"Step out onto the Planet. Draw a circle a hundred feet round. Inside the circle are 300 things nobody’s ever really seen. How many can you find?"

Bioregional Literary Studies: An Overview

Works of Literature as Bioregional Models

Works of literature and art provide proactive, engaging models on how to reinhabit a bioregion or otherwise transform our relationships to places.

A fine example is Freeman House’s Totem Salmon, an account of a grassroots effort to restore the salmon population to the Mattole River in northern California, and thus to restore the ecological health of the entire watershed. Bioregional perception is more a certain kind of attention to place than a sense of identity that divides one place from another. 

The Inland Island, Josephine Johnson’s memoir of restoring to ecological health a thirty- nine- acre former farm in southwestern Ohio, provides a striking example of a bioregional attention to place that considers nonhuman as well as human members of the community, the ugly as well as the beautiful, and above all refuses the false comfort of seeing her land as an “island” disconnected from other places around the globe.

And there is a role for speculative works of literature, such as Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia or Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, which sketch out alternate modes of existence that can help us imagine both high-tech and low-tech ways to synchronize lifestyles to place.

Bioregional Vs Regional Writing

It’s helpful to compare bioregional literature with the more widely recognized category of regional writing. As Tom Lynch argues in Xerophilia, bioregionalism moves away from common regional designations such as “West,” “Southwest,” and “Northwest”; from a bioregional perspective, these terms have “no internally inherent meaning, but only describe a place by reference to its direction from some other, presumably more central, place.

By contrast, bioregions are internally coherent rather than externally defined by their relationship to a distant urban reference point”. Lynch points out that conventional regional literature is most often composed for an audience of outsiders rather than for the residents of the region and thus is more likely to be a “literature of tourism” that highlights the odd and exotic and relies on generalities and stereotypes.

As he explains, the authors of this literature tend to be “former residents of the hinterlands [who] move to the big city and write stories about the colorful if rapidly fading life they left behind” or “writers from the big cities [who] may move (often temporarily) to the hinterlands to write stories about their new abodes for the amusement and edification of an audience back home”. 

Bioregional literature, by contrast, is more likely to be oriented towards those who live in that bioregion. As Lynch puts it, “the implied reader is more likely to be a neighbor than a dweller in a remote city”.

Bioregional vs Traditional Regional Writing

Lawrence Buell also differentiates modern bioregional literature from traditional regional writing in The Future of Environmental Criticism, arguing that the former displays a “sense of vulnerability and flux” that is less pronounced in the latter. To support this point, he discusses Thomas Hardy’s 1887 novel The Woodlanders, in which the “villagers’ basic life- rhythms have scarcely changed for years and seem unlikely to do so in the future,” despite disasters that befall individuals (88).

In contrast, he offers Graham Swift’s 1983 Waterland, in which the residents of the East Anglian fenlands experience the world as a less stable and more porous place and are clearly affected by the “shock waves” from political and technological developments of the wider world, often in ways that affect their whole region.

Poems that Raise Bioregional Awareness

At the Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco, a poem by Lew Welch is displayed on a wall of the office:

Step out onto the Planet. | Draw a circle a hundred feet round. | Inside the circle are 300 things nobody understands, and, maybe nobody’s ever really seen. How many can you find? “Ring of Bone” (1973)

When asked about the poem, Peter Berg replied simply, “poetry changes consciousness.” An important role of bioregionally minded critics is to identify literature such as Welch’s poem that raises bioregional and biospheric awareness.

Importance of Bioregional Thinking

Bioregional thinking consistently emphasizes practice and the ways theories and concepts emerge from the ground up. Consequently, bioregional literary criticism can encourage readers to connect the texts they read with their own lives, places, and practices, helping them imagine how to move, both physically and imaginatively, from the word to the world.

Working against larger cultural impulses to experience literature and other art as simply entertainment, escape, or intellectual or aesthetic exercise, bioregionally concerned critics cultivate an awareness of the implications of these creative expressions for readers’ lives in the here and now.

Bioregional literary critics can also challenge us to see the bioregional value in texts from a diversity of places different from our own.

Bioregional Vision

And critics can use literature to help us reimagine bioregionalism itself. For example, works of criticism that explore texts by African American and Chicano writers may challenge (white, middle-class, North American) assumptions about what it means to live responsibly and responsively in a particular place and thus help cultivate an awareness of environmental justice and its importance to the democratic aspirations of the bioregional vision. 

Significance of the Bioregional Perspective/Approach to Literature

A bioregional perspective, in turn, can remind readers and critics that texts grow out of the specific places that produced them (and their writers) - though certainly some texts make that more obvious than others.

As Cheney emphasizes in his essay on the postmodern bioregional narrative, a bioregional approach to literature challenges the notion of universal truths and values - not in a nihilistic way that rejects truth and value in general, but rather by valuing contextual discourse, which is grounded in and expressive of the diversity of specific places, over what he calls totalizing discourse, which ignores diversity and “assimilate[s] the world to it”.

By reflecting and respecting the context - both cultural and natural - of specific places, bioregional literature and criticism make a powerful statement that where you are matters.

From The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology & Place. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty et al