study guide

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Bioregionalism Keith Pezzoli

Image: San Diego-Tijuana transborder bioregion Pezzoli, K. 2015. “Bioregionalism.” pp 25-29, In Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by

Joni Adamson, William Gleason, David Pellow. NY: New York University Press. Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Sixty essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, each written about a single term, reveal the broad range of quantitative and qualitative approaches critical to the state of the field today. From “ecotourism” to “ecoterrorism,” from “genome” to “species,” this accessible volume illustrates the ways in which scholars are collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to reach shared understandings of key issues—such as extreme weather events or increasing global environmental inequities— in order to facilitate the pursuit of broad collective goals and actions. This book underscores the crucial realization that every discipline has a stake in the central environmental questions of our time, and that interdisciplinary conversations not only enhance, but are requisite to environmental studies today.

Bioregionalism is a social movement and action-oriented field of study focused on enabling human communities to live, work, eat, and play sustainably within Earth’s dynamic web of life. At the heart of the matter is this core guiding principle: human beings are social animals; if we are to flourish as a species, we need healthy relationships and secure attachments in our living arrangements with one another and with the land, waters, habitat, plants, and animals upon which we depend. Unfortunately, we have lost our way. Humanity’s collective capacity to nurture healthy relationships and secure attachments is not being realized. Thus, bioregionalists argue, we need to establish new, just, ethical, and ecologically resilient ways to reconnect with one another and with the land.

Bioregionalism’s core commitments include (1) rebuilding urban and rural communities—at a human scale—to nurture a healthy sense of place and to secure attachments and rootedness among community inhabitants; (2) reintegrating nature and human settlements in ways that holistically instill eco-efficiency, equity, and green cultural values into systems of production, consumption, and daily life; (3) making known (and valuing) the way wildlands, working landscapes, ecosystems, and rural dwellers and resources enable cities to exist; (4)

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developing authentic community-based participatory processes that empower just and equitable civic engagement in local and regional planning, visualization, and decision making; and (5) building global transbioregional alliances and knowledge networks to support sustainable place making around the world. To meet these commitments, bioregionalists engage in grassroots activism, group mediation, consensus building, not-for-profit and for-profit entrepreneurism, food and fiber production, ecological restoration, art, music, philosophy, spirituality, science, education, and multimedia communications.

The spatial scale of bioregional initiatives varies. Bioregionalists focus on watersheds (“ridge top to ridge top”), multiple watersheds (“landscape scale”), river basins, and even much larger swaths of the Earth’s surface, including ocean regions. Kirkpatrick Sale (2000, 55), one of bioregionalism’s leading proponents, outlined three nested spatial scales pertinent to bioregionalism. The largest scale is the ecoregion—roughly twenty thousand square miles or more (e.g., Ozark Plateau in the United States, Sonoran Desert in Mexico, Chilean Mattoral). The scale beneath this is the georegion (e.g., the Central Valley of California nested within the Northern California Ecoregion). At the smallest end of the spectrum is what Sale calls morphoregions (several thousand or fewer square miles), identifiable by human settlement patterns, including cities, towns, infrastructure, factories, fields, and farms. These scales are nested one within the other. Globally minded bioregionalists of the twenty-first century will have to forge alliances to address problems that cut across these scales, and across urban-rural divides—for instance, global climate change; globalization of disease vectors; pandemic threats; acidification of the oceans; soil degradation; large-scale disasters, warfare, and injustices associated with race, class, and gender (Evanoff 2011; Hibbard et al. 2011; Pezzoli, Williams, and Kriletich 2010).

Given the emphasis bioregionalism places on reconnecting people to the land in ways familiar to its inhabitants, it is at smaller scales where most bioregional action takes place. In people’s lived experience, bioregions are “life-places” where biogeography, ecology, culture, economy, and history interact in a distinct, discernable pattern. Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann (1977, 400) coauthored one of the first documents in the United States to spell out the meaning of “bioregion”: “The term refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.” Inhabitants define for themselves their bioregion’s boundaries. The most relevant factors include climate, topography, flora, fauna, soil, and water together with the territory’s sociocultural characteristics, economy, and human settlement patterns.

Robert L. Thayer Jr. (2003, 55), a widely noted bioregional activist-scholar, aptly argues, “the bioregion is emerging as the most logical locus and scale for a sustainable, regenerative community to take root and to take place.” That a bioregion is a fruitful place-based organizing concept stems from the premise that “a mutually sustainable future for humans, other life-forms, and earthly systems can best be achieved by means of a spatial framework in which people live as rooted, active, participating members of a reasonably scaled, naturally bounded, ecologically defined territory, or life-place” (Thayer 2003, 6).

The aims of bioregional initiatives vary. In the United States, the Klamath Basin Coalition focuses on 15,751 square miles of land spanning the U.S. states of Oregon and California and drained by the Klamath River; it is a diverse alliance of local, regional, and national organizations promoting comprehensive social-ecological restoration and sustainable livelihoods in the Klamath River Basin (Doremus and Tarlock 2008; Gosnell and Clover Kelly 2010). The Kansas Area Watershed Bioregion is restoring the ecological health of the prairie and

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its inhabitants. California’s Biodiversity Council (CBC) subdivided the entire state of California into ten bioregions as part of a watershed/landscape scale strategy to protect biological diversity and the economy. In northern California, a range of bioregional groups is focusing on fishing, water quality, timber, and agriculture in ways that address livelihood and conservation. Beyond the United States, the governments of seven Central American countries plus Mexico created a Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, which pays homage to bioregional principles for the protection of biodiversity. New Zealand divided its entire national territory into ecoregions and watershed-based subregions for bioregional policy and planning purposes, backed by an environmental court system (including landscape architects).

Bioregional initiatives conducted at the national and international scale do not necessarily advance the more radical aspects of bioregionalism (e.g., authentic participatory democracy, communitarianism, subsidiarity, mutual aid). Yet national and international efforts may help reframe public discourse, thereby creating new opportunities to advance bioregionalism’s core commitments on the ground locally. This may happen, to cite an example, in Bolivia where the country’s legislators passed the Law of Mother Earth in 2012.

The Bolivian Law of Mother Earth is based on Andean philosophy that views “Pachamama” (a term used commonly throughout the Andean region, associated with “Mother Earth” but meaning a nongendered “Source of Light, or Source of Life” [cf. de la Cadena 2010]) as a sentient being and sacred home. Article 3 of the law defines Mother Earth as “the dynamic living system formed by the indivisible community of all life systems and living beings who are interrelated, interdependent, and complementary, which share a common destiny.” The law provides legal-institutional support for nature itself as a “collective subject” entitled to legal rights, including rights to life, ecosystem health, and regeneration. Whether or not the law generates significant change is far from certain. However, it may make it easier for indigenous movements to gain leverage for their causes using their cultural heritage and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)—including sophisticated agroecological knowledge accumulated over thousands of years. Some academics have referred to these Global South movements as “indigenous cosmopolitics” (de la Cadena 2010). Along such lines, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, rebuked neoliberalism in a quest for local autonomy and the preservation of their ecocultural heritage. These movements have much to offer twenty-first-century understandings of bioregionalism, especially when it comes to ecological governance, sustainable livelihoods, and management of common wealth. Indigenous struggles around food sovereignty are a strong case in point (Adamson 2012).

Bioregionalists tend to fault foot-loose transnational finance and the reckless growth of the world’s resource-intensive, export-oriented, hypermobile, corporate-dominated global economy for many of the twenty-first century’s increasingly complex problems (e.g., climate change, peak oil, peak fresh water, ecosystem degradation, runaway economic speculation, food insecurity, poverty, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots). In view of such problems, bioregionalists advocate “localization.” Localization is a place-based strategy to create sustainable and resilient communities at a human scale; it encourages local investments in resources, livelihoods, and institutions that build the community’s assets (including community power/capabilities) (De Young and Princen 2012).

Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, Gary Snyder, Robert G. Bailey, Freeman House, and Ian McHarg, among others, laid the initial foundation for bioregional thought and practice in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. This early work has roots in utopian and anarchist ideas from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Owen; Fourier; Proudhon;

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Bakunin; Kropotkin) and in the call for ecological regionalism first articulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Geddes; Howard; Odum; Mumford; the Regional Planning Association of America). Bioregionalism in the United States initially developed outside academia. Its identity was countercultural—a back-to-the-land and appropriate- technology movement responding to the perceived failings of North American and Eurocentric conceptions of industrial modernism. Gary Snyder, a civically engaged intellectual and poet, along with Peter Berg, helped get bioregionalism onto a serious academic footing by interweaving counterculturalism with incisive critical analysis and methodology (Snyder 1995; Berg 2009). They accomplished this through civically engaged scholarship and effective science communication enriched with poetry, theater, art, and experiential learning. Doug Aberley (1999), Michael Vincent McGinnis (1999), Robert L. Thayer Jr. (2003), and Tom Lynch et al. (2012), among others, have also added academic rigor to bioregionalism.

Doug Aberley (1999, 13) provides a good historical overview of bioregionalism’s development over time, outlining how bioregionalists worldwide have “learned the cultural and biophysical identity of their home territories—their bioregions. They have also worked to share the lessons of this hard-won experience, developing intersecting webs of bioregional connection that now stretch across the planet.” Bioregionalism has a track record that includes semiannual congresses (meetings of upwards of two hundred bioregional enthusiasts, from North America mainly but also from other countries around the world). The Planet Drum Foundation (www.planetdrum.org) and the Bioregional Congress (www.bioregionalcongress.net) have been documenting and archiving the congresses. An increasing number of universities offer degrees in bioregionalism, including the University of Idaho, Utah State University, the University of California at Davis, Montana State University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Bioregional programs outside the United States can be found at universities in Mexico, Asia, Europe, and Australia, among other places.

The number of organizations advocating bioregional principles (though not always identifying themselves as bioregionalists) is growing. In the United States, the New Economy Working Group (a progressive, multipartner, action-oriented think tank) highlights the possibility and potential of localized living economies that support a healthy biosphere (www.neweconomyworkinggroup.org). Ecotrust, based in Portland, Oregon, operates an environmental bank, an ecosystem investment fund, and a range of programs in fisheries, forestry, food, farms, and indigenous affairs (www.ecotrust.org). On a global scale, Bioneers, a group of social and scientific innovators, grows social capital by building bioregional and community-based alliances (www.bioneers.org). The Global Action Research Center (the Global ARC) uses bioregionalism as a framework to help connect the dots among diverse types of globally minded localization (e.g., community gardens, watershed protection, greening of livelihoods, and infrastructure) (www.theglobalarc.org).

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, bioregionalism has an increasingly effective set of tools and concepts from which to draw, including locavore, locavesting, slow foods, food justice, green infrastructure, adapting-in-place, eco-districts, biocapacity, ecological footprint, BALLE (business alliance for local living economies), LOIS (local ownership and import substitution), community-based natural resource management (CBNRM), relocalization, and reinhabitation. The efficacy of bioregionalism as a movement hinges on the application of such tools and concepts through learn-by-doing and “living-in-place.” Nurturing bioregional culture and imagination is key. Fortunately, there are an increasing number of groups skilled at doing this—i.e., skilled at cultivating place-based environmental literacy and a new ecological

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progressivism through the arts and humanities (Lynch et al. 2012). California Northern is a good example (www.calnorthern.net). Their work provides a deeper understanding of bioregions by fostering strong local identity through effective place-based storytelling, art, and communications. Along such lines, Thayer (2003, 94) expresses hope that as bioregional groups struggle to reinhabit their life-place, “A distinctly regional art, aesthetics, literature, poetics and music can evolve from and support bioregional culture.” This hope has deep roots; it resonates with a view expressed three-quarters of a century ago by Lewis Mumford. In his classic work The Culture of Cities (1938), Mumford eloquently argued that “[t]he re-animation and re- building of regions, as deliberate works of collective art, is the grand task of politics for the coming generation.” This oft-quoted statement rings as true today as it did seventy-five years ago.

References

Aberley,  Doug.  1999.  "Interpreting  bioregionalism:  A  story  from  many  voices."  Pp.  13-­‐42  in  

Bioregionalism  edited  by  M.  V.  McGinnis.  New  York:  Routledge.   Adamson,  Joni.  2012.  Seeking  the  corn  mother:  transnational  indigenous  organizing  and  food  

sovereignty  in  Native  North  American  literature,  Edited  by  E.  Pulitano.  Cambridge  ;   New  York:  Cambridge  University  Press.  

Berg,  Peter.  2009.  Envisioning  Sustainability:  Subculture  Books.   Berg,  Peter  and  Raymond  Dasmann.  1977.  "Reinhabiting  California."  Ecologist  7  399-­‐401.   De  La  Cadena,  Marisol.  2010.  "INDIGENOUS  COSMOPOLITICS  IN  THE  ANDES:  Conceptual  

Reflections  beyond  “Politics”."  Cultural  Anthropology  25:334-­‐370.   De  Young,  Raymond  and  Thomas  Princen.  2012.  The  localization  reader  :  adapting  to  the  

coming  downshift.  Cambridge,  Mass.:  MIT  Press.   Doremus,  Holly  D.  and  A.  Dan  Tarlock.  2008.  Water  war  in  the  Klamath  Basin  :  macho  law,  

combat  biology,  and  dirty  politics.  Washington  DC:  Island  Press.   Evanoff,  Richard.  2011.  Bioregionalism  and  global  ethics  :  a  transactional  approach  to  

achieving  ecological  sustainability,  social  justice,  and  human  well-­‐being.  New  York:   Routledge.  

Gosnell,  Hannah  and  Erin  Clover  Kelly.  2010.  "Peace  on  the  river?  Social-­‐ecological   restoration  and  large  dam  removal  in  the  Klamath  basin,  USA          "  Water  Alternatives   3:362-­‐383    

Hibbard,  Michael.  2011.  Toward  one  Oregon  :  rural-­‐urban  interdependence  and  the  evolution   of  a  state.  Corvallis:  Oregon  State  University  Press.  

Hibbard,  Michael  and  Susan  Lurie.  2011.  "Creating  socio-­‐economic  measures  for   community-­‐based  natural  resource  management:  a  case  from  watershed   stewardship  organisations."  Journal  of  Environmental  Planning  and  Management   55:525-­‐544.  

Lynch,  Tom.  2008.  Xerophilia  :  ecocritical  explorations  in  southwestern  literature.  Lubbock,   Tex.:  Texas  Tech  University  Press.  

McGinnis,  Michael  Vincent.  1999.  "Bioregionalism."  Pp.  xvii,  231  p.  London  ;  New  York:   Routledge.  

McHarg,  Ian  L.  1969.  Design  with  nature.  New  York:  John  Wiley  &  Sons,  Inc.   Mumford,  Lewis.  1938.  The  culture  of  cities.  New  York,:  Harcourt.   Sale,  Kirkpatrick.  2000.  Dwellers  in  the  land  :  the  bioregional  vision.  Athens:  University  of  

Georgia  Press.  

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Snyder,  Gary.  1995.  A  place  in  space  :  ethics,  aesthetics,  and  watersheds  :  new  and  selected   prose.  Washington,  D.C.:  Counterpoint.  

Thayer,  Robert  L.  2003.  LifePlace  :  bioregional  thought  and  practice.  Berkeley:  University  of   California  Press.