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Bioregioning: How to Thrive Where We Live

One could say that ‘bioregioning’ is our species long-term evolutionary survival pattern and hence a return to it may well be the most promising pathway our species can take through the tumultuous if not catastrophic decades ahead.

How can we become good ancestors? Permaculturist and educator, Kara Huntermoon, says the hobbies we pick up now can be skills we pass on to our children, even if we never have to use them ourselves.

How we create knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself. This is the message of this week’s guest, Aboriginal scholar and author, Tyson Yunkaporta. In his explanation of the importance of learning through living, and living with learning, Tyson points to the how the discourse around decolonisation has granted expertise based on identity rather than experience.

Instead of seeing the Earth as an inventory of resources – as government policymakers and corporations tend to do – people can begin to see the challenge as how to take care of “flows, networks, and relationships” – the dynamic forces that drive living planetary systems.

With this manifesto, we are putting national governments everywhere on notice. We are not going away. We will become bolder in our local experiments and in our challenges to your authority.

Humanity soon will be returning to low-power ways of organizing itself. And in our new age of tariff wars, the tide is already turning from global to regional in trade, investment, and politics. What has seemed impossible may soon become obviously necessary to larger numbers of people.

A healthy ecosystem is diverse and small-scale manufacturing systems have the potential to contain much more diversity than industrial levels of production. I use bread and linen – basic daily items of food and textiles to illustrate this position.

Instead of seeing everything through the lens of the political economy and civilization, as if they were somehow divorced from earthly systems, bioregionalism proposes that ecological systems be treated as the foundational substrate for everything.

Now, from the war-torn border regions of South Asia to the Amazon rainforest, people are questioning whether sustainability can ever be achieved through the framework of nation-states. They are turning to other ways of organising society based on Indigenous worldviews and practices that respect all humans and the rest of nature.

More than ever before, it is grossly obvious that the western industrialized extractivist mindset is the root cause of the multiple crises besieging the planet today. I couldn’t think of a better person to speak with about this than Dr. Anne Poelina in Australia.