I’ve started a new Meetup

Steven Welzer
1 min readJun 21, 2021

No zooming. No tech. All in-person, personal, casual, free, and focused.

https://www.meetup.com/toward-fostering-bioregionalism/

What we’re about

After ecological consciousness got a boost during the sixties, there was a “paradigm shift” idea that all the old ideologies (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism, etc.) were inadequate in terms of fostering the deep social change that’s so badly needed.

For the sake of revitalization of local community life and for a participatory form of democracy we need to downscale the current too-large governments, institutions, and technologies. And we need to learn to live more lightly on the earth.

This thinking has resulted in the development of a new worldview and praxis called bioregionalism. Peter Berg wrote about it during the seventies. Kirk Sale wrote about it during the eighties. Kirk thought the Green politics movement would embrace it, but that didn’t happen.

Bioregionalism should be our social change goal. But those who comprehend it seem to have a hard time figuring out what to do about it. How do we spread the word? How do we formulate steps that can eventually lead in the direction of a bioregional society?

For one thing, we can build ecovillages as models of what we have in mind. And we can work with the Transition network. But, beyond that, we need a more comprehensive vision, mission, and message. Let’s get together and brainstorm.

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Steven Welzer

The editor of Green Horizon Magazine, Steve has been a movement activist for many years (he was an original co-editor of DSA’s “Ecosocialist Review”).