One of the most encouraging recent developments has been the resurgence of bioregional thinking. About four decades ago, in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge public appetite for re-imagining the economy, eco-stewardship, and lifestyles around natural bioregions, but it gradually waned with the advance of neoliberal ideology. Now bioregionalism is emerging again, with much more force and sophistication.
A great deal of vanguard leadership, then and now, has come from activists, academics, and social innovators in the Pacific Northwest. They are often associated with the term Cascadia, which is the name they've adopted for the bioregion stretching from British Columbia and southeast Alaska to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California. The area encompasses more than 750,000 square miles of old growth rain forests, volcanoes, and wild habitats for salmon, wolves, bear, whale and orca – and 16 million people.
Cascadia activism is part of a larger global movement that wants to reinvent markets, cultures and identities to sync with regional ecosystems. It's a bold, long-term effort to persuade modern societies to honor their ecological gifts and mindfully inhabit the distinctive places in which they live. It’s also about trying to transcend arbitrary political boundaries and global markets, building instead a world that revolves around a region's particular hydrology, weather, plants, and wildlife, and to develop economies, cultures, and ways of being that complement that landscape.
As the renaissance of bioregionalism gains momentum, I wanted to learn more, especially about the most promising strategies and challenges. I turned to Brandon Letsinger, a Seattle organizer who was founding director of CascadiaNow! – an incubator of grassroots, community-centered projects – and more recently, cofounding director of the Cascadia Department of Bioregion. Our conversation is featured in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #54).
Letsinger explained that his work seeks to "place bioregionalism into mainstream thought as a viable alternative to capitalism and the nation state." Practically speaking, this means increasing the ecological self-reliance of Cascadia by rethinking the regional economy and developing new ways to steward water, land, wildlife, and other living forces. It also means promoting more accountable, democratic government, and fostering Indigenous sovereignty, citizen/tribal partnerships, and the Land Back movement.
“As long as our frameworks are based on lines on maps that don’t represent the people, the place, or the ecosystem, we're going to always have a level of division,” said Letsinger. “The American political structure is built on gerrymandering and redefining lines to take away representation. Bioregionalism reinterprets that to a whole systems lens.”
It's dysfunctional to assign authority over the Columbia River [which flows through Cascadia] to diverse, arbitrary jurisdictions on a map, Letsinger said. “By starting fresh and looking at the whole river, and making sure that every voice is included,” he noted, “you can start to shift the framework to one that’s positive and collaborative.
What exactly is a bioregion and why is that framing important?
Letsinger explained: “A bioregion is a way to talk about a place as defined through its physical, cultural, and ecological realities, starting from the ground up.” 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.
In this sense, said Letsinger, “bioregionaism is about connecting people back to place. It starts with the geology.” In Cascadia’s case, this means the massive “Cascadia subduction zone” of tectonic plates of earth and volcanoes that have shaped the territory over eons, including watersheds, soils, plants, animals, and marine biology.
Bioregionalism is also about determining “how humans can best live within place,” said Letsinger. It makes a lot of sense of explore how Indigenous peoples have lived in sustainable harmony with a landscape for thousands of years. This holistic, longer-term perspective helps us think about how we might adapt modern systems of food production, electricity generation, transportation, and urban design as well as appropriate technology, economic practices, and cultural norms.
I've explored bioregional activism in an earlier podcast with Joe Brewer (Episode #33), who works in the Barichara region of Colombia and has recently started a series of bioregional consultations and co-learning sessions in North America. Another key bioregional activist and educator is Isabel Carlisle of the Bioregional Learning Centre UK. Her organization has convened major online numerous online events and produced educational materials while tackling challenges in its own bioregion, South Devon, England.
Brandon Letsinger believes that one of the most important things that bioregionalists can do is to create new types of maps. “Maps are not neutral,” said Letsinger. “They are created with agenda and purpose. Quite often, they are created by national governments or economic entities that have their own interests. The ultimate purpose of the map will be to make money for the company or to express its [political] interests.”
Bioregional mapping depicts “everything that's left off of Google Maps and other traditional maps,” said Letsinger. The idea is to create maps that give the land a voice by charting the presence of wildlife, migratory patterns, water flows, and other notable ecological phenomena as they intersect with human communities and their cultures.
This sort of mapping has proved important to various First Nations tribes in Canada in their legal struggles with the Canadian government. The tribes had never signed treaties with the Canadian state, and their documentation of aboriginal circumstances for litigation purposes was sparse. By interviewing tribal elders, Indigenous mapmakers and friends were able to show the historical scope and character of Indigenous homelands before colonial conquests had decimated them. Through a series of bioregional mapping workshops involving some 3,000 people on 17 islands in the Salish Sea, fourteen different bioregional atlases with 30 maps were produced.
The maps were published as a book, Islands in the Salish Sea: A Community Atlas, in 2005. The maps depict beloved treasures of the islands such as heritage orchards, fishing spots, locations of endangered wild orchids, bird colonies, and ancient First Nations' sites. In each case, the island community decided what should be included in the map, and local artists were enlisted to create distinctively different maps.
The term “Salish Sea” was itself coined as a bioregional term in the 1970s by Canadian/American biologist Bert Webber. He wanted to honor the Salish-speaking people in Washington State who live in and around the Strait of Georgia to Puget Sound, and to recognize that the oil, fish and marine mammals of those waters don’t have political identities. “Salish Sea” caught on, and is now the customary term for referring to this body of water.
In the course of my interview with Brandon, it became clear that there is a lot to learn about bioregionalism and to emulate in our respective bioregions. For a great introduction to the topic, listen to our conversation here.
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