Bioregionalism: Developing a Sense of Place

"A growing number of people are recognizing that in order to secure the clean air, water and food that we need to healthfully survive, we have to become guardians of the places where we live. People sense the loss in not knowing our neighbors and natural surroundings, and are discovering that the best way to take care of ourselves and to get to know our neighbors, is to protect and restore our region. Bioregionalism recognizes, nurtures, sustains and celebrates our local connections with:

• Land
• Plants and Animals
• Water: Springs, Rivers, Lakes, Groundwater, and Oceans
• Air
• Community: Native Traditions, Indigenous Systems of Production and Trade"

- from the Bioregional Congress web site

I can't remember if the average American moves once every three years or once every seven years, but it really doesn't matter. The point is that North Americans are a mobile society, with freedom to live on the Atlantic coast or the Pacific coast or anywhere in the hills, mountains, prairies, and deserts in between. The massive westward migrations of the 19th century have morphed into migrations from farms to cities, from job-poor to job-rich locations, and from urbanized areas to more distant suburbs. National corporations and the federal government (especially the military) "transfer" families hundreds or thousands of miles. In addition, both before and after retirement, people are subject to the feeling that "the grass is always greener on the other side of the street". Many of my own friends, who are becoming older, choose to move to wherever one or more of their children happen to be, and their children seem to spread to all parts of the country. This frequent "uprooting" means that people do not know or care much about where they are currently living. They may be nostalgic for someplace they lived in the past, looking forward to living someplace else in the future, or not feel connected to any particular geographic location at all.

The introductory social question "Where do you live?" always elicits a response of "in North Conway", or "in New Hampshire", or "in the United States" depending on the location of the conversation. But these are merely anthropocentric political designations completely unrelated to the natural world and to the Earth systems that support our lives. "In the Upper Saco Watershed" or "in the Gulf of Maine Bioregion" constitute ecocentric responses to the same question. Why do we all define our home by artificial political boundaries, rather than by natural boundaries? If we are going to learn to live more lightly on the Earth, perhaps we need to redefine where we live in Earth-based terms.

The concept of bioregionalism says that we must KNOW a place in order to treat it with respect, that we must understand a place in order to protect it instead of destroying it. Similarly we must know the geology, plants, and animals of a local ecosystem in order to maintain its structure and function, and we must know its human history in order to respect its artifacts and the peoples involved in it.

Losing and Finding a Sense of Place

Over time, many such tribal cultures developed into city states, which later combined into countries. Cities became possible as agriculture developed and a decreasing percentage of the population was needed to produce food. The separation of humanity from the natural world parallels urbanization now, just as it has for 10,000 years. David Korten, in "The Great Turning" shows that with urbanization and development of empires people no longer needed to know where their food, their water, and materials for clothing, shelter, and pleasure came from. The development of trade (commerce) led gradually to a loss of sense of place. Today, the disconnect of much of humanity from the basic sources of its necessities and frills connects directly with the destruction of Earth by commerce.

Loss of a sense of place also means loss of local community. In suburban New England, where I have spent most of my life, the concept of "neighborhood" is meaningless. Living next door to someone is no guarantee that you will ever go into their house or even know who they are. Automobiles and cheap fossil fuel have destroyed the need for neighbors. Our friends can live in other parts of town or even several towns away. Our needs are met by buying stuff in stores rather than borrowing from neighbors. In "Deep Economy" Bill McKibben makes a case that a sense of place was lost with the loss of local radio and newspapers and the development of national television. Restoring a sense of place not only is a prime goal of bioregionalism, but also extends into local production of food (see the Food chapter), supporting local businesses (see the Globalization chapter), and re-establishment of a sense of community (see the Ecojustice chapter).

Regaining a sense of place requires on overt effort on the part of individuals. It is a learning experience. It involves reading abut local history, learning about local geology, walking in woods and fields, on beaches and mountains, and studying local natural history. I have always been impressed by the walking that Europeans do and their interest in mushrooms and birds. Europeans appear much more place-centered than Americans, aided by the networks of footpaths that connect developments and villages. They do not spend all their time either indoors or in an automobile as many Americans do. Scott Russell Sanders, in "Staying Put" (which I have not yet read), describes the values of learning to be "firmly grounded in household and community, in knowledge of place, in awareness of nature, and in contact with that source from which all things arise.''

Senses of community and home are prerequisites for action to prevent development and pollution. Jim Schwab, in "Deeper Shades of Green" shows that "home" implies fighting to prevent being dumped on, fighting even by those with no apparent power. Bioregionalism in the urban environment sees "abandoned" lots as wild places, seeks to reopen and renaturalize buried streams, and wonders at city-dwelling charismatic megafauna like peregrine falcons. Paul Hawken's "Blessed Unrest" documents hundreds of local organizations formed to deal with specific local, often urban, problems. These organizations are always run by individuals with a strong concept of "home" and usually a strong desire to protect something more natural from something more artificial. Grassroots environmental activism is founded on a strong sense of place.

The Bioregion Concept

Bioregionalism involves a continuous learning process and a wide range of subjects. Here are some of the questions that bioregionalism asks:

• What are the boundaries of your local watershed? Where does the stream draining it go?
• What are the local landforms and their geologic history?
• Where does your water supply come from? Where does your sewage go?
• What happens to your garbage, trash, and recycling?
• Where does your food come from? (NOT "the supermarket"!)
• What are the local soils like and how did they form?
• What are common weather patterns? What creates the local climate?
• What is the local history of native humans?
• How many different ways has modern history altered the landscape?
• How is the health of local water bodies?
• What kinds of wildlife are present, large and small?
• What common plants dominate the landscape, from vernal herbs to trees?
• What local species are endangered, invasive, or edible?

Peter Berg created the Planet Drum foundation to develop

"the concept of a bioregion: a distinct area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and natural systems, often defined by a watershed. A bioregion is a whole 'life-place' with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured.... Planet Drum helps start new bioregional groups and encourages local organizations and individuals to find ways to live within the natural confines of bioregions."

The Gulf of Maine Bioregion

Watersheds provide an alternative approach to defining bioregions. In my corner of North America, an appropriate bioregion is defined by the Gulf of Maine, a large bay of the Atlantic Ocean. The deep Gulf is nearly cut off from the deep Atlantic by the shallow water of Georges Bank, which stretches far east from Cape Cod, and by Brown Bank, which stretches south from Nova Scotia. The Gulf of Maine is characterized by generally cold waters that mix poorly with the warm Gulf Stream farther off the coast. If sea level dropped 100 meters, the Gulf would be a sea connected to the Atlantic only by the 25-mile wide Northeast Channel. The Gulf of Maine and the watersheds of all the rivers that flow into it create a well-defined bioregion containing the Gulf itself, all of Maine, half of New Hampshire and New Brunswick, and parts of Massachusetts and Nova Scotia.

Modified from a map created by Richard D. Kelly, Jr., Maine State Planning Office, for the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment.

What connects these areas in ways that make it a well-defined bioregion? Perhaps the most important is the close connection between the people on the land and the cold waters of the sea. Lobster is the iconic animal! There is no dominant river. Though the Saint John covers one-third of the watershed area, the increasingly smaller rivers farther south are known to more of the human population: Penobscot, Kennebec, Androscoggin, Saco, Merrimack, and Charles. Each of these and many smaller rivers create many estuaries that link the land and the sea. These estuaries have been exceedingly productive of marine and bird life in the past but are less so now. The land generally slopes upward away from the sea to the 4000-foot peaks of New Hampshire and Maine, but vast flat areas of forest and suburbia, rather than hills or mountains, dominate.

The bioregion is easily divided into two sub-regions: a southern deciduous forest that contains most of the human population, including the metropolis of Boston, and a relatively unpopulated northern evergreen or boreal forest. The dominant land animal icon of the south is the human, and of the north the moose. "From Cape Cod to the Bay of Fundy", edited by Philip Conkling, provides an excellent guide to this bioregion. "The Rim of the Gulf", edited by David Platt, characterizes with beautiful photos the natural history and the problems of Gulf estuaries, the interface between land and sea. The Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment, an international coalition of various organizations publishes the Gulf of Maine Times, which is available online. Calloway's "Dawnland Encounters" describes the prehistory of the bioregion, both its geology and its native peoples. The Granite Earth Institute has chosen the Gulf of Maine and its watershed as its bioregional focus.

Other bioregions in the political entity known as New England include the Connecticut River Valley, the watershed of Lake Champlain, and the Berkshires/Taconics in the southwest. Tom Wessel's book "Reading the Forested Landscape" describes the forces that have affected and are affecting the forests of these bioregions. "Reading the Mountains of Home" by John Elder provides a good introduction to the Champlain Bioregion . He says "the challenge is to climb the trail and look around, to register every detail of the scrappy woods and experience the story of the landscape as a seamless and inclusive web." Every bioregion should have a book like this.

Travel

The tendency to travel to exotic locales purely for pleasure developed in the nineteenth century, aided by fossil-fuel-based steamships and trains. Educated Americans took the Grand Tour of Europe, capped with excursions to Egypt and Palestine. Today much international travel consists of vacations to exotic places. As awareness of adverse human impacts on Earth increases, an increasing amount of travel is "ecotourism" (see the Ecojustice chapter). Although ecotourism has noble goals, such as development of "green" tourist facilities and creating positive relations with local peoples, it still burns a huge amount of fossil fuel and creates a huge amount of CO₂ . Paying to plant trees to "offset" ecotourism emissions just isn't sufficient (see the Energy chapter).

Bioregionalism itself is not free from long-distance travel. As with much "green" change, national and even international conferences are held to discuss the subject. There have been a whole series of North American Bioregional Conferences inducing who knows how much long-distance travel. On the good side, the Bioregional Congress web site includes a detailed description of how to form a bioregional congress to bring together activists from a small area.

Bioregionalism fosters getting to know your own bioregion well, rather than traveling to exotic bioregions elsewhere. Bioregionalism emphasizes that one's own bioregion can be exotic if we look closely enough, if we learn enough about it. People from far distant places come to the Gulf of Maine to see bears and moose, eat lobster, and hike, ski, climb, or just look at mountains, ocean, and autumn foliage. One's own bioregion can be a pretty exciting, fascinating place!