Cohousing-L Mailing List: Announcing new BIOREGIONAL Discussion list...

[Ed Self (selfe]

ANNOUNCING a new list called BIOREGIONAL
(sorry for the cross-posting -- please forward to interested parties)

The purpose of this list is to facilitate communications around
bioregional ideas.  It is a forum to exchange ideas and suggestions
across bioregions, a place for "global to meet local".  Discussion
should support projects which foster design and evolution of healthy,
interdependent and self-reliant communities.

BIOREGIONAL is an unmoderated and open list, although it could
become moderated if and when conditions warrant.  We invite 
persons with diverse viewpoints and a genuine interest in
bioregional issues, to join this virtual community.

To subscribe to BIOREGIONAL, simply send 
    Sub BIOREGIONAL Yourfirstname Yourlastname

To LISTPROC [at] csf.colorado.edu

The facilitators/owners are:

Dan Earle      EarleLa [at] aol.com
Phil Ferraro   PFerraro [at] cycor.ca
Ed Self        SelfE [at] csf.colorado.edu

The Bioregional perspective is summarized by the following excerpt 
from an article by David McCloskey, titled "Ecology and Community:
The Bioregional Vision". The full article is available at:
   
   <http://www.teleport.com/~turtle/mccloskey2.html>

********************************************
   The notion of bioregions emerged from descriptions of planetary
   diversity in terms of "biogeographical provinces."  If, as Gary
   Snyder says, "the world is a place of places," then what makes up the
   world are not nation-states and global corporations but rather
   bioregions and peoples -- the difference is fundamental.  The
   breakthrough to the notion of bioregions came in the 1970's when
   human culture was added to biogeographical provinces as an integral
   element of a new vision of the human relationship with nature.  Peter
   Berg, along with the well-known wildlife ecologist Raymond Dasmann,
   gave the first and most influential definition of a bioregion.

   "Bioregions are geographic areas having common characteristics of
   soil, watershed, climate, native plants and animals that exist within
   the whole planetary biosphere as unique and intrinsic contributive
   parts A bioregion refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain
   of consciousness -- to a place and the ideas that have developed
   about how to live in that place... A bioregion can be determined
   initially by use of climatology, physiography, animal and plant
   geography, natural history and other descriptive natural sciences.
   The final boundaries of a bioregion, however, are best described by
   the people who have lived within it, through human recognition of the
   realities of living-in-place...there is a distinctive resonance among
   living things and the factors that influence which occurs
   specifically within each separate place on the planet.  Discovering
   and describing that resonance is a way to describe a bioregion."

   Bioregions should replace arbitrary political jurisdictions such as
   Washington and British Columbia.  Watersheds, ecoregions, and
   macro-bioregions should become the basis of analysis, planning and
   "resource management" for they are our prime natural addresses.  Each
   provides a natural and holistic frame of reference.  In a scientific
   sense, bioregionalism seeks to join ecology to anthropology through
   geography.  The key is linking ecosystem, region, and culture.

   The problem today is how to link the local and planetary levels of
   life and culture.  What fascinates me is precisely that forgotten
   country which lies "in between" local and global spheres of action.
   And what joins local life to planetary levels is the region itself,
   for the region mediates between parts and wholes.  More than ever we
   need to learn to find our way carefully and respectfully stepwise
   through all the concrete mediations between parts and wholes, local
   and planetary life.  Rather than repeating tired cliches such as
   "think globally, act locally" we might say instead "dwell
   regionally," for then our actions consciously resonate on every other
   level in a way appropriate to it.  Regions are not artificial spaces
   arbitrarily imposed by distant powers, but rather shared
   life-contexts, natural integrities as well as structures of meaning
   and value, a common "house" that holds us, creature and human alike,
   together in the arms of the earth itself.

   Mobile beyond our wildest dreams, ready to leap off-world into outer
   space or descend into the uncharted realms of electronic
   "cyberspace," we need to learn how to "live-in-place."  As Peter Berg
   and Raymond Dasmann suggest: "Living in place means following the
   necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a
   particular site, and evolving ways to endure long-term occupancy of
   that site.  A society which practices living-in-place keeps a balance
   with its region of support through links with human lives, other
   living creatures, and the processes of the planet -- seasons,
   weather, water cycles, as revealed by the place itself.  It is the
   opposite of a society which makes a living through short-term
   destructive exploitation of land and life."

   The first task, then, of "knowing home" -- reclaiming a natural
   address and discovering a placed identity -- is what bioregionalists
   refer to as "reinhabitation."  As Raymond Dasmann and Peter Berg
   observe: "Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area
   that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation.  It
   means becoming native to a place through being aware of the
   particular ecological relationships that operate within and around
   it.  It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior
   that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting
   systems, and establishing an ecologically and socially sustainable
   pattern of existence within it...  Simply stated, it involves
   becoming fully alive in and with a place"

********************************************

Hope to see you on Bioregional [at] csf.colorado.edu