There's No Place Like Home - bioregionalism

Ecologist, The, March, 2001 by Kirkpatrick Sale

Could 'bioregionalism' he the way out of our environmental crisis? Kirkpatrick Sale puts the case for the political philosophy he helped to develop.

A few years ago, writing a biography of Christopher Columbus for the quincentenary of his discoveries, I came across a wonderful Spanish term - querencia - usually translated as 'love of home'. It is that, to be sure, but colloquially it means much more than that too, as I came to learn. Querencia is the deep sense of inner well-being that comes from knowing a particular place on the Earth; its daily and seasonal patterns, its fruits and scents, its soils and bird-songs. A place where, whenever you return to it, your soul releases an inner sigh of recognition and realisation.

That is pretty much what bioregionalism is.

There's more to it, of course, and I'll get to that, and why it matters. But it is useful to look at Columbus for a bit, for he is a part of the problem (as well as carrier of the problem) for which querencia - and bioregionalism itself - is the solution.

EXAMINING THE PROBLEM

Columbus never knew a home in all his travels, never experienced a love of place, much less a deep fellowship with any particular part of land or sea. He was in that sense tragically symbolic of the culture from which he sprang, the culture he was to implant in the New World. Europe was a society of restless and rootless people, many repeatedly forced to move to try to escape the ravages of the Plague, others regularly conscripted for far-off wars, some in constant motion like the peripatetic court of Spain. Even peasants were constantly displaced by famine, war, pestilence, crop failure and Lordly whim. In this maelstrom, in which the migrant soul had no way to learn or value nature, the only groundings were those of wealth, materialism, humanism, violence and conquest. It was those that became Europe's gift to the world.

And nowhere more so than in the Americas, especially the part settled by successive waves of European immigrants, pushing on from one ocean to the other for three centuries and creating a United States in which mobility, upward and outward, has always been its most treasured characteristic. And if today 20 per cent of its population changes residence every year (as against 8 per cent in the UK, for example), where social cohesion is so thin that its murder and incarceration rates are the highest in the world, and the barest minimum of civic participation (ie voting) engages less than half the population at best, and then but once every four years, that is the inevitable result of being what historian Samuel Morison has called a 'tenacious but restless race' - never knowing, except in rarest incidences, the comfort of querencia. Surely that is why this nation, and the industrialised system it has spawned, has so little regard for the natural world. We don't live on any one part of the land long enough to know very much about it, and it enters our consciousness mostly only when we wish to exploit it. In that sense Americans today are the true inheritors of the early settlers whom Alexis de Tocqueville described as 'insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature' and 'unable to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet'. And for all our efforts here in America to establish a huge park system and protect wilderness areas, our truest character is revealed in our unabated urban-suburban sprawl, a paving over of three million acres of US farmland by 1995 and now gobbling up more than twice as much land as just 15 years ago.

WHAT IS BIOREGIONALISM?

Given the consequences today of living in a system devoted to the rapidest exploitation of the natural world for the rapidest accumulation of junk, surely it is not fanciful to feel that some such identification with place as querencia implies is a necessary antidote; and the sooner the better. Surely it makes sense to imagine a society divided into territories and communities where love of place is an inevitable byproduct of a life mindful of natural systems and patterns experienced daily - however far removed this may seem just now for the gigantic, destructive society around us.

This is what bioregionalism offers - and why it matters. It is a way of living and thinking which views the world in terms of the actual contours and life-forms of the Earth - measured by the distinct flora and fauna, the climate and soils, the topology and hydrology, and how all these work together: regions defined by nature, not by legislature. But it does more: it pays respect to these natural ecosystems by seeing them as coherent and empowered social and political entities as well, necessarily living by ecological principles of sustainability dictated by the limits of the land itself.

In the United States, it is easiest to think of watersheds as the defining bioregional unit - the Hudson Valley, for example, where I live, or the Potomoc estuary, or the Kansas River area. But there are myriads of other discrete territories, such as deserts, mountain ranges, peninsulas, and islands, that function as bioregions. What gives particular weight and authenticity to viewing America this way is that it conforms remarkably to the way that the original people lived here before the European invasion.