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  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism, by Kirkpatrick Sale
  • Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 06:55:52 -0700


Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism, by Kirkpatrick Sale
Third Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/lec-sale83.html
©Copyright 1983, 2004 by the E. F. Schumacher Society and Kirkpatrick
Sale

May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140
Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230, (413) 528-1737,
www.smallisbeautiful.org/publication.html.

To Gaea, mother of all of life and oldest of gods, I sing,
You who make and feed and guide all creatures of the earth,
Those who move on your firm and radiant land, those who wing
Your skies, those who swim your seas, to all these you have given
birth;
Mistress, from you come all our harvests, our children, our night
and day,
Yours the power to give us life, yours to take away.
To you, who contain everything,
To Gaea, mother of all, I sing.

-- Homeric Hymn to Earth


In the beginning, as the Greeks saw it, when chaos settled into form, there
was a sphere, aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming embrace of
the sky and its swirling drifts of white cloud, a great vibrant being of
green and blue and brown and gray, binding together in a holy,
deep-breasted synchrony the temperatures of the sun, the gases of the air,
the chemicals of the sea, the minerals of the soil, and bearing the
organized, self-contained, and almost purposeful aspect of a single
organism, even a living, breathing body, a heart, a spirit, a soul, a
goddess, in the awed words of Plato, “a living creature, one and visible,
containing within itself all living creatures.”

To this the Greeks gave a name: Gaea, the earth mother. She was the mother
of the heavens, Uranus, and of time, Cronus; she was the mother of the
Titans and the Cyclops, of the Meliae, the ash-tree spirits who were the
progenitors of all humankind; she was the mother of all, first of the
cosmos, creator of the creators. She became the symbol of all that was
sacred and the font of all wisdom, and at the fissures and rifts in her
surface—at Delphi, especially, and Dodona and Piraeus—she would impart
her knowledge to those oracles who knew how to hear it. And ultimately,
inevitably, she became embodied in the language of the Greeks as the unit
of life or birth or origination, combined into the word “genos” to give
us, in English, “genesis,” “genus,” “genitals,” “genetics,”
and “generation.”

“Earth is a goddess,” wrote Xenophon in the fourth century before
Christ, “and teaches justice to those who can learn.” Justice and
compassion and prudence and appropriateness and harmony, all of what were
later called the cardinal virtues: “The better she is served,” Xenophon
taught, “the more good things she gives in return.”

All that seems obvious enough, or at least was obvious enough to those who
first inhabited the earth and created her cultures—which is why, in
virtually every early society that we know of, in every preliterate society
that has been discovered, the primary deity, worshipped before all others,
was the earth. And even in those societies that eventually came to displace
the earth goddess with other deities, most typically the sky god—a male
figure, be it noted, and one adopted almost exclusively by those cultures
(even the later Greeks) which simultaneously created empire, war,
hierarchy, priesthood, and slavery—even in those societies the earth was
still considered a living being, sentient and organic, and still retained
its character as a deity.

It was not until the development of European science, from about the
sixteenth century on, that this animistic conception of the earth finally
gave way, to be replaced by one supported by the new insights of physics,
chemistry, mechanics, astronomy, and mathematics. The new perception
held—more than that, in fact it proved—that the earth, the universe,
and all within it operated by certain clear and calculable laws and not by
the whims of any living, thinking being; that, far from being divine and
omnipotent, these laws were capable of scientific prediction and
manipulation; and that objects, from the smallest stone to the earth itself
and the planets beyond, were not animate with souls and wills and purposes
but were nothing more than the combination of certain chemical and
mechanical properties. The cosmos was in no sense like a purposeful,
pulsatory celestial thing alive but rather, in the Newtonian image,
something more like a giant clock, its many parts moving in an ordered,
kinetic, mechanical way. Europe’s scientific revolution—in the
triumphant words of the seventeenth-century physicist Robert
Hooke—enabled humankind “to discover all the secret workings of nature,
almost in the same manner as we do those that are the productions of
[human] Art and are managed by Wheels, and Engines, and Springs.”

Now, as I am sure you know, the history of ideas is just like the history
of technologies: those that suit the powers-that-be are embraced, those
that seem to have no utility are forgotten. The ideas of the new science
were very quickly heeded and their creators rewarded and pantheonized by a
European establishment that at the same time was in the process of creating
other complementary attitudes and systems for which scientism provided both
intellectual conditioning and practical guidance. For the scientific system
was developed, let us not forget, contemporaneously with—and, by no means
accidentally, in aid of—the consolidation of the nation state, the growth
of mercantile and then corporate capitalism, and the spread of global
exploitation and colonialism. Its inherent message—the celebration of the
quantifiable, the mechanistic, the physiochemical, and the tangible, as
against the organic, the spiritual, the creative, and the intangible—had
immense importance, and far beyond the laboratories, for the European
society that developed out of the sixteenth century. And its ultimate
governing principle—that humans should not merely understand but be
capable of manipulating nature, and indeed, as Descartes put it for all of
European science, be “masters and possessors of Nature”—became
ingrained into not only the scientific but all scholarly and most popular
thinking in the Western world from that day to this, until by now it shapes
the perceptions of our senses and the patterns of our psyches.

And if today we see the earth as a static and neutral arena which is
alterable by our chemicals and controllable by our technologies; if we see
ourselves as a superior species, to whom is given the right to kill off as
many hundreds of others as we wish and “have dominion over” the rest;
if we believe we have the power to reorder earth’s atoms and reassemble
its genes, to contrive weapons and machines fueled by our own invented
elements and capable of destroying forever most of its organic life; if we
create technologies capable of plundering its resources, befouling its
systems, poisoning its air perhaps irretrievably, and altering its eons-old
processes to suit our wishes; and if those who are most especially devoted
to the truest nature of the earth, those we call the ecologists, can choose
to dress themselves in the cloaks of scientism to talk of nature’s
“entropy” or energy “production” or food “chains” or forest
“management” or even displace the image of the biotic community with
that of the mechanical eco-“system”—if this is our condition today,
it is because, far from calling into question the scientific view of the
universe in these past four centuries, we have in fact accepted it
virtually in its entirety: it has become the foundation and sustenance not
only of our various social systems—of education, agriculture, medicine,
religion, energy, communication, transportation—but of our most basic
economic and political institutions as well.

To be sure, the scientific worldview is not without its values, its uses,
its triumphs even, and I think we may want to call the world a better place
for our knowledge of hygiene, say, or radiotelegraphy or immunology or
electricity. But its shortcomings, its failures, its calamitous dangers
have by now become obvious, and it is surely safe to say that the path of
sanity, perhaps survival, is to regain the spirit of the ancient Greeks, to
once again comprehend the earth as a living creature. We need to recover
the sense, as Schumacher puts it in Good Work, “that man is the servant
of this world, or at least a trustee,” a concept that has been
“organized out of our thinking,” as he put it, “by the modern
world,” and we must listen again to the two great teachers, one “the
marvelous system of living nature” and the other “the traditional
wisdom of mankind,” teachers we have “rejected and replaced by some
extraordinary structure we call objective science.” And we must
re-envision humans as participants and not masters in the biotic community,
as only one among many species, special perhaps in having certain skills of
information-gathering and communication but not for that reason superior to
those with other skills—for the human being, as Mark Twain might have
said, is different from other animals only in that it is able to blush. Or
needs to.

In The Interpreters, a book by the Irish author known as AE, written at the
height of the Irish Revolution, there is a passage in which a group of
disparate men, all prisoners, sit around discussing what the ideal new
world should look like. One of them, the poet Lavelle, argues fervently
against the vision put forth by one prisoner, a philosopher, of a global,
scientific, cosmopolitan culture. “If all wisdom was acquired without,”
he says, “it might be politic 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 the land.”

To become “dwellers in the land,” to regain the spirit of the Greeks,
to fully and honestly come to know the earth, the crucial and perhaps only
and all-encompassing task is to understand the place, the immediate,
specific place, where we live: As Schumacher says, “In the question of
how we treat the land, our entire way of life is involved.” We must
somehow live as close to it as possible, be in touch with its particular
soils, its waters, its winds. We must learn its ways, its capacities, its
limits. We must make its rhythms our patterns, its laws our guide, its
fruits our bounty.

That, in essence, is bioregionalism.

Now, I must acknowledge that “bioregionalism” is not yet quite a
household word—you’re writing a book on what? my friends say—and when
the Schumacher Society board of trustees decided to use it as the theme of
this forum, we knew we ran the risk both of alienating the uninvolved and
perplexing the sympathetic. But I believe bioregionalism to be a concept so
accessible, so serviceable, so productive—and, after about five years
now, so impelling as to have created a momentum of its own—that I feel
quite confident in its use. For there is really nothing so mysterious about
the components of the word—“bio,” from the Greek for life;
“regional,” from the Latin for territory to be ruled; “ism,” from
the Greek for doctrine—and nothing, after a moment’s thought, so
terribly strange in what they convey. If it initially falls oddly on our
ears, that may perhaps only be a measure of how far we have distanced
ourselves from its wisdom—and how badly we need it now.

Let me take a little time to excavate this concept of bioregionalism a bit,
baring and examining its several layers as one might in looking at the
strata of the earth.

All aspects of the bioregional society—and, one might imagine, a
bioregional world—take their forms from that of Gaea herself. One of
Gaea’s many offspring, the first of all her daughters, was Themis, the
goddess of the laws of nature and the mother of the seasons, and it is by a
diligent study of her—her laws, her messages, her patterns as they have
been established over these many uncounted millennia—that we can guide
ourselves in constructing human settlements and systems. This is not, of
course, an easy undertaking, for the lessons of nature can sometimes seem
confusing, even contradictory, and perhaps I have read them wrong; perhaps
only more time and more opportunity to be closer to nature, as close as the
preliterate peoples who have twenty words for snow and distinguish thirty
kinds of annual seasons, will allow us to learn these lessons properly. But
I think I have at least the outlines right, and I am bolstered by the
knowledge that they seem to accord well with the findings of many others
who have looked in this direction, not the least of whom was Fritz
Schumacher himself.

I would offer, then, what it seems to me are the bioregional guidelines
bearing upon what I regard as the four basic determinants of any organized
civilization: scale, economy, politics, and society.


Scale

I will, if I may—I always do—start with scale: the size, the dimensions
of the bioregion as set by the characteristics of the earth, by the
“givens” of nature. A bioregion is a part of the earth’s surface
whose rough boundaries are determined by natural rather than human dictates
and is distinguishable from other areas by attributes of flora, fauna,
water, climate, soils, landforms, and the human settlements and cultures
those attributes have given rise to. The borders between such areas are
usually not rigid—nature works with more flexibility and fluidity than
that—but the general contours of the regions themselves are not hard to
identify and indeed will probably be felt, understood, sensed, or in some
way known to many of the inhabitants, particularly those rooted in the
land—farmers, ranchers, hunters and fishers, foresters and botanists, and
most especially, across the face of America, tribal Indians, those still in
touch with a culture that for centuries knew the earth as sacred and its
well-being as imperative.

Now, one rather interesting thing about all this is that when you start to
look closely at how nature is patterned—and I have spent a considerable
amount of time doing this for North America in the last few months—you
discover that you are dealing with something almost, appropriately enough,
organic. For just as bioregions normally merge with one another without
hard-edged boundaries, so they overlap and even subsume one another in a
complex arrangement of sizes depending upon the detail and specificity of
natural characteristics. The whole matter is complex, and I do not wish to
go into all its intricacies today, but let me suggest the labels with which
I propose to describe (and, I hope, to popularize) the various kinds of
bioregional gradations.

The widest region, taking its character from the broadest measures of
native vegetation and soil contours, may be called the “ecoregion” and
will generally cover several hundred thousands of square miles over several
states; it is possible to determine somewhere between forty and fifty such
areas across North America. But within these ecoregions it is easy to
distinguish other coherent territories that define themselves primarily by
their surface features—a watershed or river basin, a valley, a desert, a
plateau, a mountain range—and that we may call the “georegion.” And
within these georegions, in turn, one can often locate still smaller areas
of perhaps several thousand square miles, discrete and identifiable with
their own topographies and inhabitants, their own variations and human
culture and agriculture, to which we may give the name “vitaregion.”

Using that terminology for our location today, we would say we are in an
ecoregion that could be thought of as the Northeastern Hardwood, stretching
(in conventional terms) from mid-New Hampshire and mid-Vermont to mid-New
Jersey, an area characterized by birch and beech in addition to conifers,
largely podzolic and blue podzolic soils, and a July-maximum,
January-minimum rainfall. Within this territory are a number of obvious
georegions—the Hudson watershed, the Berkshires, the Massachusetts Bay
systems—and South Hadley [home of Mt. Holyoke College, site of the 1983
lectures—ed.] is solidly within the Connecticut River georegion, a long
fertile valley running between the Green and Taconic Mountains on the west
and the White Mountains on the east all the way down to Long Island Sound.
But there are obvious distinctions to be made within this georegion, too,
for the valley here as it broadens out from the Deerfield River on down to
the Meshomasic foothills south of Hartford is quite different from the
stretch up north to the Ammonoosuc or south in the pinched and hilly course
to the Sound; and within this vitaregion clear differences from surrounding
areas in both agriculture—tobacco, for example, and potatoes—and
homoculture can be seen.

But I do not wish to dwell on such distinctions, to elaborate this
cosmography, for I think at this stage of bioregional consciousness it is
more important to stand a bit aside and appreciate the broad contours of
the concepts than to plunge headlong into the briarbush of elaborate
differences and definitions. Whether we speak of ecoregion or georegion or
vitaregion, after all, we speak of bioregions, and it is this essential
archetype that is most important to comprehend. For once that is done on
any significant scale, then the matter of making distinctions among
bioregions and creating human institutions to match them can safely be left
to the inhabitants, the dwellers in the land, who will always know them
best. In the discussions to follow, therefore, we may imagine that
bioregionalism will apply in its initial and formative phases to the
largest territory, the ecoregion, and thereafter, in an evolving organic
process narrowing in scale as the perceptions become sharper and the tools
more finely honed, to smaller and smaller territories, to the vitaregion
and perhaps beyond, moving closer and closer to the specifics of the soil
and those who live upon it.


Economy

The economy that comes into being within a bioregion also derives its
character from the conditions, the laws, of nature. Our ignorance is
immense, but what we can be said to know with some surety after these many
centuries of living on the soil has been cogently summarized by Edward
Goldsmith, the editor of The Ecologist, as the laws of Ecodynamics—to be
distinguished, of course, from the laws of Thermodynamics.

The first law is that conservation—preservation, sustenance—is the
central goal of the natural world, hence its ingenerate, fundamental
resistance to large-scale structural change; the second law is that, far
from being entropic (that’s an image rightly belonging to physics,
errantly borrowed by scientific ecologists), nature is inherently stable,
working in all times and places toward what ecology calls a “climax,”
that is, a balanced, harmonious, integrative state of maturity which, once
reached, is maintained for prolonged periods. From this it follows that a
bioregional economy would seek to maintain rather than exploit the natural
world, accommodate to the environment rather than resist it; it would
attempt to create conditions for a climax, a balance, for what some
economists have recently taken to calling a “steady state,” rather than
for perpetual change and continual growth in service to “progress,” a
false and delusory goddess if ever there was one. A bioregional economy
would, in practical terms, minimize resource use, emphasize conservation
and recycling, avoid pollution and waste. It would adopt its systems to the
given bioregional resources: energy based on wind, for example, where
nature called for that, or on wood, where that was appropriate, and food
based on what the region itself—particularly in its native,
pre-agricultural state—could grow.

And thus this kind of economy would be based, above all, on the most
elemental and most elegant principle of the natural world, that of
self-sufficiency. Just as nature does not depend on trade, does not create
elaborate networks of continental dependency, so the bioregion would find
all its needed resources—for energy, food, shelter, clothing, craft,
manufacture, luxury—within its own environment. And far from being
deprived, far from being thereby impoverished, it would gain in every
measure of economic health. It would be more stable, free from
boom-and-bust cycles and distant political crises; it would be able to
plan, to allocate its resources, to develop what it wanted to develop at
the safest pace, in the most ecological manner. It would not be at the
mercy of distant and uncontrollable national bureaucracies and
transnational governments and thus would be more self-regarding, more
cohesive, developing a sense of place, of community, of comradeship, and
the pride that comes from stability, control, competence, and independence.

In what was perhaps one of his most prescient perceptions Fritz Schumacher
realized that the market economy of twentieth-century capitalism erred
fundamentally, because it erred repeatedly, against nature. “It is
inherent in the methodology of economics to ignore man’s dependence on
the natural world,” he wrote. “The market represents only the surface
of society and its significance relates to the momentary situation as it
exists there and then. There is no probing into the depths of things, into
the natural or social facts that lie behind them.” And this is why, as he
points out, conventional economics makes no distinctions at all between
primary goods, “which man has to win from nature,” and secondary goods
manufactured from them or between renewable and nonrenewable resources or
the environmental and social costs of developing one against the other.

A bioregional economy, in sharpest contrast, makes—in fact is grounded
in—these vital distinctions.


Politics

Political principles on a bioregional scale are also grounded in the
dictates presented by nature, in which what is forever valued are not the
imperatives of giantism, centralization, hierarchy, and monolithicity but
rather, in starkest contraposition, those of scale, decentralization,
division, and diversity.

Nothing is more striking in the examination of a natural setting than the
absence of the forms of authoritarianism, domination, and sovereignty that
are taken as inevitable in human governance; even the queen bee is queen
only because we designate her so. In a healthy econiche the various sets of
animals—whether themselves organized as individuals, families, bands, or
communal hives—get along with one another without the need of any system
of authority or dominance—indeed, without structure or organization of
any kind whatsoever. No one species rules, not one even makes the attempt,
and the only assertion of power has to do with territory, with a particular
area to be left alone in. Each set, each species, in the system has its own
methods of organization, but none attempts to impose them on any other or
to set itself up as the central source or power or sovereign. Far from
there being contention and discord, the pseudo-Darwinian war of
all-against-all, there is for the most part balance and adjustment,
cooperation among communities, integration into the environment, variety,
complexity, and flexibility.

The lessons are of course obvious and suggest immediately the design for a
bioregion as well as for a continent of bioregions. Each unit, of the size
that the natural settings promote, may be unified and cohesive—let us
imagine, for a start, a neighborhood, a community, a small town—and yet
live side by side with others in a settled and mutual pattern, together
comprising a vitaregion; and that vitaregion may have its own unification
and cohesiveness, its own method of governance, and yet live side by side
with other regions, organized as they may see fit; and so on, outward, in
self-sufficient collaboration, unit upon unit, for so long as the natural
boundaries may permit and the natural affinities be kept intact.

Similar lessons may be derived from the patterns of human nature, and in
the matter of political relations it is only fitting to factor those in as
well. Throughout all human history, even in the past several hundred years,
people have tended to live in separate and independent groups, a
“fragmentation of human society” that Harold Isaacs, the veteran MIT
professor of international affairs, has described as something that is akin
to “a pervasive force in human affairs and always has been.” Even when
nations and empires have arisen, he notes, they have no staying power
against the innate human drive to fragmentation: “The record shows that
there could be all kinds of lags, that declines could take a long time and
falls run long overdue, but that these conditions could never be
indefinitely maintained. Under external or internal pressures—usually
both—authority was eroded, legitimacy challenged, and in wars, collapse,
and revolution, the system of power redrawn.”

I feel I must add here a note that may be painful for those whose
allegiance to the precepts of fragmentation and diversification tends to
crumble halfway through. Bioregional diversity means exactly that. It does
not mean that every region of the Northeast or of North America or of the
globe will build upon the values of democracy, equality, liberty, freedom,
justice, and other suchlike “desiderata.” It means rather that truly
autonomous bioregions will likely go their own separate ways and end up
with quite disparate political systems—some democracies, no doubt, some
direct, some representative, some federative, but undoubtedly all kinds of
aristocracies, oligarchies, theocracies, principalities, margravates,
duchies, and palatinates as well. And some with values, beliefs, standards,
and customs quite antithetical to those that the people in this room, for
example, hold dearest.

Schumacher somewhere quotes with favor Gandhi’s remark that it is
worthless to go on “dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need
to be good.” But that is exactly what I think is necessary: systems so
perfect, or at least good enough, that they accommodate people who are not
good. There’s no point, it seems to me, in dreaming that people will be
good, not merely because that would produce a fairly vapid society, I
should think, but because there’s every reason to suppose that it is
simply not likely to take place on this planet in this galaxy. We must
dream of systems, rather, which allow people to be people in all their
variety, to be wrong upon occasion and errant and bad and even evil, to
commit the crimes which as near as we know have always been
committed—brutality, subjugation, even war—and yet systems in which all
social and civil structures will work to minimize such errancies and, what
is even more important, hold them within strict bounds should they occur.

Bioregionalism, properly conceived, is such a construct, for it provides a
scale at which misconduct is likely to be mitigated because bonds of
community are strong, and material and social needs for the most part
fulfilled; a scale at which the consequences of individual and regional
actions are visible and unconcealable, and violence can be seen to be a
transgression against the environment and its people in defiance of basic
ecological common sense; a scale at which even error and iniquity, should
they happen, will not do irreparable damage beyond the narrow regional
limits and will not send their poisons coursing through the veins of entire
continents and the world itself. Bioregionalism, properly conceived, not
merely tolerates but thrives upon the diversities of human behavior and the
varieties of political and social arrangements those give rise to, even if
at times they may stem from the baser rather than the more noble motives.
In any case, there is no other way to have it.


Society

When asked recently to name the seven wonders of the world, the renowned
biologist Lewis Thomas led off with the extraordinary phenomenon of the
oncideres beetle and the mimosa tree. It seems that when she wishes to lay
her eggs, the female oncideres beetle unfailingly picks out the mimosa tree
from all others in the forest, crawls out on one of its limbs and cuts a
long lengthwise slit into which she drops her sacs. Then, because in the
larva stage the offspring cannot survive in live wood, she backs down the
branch a foot or so and cuts a neat circular slit through the bark all
around the limb, which has the effect of killing the branch within a very
short time, whereupon it falls to the ground in the next strong wind and
becomes the home for the next generation of oncideres beetles. But,
interestingly, this process also has the effect of pruning the mimosa tree,
a rather valuable ancillary result because, left alone, a mimosa has a
lifespan of twenty-five to thirty years, but pruned in just this simple way
it can flourish for a century or more.

Dr. Thomas seems to regard this relationship as sufficiently extraordinary
to be regarded as a wonder of the world, particularly worthy, he writes,
because such things “keep reminding us of how little we know about
nature.” Well, perhaps confession on the side of ignorance is wise in
these matters, and yet I do think it is permissible to point out that, far
from being unusual, this sort of biological interaction is in fact
commonplace throughout every phase of nature, and, moreover, it is found
with such regularity that it should indicate at least one lesson we know
very well. The relationship is called, of course, symbiosis, and its
persistence and pervasiveness in the natural world should be allowed to
suggest to us, if we will but let it, a fundamental principle. From the
very mitochondria that float about in our cells, infinitesimal creatures
with their own DNA and RNA who live on us as we live on them, right on to
the giant clam, which lives off the photosynthesis created by the plant
cells it engulfs and actually incorporates into its body, where the cells
live happily in a protected environment that even includes small lenses in
the clam’s tissues particularly adapted to increase their needed
sunlight—from the smallest to the largest, the recurrence of the
phenomenon of symbiosis provides a model for, if it does not strongly
suggest the need for, a reordering of human society along similar lines,
with families and neighborhoods and communities and cities operating within
a bioregion on the basis of collaboration, exchange, cooperation, and
mutuality rather than contention, competition, and selfishness.

The prime example of such an interaction on the bioregional scale would be
the social symbiosis between the city and the countryside, the urban and
the rural—a correlation that has been celebrated by philosophers from
Aristotle on and brilliantly analyzed by the woman with whom I share the
platform this morning, Jane Jacobs, and the demise of which has been
tellingly bemoaned by most of the giants of our century from Mumford to
Borsodi to Bookchin. Listen to Fritz Schumacher:

Human life, to be fully human, needs the city; but it also needs food
and other raw materials gained from the country. Everybody needs ready
access to both countryside and city. It follows that the aim must be a
pattern of urbanization so that every rural area has a nearby city, near
enough so that people can visit it and be back the same day. No other
pattern makes human sense.

Actual developments during the last hundred years or so, however, have
been in the exactly opposite direction: the rural areas have been
increasingly deprived of access to worthwhile cities. There has been a
monstrous and highly pathological polarization of the pattern of
settlements.

“Pathological polarization”: the mixedness of the metaphor aside, that
is obviously the exact opposite of symbiosis and is equally obviously, as
Schumacher saw, the condition of our time. Could we imagine a sadder
comment?

In a bioregional society the division between urban and rural, industrial
and agricultural, population and resources, would be replaced by an
equilibrium, a symbiosis. On the one hand, the city would be necessary as a
producer of certain kinds of goods, as a center of artistic culture, as a
source of the assembled civic virtues, though the city need not be of
immense size—indeed, no larger than fifty thousand or one hundred
thousand people—and in fact would ideally replicate rather than grow so
that instead of a single metropolis there would be a multiplicity of cities
of modest sizes scattered throughout the bioregion. And on the other hand,
the country would of course be necessary as the prime source of food and
water and the materials of shelter, clothing, artisanship, and trade, and
especially as the embodiment of the bioregional spirit of Gaea, whose
presence should be felt daily by the inhabitants of every settlement, of
whatever size. This equilibrium should not suggest some sort of
polarization of its own, for in a bioregional society living with, on, for,
and around the earth as a necessitarian matter of course, the countryside
would become part of the city, not merely in the sense of parks and
woodlands and greenswards and open waterways—as fundamental as they
are—and not merely in the sense of backyard and rooftop gardens and
floral displays and tree-lined streets and plaza fountains—as desirable
as they are—but through the integration into every urban process of a
total understanding of ecological principles until the smallest child knows
that water does not come from a pipe in the basement and that you can’t
throw anything away because there is no “away.”

Now, it would be possible to continue this description of the bioregional
civilization as derived from the laws of nature—as it relates to energy,
for example, and agriculture and health and defense and much else
besides—and of course such a task is ultimately necessary for the
bioregional citizenry to undertake, with study, in depth, over time. But in
discussing those four primary determinants—scale, economy, politics, and
society—I hope I have suggested to you the outlines of such a project and
something of what it might evolve into—some of the bones, a little of the
meat—so that you can appreciate its validity at least as a philosophical
approach.

To my perception, honed through these many years of mid-century turmoil,
bioregionalism satisfies the principal conditions of an effective political
project, most particularly in these respects: it is rooted in the
historical realities of the past, it accords with the visible patterns of
the present, and it provides desirable and workable visions of the future.
I would like, all too briefly, to touch upon each of these.


Historical Realities

There is nothing more fundamentally supportive of the validity of
bioregionalism than its being the modern version of a very old perception
of the world held not merely by the Greeks but, as I indicated before, by
virtually every preliterate society of which we have knowledge. It must
mean something that the early human societies which occupied the earth held
this perception as a truth so profound that it could be accurately
described as almost innate; it must have significance that in most
subsequent societies until quite recently the earth and its behavior formed
the basis of all folk knowledge, not merely in matters of agriculture and
nutrition but in medicine, religion, art, and even government. And as
Schumacher says—it is indeed the ultimate sentence of Small Is
Beautiful-—“The guidance we need for our work cannot be found in
science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they
serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.”

But the historical validity of this concept—the provenance I might say,
as the art dealers do in describing the history of an artwork to establish
its authenticity—can be certified in an even more concrete way, closer to
this time and place. Regionalism, whether conceived of as sectionalism,
localism, separatism, agrarianism, states rights, or nullificationism, has
a fine and venerable tradition in this country and is by any reckoning as
American as—depending on your region—apple, peach, Boston cream,
Jefferson Davis, sweet cactus, German cherry, or Key lime pie.

Frederick Jackson Turner, the great Wisconsin historian, knew it, and it
formed the basis of a lifetime of studies culminating in The Significance
of Sections in American History, where he showed that only by a
consideration of American sectional, or regional, differences could one
understand the patterns of settlement, migration, architecture, literature,
and economic and political life: “We in America are in reality,” he
concluded, “a federation of sections rather than states.”

Lewis Mumford knew it when he put together the Regional Plan Association in
1923, an ambitious—and for a decade successful—attempt to create
regional plans along geographical lines, which would, in his words, mean
the “reinvigoration and rehabilitation of whole regions so that the
products of culture and civilization, instead of being confined to a
prosperous minority in the congested centers, shall be available to
everyone at every point” and so that we may “eliminate our enormous
economic wastes, give a new life to stable agriculture, and [though I blush
to say it] set down fresh communities planned on a human scale.”

Howard Odum knew it when he started a highly honored and remarkably
multidisciplinary school of regionalism at the University of North Carolina
in the 1930s and over two decades produced a series of scholarly books
highlighted by the massive 1938 study American Regionalism, all to the
point of showing, as he put it, that “regionalism . . . represents the
philosophy and technique of self-help, self-development, and initiative in
which each area unit is not only aided in, but is committed to the full
development of its own resources and capacities.”

And even the United States government, mirabile dictu, knew it when in 1934
it authorized a National Resource Committee to study the regions of America
and discovered that “regional differentiation may turn out to be the true
expression of American life and culture [reflecting] American ideals,
needs, and viewpoints far more adequately than does State consciousness and
loyalty.” It was out of this exhaustive study, more than fifteen reports
in all, that the Tennessee Valley Authority was born, America’s
greatest—though in some respects most distorted—experiment with
regionalism.

Much there is today that goes against the grain of regionalism, of course,
much forcing the nation away from its natural contours toward the
artificial unanimity of a monolithic plasticized government. And yet... and
yet... even in an age such as this the historical realities of regionalism,
as perceived by those several generations of scholars and planners, cannot
be erased. And that is why—just to touch on a small part of this complex
subject—there are today more than twenty-five specialized regional
governments on the TVA model operating in the United States, more than a
thousand metropolitan regional districts, almost five hundred substate
planning districts, and more than a hundred multi-county regional
associations. That is why regional planning, particularly since the 1970s,
has become an established academic and governmental profession and all but
ten states have active regional planning departments, some of which are now
beginning to be responsive to bioregional imperatives. And that is why
there are real and persistent rivalries among national regions for such
things as defense contracts, army bases, public works projects, businesses,
conventions, sports franchises, and the like, a competition so strong these
days that the Wall Street Journal this spring ran a front-page story
declaring that “another war between the states is raging.”


Contemporary Trends

Another salient measure of the validity of the bioregional enterprise is
that it accords well with the most basic—and complementary—political
processes in the world today: first, the pressure from a series of mounting
national and global crises that threaten to end with nothing less than the
collapse of the established order and, second, the concurrent trend toward
the disintegration of imperial, continental, and national
arrangements—what is called separatism, decentralism, or, to use a
supposedly derogatory term, Balkanization.

I do not need to belabor for an audience of this distinction the evidence
of the crises threatening the contemporary industrial system. It is
sufficient, I think, merely to say that those who are predicting some sort
of near-term calamity and collapse range through all the academic
disciplines, from physics to philosophy, and through all the political
positions, from anarchist to authoritarian. To be sure, that is not enough
to guarantee that such a disintegration will in fact take place, but it is
accompanied by plentiful signs of the failure of the established orders to
satisfy the most basic human needs of large portions of the population,
signs of the apparently unstoppable disintegration of America’s cities,
signs of the rising tides of poverty, disease, ignorance, anomie, suicide,
violence, and crime, even in this most affluent of nations. And it is
interesting that, whatever form the collapse in fact will take, we already
possess a wide variety of labels for it: Schumacher’s “the degeneration
of the industrial system,” Robert Nisbet’s “twilight of authority,”
the Club of Rome’s “oncoming age of scarcity,” Arnold Toynbee’s
“the end of the frontier,” and, variously, “the coming dark age,”
“the twilight of capitalism,” “the biological time bomb,”
“overshoot,” “the end of the American Era.”

I remember Fritz Schumacher, during the height of the oil crisis, looking
up at the skyscrapers of New York and remarking, “I wonder how many
people will want to climb to the fortieth floor when there is not enough
electricity to run the elevators,” and going on to suggest that the human
limit for climbing is about four or five stories. In his typically gentle
way he was encapsulating a truth: that the disintegration of the present
system is coming about virtually by itself as the era of industrial
capitalism, based on the exploitation of unending frontiers and
non-renewable resources or, as William Catton puts it, on its ability to
steal from elsewhere and elsewhen, reaches its inevitable end; and when it
does, the whole face of industrial society—the height of its buildings,
the size of its cities, the extent of its markets, the reach and power of
its governments, the nature of its institutions—will be forced to change,
and change drastically. There is no escaping this eventual transformation,
for its inevitability is programmed into the very genes of this society,
part of its capitalistic DNA if you will, and as Schumacher wrote in his
final work, “It is no longer possible to believe that any political or
economic reform, or scientific advance, or technological progress could
solve the life and death problems of industrial society.”

The alternative society that may rise from its ashes—or, if we are
terribly lucky, that will evolve before the fires of destruction actually
begin and create those ashes—the one that could logically be thought of
as befitting the coming age, attuned to the conditions that will prevail
after the industrial society runs its course, is the bioregional one. But
in a sense we do not necessarily need to wait until then, however near that
“then” is, because at least one form of the bioregional society is
already taking shape in the nascent separatist movements that have come
into being in almost every corner of the globe within the last generation.
They too represent an organic, I would argue an inevitable, response to the
disintegration of the contemporary order, a growing centrifugal force as
industrialism spins more wildly about. As a global phenomenon the current
rise of these movements is something quite without precedent in history; it
is, according to Eric Hobsbawm, “the characteristic nationalist movement
of our time” and “an unquestionably active, growing and powerful
socio-political force.” An exhaustive elaboration would be exhausting; it
should be enough to note only the most active movements just within Europe,
the continent where it might have been presumed that nations were the
oldest, strongest, and most cohesive: there are the Bretons, Corsicans,
Occitanians, and Alsatians in France; the Catalonians, Andalusians, and
Basques in Spain; the Welsh, Scots, and Cornish in Britain; the Sicilians
and Tyrolians in Italy; the Waloons and Flemish in Belgium; the Latts,
Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians, and a variety of Asians in
the Soviet Union; the Turks and Greeks in Cyprus; the Croatians, Serbs,
Bosnians, Macedonians, and Montenegrins in Yugoslavia—and that, I remind
you, is the bare surface.

It is truly remarkable. The undeniable trend of these past forty years has
not been toward larger and more consolidated arrangements but, everywhere
in the world, toward smaller and more decentralized ones. In the words of
Harold Isaacs: “What we are experiencing is not the shaping of new
coherences but the world breaking into its bits and pieces. . . . We are
refragmenting and retribalizing ourselves.”

What is so interesting in this amazing process is the clear expression of
the bioregional idea. For though it has long been acknowledged that the
cultural aspects of these separatist movements are grounded in their
special regional histories, from which they take their obvious and
cherished differences of language and dress and music, the fact is that
their political and social characters are every bit as rooted in the long,
intimate, and knowledgeable association with their particular bioregion and
its history. And the truths these movements embody, the apparently
unquenchable truths, are in every case the product of the land they hold
sacred.


Desirable Visions

In treading upon the insubstantial ground of the future we take certain
risks, and we must face the fact that the word “utopian” has become an
epithet, a chastisement, for those who would dream of things that never
were and imagine that they still might be. Yet it is a necessary part of
any political construct that it offer an image of the future that can be
regarded as positive and liberatory and realistic and energizing. This, I
submit, bioregionalism succeeds in doing.

For what the bioregional vision suggests is a way of living that not merely
can take us away from the calamities of the present and the diseases of our
quotidian lives but can provide its own indwelling enrichments and
satisfactions, a widening of human possibilities. Imagine, if you will, the
joy of knowing, as we can imagine from the scholarly record, what the
American Indians knew: the meaning of the changes of the wind on a summer
afternoon; the ameliorative properties of everyday plants; the comfort of
tribal, clannic, and community ties throughout life; the satisfaction of
being rooted in history, in lore, in place; the excitement of a culture
understandable because immanent in the simple realities of the
surroundings. Imagine a life primarily of contemplation and leisure, where
work takes up only a few hours a day—an average of fewer than four,
according to the studies of nonliterate societies—where conversation and
play and making love become the common rituals of the afternoon, and there
is no scramble for the necessities of life because they are provided
regularly, equally, joyfully, and without charge. Imagine a life—and here
I am paraphrasing an anthropologist’s description of a California Indian
tribe—where people do not feel themselves to be independent, autonomous
individuals but rather deeply bound together with other people and with the
surrounding nonhuman forms of life in a complex interconnected web of
being, a true community in which all creatures and all things can be felt
almost as brothers and sisters and where the principle of nonexploitation,
of respect and reverence for all creatures, all living things, is as much a
part of life as breathing.

Yet I think, however enchanting that image might be, the bioregional vision
is even more important in that it actually has an air of the practical, the
doable, the achievable: it has the smell of reality about it.

For one thing, the idea of the bioregion is accessible to people, all kinds
of people, for as Kevin Lynch notes in his Managing the Sense of a Region,
“Our senses are local, while our experience is regional.” Lee Swenson,
an early bioregionalist, has reported that when he took his bioregional
slide show across the country, it didn’t take long for his audiences to
come up with some rough consensus about the territories they lived in that
pretty well matched any ecological definition of their bioregions. If true,
this suggests that the process of organizing around this issue, especially
among those outside of the usual constituencies for social change, is made
much easier.

Then, too, bioregionalism joins—or at least has the potential to
join—right and left (or, perhaps more precisely, it ignores right and
left), thus uniting the communard and the NRA hunter, the homesteader and
the conservationist, the antinuclear activist and the antipowerline farmer.
The concern for place, for the preservation of nature, the return to such
traditional American values as self-reliance, local control, town-meeting
democracy—these things can ally many different kinds of political people;
in fact, they have a way of blunting and diminishing other and less
important political differences.

Bioregionalism also has the virtue of gradualism, in that it suggests that
the process of change—or organizing, educating, energizing a following,
and reshaping, refashioning, recreating a continent—is, like the
overarching processes of Gaea herself, not revolutionary and cataclysmic
but, like the drift of the continents on their tectonic plates, steady,
slow, continuous, regular, and inevitable. One does not imagine a
bioregional civilization coming about by revolutionary decree—no matter
whose revolution—or even, in truth, by legislative or administrative
fiat. If one had to dictate or legislate the bioregional future, it would
never happen, because it would be resisted and sabotaged as crazy and
utopian and impractical and un-American; it is only by the long and steady
tenor of evolution that people will ease themselves into such a society as
the alternative futures gradually come to seem senseless and the
bioregional prospect becomes the only sane choice.

And finally, the bioregional vision does not demand elaborate wrenching of
either physical or human realities. It does not posit, on the one hand, the
violent interference with nature that so many of the scientific technofix
visions of the future do—those, for example, that ask for icebergs to be
floated into deserts or the Great Plains to be given over to concentrated
nuclear power plants (it does not, for that matter, have anything to do
with nuclear fission, the single most unnatural project humankind has ever
devised) or rockets full of people to be fired millions of miles away into
space colonies around the sun. And it does not imagine, on the other hand,
the creation of some kind of unlikely and never-before-encountered
superbeings as do so many of the reformist and radical visions of the
future—those, for example, that promise “a new socialist man” without
motives of greed or self-interest or that plan by education or religion or
therapy to create a populace living in aquarian harmony without human
vices. On the contrary, bioregionalism insists on taking the world “as it
is” and people, as I have indicated before, as they are.

I hope I do not suggest with all of this that the bioregional project is
blind to the chances of failure—or what is worse, half-failure—or is
unmindful of the pains that might attend the accomplishment of its ends.
Just because I am suggesting hope and desirability, I am not suggesting
sanguinity or quiescence or detachment or passivity. I mean merely to
underscore that element of the project which speaks to the Biblical
admonition, “Where there is no vision the people perish.”

Lewis Thomas concludes his fascinating Lives of a Cell with this
observation:

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the
earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the
dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone.
Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue
sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the
cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the
great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden
masses. . . . It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature,
full of information, marvelously skilled at handling the sun.

And just one year later, in 1975, the British atmospheric chemist James
Lovelock described in the magazine New Scientist a perception of the world
that had come to him and his colleagues one day:

It appeared to us that the Earth’s biosphere is able to control at
least the temperature of the Earth’s surface and the composition of the
atmosphere. Prima facie, the atmosphere looked like a contrivance put
together cooperatively by the totality of living systems to carry out
certain necessary control functions. This led to the formulation of the
proposition that living matter, the air, the oceans, the land surface, were
parts of a giant system which was able to control temperature, the
composition of the air and sea, the Ph of the soil and so on as to be
optimal for survival of the biosphere. The system seemed to exhibit the
behaviour of a single organism, even a living creature.

Out of this new perception Lovelock and his colleagues created a whole new
scientific hypothesis on the nature of the biosphere. Or should I say a
very old hypothesis? For when they went in search of a name for this
hypothesis, they sought out William Golding, the novelist who just recently
was honored with the Nobel Prize. And what did he suggest immediately? As
Lovelock writes, “He suggested Gaia—the name given by the ancient
Greeks to their Earth goddess.”

So after all, there seems to be no doubt about it. The earth, the
biosphere, is alive, a living creature, one and visible, containing within
itself all living creatures. Like any living entity it can be stressed or
injured or diseased, as it surely is now. But it will live—of that we can
be sure—one way or another, and it will resettle itself, restore itself,
with humankind or without. It behooves us, as nothing in the long history
of humankind, I believe, has so far behooved us, to come to this literally
most vital understanding and, before it is too late, give up those demonic
practices that threaten our fundamental forms of existence and ultimately
our existence itself. We must make the goddess Gaea part of—no, I want to
say the whole of—our lives, even though that may be, as John Todd has
suggested, a change of consciousness as profound and as wrenching as that
which accompanied the origination of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. But
then, what other choice, really, do we have?
-----------

Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of Human Scale, Dwellers in the Land, and
Rebels Against the Future; he is a formulator and early proponent of
“bioregionalism.” His development of this concept in his books,
lectures, articles, and radio broadcasts has fueled the growing interest in
a local approach to the solving of political, economic, and social
problems. An historian and careful researcher, he examines what seem daring
social undertakings of today and places their roots squarely in Western
European traditions.





  • [Livingontheland] Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism, by Kirkpatrick Sale, Tradingpost, 03/21/2005

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