The wisest thing I’ve heard

. . . and most people on the left likely would balk at it. Which is indicative of a problem of extant leftism: Universalism. A certain specific vision of the better society … everywhere.

Naïve, unrealistic. Wrong-headed.

Rejection of universalism is one reason why the bioregionalist perspective is superior to the socialist perspective.

Here’s an excerpt from Kirk Sale’s 1983 lecture to the E. F. Schumacher Society:

I must add here a note that may be painful for those whose allegiance to the precept of diversification tends to crumble halfway through. Bioregional diversity means exactly that. It does not mean that every region of the Northeast or of North America or of the globe will build upon the values of democracy, equality, liberty, freedom, justice, and other suchlike desiderata. It means rather that truly autonomous bioregions will likely go their own separate ways and end up with quite disparate political systems — some democracies, no doubt, some direct, some representative, some federative, but, then, likely all kinds of aristocracies, oligarchies, theocracies, principalities, duchies, and palatinates as well. And some with values, beliefs, standards, and customs quite antithetical to those that people on the left hold dearest.

There’s no point, it seems to me, in dreaming that people will be all so good, because there’s every reason to suppose that it is not likely to take place on this planet in this galaxy. We must dream of systems, rather, which allow people to be people in all their variety — to be wrong upon occasion and errant and bad and even evil, to commit the crimes that as near as we know have always been committed — and yet systems in which all social and civil structures will work to minimize such errancies and, what is even more important, hold them within strict bounds when they occur.

Bioregionalism, properly conceived, is such a construct, for it provides a scale at which the consequences of individual and regional actions are visible and unconcealable, and violence can be seen to be a transgression against the environment and its people in defiance of basic ecological common sense; a scale at which even error and iniquity, should they happen, will not do irreparable damage beyond the narrow regional limits and will not send their poisons coursing through the veins of entire continents and the world itself. Bioregionalism not merely tolerates but thrives upon the diversities of human behavior and the varieties of political and social arrangements those give rise to, even if at times they may stem from the baser rather than the more noble motives.