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Europe, Canada, Australia, Latin America, and Asia. People with whom bioregionalists find allegiances and/or inspiration include: Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, Gar Alperovitz, Gus Speth, David Orr, Gary Snyder, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, and Stephanie Mills, among others. A person can also think of the work and maps of Joel Garreau, author of Nine Nations of North America.
Bioregionalism found itself once again in vogue in the 1980s and 1990s, but consensus had yet to be reached on exactly what the concept meant. Yet returning to its theoretical foundations, a person can argue bioregionalism had its origins in Man’s desire to find meaning within his or her life. Bioregionalism is thus a philosophical, if not theological, quest that involves both man and the environment in which he lives. This requires a person address both cultural and environmental concerns.
For Peter Berg, the man who coined the term, a bioregion refers both ...
to a geographical terrain and to 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, [but] also the final boundaries are best described by people who have lived within it. Bioregionalism and bioregional perspective involve learning to live-in-place, a kind of spiritual identification with a particular kind of country and its wild nature [that is] the basis for the kind of land care the world so definitely needs.20
Yet, a person must not automatically assume such a definition ended the debate; instead that is the point at which the debate heightened. Question of place raised concerns about location and definition, concerns about purpose and individuality, and concerns about values and subjectivity. Taken together, these questions generated concerns about human limitations and potentialities.
Nearctic Biogeographical Realm
Source: Udvarky, Miklos. “A Classification of the Biogeographical Provinces of the World,” Prepared as a contribution to UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme, Project No. 8, IUCN Occasional Paper No. 18, International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, Morges, Switzerland, 1975, p. 16. Reproduced courtesy of IUCN. Available from https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/6582.