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The term "bioregionalism" was first popularized in the 1970s by the ecologist Raymond Dasmann and activist Peter Berg.
Berg was in Japan this past winter investigating, together with Japanese activist Kimiharu To, the ecological damage
caused by the Nagano Olympics. The Japan Times ("Ecology of Nagano seen coming in last," February 12, 1998) quoted Berg's reference
to the event as the "greatest ecological disaster in Nagano's bioregional history." To criticized the games for being run
in the interests of multinational corporations, television broadcasters, and developers with no citizen input, despite
the fact that it is citizens "who must pay for a four-lane highway and airport they don't need." Farmers will also suffer
from pollution of their rice paddies and the native species of Nagano will be damaged. The Planet Drum Foundation,
founded by Berg and others in 1973 to advance bioregional ideas, publishes the biannual journal Raise the Stakes, sponsors educational
and cultural activities on bioregional themes, and provides networking services for bioregional activists, including a
directory listing 250 bioregional groups around the world. The organization has helped to develop the Bioregional Association
of the Northern Americas and sponsors a biannual continental gathering of bioregionalists. Its publications include A Green
City Program for the San Francisco Bay Area and Beyond, Reinhabiting a Separate Country, and Discovering Your Life-Place:
A First Bioregional Workbook. For more information on publications and membership contact: Planet Drum Foundation, P.O.
Box 31251, San Francisco, California 94131, Shasta Bioregion, U.S.A. Email: planetdrum@igc.apc.orgThe following interview was conducted in Tokyo and introduces readers to some of the key ideas of bioregionalism. Evanoff:
What exactly is bioregionalism? Berg: A bioregion is a geographic area defined by natural characteristics, including
watersheds, landforms, soils, geological qualities, native plants and animals, climate, and weather. These characteristics
are continuous; in other words, when there are changes in these characteristics you've gone from one bioregion to another.
Obviously these borders are soft and wide, as opposed to linear and sharp in the present geopolitical sense of "boundary." Bioregionalism
includes human beings as a species in the interplay of these natural characteristics. It promotes an inhabitory attitude
by which humans adapt themselves to the natural characteristics of a bioregion in an appropriate way. At this point
in history such an attitude exists only among so- called primitive people or as a matter of historical record. For most
people on the planet today it would be necessary to become a reinhabitant in order to fit into the natural characteristics
of the bioregions they occupy. A bioregion is a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness. It is a cultural idea
based on characteristics usually associated with the natural sciences. Put simply, a bioregion is a "life-place," the
natural place around you that's alive and contains your life as well as the lives of other species. Evanoff: There
seems to be a perception, at least among some, that the environmental movement is about preserving pristine wilderness
areas with little or no human interference. You seem to be working, however, towards a harmonization of nature and culture. Berg:
Bioregionalism is proactive. It is carrying the concept of a life-place into the activities and goals of human society,
as opposed to protest. Environmentalism has been a protest-oriented activity based on attempting to deal with a destructive
industrial society. On the one hand, it tries to preserve pristine wilderness areas for their own sake and, on the other,
to keep water and air clean for the sake of humans. Bioregionalism goes beyond both of these. In a bioregion there are
different zones of human interface with natural systems: urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness. And each of these has
a different appropriate reinhabitory approach.
Evanoff: What kind of changes in lifestyle will be necessary if people want to
live in harmony with bioregions?
Berg:
The bioregional idea at first seems to be a nature or outdoors-oriented
view. In fact, it is a fairly profound philosophical
perspective because it
addresses basic civilization questions: who am I, what I am, and what am I
going to do? In the
context of the biosphere, a person as a member of the
human species interacting with other species is a fundamental premise
of
bioregionalism. So what you do is to reconceptualize your relationship with
the elements of the planetary biosphere,
other people, society, and the
exigencies of contemporary life. Carrying out a bioregional lifestyle is to
apply reinhabitory
directions to the basic necessities of life. Where does my food
come from? What's my relationship to the water that I use?
What's my
relationship to the soil? What's my relationship to native ecosystems? Am I
using materials that are from
the bioregion where I live for house construction
and the fabrication of products? Am I learning about the life-systems
of the
place where I live and about how my own life ultimately depends on them?
Am I learning how to live in a place
in a long-term, sustainable way with
bioregional self-reliance as a guide? There are a lot of ways to apply the
bioregional
idea.
Evanoff: A lot of the things we consume these days are not locally produced
but imported via the global market,
and it's sometimes difficult to trace out
the connections. What kind of critique does bioregionalism offer of global trade?
Berg:
The connections are actually fairly easy to trace out. It's the
combination of them that's hard to keep up with. I know
that the coffee I drink could come from several different places on the planet, that it's harvested in a certain way, and
I know that ships carry it. What makes it difficult are the eco-energetics of the cups, of the heating source used to make
the coffee, of the water that goes into it. All of those eco-energetics become extremely complicated. Right now, these eco-energy
inputs cost more than we know because the ecological damage hasn't been assessed. The bioregional worth of things as opposed
to the negative ecological footprint simply hasn't been investigated. It hasn't been one of those things that a big R&D
project has been designed to find out-- and it should be! What people can do about it in a practical way is to try tofind
out what the local products are, what the costs are, and to make decisions about what they consume and what they get involved
with based on that. It's possible to do this with joy rather than puritanical morality. In fact, when I walk down the street
in the Shasta Bioregion in San Francisco and see a native plant or tree, it's quite exciting. It's thrilling!
Evanoff: How far do you want to go with self-sufficiency? Should communities
become entirely self-sufficient? Would
that preclude any possibility of
international trade?
Berg: We're talking about a direction here, not a dictum --
as much self-
reliance as possible and as much of a real cost analysis of exports and
imports as possible. For example,
when you export agriculture, you export soil
and water, as well as some species of domestic plant. You transport it using
some
energy source and you package it. All of these things have real costs
that aren't reflected in the price.
Evanoff:
One aspect of bioregionalism seems to be the transformation of
consciousness on a very personal level.
Berg: We
often assume that we're capable of divining models that somehow
will be or should be employed by the general public to
initiate some sort of
enormous change based on a critical evaluation of the present situation. And
we often feel that
these models can have efficacy in some grand historical
and socially progressive way. But I'm not sure this is true. I
believe that most
people are in a trance, a deep trance having to do with the nature and
requirements of industrial
society. You get up in the morning in an essentially
disinhabitory environment. You deal with the requirements of getting
your
body and mind together in ways that are completely dissociated from their
origins in nature -- you only see water
coming out of a tap. You get out on the
street with people you've learned to be wary of and adopt an anonymous
identity.
You get on some means of public transportation about which you
know nothing. The subway is rattling through the geology
of the city, but it's
not geology you see, it's advertisements. Then you get off, and you're dealing
with these other
people on the basis of relationships that are dictated by
power and command. You fulfill your role in the operation, using
a lot of
mechanical signals. You get through all that, go back home, watch television,
and go to bed. Now, if you haven't
been in a deep trance, where exactly have
you been? We're talking about at least 50% of the population. They take
respite
by going to foreign places where they absolutely destroy the
landscapes without even knowing it. To escape from this trance,
they go mess
up Hawaii. That's what we're dealing with. This is the famous, average,
normal, reasonable human being
that we assume is out there. So why do we
pretend to have models that might be useful to these people and believe that
it's
possible to create some sort of social movement based on something like
the Paris Commune? Where do we get this crap? What
hope do we have?
How should we go about it? As an activist-thinker in a situation such as
talking to a university class
or a group of businessmen or public policy
people, I simply try to create a mental condition that will have the effect
of
an explosion in their brain. I could talk paradigm-talk all day, and it would bore
me. I try to set off a large-scale
explosion in the mind of the person or
audience I'm dealing with. If I'm lucky and the explosion does occur, I don't
know
where the pieces are going to settle. The reason I'm doing this is
because I feel as though I'm an agent provocateur who
is pursuing his own
survival in a trance-driven society that wants to deprive me of any of the
little measly human-natural
interactive possibilities that I can experience. That
really is where I'm at.
Evanoff: How exactly do you go about shocking people?
Berg: One way to shock people is to say that they aren't
going to do anything
to save the earth if they aren't doing something around them right now. The
earth isn't just the
rainforest or the Amazon jungle or the whales or the hole
in the ozone layer alone. The earth is also where you are. To
so-called primitive
people the world is local-cosmological, not planetary. The direction of our
present civilization
is to turn the earth into a garbage dump and then abandon
it, to turn it into an uninhabitable smoggy sewer and then leave
it. To a large
extent what we're doing is committing suicide as a species. Another shocking
thing is for people to realize
how impoverished they are in spite of the
illusion of material success, that their relationships with others are often
bad and that they can't depend on very many people. In the U.S., the majority of the
population is just two paychecks away
from homelessness. That should send
a shiver of fear through anyone! Everyone is extremely close to that edge,
which
includes insanity, neurosis, unhappiness, and bad health. I think most
people are aware that they're committing a sort
of soft-shoe planet-murder
simply through their lives.
Evanoff: Some people criticize the environmental movement for emphasizing
changes in lifestyles rather than changes
in political structure.
Berg: That's a false opposition. You can't change the political structures
without changing
the description of the person and what their anticipations
and intentions are. During the French Revolution, most people
had no idea
what freedom was. What they were saying was that freedom was the direction
they wanted to go in. They simply
wanted the situation to be something other
than what it was then, but they had no idea what it was going to be. In the
same
way a life of identifying with the human species, of an eco-centered
basis of decision-making and public policy, of identifying
with wild nature in a
planetary context is something we have no idea of. A person now in late
industrial society can
say there is a possible world to go to, not utopia, but
relieving the oppression and suffering of the present. It's a process,
and it
involves different relationships and activities, as well as disavowing certain
political and economic structures
and putting faith in others, or at least
saying that I'll put my faith in trying to make this alternative work rather than
put
my faith in hoping that this present dominant structure continues.
Evanoff: Is there in fact a utopian element
in bioregionalism?
Berg: I think there's a utopian element in human consciousness. I think there
was a utopian element
in the Stone Age. People have always dreamt together
of a resolution of problems and difficulties. Medicine is utopian
-- that a cure
is possible for disease. Magic is utopian -- that a miraculous outcome can occur.
Art is utopian, that
you can produce something that others will be inspired by
aesthetically.
Evanoff: How do you assess the current
state of the environmental
movement?
Berg: The environmental movement is over. I actually believe it ended on
Earth Day in 1972, and in fact historians
will probably say that.
Environmentalism had always been the handmaiden of late industrial society.
It was a way to
preserve the material benefits of industrial products and
processes while mitigating the effect of developing those products
and
carrying out those processes. Clean water and clean air were the epitome of
the environmental movement. We had rivers
that caught fire and air that was
causing cancer. Even ordinary environments were visibly affected by
industrial processes.
It's not surprising to me that a lot of old-line
environmentalists have felt assailed by the deep-ecology, bioregional,
whole-
systems perspective because single-issue environmentalism was a way to
get through the day. It was a way to deal
with that soft-shoe planet-murder.
You could take a bath in your environmentalism and feel good.
Environmentalism simply
won't be a twenty-first century consideration.
Evanoff: So where's it going?
Berg: There are two
major activities that will replace environmentalism. One is
restoration ecology -- not in the academic sense, but as practiced
by
residents: urban people, suburban people, and rural people. Ecological
restoration projects are much more comprehensive
human activities than first
imagined. When people first hear of ecological restoration, they think, oh,
some nature
project that I do on weekends. But in fact, restoring an urban
creek is a major undertaking and is an essential activity
for a reinhabitory
perspective in a city, and has multiple implications. The other direction is
urban sustainability.
We have become an urban species. More than half of us
live in cities. So we have to become renaturalized as urban residents.
In other
words, we have to regain our species perspective and expand it, even while
living in dense multistoried areas.
Urban sustainability is not just a
watchword. At present most municipal governments put urban sustainability
below the
top ten issues that they're involved with. But within a very short
time it will rise to the top three or so, and I believe
eventually become the central
issue for decision-making and policy directions regarding employment,
health, education,
welfare, transportation, energy, and so on. The central
component of all these concerns is sustainability.
Evanoff:
What is the Green City Project?
Berg: We're trying to raise consciousness and help people get involved. We
connect
volunteers with 450 groups in the Bay Area. We publish a calendar of
events that has activities for every day of the year.
The idea is that school
children, the elderly, working people, people of all classes and ethnicities,
can become involved
in some aspect of urban sustainability, such as tree
planting, neighborhood empowerment, appropriate transportation,
celebrations,
and culture. Culture is particularly important: art and murals
depicting native species, libraries, public sculptures,
and events connected
with watching natural phenomena, such as the rising of the sun at the equinox
or solstice. I tell
people that the future mayor of San Francisco will one day
walk onto the Golden Gate Bridge, with all the traffic stopped,
to lead the
Salmon Welcoming Celebration on the day in fall when salmon return to
spawn from the North Pacific into
San Francisco Bay and up the Sacramento
River, with thousands of people dancing and making music, wearing salmon
costumes,
eating smoked salmon, and saying "Welcome back brothers and
sisters!"
Evanoff: Those kinds of cultural activities
seem so rich compared to most of
the pastimes that dominate modern life.
Berg: The appreciation of culture inherent
in the bioregional perspective
involves the very values that are mostprized by art and antique collectors.
They are
unique, diverse, participatory, personal. They are the most highly
valued things, yet people are unaware of the potential
of ordinary everyday
experience, and think of it as somehow going back to wearing a loincloth.
Evanoff: How do you
see public participation in terms of the political decision-
making process? On the one hand, bioregionalism advocates
local
participation, but on the other, so many decisions about what's going on in the
world are made by multinational
corporations and international organizations
such as the World Trade Organization. The local and the global are often in
conflict
with each other. Decisions might be made by a multinational to close
down a factory in a particular community, for example,
and the community can
be devastated by that. Do you see the two coexisting side by side?
Berg: There are many possibilities
for effecting change. The variety that I'm
most fond of and I think is the most authentic is when people undertake
through
their mutual decision-making to create a situation which they feel is
desirable or beneficial and fits in with their idea
of bioregional
reinhabitation. When they do this, all kinds of interaction will occur with the dominant society. To give
an example, when residents of the Shasta Bioregion tried to carry out a salmon restoration project on their own, using their
own backyards as the site for water tanks for eggs to hatch so that salmon could be put back into the creeks where they had
become extinct, they were prevented from getting
eggs from female salmon by the California Department of Fish and Game,
who
had no way to see that activity except as poaching! Isn't that a wonderful
contradiction? It really exposes the conflict.
Evanoff:
What about globalization?
Berg: Protest is necessary because as globalization increases there are
inroads into things
like personal privacy and community cohesion that are
extremely destructive. So protesting, regulating, and defending against
globalization
is extremely important.
Evanoff: Do you see bioregionalism as something that's going to disrupt the
dominant society?
Berg:
The dominant globalist society believes that it has ultimate dominion
over anything that it chooses to have dominion over.
That's the situation at
present. If you put together the heads of major multinational corporations and
gave them a list
of possibilities for getting involved with communities, or
individual and social behavior, they would be able to go through
the list and
think of ways in which they could dominate any of those situations. Public
relations and advertising people
already do that. They ask themselves, is
there a way that we can get into the bedroom of every married couple so that
they
all use a particular product, do a particular thing, stop doing something
else. That's their present perspective. And the
reason that they've had such
extraordinary success is because they've just blasted communities, blasted
human taste,
befuddled people, cast illusions so dense that people just don't
know what's going on -- their mouths are open. Bioregional
activities run
against this, and they're not the only ones that run against this. Native
economies and cooperative endeavors
do as well. I've been to globalization
forums where there have been literally hundreds of representatives with a
tremendous
range of reaction to globalist imposition. As bioregionalist
solutions are counterposed to industrial solutions, they by
necessity run
against globalist imposition.
Evanoff: Can the bioregional sentiment prevail against it?
Berg:
Here we're dealing with values. If we can establish activities that have
values associated with them that people don't
want to lose, or that they feel
they've contributed in establishing, then we can establish some ground. I
believe there
is an essential, dichotomous conflict between eco-localism in
general, of which bioregionalism is a form, and the globalist
multinational
corporate push. In the twenty-first century we'll see that conflict. I hate to
use the word "war" but
we're already seeing it. The Zapatista rebellion in the
Chiapas region of Mexico is completely formulated around resistance
to
globalist imposition on the part of eco-local social groups. But I've also seen
it
in what could be called suburban
situations in Mexico, for example in the
town of Tepoztlan in an event that's called the "Golf War," where citizens
resisted
the building of a resort and golf course that would use communal
water. The plan had been approved illegally by the state
and national
governments and rights were given to multinational corporations which the
governments did not have the
authority to give. I was there a year ago and
there were still roadblocks to prevent the army trucks from coming into town.
Local
people resisted the project to the point that they ousted their bribed
city councilmen. They now call themselves the Free,
Autonomous and Democratic
Municipality of Tepoztlan. You can also see the trend towards localization in
the falling
apart of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and the realignment of
social groups in Africa and Asia.
Evanoff:
It seems that the people who advocate globalization get a lot of
political mileage out of the rhetoric that we're "bringing
the world together"
and creating a global society based on peace and harmony. At the same time
criticisms are sometimes
made against eco-localism on the grounds that it's
going to promote insularity, ethnic exclusiveness, religious fundamentalism,
and
the creation of cultural enclaves in which people are going to be isolated
from each other. In the media and so forth all
of this makes globalism seem
appealing while making something like bioregionalism look insular.
Berg: The dominant
oppressive group can always do extraordinary things to
divide, conquer, and corrupt authentic, viable local structures.
There probably
isn't anything that globalism offers that shouldn't be questioned or negotiated
from a bioregional point
of view. Some areas of global cooperation may be
more acceptable than others. The hole in the ozone layer, for example,
is the
kind of problem that has to be solved by people occupying various places on
the planet. There are potential benefits
from global cooperation in areas such
as these. It's extremely hypocritical, though, for multinational corporations to
pretend
to be bringing the world together.
Richard: How about the charge that bioregionalism encourages people
to go
off into their own little communities and not become cosmopolitan?
Berg: The richness and authenticity that
is the reward of bioregionalism
requires exactly that kind of going into the place where you live. I can walk
down a
country lane and be thinking about the world tennis matches or I can
be looking at the particular native trees that are
right in front of me. It
doesn't
matter where the world tennis matches are being held but the trees being
there does
matter. They can't be anywhere else. They have to be there. This
is where they evolved. So there's information selection
that is in fact insular
or
that isolates you from other information. Now, does that necessarily breed
parochialism?
I've heard people say that parochialism and xenophobia may
not be that bad, but I personally think that they are. I believe
that they are
restrictive. So I look for a meta-level of bioregional identification: the
bioregion
is my window on
the planetary biosphere and the means for participating in it.
So, yes, this stream that comes through the area that I'm
standing in is unique
to this place, but that water is joining up with the water of the whole
biosphere
by mingling
with other watersheds, by going to the ocean, through
evaporating as clouds and coming back as rain. Just the idea that
every
molecule of water on the planet has been used and reused again and again
is a marvelous cosmos-establishing experience.
So, the "joys" of chauvinism
are easily replaced by the magic of larger biospheric and cosmological
participation.
Evanoff:
So we're connected both geographically with people and life in other
bioregions and historically with the past and future.
Berg:
Exactly.
Evanoff: Despite what seems to me to be a lot of unnecessary ideological
conflict between
the various schools of environmental philosophy -- deep
ecology, social ecology, ecofeminism, and the like -- people in
each of these
groups seem to be attracted to at least some aspects of bioregionalism. Deep
ecology, for example, is
big on promoting a change in cultural attitudes and
personal consciousness, while social ecology emphasizes decentralized
municipal
decision- making. Do you see bioregionalism as being a mediating
force that might be able to unify or bring together some
of these disparate
theoretical perspectives?
Berg: One reason why these new ecological, philosophical formulations
have
been attracted to and have subsequently incorporated a bioregional
perspective is because bioregionalism offers
an authenticating foundation for
the whole ecological premise. People these days are putting the word "eco" in
front
of everything precisely because they don't want to be identified with the
old power and resource manipulating ethos. Reinhabitation
as a practical
activity does have a fluidity that is unifying. A person can have an ecological
perspective but for that
person to be able to do something with others and
have a social relationship based on an ecological perspective, there
must be
a social understanding (not an academic or technical understanding) about
what our mutual territory is, where
we are, and what we relate to each other
about. The bioregion comes in as a common vista -- this is what we can talk
about!
Let's talk about the restoration of the natural systems that we live in
as
a long-term goal, with all of these various
perspectives -- the social
perspective, the gender perspective, the diet perspective, the cosmological
perspective --
having something to contribute. Words such as "bioregion" and
"reinhabitation" shouldn't be seen as the property of some
narrow theoretical
perspective but as public language.
Evanoff: What's your interest in Japan?
Berg:
The Sacramento River goes into San Francisco Bay and into the
California Current and the North Pacific. Salmon which swim
in our rivers also
swim past Hokkaido Island. We're on the same latitudinal lines as Japan. So
it's no longer possible
for me to have a "United Statesian" identity. I have to
have both a Shasta Bioregion identity and a North Pacific Rim identity
in
planetary terms. On the one hand, I can say that I'm a citizen of the city of
San
Francisco, in the county of
San Francisco, in the state of California, in the
United States of America, in the so-called "free world." Or I can say
that I
live
in the Islais Creek Watershed, of the San Francisco Bay Estuary, of the Shasta
Bioregion, of the North
Pacific Rim, of the Pacific Basin, in the planetary
biosphere of the universe. In this latter way of thinking, which I
much prefer,
Japan and America are transpacific relatives.
Evanoff: How would bioregionalism apply
to Japan?
Berg: Well, historically Japan has this great nature philosophy that I can be
inspired by. But since the
war Japan has had a productivist, modern,
competitive system that functions only at the cost of personal freedom,
ecological
damage, and a really nasty attitude outside the boundaries of the
country towards other people's resources and bioregions.
There are many
segments of Japanese society, however, that are aware of this on numerous
levels -- of the need for greater
personal freedom, greater ecological
responsibility, and a harmonious interaction with other people on the planet.
Attitudes
about peace, nonviolence, and spirituality among the Japanese
people are extremely strong. I gave a bioregional tour of
Hakuba Valley to
local residents and we stood up on a cliff about a thousand feet high looking
down on the whole watershed.
We had just seen the springs and were
observing native plants vs. exotic, water coming into the rice fields, the
damage
of the Olympics construction, and the power of the watershed. It's a
very steep valley, you know. You could tell what the
forces are by looking at
the flood plain of the river. It's ten times the width of the river on both
sides and it's
pure rock and gravel. That means that when the snow melts, the water is just roaring through there because of the gravitational
pull. That's one of
the reasons why Hakuba Valley is so delicate--all the water ends up in the river.
There's no place
for it to go, no seepage. So here is the natural template of
this watershed that was given by natural forces and that people
adapted to,
and now we're looking at a phenomenon -- the Nagano Olympics-- that will
rewrite the ecological history
of this area. This is the historic episode, the
modern history-making event of that area. After the Olympics leaves, people
will
count the future in terms of this event. We can either live harmoniously
with this natural area or we can allow it to be
degraded and destroyed. It
really is a spiritual question. After the tour a woman came up to me and said
that she was
a teacher but had lost her purpose in teaching. Now, however,
she had something to believe in and something to teach the
children. "In
everything I do I'm going to make this a part of their life," she said. Japanese
people have this spiritual
dimension which I find absolutely astonishing.
Evanoff: What exactly do you hope to achieve with respect
to the Olympics?
Berg: We're going to try to assess the damage using socio- cultural rather
than natural-scientific
tools. What I'm hoping personally is that some basis for
reparations can be established. The upshot is that this kind of
large-scale
sporting spectacle promotes a "society of the spectacle" that lasts for a very
short time but has a devastating
effect on the long-term prospects of natural
landscapes. This can't go on. This is an important instance of globalism vs.
bioregional
sustainability and it has to be opposed.
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