write one page summery

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exc e r p t s f ro m Bi o r e g i o na l i s m:

th e po l i t i c s o f pl ac e

From Ecopolitics: Building a Green Society

by Daniel Coleman

The trend in the environmental movement that best

captures th[e] sense of place, of commitment, and of home is

bioregionalism. Although it sounds like a term from an advanced

program in environmental studies, bioregionalism describes both

a movement and a fundamental orientation toward attaining

an ecological society. Quite simply, bioregionalism advocates

that human society be consciously oriented to natural life (bio-)

and that this consciousness be based on an understanding of a

particular locale or region.

The phrase “the politics of place” is often used descriptively

in lieu of bioregionalism and provides a sense of concern for

home in the broader sense. The ecological issues that seem

remote and impersonal or merely philosophical when addressed

at the national or global level become immediate and personal

when viewed at the regional or local level. For bioregionalists, the

very concept of home must be changed from a salable commodity

to a place where one puts down roots, a place one calls one’s own.

No longer acceptable is the view of home as an exchangeable

piece of real estate that goes along with exchangeable jobs in

exchangeable “communities.” Bioregionalism demands the

commitment to a place required for the intimate knowing on

which care, respect, and responsibility can be based. . . .

A bioregion is itself a sort of geopolitical entity, one in which

boundaries are set not by arbitrary political factors but with a

sensitivity to natural conditions. These boundaries might follow

the definition of a watershed, changing flora and fauna, differing

soil types, or geological formations. Most likely it will be a

combination of these and similar factors. The identification of a

bioregional entity will always be somewhat arbitrary, particularly

as some bioregional criteria contradict others. North Carolina,

for example, is commonly understood to have three geographic

sections: the sandy coastal plains, the rolling hills of the

piedmont, and the wooded western mountains. The rivers

typically flow through all three. The solution, of course, is that a

bioregionally-oriented community would apply different criteria

to different needs. Those in the coastal plains might work

together on coastal protection and issues to do with marine life.

Then, coastal communities surrounding the rivers might also

work with those upstream on water-quality issues or questions

of permissible effluent. . . .

Commitment, one of the principles of community building,

in this case a commitment to place, is the first step toward attaining

the understanding of place advocated by bioregionalists. This

understanding of and commitment to place leads to an emphasis

on a self-reliant and sustainable way of life within the natural

context of a particular region. Since each region has unique

geological and biological features, its inhabitants will develop

a unique way of life to ensure an ecologically sustainable

community. These natural features will determine the way

basic human needs — food, clothing, shelter, and energy — are

met, which will in turn lead to a unique culture and economy.

Certainly, the thousands of distinct cultures that have existed

around the planet can at least partially be explained as having

arisen in response to the natural qualities of distinct bioregions.

The sustainability sought by bioregionalists requires a rootedness

that persists over generations, during which time the politics

of place can become well established. Bioregionalists believe

that well-rooted people will work to ensure the viability of their

communities.

—Daniel Coleman is an activist and political columnist for the Chapel

Hill Herld. He is the author of The Anarchist.

sp e a k i n g f o r do u g l a s fi r

By Gary Snyder

The bioregional movement is an educational exercise, first of

all. Next, when you really get down to brass tacks, what it really

means is that you have people who say: I’m not going to move.

That’s where it gets new. People say I’m going to stay here, and

you could count on me being here 20 years from now. What that

immediately does is make a politically-empowered community

possible. Bioregionalism has this concrete base that it builds

from: human beings that live in place together for the long run.

In North America that’s a new thing!

Human beings who are planning on living together in the

same place will wish to include the non-human in their sense of

community. This also is new, to say our community does not end

at the human boundaries, we are in a community with certain

trees, plants, birds, animals. The conversation is with the whole

thing. That’s community political life.

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The next step might be that you have an issue, and you testify

at a hearing. You say: I speak as a local, a local who is committed

to being here the rest of my life, and who fully expects my

children and my grandchildren to be living here. Consequently,

my view of the issue is a long- range view, and I request that you

have a long-range view in mind. I’m not here to talk about a 20

year logging plan. I’m here to talk about a 500 year logging plan.

Does your logging plan address 500 years? If not, you are not

meeting your responsibility to local people.

Another person by this time takes the stand, from your

same group, and says: I’m a member of this community who

also intends to live here in the long run, and one of my friends,

Douglas Fir, can’t be here tonight. So I’m speaking for Douglas

Fir. That point of view has come to me by spending time out

in the hills, and walking with the trees, and sitting underneath

the trees, and seeing how it seems with them. Then speak a

sensitive and ecologically-sound long-range position from the

standpoint of the tree side of the community. We’ve done this

in Northern California, in particular a character who always calls

himself “Ponderosa Pine.” You can see how it goes from there.

It’s so simple. Such common sense. And so easily grasped by

children.

— This essay appeared in The New Catalyst, January/February 1986. Gary

Snyder is an award -winning poet, essayist and environmental activist. Danger on

Peaks is his most recent collection of poems.

cr a f t i n g nat i v e n e s s

By Jeff Bickart

I know some native Vermonters, all residents here for

quite some time, all with a deep understanding of this place,

all able to make their lives here perfectly, without excess

and without waste, from the materials and resources they

find around them, using only the tools given to them by

birth. You know them too: sugar maples, black spruces,

and Green Mountain maidenhair ferns; moose, deer, and

fisher; the common whitetail dragonfly and the eastern

tiger swallowtail; boreal chickadees, ravens, and Bicknell’s

thrushes; spring peepers and painted turtles. And a few

hundred others. There are even more I haven’t met yet. All

these native Vermonters have likely been here for tens of

thousands of generations, notwithstanding some long stays

in the south when their home ground was buried in thick ice

or still warming up after a few millennia of arctic weather. I

don’t know any Vermont people who are native like this.

I don’t expect us, of course, to live up to the same high

standards set by saw-whet owls and yellow birches. For

us, being native to a place is a much more difficult task. It

is, in fact, a becoming, a development of nativeness over

generations—but not just generations of simply being born

in a place. That may be only accident or happenstance. For

people, complete nativeness is earned: being, or becoming,

a native Vermonter must be a conscious act. And it

must be renewed, revitalized, and strengthened with every

generation.

There can be no doubt that knowledge of and personal

connection to the human history of a place is part of being

native. Growing up on the farm that has been in one’s

family for decades, a century, or more, could be nothing but

deeply meaningful. Newcomers like me will never have that

blood connection. We are not going to know, for example,

what it means to get up at 3:30 every morning, in every sort

of weather, to go out to milk in the same barn that one’s

grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather

went out to; we will not ourselves know what it means to

look out over fields once hayed with scythes by the sweat

of one’s own family, and still kept productive by ferociously

hard work. We can only hope that our children will choose

to come back and settle here after the wanderings and

explorings of young adulthood, and carry on with making a

family history.

Two miles down the road from our place, Robert Linck

has come back to Craftsbury after college in New York and a

bachelor’s degree in anthropology. His mother’s family has

been here since the 1830s. During summers in college and

after graduating, Robert worked for Pete Johnson, a local

organic vegetable grower. Now he’s moved an old trailer

onto the family land, has planted 500 black currant bushes,

and has additional plans. His sister has also moved back,

with a passion for sheep and organic dairying, after college

and a stint teaching high school in Massachusetts.

Family history and continuity are important, but are

only one part of being native. I was born in Baltimore,

Maryland, and grew up in Syracuse, New York. I’ve lived

in Maine and Vermont all but two of the past eighteen

years, since 1998 in Craftsbury. The biomes of the northern

deciduous forest and the boreal forest are where my heart

is, and where I have chosen to make my home. In a slim

volume titled The Rediscovery of North America, author Barry

Lopez writes of the Spanish word querencia, “a place on the

ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s

strength of character is drawn . . . a place in which we know

exactly who we are . . . from which we speak our deepest

beliefs.” The northern forest, and the farm country that has

been made from some of that forest, are my querencia. To

here I always come back, here I gather strength, to this land

I have pledged my life and my fidelity.

Americans have almost always been happy to move

on to the next chance, the beckoning frontier, the unsettled

country. We are mobile. And our willingness to imagine, to

head down a fresh trail, to throw everything we’ve got into

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something new, to take risks, has shaped us deeply. But we

have often left wreckage behind—worn-out farms, cutover

forests, cities with severe problems. Some people, however,

have always stayed behind, for whatever reasons, in difficult

places, on difficult land. Some have used these places poorly,

but also some well, with great care, with love, with slowly

growing knowledge and understanding.

We need an expanded

nativeness, a flourishing of people

committed to place in the deepest

possible ways. Indeed, I believe

that our survival depends on this:

we can no longer keep moving on.

We must decide, at last, to settle,

to become as much at home as

the black-capped chickadee and

the red squirrel; to make the best

of what is at hand. The first

standard of our success must be

the health of the land. No true

native, by his actions, leaves the

land in worse condition at the end

of his life than at the beginning,

for all lives, whether in the city or

in the country, ultimately derive

their good health from the good

health of the land. (And no

true native, loving deeply her own

home, willingly or happily makes

choices that harm the homes of

others.) We will not achieve this

in one generation, or several; it

is a project of centuries, but we

must get started.

Vermont, with relatively few

people, with small cities and much

of the population living in rural

areas, with a strong attachment

to a small-scale agriculture, with

abundant resources for self-

reliance, is a good place to begin

to craft this new nativeness. It

will be difficult, because people

everywhere have become very

nearly locked into an economic

system that (thanks to inexpensive

petroleum) supplies local needs

with stuff brought in from around

the globe. But there are numerous

examples around this state of

Vermonters figuring out how to

do things differently. Vermonters

getting local fresh vegetables

onto the tables of our citizens.

Vermonters learning how to milk

sheep and make exquisite cheeses. Vermonters turning wood

from our forests, and wool from our pastures, and wind from

our ridgelines into what we need to thrive. It is continuously

inspiring and energizing. What I see in Vermont is a drive

everywhere toward a renewed, invigorated nativeness that

respects and draws on the good knowledge, traditions, and

connectedness of the people whose family names are on the

headstones, combining that with the energies of those who

are just now establishing homes here.

My wife and I bought our place, 87 acres on the Wild

Branch River, in 1999, just a few

days after our first child was born in

Burlington. Slowly we are coming

to know it. We have planted more

than 300 fruit trees, bushes, vines and

canes, learning the nature of our soil

by digging holes for them each spring.

We ate our first own apples last year.

more of them are flowering this spring.

We expect the grapes to bear this

summer. The currants, gooseberries,

blueberries and raspberries are fruitful.

We are learning which varieties do

well here, which don’t. . . .

Our vegetable gardens are well

established and fertile, enriched by

the manure given back to us by the

neighboring dairy farmer who hays

our fields. We save our vegetable

seeds for the next season and replant

our garlic and potatoes from year to

year. The asparagus and rhubarb are

flourishing. We cut some of our own

fireweed. The rest we buy from our

neighbor, Andy Moffat. His family

has lived on this road since the 1930s.

There are now four houses, three for

family and one with renters. The

business is Christmas trees, with a side

of firewood and sometimes of syrup.

Working to unload several cords of

wood at our woodshed from Andy’s

truck, we’ve learned the unrecorded

history of our area. . . .

Food is always on people’s minds,

and in Vermont the activity aimed

at growing our own seems almost

hyperactive. The event calendars sent

out by the UVM Center for Sustainable

Agriculture and NOFA-Vermont are

stuffed: grazing seminars, dairy goat

nutrition, cheesemaking, on farm

composting, soil ecology, northern

Vermont slaughterhouse feasibility,

direct marketing of farm-raised meats,

organic vegetable seed production and

on and on.

In Westfield, Butterworks Farm,

owned by the Lazor family produces from its dairy herd

its incomparable yogurt, sold around the state, as well as

grains, dry beans, sunflower oil and other products, in a

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nearly closed system with almost no purchased inputs, while

building the health of the soil; they, and many other farmers

looking for new possibilities, are showing that we can supply

more of own food than we have thought we could.

To the degree that we depend on resources or finished

products brought in from outside our region, we are not

native. Can one truly be a native Vermonter (Coloradan,

Michigander, North Dakotan) if most everything one

needs—food, clothing, building materials, tools, energy and

so on—comes from somewhere

else? If being native to a place

means anything, it must include

making one’s life from the

resources of that place—and

doing so in a way that does not

degrade that place, that does

not make it possible for our

children and grandchildren

also to make native lives. But

we have moved so far from

local and regional self-reliance that this is a very difficult

business.

For the past sixteen months, as part of developing a

new course for Sterling College, where I teach, I’ve been

slowly making clothes. Garments straight from the soil

of Vermont, from this ground that I love—from pastures,

forests, roadsides, overgrown fields. I have washed, carded,

spun, knitted, woven and felted wool from Craftsbury sheep.

I’m working with local llama fiber, alpaca and mohair. I’ve

gathered milkweed, dogbane, and nettle to experiment with

the beautiful and strong fibers found in the stalks of those

plants, and have grown flax. I have tanned the hides of

deer and stillborn calves to make buckskin clothing and

leather for shoes. We could do much more here to supply

one of the most basic human needs—clothing—from local

resources. This has become very nearly a thing of the past:

our clothes are made of cotton, wool, silk, leather, nylon,

polyester, acrylic, whatever, grown/raised/extracted, and

processed, assembled we know not where or by whom, with

unaccountable environmental and social costs. Could we

change this just a little bit? Would it make some sense? . . .

What would it take? Would there be rewards that we must

now re-imagine?

  

A new nativeness must also take delight in and continually

expand our understanding of the wild creatures with which

we share this place. The citizenry of the woods and the

fields; the lakes, ponds and rivers; the marshes and swamps

and bogs; the alpine summits. Being able to recognize the

field marks and songs of many of Vermont’s two to three

hundred species of birds, for example, enriches every walk

and enriches life, brings more meaning and sense to what one

sees and hears every day. It brings more beauty into one’s

life, blurriness resolving into individual creatures whose

ways of living one can gradually come to know, to admire,

and to cherish.

After decades of studying birds and plants, I have

undertaken to become more acquainted with insects. In

the past few years, outstanding guides have been published

for a few groups. More than 130 kinds of dragonflies and

damselflies here? Who would have guessed! They’ve flown

back and forth past me for years and I’ve never taken a close

look. And the butterflies! How easy it is to overlook all but

the most obvious, the morning cloaks, the swallowtails, the

monarchs, the white admirals. But down there in the grasses

and the weeds are the dozen of kinds of skippers, doing

whatever it is skippers do, I don’t know, but I want to find

out. What a richness there is, how endless the pleasure of

discovery, and how satisfying to come to understand better

who else lives here.

We must craft our native hearts and native minds. Hearts

and minds that can learn how to carefully and properly shape

to our use the land and resources of Vermont, that find deep

pleasure in making here a lasting human culture that also

embraces the lives of the non-human, and that understands,

too when wildness ought to be left alone. And we must

allow ourselves in turn to be changed by this place, as all

native creatures are changed and shaped by their places, as

over generations they adapt and become embodiments of

their places. We must, literally, incorporate lush fields, fertile

river bottomlands, windy lakeshores, tumbling rocky streams

and green mountains. Otherwise, in the end, we are all just

visitors.

— This article appeared in Vermont Commons, July, 2005. Jeff Bickart is

a faculty member at Sterling College. He lives with his family on their farm in

Craftsbury, Vt, and grows tree fruits and small fruits commercially.

For people, complete

nativeness is earned. . .

it must be renewed,

revitalized, and

strengthened with every

generation.

People already sense, in some way, that they live in

geographic regions comprising natural systems, of water,

air and land. Now they are becoming aware of them, and

seeing if we are overstressing these systems and rhythms.

At the scale of the bioregion, people can understand the

flow of natural systems, whereas at the global, or nation-

al, levels, the mind boggles. The systems are so varied, the

climates so different. But the bioregion is something that people

do understand.

So you have the region, and that’s the right scale; and

you have the sense of systems, that’s the right philosophy.

If you put the two of them together, you get ecological

consciousness.

— Kirkpatrick Sale, from an interview in

The New Catalyst, Spring 1987.