Gian de Phillipo
Regional differentiation … may turn out to be the true expression of American life and culture … [reflecting] American ideals, needs, and viewpoints far more adequately than does State consciousness and loyalty.
- National Resources Planning Committee, Regional Factors in National Planning and Development, 2 December 1935.
Populists around the globe have effectively offered American and other citizens of the world a binary choice: either globalism or nationalism. In many ways, it reminds a person of the binary choice of the Cold War era: capitalism or communism. But why must it be so? Given the disparities of wealth and income, the decline of the nation state, and what has come to be defined as the “existential crisis” of our time–climate change–why can’t there be a third way? Why can’t there be a way that reduces the disparities and empowers the disenfranchised, reconfigures and revitalizes the notion of a nation state, and finds a means to steward the one home we all inhabit–the small blue light, which seen from space, confirms both the fragility of humanity and of the environment which we call home?
The Third Way
The earliest known reference to regionalism and bioregionalism can be traced back to 1826, in the theories of regional science developed by van Thunen in his work entitled Der isolierte Staat.1 The science proceeded to develop in the 1800s through the works of economists and geographers like August Losch and Walter Christaller who “showed interest in problems connected with the location of activities,”2 and through the work of anarchist geographers Peter Kropotkin and Elisee Reclus who “discussed the notion of humankind’s responsibilities to nature, and the integration of natural and social processes.”3
Fredrick Jackson Turner also referenced this notion as early as 1924, in an article seldom cited by historians or environmentalists, entitled "The Significance of the Section in American History,” arguing development could only be understood if one linked a sense of place to historical comprehension. Turner suggested the “section” (which he would also call a “geographical province” or “geographical region,” terms Sale would later argue were akin to a bioregion) provided “the only way to understand the patterns of American settlement and migration, of economic and political history, of architecture, literature, and social custom.”4
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