Even Ted Trainer leaves out these two aspects
Having read my article in the current Green Horizon:
https://stevenwelzer.medium.com/lead-article-in-the-current-green-horizon-80530bf0b335
. . . someone turned me on to an article by Ted Trainer where the theme is very similar:
I’ve seen other like-minded articles along these lines, and I much appreciate them, but there are two key aspects that they rarely include:
One is the bioregionalist ultimate vision. Like Trainer, many talk about re-localization and communitarianism. But either there’s a sense of the United States of America being filled with ecovillage communities or there’s a sense of the whole (borderless) world being filled with ecovillage communities. That can’t be. People need and want to have a territorial identity. A mega-state along the lines of the United States of America provides a faux sense of it. The modern mega-states are too large.
Native Americans lived in villages within tribal territories having a common culture and common language. Identity: family, village, tribe. The Haudenosaunee supra-territory encompassed six tribal groups who were distinctive yet had much in common. Their territory was about the size of what bioregionalists advocate as ideal for territorial relating and identity.
The re-localization vision should include this level of confederation for the villages and towns and cities. A bioregion should be the “supra,” the largest level of identity.
We currently have a world of about 200 countries, of which maybe 30 could be viewed as mega-states. In the diversity of a bioregional world the thousands of polities would vary in all kinds of ways, including population size. I feel certain that 350 million people can’t have a meaningful sense of uber-community, but maybe an entity as large as 20 million can. Maybe (Chile has 20 million people). I would think under five million would be better. At that scale there could be a nearly self-sufficient regional economy. The seats of administration would be close enough. Etc. But diversity could mean some bioregions with fewer than a million people and some with more than ten million.
So: A world of thousands of diverse bioregional sovereignties. I don’t understand how Trainer could avoid theorizing about that level of social organization.
The other aspect rarely mentioned by degrowthers is the extent of cultural diversity we should anticipate after the devolution. Most still make the mistake of trying to envision some universally ideal sustainable, just, cooperative, democratic, post-patriarchal ecotopian way of life. That’s so naive. Diversity actually means diversity. The only decentralist who I believe envisions it correctly in this regard is Kirk Sale. I’ve referenced his Schumacher talk many times before:
https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/mother-of-all-an-introduction-to-bioregionalism/
