Bioregionalism: Some historical context

[this is a written-up version of the presentation I gave to the “Bioregional Catalysts” group on Nov. 15]

It needs to be appreciated that what we’re talking about is the original natural and healthy way of living. Humanity had lived in a thriving and sustainable way for 99% of our species-history.

In consideration of the idea of “we” . . . Our ancestors, proto-human hominids, date back two million years; and our specific species, homo sapiens, dates back about 300,000 years. Until the relatively recent rise of modern states and empires, just five thousand years ago, all people always lived bioregionally! They lived in bands and tribes.

A tribe is a cultural group dwelling within a particular place. Tribes inhabited territories usually based on watersheds or coastal plains or highland areas, etc. Their territories didn’t have rigid geopolitical borders like our states do. People identified with place; their culture arose from the characteristics of their place. That’s the healthy way-of-life that we bioregionalists want to recreate via a synthesis of the primal and the modern.

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In the long run, the story of human social evolution might be told something like this:

During 99% of our species-history prior to the Neolithic Revolution and the rise of statist civilization, humans lived lightly on the earth, bioregionally, oriented to local community, and attuned to the land. Then there was a relatively brief (from the standpoint of natural history) period of some millennia, an aberrant period during which we lost our grounding. After recognition of the problematic direction things were going in, there was a turn . . . a transition toward a broad greening of society, an organic and diverse movement having the goal of restoring our bearings. It took time — and the human race had to pass through a crucible of degrowth and devolution — but eventually there was a reintegration into the biotic community, a settling back into social and ecological sanity.

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As you might imagine, during the aberrant period — of empire, statism, patriarchy, hyper-growth, and resource depletion — there have been intimations that this is all wrong. Because it is all wrong! So throughout, unsurprisingly, there have been push-backs, counter-movements, rebellions, critiques, and proposed alternatives. That was the subject of Fredy Perlman’s 1983 book: Against His-story, Against Leviathan!

Bioregionalism entails a radical paradigm shift in regard to what we tend to call Western Civilization. In Ishmael, Daniel Quinn says that over the last five millennia it has become a globalized mono-civilization, East and West, the values of which (growth, development, and so-called progress) have been highly problematic. The elites who have benefited from development have, of course, viewed it as beneficial, as advancement . . . even though, all along, it has engendered exploitation and oppression in addition to ecological irresponsibility.

Meanwhile, all along, naming the problem has itself been a problem! (or, at least, a challenge). For example, just since the Sixties these and other writers have attempted to categorize it in different ways:

. mass society
. the built world
. the artificial environment (Gary Snyder)
. the Technosphere (Barry Commoner)
. the artifactual world (David Watson)
. the surrogate world (Edward Goldsmith)
. the synthetic environment (Murray Bookchin)
. urban-industrialism (Theodore Roszak)
. the Megamachine (Lewis Mumford, David Watson)
. the Apparatus (Karl Jaspers)
. the power complex (Lewis Mumford)
. the Organized System (Paul Goodman)
. the cosmopolitan global economy (Helena Norberg-Hodge)
. the Industrial Goliath (Rudolf Bahro)
. the Leviathan (Fredy Perlman)
. the global totality (John Zerzan)
. consumer society (Ted Trainer … vs. conserver society)

. Empire Culture (David Korten and Samuel Alexander)
. Taker Culture (Daniel Quinn … vs. Leaver Culture)
. Dominator Culture (Riane Eisler)

During the nineteenth century the problem tended to be named as capitalism. On that basis, a movement advocating the alternative called socialism swept the world. It was a very powerful movement in its time (from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries). But it turned out that socialism actually didn’t represent all so much of a paradigm shift. Marxism was characterized by optimism regarding ostensibly progressive things like growth, rationalization of production, centralization, and economies of scale. Under that influence socialism still tended to view developmentalism as beneficial and industrialism as the so-called “material basis” for a classless future society.

The true paradigm shift of the twentieth century starts with the questioning of all of that.

Instead of growth and development bioregionalism values:
. stability
. decentralization
. appreciation for limits and balances
. rejuvenation of local community life
. renewal of a healthy relationship with the land and with nature

It’s striking what a difference this is, what a new direction it implies, relative to the mindset and values of our current, unsustainable civilizational trajectories.

Under the onslaught of statism and developmentalism, local community life has withered. Some the early socialists and many of the early anarchists were communitarians. They participated in debates about social change direction, strategy, and theory. Marxist developmentalism won out in those debates because the mindset of industrial-modernism was predominant during the nineteenth century. Therefore, despite some resonance for the alternative writings of Kropotkin, Tolstoy, William Morris, and others, communitarianism was marginalized during the nineteenth century.

But it wouldn’t die. Eventually, after the recognition that socialist theory was deficient in some key ways, there was an important re-thinking among many activists. It led to the recovering of some of the earlier ideas about how our civilizational trajectories of growth have led to a situation where the nation-states, governments, institutions, and technologies have become insanely hypertrophied, way beyond human scale.

For example: During the 1920s Lewis Mumford and others initiated the Regional Planning Association of America and the garden cities movement. (Personally, I consider Mumford to be the progenitor of the bioregionalist movement.) During the 1930s Ralph Borsodi and Mildred Loomis started the School of Living, advocating communitarianism, decentralism, regionalism, cultural diversity, organic agriculture, and what we would now call permaculture.

The 1940s were all about World War II and austerity. The Fifties were all about conformity and affluenza! But during the 1960s a lot of alternative ideas started to congeal into the beginnings of a deep green social change movement . . . exemplified by the resonance for Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962.

I think history will look back and date a major turning point to the social change ferment of that period . . . much of which was based on a re-thinking of what had formerly been thought of as “progress.” Unsurprisingly, the ferment was, at first, very inchoate; it went in all kinds of directions. In the air were new ideas, new paradigms, new consciousnesses. In practice there were communal experiments, new political parties (like: Peace and Freedom and then the Green parties), new movements — New Left, New Age, neo-Marxism, neo-anarchism, second-wave feminism, identity liberation movements — all kinds of alternative ideas, having in common that they were disdaining the values, institutions, belief systems, and lifeways in general of the establishment society.

And amongst all the alternative thinking . . . bioregionalism emerges.

1973 sees the publication of E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and also the establishment of Planet Drum Foundation. When Peter Berg publishes Reinhabiting a Separate Country in 1978, a sense of a new movement being born is evident. That was the breakthrough work that introduced most of us at the time to the idea of bioregionalism.

In that same year, 1978, a new edition of The Breakdown of Nations is published, with a Foreword by Kirkpatrick Sale.

Sale had been a journalist and author. He wrote about participatory democracy in his 1973 book, SDS (about the New Left group Students for a Democratic Society). Then, in 1975, he wrote about American regionalism, discussing how population and industry and influence seemed to be shifting from the coasts to the south and the southwest. That book was titled Power Shift, but he might as well have called it Paradigm Shift, because at the time his thinking was being transformed by reading Mumford, Borsodi, Schumacher, and Peter Berg.

E. F. Schumacher’s mentor was an obscure professor named Leopold Kohr. When, in 1957, Kohr wrote about decentralization in the wake of what he predicted would be the Breakdown of Nations, there was very little interest. But Kirk Sale, on his journey toward bioregionalism, happened to read that book in 1977. It was long out of print, but Kirk was so impressed with it that he got in touch with Kohr to urge the printing of a new edition. After writing the Foreword, Sale expanded those ideas into his 1980 treatise, Human Scale.

By that time the bioregional movement was starting to take off . . . enough as to count dozens of local advocacy groups. On that basis David Haenke and others saw the potential to organize what they called Continental Bioregional Congresses. The first one was held in 1984 near Kansas City. The prime sponsoring organizations were the Ozark Area Community Congress and the Kansas Area Watershed Council.

The following year Kirk Sale published Dwellers in the Land. It was based on an address he had presented to the E. F. Schumacher Society two years earlier.

So by the mid-1980s bioregionalism had started to get some real momentum. Continental Congresses were being held bi-annually. But the energy started dissipating during the 1990s. Only a couple of more Congresses got organized after 1996.

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Why the dissipation?

For one thing, the energy of particular movements does tend to ebb and flow. The waves of feminism are a good example: There was the initial wave (the suffragette wave) of the nineteenth century, then the Second Wave during the 1970s, and a Third Wave which started during the 1990s.

Also, the 1960s and ’70s momentum of paradigm shifting activity started losing steam when the zeitgeist changed during the era of Reagan and Thatcher.

And then there was an issue regarding the relationship of bioregionalism to the broader social change movement . . .

For example: During the Eighties Kirk Sale had advocated that the newly forming Green political parties ought to embrace bioregionalism ideologically. On that basis, in 1986 he helped found the New York City Green politics chapter. But political movements tend to be contentious. Leftists associated with Murray Bookchin’s Institute for Social Ecology aggressively contravened the influence of those, like Kirk, who were espousing Deep Ecology. A war broke out: Social Ecology vs. Deep Ecology! In retrospect, very silly . . . but it was, at the time, understandably, very disconcerting to some, especially when the Bookchin acolytes tried to make bioregionalism into a hard-leftist kind of a movement. Green-oriented leftists and others pushed back, but many people got frustrated or discouraged . . . and dropped out.

And then, also . . . in very human terms, it might not be surprising to hear that after some initial, hopeful, but kind-of-naive ideas about what could be accomplished in the near term, many bioregional activists got a sense of: (a) just how alternative the bioregional vision really is, and (b) how enormous is the “project” of civilizational transformation.

It’s a pretty big project! It’s based on a major paradigm shift. It shows the pathway back to sanity . . . but at this point in history it’s very new and very alternative. So, after the initial energy surge, after the sixth or seventh bi-annual Continental Congress . . . somewhat chastened, somewhat intimidated, somewhat discouraged, many activists stepped back.

After which there had to be a re-thinking, a gaining of perspective, a re-grouping, a reinvigoration. This is typical of how social change movements experience ebb and flow; phases of energy, dissipation, rejuvenation.

Hopefully, rejuvenation of the bioregionalist vision is now on the agenda for the coming decades.