Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As climate disruption, biodiversity loss and political polarization deepen, a revived bioregional movement is emerging worldwide. This piece traces its roots and explores why place is becoming a source of resilience and belonging.
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.
Even as the global continues to powerfully exist here, we can break beyond its mental confines to make a home place rooted in bioregional nature. It requires acts of revolutionary imagination to make that place.
Bioregionalists are interested in deeply integrating maps and map-making with natural distinctions, because they seek to live not in an abstraction but in the real, concrete and natural world.
Please understand, a bioregionalist map cannot be made by any other people than bioregionalist people who map their own land / territory from within — never from without. Never from the outside.
Cascadia has a new bioregional journal, Cascadia Spoke. The journal is a revival of that good old medium that has graced the world with so many great journals, bioregional and other. Paper and print.
Already it is starting to make economic as well as social sense to produce more food and other essentials locally, and exchange them outside existing industrial consumption systems. In other words, to live bioregionally now!
Unless we can learn and adapt faster than the rate of global systems change, our viability—the basic necessities for human thriving (nested within the imperative of thriving ecosystems and biodiversity) will dwindle to the point at which they cannot sustain us.
Watersheds are life-places. They outline and embrace distinct realms. They collect fluid intelligence from animate terrains.
Ecology and economics come from the same root word. Hopefully before it’s too late, humanity will see that good economics must be also good ecology: ECO-ECONOMICS. This is the “unified field theory” and practice for economics.
Salmon Nation offers a radically old idea (living locally), but dresses it in new clothes on a fancy digital platform launched last year during the pandemic.
Confused by the story of separation, many people have tried to seek certainty, control and prediction, rather than embracing uncertainty and humbly accepting the limits of what can be known.
