There's No Place Like Home - bioregionalism

Ecologist, The, March, 2001 by Kirkpatrick Sale

The revival of regionalism is to be seen everywhere, usually driven by ethnic attachments but always with geographical roots: in Turkey and the Middle East, in the Indian subcontinent, along the Indonesian archipelago and the Philippine chain, in China, everywhere in Africa, in Central and South America. It has been estimated, in fact, that there are 75 regional military forces in existence today, fighting against one nation state or another -- some of them well-known (as in East Timor, Irian Jiya, Kurdistan, Chiapas, Kashmir, Somalia, Ethiopia, Colombia and Peru) but most of them out of the limelight and ignored by the internationalist media.

And in the land where bioregionalism started as a movement some 20 years ago, there are unmistakable signs of a resurgent regionalism, though none has taken up arms.

BIOREGIONALISM IN AMERICA

I suppose it is not news to say that there are, as yet, no actual self-empowered bioregions in the United States, nor are there likely to be in the near future. Nonetheless, according to Alan Ehrenblat, executive editor of Governing magazine, the US Congress 'has ceased to be the primary political instrument for resolving the difficulties of modern American capitalism', and 'people have discovered that the governmental units created long ago are too clumsy to serve them very well'.

Thus, there are now more than 30,000 'special district governments' operating at regional and local levels for such things as transportation, energy, water, land use, and education, and the Federal government has decentralised itself for day-to-day functioning into 600 regional councils, 488 substate planning districts, and at last count, some 1,932 regional boards, committees, and offices to plan and carry out nationally-funded services.

There are even regional secession movements these days. There is an active group in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles trying to take that bioregion out of that city's unwanted reach. There is an organisation in Maine, including a State legislator, pushing to make the northern mountainous section of the state, so different from the coastal region, into the 51st state. Hawaii actually voted for secession and the right to become an independent nation in a nonbinding referendum in 1996, and Alaska has an Independence Party seeking to put the question of nationhood status on the ballot there.

As for the bioregional movement itself, there are now more than 200 self-proclaimed bioregional organisations in the United States, and several in Central America and Canada as well. The concept of bioregionalism has been recognised by the Professional Geographers Association and the American Society of Landscape Architects, and has been used by the Government of California to shape 11 watershed organisations in order to develop policies on land use and natural resources. The idea has been quietly co-opted too by the Interior Department of the Federal government, which has created Resource Advisory councils and Ecosystem Projects - on bioregional grounds - in a number of Western states, and by the US Forest Service, which has created an Ecosystem Management Division in Fort Collins, Colorado, complete with a map of North American 'ecoregion divisions' that is nothing more than a bioregional blueprint.