concerns involving questions concerning pollution control, energy conservation, environmental management, and planning, regional science would again find
itself the province not only of economists and political scientists, but also of geographers, cultural historians, and critics. Regional science would, through the 1970s and the 1990s, return to its roots. This is seen most notably in the development of bioregionalism.
Bioregionalism
Bioregionalism is defined as “a political, cultural, and ecological system or set of views based on naturally defined areas called bioregions, similar to ecoregions.”14 Although hard to pinpoint, it appears bioregionalism was first coined in a research prospectus, entitled “Bioregions: Towards Bioregional Strategy for Human Culture,” which was written by Canadian Allen Van Newkirk and published in the International Union’s journal Environmental Conservation in 1974.15 Reprinted in CoEvolution Quarterly, it was most likely there or from Raymond Dasmann that Peter Berg popularized the term through the Planet Drum Foundation, which was founded to “pursue research and public information on the relationship between human culture and the natural processes of the planetary biosphere,”16 even though he used the term without attribution in a paper, entitled “Strategies for Reinhabiting the Northern California Bioregion,” which was published in the San Francisco Bay Area Ecotopian journal.
Since the 1970s, there has been considerable
momentum under the movement. Writing in 1985, James Parson noted:
The underground press of the 60s and 70s … became the bioregional press of the 80s. Its leaders and theoreticians have included poets, novelists, and philosophers–names like Peter Berg, Jim Dodge, Peter Marshall, Michael Helm,
Stephanie Mills, Gary Snyder, Ernest Callenbach –but academics have contributed little to it.17
Since that time, academics have entered and contributed more deeply to the debate: most notably, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Thomas Berry. Several bioregional congresses have been held: the Ozark Area Community Congress in 1980;
the North American Bioregional Congress in 1984, 1986, and 1988; and the various Fourth World Assemblies held in Europe since 1991.18 And, publications outlining bioregional applications have been published.
Consider, for example, the work undertaken by Miklos Udvardy to map of biogeographical provinces around the world. Initially, the work was commissioned by the IUCN and UNESCO for conservation planning purposes, but later published in the CoEvolutionary Quarterly in 1976 and later as a frontis in the Next Whole Earth Catalogue in 1980.19
A person can also think of the green city concepts in San Francisco and Bahiá de Caráquez in Ecuador, think of the Frisco Bay Mussel Group in northern California, and think of the Ozark Area Community Congress on the Kansas-Missouri border. There are also approaches to specific regions: consider for example, native prairie grass activity of the Kansas Area Watershed Bioregion in the Midwest, rehabilitation of salmon runs in the Shasta Bioregion in northern California, engaging geothermal and wind in the Cascadia Bioregion in the rainy Pacific Northwest, and the solar energy project opportunities available to the Sonoran Desert Bioregion of the Southwest. And this doesn’t include various projects in
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It is still the case regional planning remains “one of the most important, and still unfinished, chapters in American planning history."
- Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land