Bioregional Consciousness!

With Ecoliterature having gained much currency all over academia for the past two decades, there’s been a kinda dearth of extensive research in the field of bioregionalism, which, interestingly, is an offshoot of Ecoliterature, but a study that tends to be more specific, and inclined more towards an environmental awareness of a particular region!

Cheryl Glotfelty, the well-renowned nature lover, ecocritic and co-founder of ASLE, (which has, coincidentally hosted a confy in MCC, way back in 2004), who has also authored the famous Ecocriticism Reader has come out with a wonderful volume on The Bioregional Imagination!

This book is a lovely primer for aspiring scholars intending to do their research on Bioregional Studies.

The Introduction to the book, written by Glotfelty and her team, is a wonderful eye-opener of sorts to the theory and practice of Bioregionalism.

Thought of sharing with y’all quite a few interesting excerpts from Glotfelty’s!

Here goes –

On a September evening in eastern Nebraska, several hundred community residents gather at Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center, a restored tallgrass prairie, for a “Twilight on the Tallgrass” celebration.

As people wander the trails, they encounter stations where they learn about native insects, birds, wildflowers, and medicinal plants.

At one station, local writers read from their prairie-inspired work.

Nearby, a Winnebago tribe dance troupe gets into costume for a performance of traditional powwow dances.

A Bioregion

Outside the visitors’ center, a local astronomy club sets up telescopes they will later use to show visitors a close-up of the night sky.

In South Dakota, a rancher replaces his herd of cattle with bison, then writes a book recounting the pains and delights of the experience.

His book is chosen as a One Book South Dakota selection and subsequently read, discussed, and debated by tens of thousands of citizens around the state.

In North St. Louis, a predominantly African American community, crowds gather every Saturday morning from June through October for the North City Farmers’ Market.

In this neighborhood, where gas stations, convenience stores, and liquor stores long ago crowded out the grocery stores, and some residents have no way to travel to distant supermarkets, the stands selling fresh produce are a much-needed source of healthy food.

Just as importantly, the market brings neighbors together and provides a source of community pride.

Although traditional rural farmers participate, many of the produce stands feature vegetables, herbs, and fruit grown in nearby urban gardens.

Another vendor, a student-run garden at Washington University, fosters connections between North City and the university population.

The market also features health screenings, healthy-cooking demonstrations, and entertainment by local artists.

In downtown Reno, Nevada, residents gather on the banks of the Truckee River to cheer kayak racers in action.

The Truckee, which had deteriorated into a trash-filled eyesore, is now the main artery pumping life into a downtown revitalization effort that links Reno residents with their watershed and has enhanced urban life throughout the community.

Reno’s historic Riverside Hotel, which had been boarded up for years and slated for demolition, has been renovated to provide affordable studio and living space for artists, whose works are installed throughout the city.

Once a place to be avoided, the Truckee River has become the focal point of community life.

At the White House in Washington, D.C., the First Lady, joined by the secretary of agriculture and a group of school children, tears up a part of the lawn and replaces it with an organic garden.

Vegetables from the garden are later served to visiting dignitaries at the White House and donated to a local homeless shelter.

Although the word bioregional may never have been uttered during any of these activities, nor even be familiar to many of the participants, these anecdotes all illustrate the bioregional imagination at work.

WHAT IS BIOREGIONALISM ?

As part of the development of the environmental movement during the 1970s, a school of thought emerged calling itself bioregionalism.

Located primarily in western North America, especially California and British Columbia, this movement included thinkers such as Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, Gary Snyder, and Stephanie Mills.

Their motivation was to address matters of pressing environmental concern through a politics derived from a local sense of place, an approach they felt would effectively complement efforts focused at the national and international levels.

Hence bioregionalists began to create a sort of parallel culture and to redefine the locus of their work, moving away from existing but for the most part arbitrary political boundaries (nations, states, counties, cities, etc.) in favor of those that emerged from a biotically determined framework, primarily based on natural communities or watersheds.

In a recent study, LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice, Robert L. Thayer Jr. defines a bioregion as follows:

A bioregion is literally and etymologically a “life-place”—a unique region definable by natural (rather than political) boundaries with a geographic, climatic, hydrological, and ecological character capable of supporting unique human communities.

Bioregions can be variously defined by the geography of watersheds, similar plant and animal ecosystems, and related, identifiable landforms e.g., particular mountain ranges, prairies, or coastal zones) and by the unique human cultures that grow from natural limits and potentials of the region.

Most importantly, the bioregion is emerging as the most logical locus and scale for a sustainable, regenerative community to take root and to take place.

In addition to establishing a particular way of delineating place, bioregional thinking also implies a political and cultural practice that manifests as an environmental ethic in the day- to- day activities of ordinary residents.

As Doug Aberley has explained in his succinct history of the movement, “Bioregionalism is a body of thought and related practice that has evolved in response to the challenge of reconnecting socially- just human cultures in a sustainable manner to the region- scale ecosystems in which they are irrevocably imbedded”. As Aberley goes on to explain, however, “it is a difficult task to provide a definitive introduction to bioregionalism” because “its practitioners protect a defiant decentralism”.

There are, that is, no designated leaders, no figure whose theoretical musings are accepted as gospel, though inevitably some people have had more influence than others.

Still, there is no official bioregional program or ideology; rather, there is an evolving dialogue about a set of ideals and ideas continually tested by practice and, as would seem proper, continually inflected by the particularities of diverse places and cultures.

Bioregional thinking may be expressed quite differently in San Francisco, California, than in Ferrara, Italy, and such flexibility has given the movement surprising durability.

Bioregionalism emerged as a proactive force in the environmental movement because it saw traditional environmentalism as too reactive, forever rallying around the next disaster or impending crisis.

Bioregionalism emerged as a proactive force in the environmental movement because it saw traditional environmentalism as too reactive, forever rallying around the next disaster or impending crisis.

Granted such disasters require a response, but bioregionalists prefer a more positive orientation, one that seeks to head off environmental crises by attempting to both imagine and create human communities that live sustainably in place.

Although the label bioregionalism does not have wide currency, the ideas that constellate around that term—community, sustainability, local culture, local food systems, “green” cities, renewable energy, habitat restoration, ecological awareness, grassroots activism—have become widely adopted around the world, in no small part due to the efforts and example of bioregionalists.

In recent years, the bioregional movement has continued to inform a variety of other expressions of emergent new localisms, including community-supported agriculture, the slow- food movement, antiglobalization efforts, and postcolonial reconceptualizations of place and identity.

By foregrounding natural factors as a way to envision place, bioregionalism proposes that human identity may be constituted by our residence in a larger community of natural beings—our local bioregion—rather than, or at least supplementary to, national, state, ethnic, or other more common bases of identity.

Bioregionalists ask questions such as the following:

What does it mean to be a resident, not of Vancouver, British Columbia, but of Cascadia? Not just of Nebraska, but also of the tallgrass prairie? Not just of California, but of the Shasta bioregion? Not simply of Milan, but of the Po River Watershed? Not of Nevada, but of the Great Basin Desert?

The answers to such questions are rich with ecological, political, cultural, and even literary significance, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand.

Such shifts in perspective, bioregionalists propose, can have a major and ecologically positive influence on how we choose to relate to the world around us and, indeed, for who we imagine ourselves to be.

And as this book attempts to show, literature is very much part of such a shift, helping people reimagine the places where they live and their relations to those places, as well as reflecting the unique bioregional character of specific communities.

In the discourse of bioregionalism, several key terms recur, most notably dwelling, sustainability, and reinhabitation.

Kirkpatrick Sale titled his 1985 book advocating bioregional philosophy and practice, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision.

In explaining the term dwelling, Sale argues that the crucial and perhaps only and all- encompassing task is to understand place, the immediate specific place where we live.

The kinds of soils and rocks under our feet; the source of the waters we drink; the meaning of the different kinds of wind; the common insects, birds, mammals, plants, and trees; the particular cycles of the seasons; the times to plant and harvest and forage—these are the things that are necessary to know. . . . And the cultures of the people, of the populations native to the land and of those who have grown up with it, the human social economic arrangements shaped by and adapted to the geomorphic ones, in both urban and rural settings—these are the things that must be appreciated.

To readers familiar with twentieth- century European philosophy, the term dwelling certainly hints of Heidegger, who used the term extensively and in an analogous way. (Heidegger, however, is never mentioned in Sale’s book, so his influence, if present, is once- or twice- removed).

For Sale, to dwell means to live mindfully and deeply in place, to be fully engaged to the sensory richness of our immediate environment.

In this context, and gesturing again towards European philosophy, bioregions can be seen as more phenomenologically real than politically constructed places.

Different bioregions look, smell, taste, sound, and feel different. We sense the transition between bioregions with our whole bodies.

Crossing from Nebraska into Kansas has no sensible eff ect, but the shift from the tallgrass prairie to the shortgrass prairie is vividly apparent to all the senses.

More common than the term dwelling, however, is the less formal living- in- place, which Berg and Dasmann explain means “following the necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a particular site, and evolving ways to ensure long- term occupancy of that site”

The last phrase suggests another key concept in bioregional discourse: sustainability.

Typically, this term refers to the practice of living within the ecological limits of a place in a manner that can be continued by future generations with no deleterious impact on the environment.

In recent years sustainable has been used to describe everything from agriculture to architecture to poetry. Indeed it has become so widely used that (like green) it has been co- opted to describe activities that are far from sustainable.

Canada’s Suncor Energy, for example, has the audacity to call itself a “sustainable” company even as it ravages Canada’s boreal forest to mine tar sands, which are converted into oil that will be burned to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Surely few activities are less sustainable than that.

Still, in spite of its misuse, sustainability is a valuable term that is worth fighting for.

Making the long- term ecological consequences of our behavior—at the personal, social, and cultural levels—a matter of moral deliberation is surely an ethic worth maintaining.

Perhaps the most distinctive key term in bioregional discourse is what Berg and Dasmann refer to as reinhabitation, that is, not only “learning to live- in- place,” but doing so “in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation”.

Berg and Dasmann were considering the task of learning how to live in northern California when they wrote this description, but few places on earth, alas, remain uninjured by human activity, and so the principle of reinhabitation can be applicable nearly anywhere, even, and perhaps especially, in urban settings.

The idea is not simply to minimize harm to the environment, not simply to be able to sustain the current circumstances, but to find ways of living that repair the environmental harm caused by previous behavior.

Reinhabitory practices might involve restoring native plant communities, redesigning landscaping with an eye to indigenous plants and habitats, restructuring transportation facilities to have as little negative social and ecological effect as possible etc.,

It also includes, retrofitting homes to conserve energy or, better yet, to produce energy, converting brownfields to gardens, working for social justice and valuing cultural diversity, and even reimagining what a bioregionally inspired local literary tradition might consist of.

Admittedly, these kinds of living- in- place activities are not the norm in the twenty- first century.

Most of us live lives that have become increasingly detached from our places. We have become, as a number of recent theorists, such as Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, term it, deterritorialized.

We increasingly inhabit a global monoculture, consuming the same food, watching the same movies, reading the same books, wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, surfing the same Web, thinking the same thoughts, from Canberra to Kathmandu.

Bioregionalism is certainly, in part, a response to this process. And one of the tools bioregionalists often employ to reterritorialize their lives and places is mapping. Liberated from the control of the official cartographers of states and nations, map making can be an empowering tool of reinhabiting and reimagining place, allowing us to visualize in a nearly infinite array of contexts and scales the multiple dimensions of our home places.

In his book *Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment,* Aberley argues that maps can not only reveal socially unjust patterns of environmental harm and the degradation of plant and animal communities but also help us to visualize strategies for resistance and a hopeful vision for the future.

Maps can mingle the contours of the land with the human imagination in powerful and productive ways.

Mapping is so much a tool of bioregional thought and practice!

image: gaiaeducationdotorg