-connects us into the living biosphere through the places and regions where we live. Bioregionalism acknowledges that we not only live in cities, towns, villages or ‘the countryside’; we also live in watersheds, ecosystems, and eco-regions." (https://medium.com/@gaiaeducation/bioregionalism-e32937bb610b)
Source: Excerpt from the ‘Social Design’ dimension of Gaia Education’s online course in ‘Design for Sustainability’
Characteristics
Daniel Christian Wahl:
"Kirkpatrick Sale states the rationale for bioregional organization in terms of scale, economy, polity, and society in his book Dwellers in the Land (Chapters 5–8):
Scale: People can understand issues and their connections to them at a scale where the forces of government and society are still recognizable and comprehensible, where relations with others are still intimate, and where the effects of individual actions are visible. This is the scale where abstractions and intangibles give way to the here and now, the seen and felt, and the real and known.
Economy: A bioregional economy would seek first to maintain rather than use up the natural world, to adapt to the environment rather than try to exploit or manipulate it, to conserve not only the resources but also the relationships and systems of the natural world. This economy would also seek to establish a stable means of production and exchange rather than one always in flux and dependent upon continual growth and constant consumption.
Polity: A bioregional polity would seek the diffusion of power, the decentralization of institutions, with nothing done at a higher level than necessary, and all authority flowing upward incrementally from the smallest political unit to the largest.
Society: Symbiosis is as apt a model as any for a successful human society, which we may envision as a place where families operate within neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods within communities, communities within cities, cities within regions, all on the basis of collaboration and exchange, cooperation and mutual benefit, and where the fittest is the one that helps the most — and of course is thereby the most helped. The most important instance of such an interaction on a bioregional scale would be the social symbiosis between the city and the countryside." (https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/organizing-bioregionally-6ed398e7a8c5)
Aspects
Urban Bioregionalism
Daniel Christian Wahl:
"The sustainability consultants Pooran Desai and Sue Riddlestone of the London based consultancy BioRegional suggest that we need to reconsider the scale of our production systems and create more locally self-sustaining communities in compact cities. They propose that “creating stable regional economies can help to create a sense of community and security that can alleviate the stresses inherent in a globally competitive world”(Desai & Riddlestone, 2002: 75). Desai and Riddlestone ask the question: “What route might development take on a more bioregional planet?” (Desai & Riddlestone, 2002: 76); and answer their own question as follows:
“By ensuring that the economy is taking into account all the costs of environmental damage, fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources would become more expensive. Transport, particularly by air, would cost more, so that market forces would create an economy in which goods were moved around much less. This would shift production towards a more local and a smaller scale. In agriculture, the competitiveness of local farmers would increase, creating a healthy farming ring around the city. The proximity of these farms to the cities would mean that the farmers could use organic wastes and sewage from the city for fertilizing their fields, creating a symbiotic relationship between city and farms. […] In industry, the economy would favour local production of bulk commodities. Local paper recycling would become the norm. Losing the economies of scale by moving to smaller scale production in reality would simply shift employment away from the transport sector to jobs in recycling, local manufacturing, farming and forestry. Whilst smaller scale production might increase labour costs per unit of production, these would be offset by lower investment costs and greater adaptability to local conditions. […] Creating a more balanced regional, self-regulating, diverse and stable economy will create greater richness in opportunities for people to chose a wide range of careers and vocations. The connection between quality of life and economic diversity will become increasingly evident. […] Regional scale development encourages people to become engaged, creating an environment in which the political ideal of subsidiarity can be expressed.” (https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/organizing-bioregionally-6ed398e7a8c5)
Source: Pooran Desai & Sue Riddlestone, 2002: 76
History
Ella Hubbard:
"Bioregionalism as an eco-philosophy took root in California in the 1970s. The back-to-the-land movement was in full swing and, in recognition of the disconnect between (particularly Western) livelihoods and the ecosystems supporting them, eco-anarchists were criticising the state as a spatial configuration that was too big, too centralised and too unresponsive to ecological issues.
Francisco J. Toro, ‘Stateless Environmentalism: The Criticism of State by Eco-Anarchist Perspectives’. In ACME 20(2): 189–205. It was in this context that thinkers like Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann and Kirkpatrick Sale imagined different ways to inhabit the earth. Their offering was the bioregion: regions defined by natural borders rather than political boundaries. These could be defined by any natural characteristic delineating one place from another. The Planet Drum Foundation (founded by Peter Berg in 1973) defined the bioregion as:
- "a distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole ‘life-place’ with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured."
In their seminal essay from 1977, ‘Reinhabiting California’, Berg and Dasmann extended this definition to include ways of knowing the land according to the people that live there, for example shared understandings of where boundaries lay, and local ecological management practices.
They called this ‘terrains of consciousness’:
- [Bioregion] "refers both to a geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place."
(Source: Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann ‘Reinhabiting California’ in Cheryll Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel (Eds.), The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg. London; New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.)
According to Berg and Dasmann, bioregions were the scale at which human communities could exist sustainably and to achieve this bioregional livelihood required a process of ‘reinhabitation’. Reinhabitation involves learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it.
As well as learning about sustainable subsistence, reinhabitation involves fostering human cultures that are bioregionally specific and developing place-based forms of governance. This early bioregionalism can be understood as the confluence of three key strands of environmental thought. The first was the deep ecology movement, sparked by philosopher Arne Naess’ 1973 essay ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movements: A Summary’ (itself inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) that advocated for the rights of all living things, regardless of their utility to human lives.
(Arne Naess, ‘The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement. A summary’, An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, August 2008, 95-100.)
Through this movement, the writings of Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold ’s ‘Land Ethic’ framework were generating alternative narratives about a relationship to the land, focusing on the pleasures and ethics of interconnectedness with nature. This revaluing of nature and non-anthropocentric approach supported bioregionalism’s view of humans as part of ecology, rather than outside of it.
The second is an economic current. The landmark Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth, was published in 1972 and was the first report based on computer models of global resources to suggest that planetary resource depletion was unsustainable. It was closely followed by E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful in 1973, which argued that the economy should be oriented towards human wellbeing while respecting natural limits. These texts supported the eco-anarchist critique of the economy and the state in environmental governance.
Finally, there was a social ecology current. Social ecology emerged in direct response to deep ecology, as Murray Bookchin (who was previously strongly associated with deep ecology) publicly criticised the movement as ‘patently anti-humanist’ and as ignoring the social roots of environmental problems: The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man.
(Source: Murry Bookchin, ‘Social Ecology vs. Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement’, Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5, 1987; Murry Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Ramparts Press, 1971.)
Bookchin argued for a social ecology based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it.
(Murry Bookchin, Social Ecology and Communalism. AK Press, 2006.)
Bookchin envisioned ‘ecological utopias’, where human communities are rooted in local ecology and mirror the way the ecology organises itself, rather than human communities reflecting their dominion over each other onto nature. At the intersection of these ideas, bioregionalism began to stabilise into an eco-philosophy, with thinkers imagining a world made up of autonomous and self-sufficient bioregional communities, inhabited by people that felt deep responsibility and stewardship towards their bioregion."
(https://fojournal.org/essay/contested-terrain/)
Discussion
1. James Quilligan:
"The bioregional economy offers an opportunity for genuine accountability in our patterns of consumption and restoration of resources, reconnecting us with the consequences of our decisions. When people actually know their aquifer storage and crop acreage yields, then they can calculate how much groundwater and food they can produce, the size of the population they can supply and how to absorb the associated waste.
Bioregionalism takes us beyond the Enlightenment beliefs about inherent rights which are guaranteed by sovereign governments. When the people of a bioregion are making decisions about the production and management of their resources, they are creating a conscious relationship with their regional water and food supplies. In essence, they are expressing the fundamental right of resource sovereignty, a freedom that is denied in liberal democracies.
Basing economics on the functions of nature means reversing the consumption of scarce and non-renewable resources. It also means provisioning energy and materials sustainably for everyone in society. In evolutionary terms, the dignity of bioregional identity is the birthright of every human being—the inalienable value which arises from natural rather than political boundaries.
Tolerance and a respect for diversity involve a deliberative, participatory process for the management of resources and a revitalization of the cellular memory that connects people with the Earth. Resource democracy thus has a basis in many spiritual traditions. The individual attempts to integrate the Divine into his/her Human Nature, and his/her Human Nature attempts to integrate itself with the Earth. This means uniting the individual with the collective identity not only through healthy social relations, but also by ensuring a more equitable allocation of resources and restoring vital human contact with the Earth.
Human dignity is presently at odds with policies which disrupt or suppress the ability of citizens to provide for their basic needs. This is why the socially marginalized and the poor must be included in policies which promote dignity and carrying capacity. In this context, the principle of responsibility to protect (R2P) is providing hope for the security of vulnerable resource areas by the global community, particularly when it encompasses the human right to sustenance and a healthy environment.
Ensuring that all people receive an equal degree of esteem and consideration is the foundation of a new belief system. Bioregional democracy offers a world of vibrant respect for life and a lasting commitment to justice and peace. By generating freedom, guaranteeing equality and building social cohesion—and developing the conditions in which these principles are no longer set in opposition as they have been under Western liberalism—human dignity will become the basis for a new culture of bioregional identity and sustainable citizenship.
Like the natural world of which we are a part, human beings evolve to survive and survive to evolve. In this way, human dignity is like the headwaters which are the source of biodiversity and community within a watershed. The sense of respect arising from bioregional identity starts an unbroken stream of social responsibility, empathy and care flowing through interpersonal relationships. This generates the conditions for resource cooperation across borders and enables human beings to express the evolutionary will to succeed on a collective scale."
(http://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/human-watershed-the-emerging-politics-of-bioregional-democracy/)
2. Earthlight:
"The second building block of an Ecozoic Society is Bioregionalism. A "bioregion" is a naturally occurring geographic division of the Earth that functions as a distinctive, relatively self-supporting geo/biological unit.
To think bioregionally means to understand humans as being integrally related with the natural order of their local communities, not as dominant over it. The role of the human in the bioregion is to appreciate and celebrate its diversity and to nurture and preserve its vitality.
Bioregionalism offers a new vision for the ordering of society. In the bioregional sense, "society" means the entire animate and inanimate community, all of which are recognized as necessary for the successful functioning of the whole. The current social order, dominated by the rise of the nation-state and the multinational corporation, has been driven by the goals of providing identity, freedom, and economic well-being to the various peoples of Earth. Nationalism, together with progress, democracy, human rights, the market economy, private property rights, and unlimited rights to material gain, have captivated and guided the human imagination in the modern era.
The benefits of these movements, focused on the plight of the human, have had an entrancing effect. We are now only beginning to see, when taken out of the context of a vision for the Earth community as a whole, how fragile and temporary the benefits they offer may be.
Bioregionalism does not stand in opposition to the quest for greater well-being for the human community. Rather it offers a viable basis for this quest grounded in the understanding that the health of living beings in all of their diverse forms depends on the health of Earth. In its recognition that Earth is a functional unity-that air, water, other elements, the various forms of life, and energy ceaselessly flow and are interchanged throughout Earth-it is global in its orientation. In its recognition that Earth is a differentiated entity and must be sustained in the integrity of its many bioregional modes, it is local in its orientation.
Intuitively we sense that the constitution of the bioregional polity would preserve not only the rights of the human, but the rights of the entire geo/biological community. In economics, the primary law would become that the human economy must be sustainable in, and preserve the functioning of, Earth's economy. The wealth of nations would be recognized as the splendor and health of their diverse and vital bioregions and of human cultures within the bioregions.
Aroused by the new sensitivities of bioregionalism, humans would reinhabit their own dwelling places. They would come home, as though for the first time. Scales would fall from their eyes, exposing at once the grandeur and intricate beauty of their natural settings, and the alarming injury being visited upon them. They would come to know their places as much by trees, plants, animals, rocks, and streams as by streets and buildings and other human features. Their eating and living would observe the gentle ordering of seasonal cycles. They would come to know a communion with a larger family. They would, also, come to know, understand and observe the guiding principles of the natural order, how we depend on and sustain each other, and how we exchange and recycle each other's energy and waste.
Bioregionalism provides the context for meaningful human endeavor, and thus it can be thought about as the "doing" dimension of an Ecozoic Society. Work in support of the bioregion might include planting neighborhood vegetable gardens; learning about and teaching others how to compost; getting to know local plants, animals, and geology; leading groups on nature walks; learning and teaching about permaculture and environmental conservation; changing personal and family patterns of consumption; working with developers, town councils, and zoning boards on developing communities in a way that natural habitats are preserved; learning and teaching about bioregionalism and its implications for government and economics; and sharing ideas on bioregional efforts that work. "
(https://earthlight.org/challenge28.html)
Why the bioregional movement eclipsed in the 1990s
Ella Hubbard:
"For all of bioregionalism’s supposed democratic and utopian values, the movement began to be discredited from the 1990s. There were four strands of critique that led prominent thinkers, such as Sarah Whatmore, to describe bioregionalism as ‘analytically and politically misconceived’.
(Sarah Whatmore, ‘Bioregionalism’. In D. Gregory, R. Johnston, G. Pratt, M. J. Watts and S. Whatmore (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009.)
The first was a critique of bioregionalism’s strategies. The growing recognition of the climate crisis and its global scale shifted the gaze of environmental politics; the small-scale focus of bioregionalism no longer seemed tenable. While the ecological issues of concern in the 1970s (such as pollution) made sense within the purview of bioregionalism, CO₂ clearly refuses to remain in place.
The second was a critique of the lack of attention given in bioregional thought to the many places that support our lives. Critical analyses of power in the ecological and environmental crises have challenged the focus within bioregionalism on the singular places that we live. As Australian philosopher Val Plumwood writes,
Developing a politics and ethics of place has great potential to clarify, focus and connect environmental and ecojustice concerns … An important missing ingredient in the bland ‘celebration’ of ‘sense of place’ is a consideration of power relationships—whose place is made better, whose worse, and what patterns can be discerned?
(Val Plumwood, Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling. Australian Humanities Review 44: 139–150, 2008.)
It is easy to love the beautiful places that we might live, and to ignore the other, less beautiful and unknown places that support our livelihoods. Plumwood describes these as shadow places, the places that ‘provide our material and ecological support, most of which, in a global market, are likely to elude our knowledge and responsibility’.
Third was a spatial critique being generated in Western academic thought. In the social sciences, post-structural turns shifted away from understanding place as ‘natural’ in favour of unpacking the social construction of place. It resisted boundary-making and defining place in essentialist ways. As Castree writes, this was underpinned by two assumptions:
The first is that ideas of nature are typically about fixity and permanence. The second is that these ideas are, in political and moral terms, typically conservative.
(Castree Castree, ‘Nature is Dead! Long Live Nature’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 36(2): 191–194, 2004.)
The social, rather than the natural, was seen as a more productive site for transformation. Simultaneously, there was a resistance to what Doreen Massey describes as reactionary understandings of place, that are antagonistic to outsiders and based on a coherent and ‘seamless’ identity.
(Doreen Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today. June 1991: 24–29.)
Instead, Massey sought to demonstrate how place might be unique, but is always multiple, contested and exists in relation to other places. Bioregionalism focuses on nature as it is, rather than through a human lens, and its centring of place seemed, to some, to be essentialist and conservative.
Finally, and perhaps most troubling, is an ethical critique of bioregionalism. The way in which a desire for human communities delineated by natural landscape sounds somewhat like environmental determinism or calls for lebensraum.
As Olsen asks,
On what basis, for example, do the inhabitants of a bioregion come together? Who qualifies as a citizen or ‘dweller’ (to use the Heideggerian language of bioregionalism) within a bioregion? Is simply being present in a place enough or would some kind of ‘natural’ criteria be invoked? In short, how much room would there be in a bioregional community for the ‘unrooted’, the immigrant, and the cosmopolitan?
(Olsen, J. (2000) The Perils of Rootedness: On Bioregionalism and Right Wing Ecology in Germany. Landscape Journal 19(1–2): 73–83.)
The need for belonging can translate into reactionary nationalisms that seek to exclude all that is not native, in a form of right-wing ecology. In addition, bioregionalism’s strategies of reinhabitation and becoming native carry colonial undertones:
Claiming the ‘nativeness’ of one’s belonging in place is a political move that delegitimizes and erases previous claims, which is exactly the process to which settler colonialism – and its industrial, consumptive modes of relating to nature – refers.
(Wiebe, J. (2021) Cultural Appropriation in Bioregionalism and the Need for a Decolonial Ethics of Place. Journal of Religious Ethics 49(1): 138–158.)
At best then, bioregionalism can be understood as having a naive political approach; at worst, a colonial project that assumes settler futurity and appropriates Indigenous livelihood practices."
(https://fojournal.org/essay/contested-terrain/)