When I began my involvement with environmental politics in the 1980s, the main currents of radical or critical thought were represented by deep ecologists (or biocentrists), social ecologists (gathered around Murray Bookchin and his Institute for Social Ecology), and ecofeminists, and they seemed more at odds with each other than united. Marxists and socialists (especially around the journals Capitalism Nature Socialism and Monthly Review) were only just starting to embrace ecological thinking. “Eco-anarchism” had grown out of Bookchin’s first forays in the late 1960s, but its representatives were often at odds with each other, due as much to personality clashes (Bookchin’s being one of them) as to anything else. On the other hand, liberal and reformist environmentalism had become pretty mainstream, even if attacks upon it had already registered substantial successes in the Reagan and Thatcher (counter-) revolutions.
At the time, bioregionalism seemed a promising movement that was more practically based — more rooted in local forms of grassroots organizing than in theoretical debates — and that harbored the potential to steer the radicals away from endless theorizing toward real-world action. It also presented the hope that relations could be developed with indigenous communities. Bioregional groups seemed to be growing, and several North American “bioregional congresses” were ultimately held around North America.
Since then, Bookchin’s social ecology transformed itself more fully into a city-based “libertarian municipalism” (though the term “social ecology” is still used by some, including the Rojavan Kurds, who have become the best known on-the-ground example of Bookchinite social organization in the world). Bookchin, meanwhile, passed away several years ago (just after I moved to his city of Burlington, Vermont).
Meanwhile, deep ecologists, ecofeminists, eco-Marxists and socialists, eco-anarchists (including the “primitivists” that grew out of Detroit-based Fifth Estate magazine and the anarchist milieu of Eugene, Oregon), and various other kinds of eco-justice activists have continued to develop their own theoretical orientations while sometimes working together (as in the burgeoning climate justice movement) and sometimes avoiding each other. The environmental justice movement also grew quickly in the 1990s, and today’s eco-activist scene is arguably much more diverse, more global, and at the same time less definable than that of the 1980s. Where “environmentalism” ends and other things begin — like sustainability (in all its variously-inflected guises), the global climate and eco-justice movements, and religiously inspired “creation care” and its analogues around the world — is not always clear.
Bioregionalism, on the other hand, has become less visible, at least under that name. In on-the-ground activism, however, bioregional concepts and approaches have become part of the common vocabulary of environmentalism. This is especially the case with the notion of the “watershed,” as it is with the idea of the locale as the prime focus for the growth of sustainable food systems and regenerative, community-based local economies. Locavorism is, after all, a bioregional sort of thing. But the term “bioregionalism” has not accompanied much of this activism.
The reasons for this partial falling away of the bioregion concept aren’t clear to me. Some proponents of bioregionalism (like Kirkpatrick Sale) had been criticized for articulating a bioregionalism that seemed too environmentally determinist, and it’s possible that the connection with decentralist and separatist movements have harmed the broader recognition of the movement. On the other hand, the concept of the “ecoregion” has become better established in scientific literature and there are good arguments that it may be more supple and user-friendly than that of the “bioregion.”
A handful of recent works, however, have picked up the language of bioregionalism in ways that suggest it is coming back onto the agenda of environmental and ecological theorizing around the world. To my mind, bioregionalism — at least when defined with the nuance and suppleness that one finds in articulations like Robert Thayer’s — remains a tremendously valuable source of concepts and orientations for environmental organizing and activism.
The following is a list of basic readings in bioregional theory and practice. (Here’s a much longer list of bioregional-ish literature.) If there are two books I’d recommend as a “first stop” to the topic, they are Thayer’s LifePlace and Glotfelty and Quesnel’s anthology of the writings of Peter Berg.
- Aberley, Doug, ed. Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment. New Society Publishers, 1998.
- Berg, Peter, ed. Reinhabiting A Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978.
- Berg, Peter, Envisioning Sustainability, Subculture Books, 2009.
- Brunckhorst, David J., Bioregional Planning: Resource Management Beyond the New Millennium, Routledge, 2000
- Carr, Mike, Bioregionalism and Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism, UBC Press, 2004.
- Evanoff, Richard, Bioregionalism and Global Ethics: A Transactional Approach to Achieving Ecological Sustainability, Social Justice, and Human Well-Being. Routledge, 2014.
- Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Eve Quesnel, eds., The Biosphere & the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg. New York: Routledge, 2014.
- Lockyer, Joshua, and James R. Veteto, Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, and Ecovillages. Berghahn, 2013.
- Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty, & Karla Armbruster, The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
- McGinnis, Michael, ed. Bioregionalism, Routledge, 1998.
- Moothart, Ryan. Towards Cascadia. Minneapolis, MN: Mill City Press, 2015.
- Myers, Ched, ed., Watershed Discipleship: Reinhabiting Bioregional Faith and Practice. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016.
- Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. Random House, 1985. University of Georgia Press, 2000.
- Snyder, Gary. A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds. Counterpoint, 1995.
- Thayer, Robert. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice, University of California Press, 2003.
thanks for this, when one sees how events like the recent federal elections here in the US and the like have been overrun by capital (writ large) from outside or how states like ours here in Iowa have stripped our county of the right to set our own minimum wages or water protections, how international corporate funds set our state legislative process/results and so on how functional/effective local organizing/resistance can be but we should certainly all do what we can.
Anarchists often say that we need to build the new society from the ground up so that when the old one collapses, there’s something ready to replace it. Bioregionalism offers a model for doing that.
I see, can’t imagine that we could all be so reasonable under such circumstances, when one looks at collapsed states (or even just neighborhoods excluded from the usual economy/laws) warlords and the like seem to be the general trend, and what about the extra-extreme weather that would come with such circumstances, what does that do for crops, water, soil, and such?
Yes, not exactly a picnic… Your alternative?
that’s been my experience to date, my only hope is that people might make some local alliances now when things are relatively stable and learn to overcome challenges in times of less stress that might lead to ways of coping as the stresses build but these will be very vulnerable to outside factors, of course thru most of history (including for most people the present) people have suffered at the feet of titanic forces beyond their mortal controls so we need new ways of suffering and mourning, for me if the humanities/arts/religions have any role in our times it will be palliative.
see what you make of: