{"id":9316,"date":"2017-06-23T12:06:24","date_gmt":"2017-06-23T17:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=9316"},"modified":"2021-06-14T07:31:20","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T12:31:20","slug":"bioregionalism-primer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/06\/23\/bioregionalism-primer\/","title":{"rendered":"Bioregionalism primer"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I began my involvement with environmental politics in the 1980s, the main currents of radical or critical thought were represented by deep ecologists<\/a>\u00a0(or biocentrists), social ecologists<\/a> (gathered around Murray Bookchin<\/a> and his Institute for Social Ecology), and ecofeminists<\/a>, and they seemed more at odds with each other than united. Marxists and socialists (especially around the journals Capitalism Nature Socialism<\/em> and Monthly Review<\/em>) were only just starting to embrace ecological thinking<\/a>. “Eco-anarchism” had grown\u00a0out of Bookchin’s first forays in the late 1960s, but its representatives\u00a0were 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\u00a0pretty mainstream, even if attacks upon it had already registered substantial\u00a0successes in the Reagan and Thatcher (counter-) revolutions.<\/p>\n

At the time, bioregionalism<\/a> 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\u00a0presented 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.<\/p>\n

Since then, Bookchin’s social ecology transformed itself more fully\u00a0into a city-based “libertarian municipalism” (though the term “social ecology” is still used by some, including the Rojavan Kurds<\/a>, 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).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, deep ecologists, ecofeminists, eco-Marxists and socialists, eco-anarchists (including the “primitivists” that grew out of Detroit-based Fifth Estate<\/em> magazine and the anarchist milieu of Eugene, Oregon), and various other kinds of eco-justice activists have continued to develop their own theoretical orientations\u00a0while sometimes working together (as in the burgeoning climate justice movement) and sometimes\u00a0avoiding 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.<\/p>\n

Bioregionalism, on the other hand, has become less visible, at least under that name. In\u00a0on-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<\/a>,” as it is\u00a0with the idea of the locale as the prime focus for the growth of sustainable food systems<\/a> and regenerative, community-based local economies<\/a>. Locavorism is, after all, a bioregional sort of thing. But the term “bioregionalism” has not accompanied much of this activism.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>” 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.”<\/p>\n

A\u00a0handful of recent works, however, have picked up the language of bioregionalism in ways that suggest it is\u00a0coming back\u00a0onto 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<\/a> — remains a tremendously valuable source of concepts and orientations for environmental organizing and activism.<\/p>\n

The following is a list of basic readings in bioregional theory and practice. (Here’s<\/a> 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<\/em> and Glotfelty and Quesnel’s anthology of the writings of Peter Berg.<\/p>\n