general economic and environmental trends happening within America and around the world in the 21st century. Evidence shows the nation state has been in decline for four decades, a consequence of there being a rise in region-based economies,23 just as evidence
gathered in the last decade shows that America has become a country built around cities within regional frameworks,24 a fact reflected around the globe as mega cities and urban archipelagos continue to define the new economic geography.25 Each suggests
movements embracing regional development need not be tied to the nation state, constructed as that is through arbitrary lines striking across ecosystems and cultures.
Newer technologies and means of communication and conducting work – whether that be defined through the emergence of the Internet, artificial intelligence, increasing use of data, robotics, and reconfiguration of supply chains – also lend credence to the fact our
political and cultural landscapes are changing in ways more aligned with regional frameworks.26 And complicating matters even more is evidence now suggesting the world is experiencing a polycrisis that no nation state acting alone can solve.
And what is that polycrisis? The fact the world is getting hotter,27 which will affect where people can or will live. Warming is effectively causing sea levels to rise,28 which will not only affect habitation but stress the availability of fresh water,29 which in turn will affect agricultural production and ultimately our food supplies.30 This will only heighten existing tensions, as people fight for jobs within the Fourth Industrial Revolution,31 battle the effects of climate change, and flee conflict in search of a place where they will not suffer but instead be likely to benefit. The consequence of which is: these forces are and will be putting people on the move,32 whether nation states formed from
theories and ideologies or conquest like it or not. And all will bring forces to bear on peoples living in specific regions, people who should have a voice in their future well-being as they will be experiencing effects on the environment firsthand. If ever there was a time to reconsider
things, it is now.
The point being: putting all this together, building off so much work done by so many
people in mapping the bioregions and economies of the world, one realizes how it
becomes possible to create what could be constituted as an eco-cultural community on
the local as well as global scales.33 And avoiding boundaries by creating such spaces, it
also becomes possible to provide depth by
overlaying the additional knowledge we
possess of minerals,34 of biodiversity,35 of environmental initiatives,36 of the world’s
languages,37 and world cultures.38 Each provides information about how bioregions and
eco-cultural communities might be defined and formed, and simulation modeling and
artificial intelligence (AI) will only facilitate the process. And it is from this foundation that
relationships and coalitions and alliances can be formed and forged across the globe.
But it needs to be noted that, in creating these spaces (or maps), the goal would be not simply to find resources to be extracted or to colonize
Such a framework would provide a means for developing a new Constitution of the body politic, a space for living and governing, constructed amidst people and places, which could more readily represents our notion of a more naturally occurring governance framework than an artificially generated one constructed through arbitrary lines. In short, for societies in search of ideas, as our forefathers were at their founding and we are today, the eco-cultural community serves as a way of thinking big.
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