How do you know when a bioregion is a bioregion? When it’s not just watersheds and biomes, but histories and cultures too
Europe perceived as bioregions? From Reddit
We are always interested in the different ways that communities, imagined at whatever scale, define their polity, sovereignty or territory. How can we connect assets and people differently? What are the new ways in which people can be responsible for their resources - and newly understand what those resources might be?
If you give this process a new name, however, you have to be ready to define its terms. A/UK throws out new terms for political and communal agency - eg, CANs, constitutes - and we enjoy the debate around them, even the creative misuse of them.
So we welcomed this blog from The Bioregionalist, asking the simple question: when we do know when a bioregion is a bioregion? We’ve blogged heavily on the concept here, but it’s very useful to read their basic definition:
A bioregion is a land and water territory whose limits are defined by the geographical limits of human communities and ecological systems rather than by political boundaries.
Such an area must be large enough to be able to be self-reliant and be able to maintain the integrity of its biological communities, habitats, and ecosystems.
A bioregion is also defined by its people and inhabitant cultures. There must be a unique identity or cultures connected together that stem from the place, that have the ability to help determine or shape these boundaries.
Bioregional scales can be used as a framework to
measure success and failure of sustainability and carbon neutrality.
How much a bioregion can store, recycle, mitigate, and set natural limits for growth;
Meet the habitat requirements of keystone and indicator species;
including human communities and the development of place-appropriate technologies and ways of living.
The blog also cites (indeed, favours) this definition by Mitchell Thomashow:
Bioregionalism emerges as a response to the formidable power relations of global political economy and the ensuing fragmentation of place.
It seeks to integrate ecological and cultural affiliations within the framework of a place-based sensibility, derived from landscape, ecosystem, watershed, indigenous culture, local community knowledge, environmental history, climate and geography.
More than an alternative framework for governance or a decentralized approach to political ecology, it represents a profound cultural vision addressing moral, aesthetic and spiritual concerns.
In effect, bioregionalism seeks to penetrate, inform and reinhabit the interstices of contemporary political economy, turning states and countries into biomes and watersheds.
It changes not only the boundaries of governance, but the boundaries of perception as well. Indeed, the reinhabitation of landscape is fundamentally a challenge of perception as well as citizenship.
This seems like just as strong a claim to establishing a different way of seeing the relations between humans and the natural world as Permaculture. But it’s the boundary-drawing of a bioregion that seems to be the real challenge - as it says above, “turning states and countries into biomes and watersheds”. At the head of this blog, we’ve placed an image we found on Reddit of someone trying to do it for Europe (but can you imagine the science and data that could justify these boundary claims?).
What is the crisis or challenge that suddenly makes a bioregion seem like a viable domain to reside within? Our current Covid and environmental crises may readily throw up these challenges:
Is it the need to re-establish local food and energy supply-chains, if it looks like our global supply-chains disrupt the biosphere too much?
Is it the rise in the flooding of previously unflooded residential and working areas, requiring a new arrangement between land and humans?
Could it even be a requirement that we know the fertility and possibilities of our surrounding land better, so that we can rely on it for resilience if climate disruption worsens?
Looking over our previous entries, we’re struck by the vision of John Thackera, who sees a bioregion as an exciting challenge to designers and engineers - what he titles Back to the Land 2.0 - and a way to bring cities and rural areas together:
We discovered that a rich diversity of city-rural connections is emerging. These include: Maker networks; grain and fiber ecosystems; outdoor and land-based learning; adventure tourism, sport science, mixed-reality gaming; ecological restoration; civic ecology; farmer-city connections; learning journeys: and the reinhabitation of abandoned of rural communities.
We learned that myriad new ways for urban people to re-connect with the land are emerging: Ways that are part-time, but long-term; ways that involve an exchange of value, not just paying money; ways to share knowledge, land, and equipment in new ways; ways based on historical links between town and country – but reinvented in an age of networks and social innovation.
Designers and artists, we saw, can contribute to bioregional development in various ways. Maps of the bioregion’s ecological and social assets are needed: its geology and topography; its soils and watersheds; its agriculture and biodiversity.
The collaborative monitoring of living systems needs to be designed – together with feedback channels. New service platforms are needed to help people to share resources of all kinds – from land, to time. Novel forms of governance must also be designed to enable collaboration among diverse groups of people.
More here. Another blog worth exploring is Daniel Christian Wahl’s Re-Regionalization: Bioregional Development as a Regenerative Pathway.