For example, the study of bioregions initially began as an exploration into the relationship of men with their environment. If there was a value placed on any one thing during this inquiry, then it was not on man or nature singularly but on the fact that each touched upon the other. Geographers and planners looked to more natural ways of living within the context of a landscape, hoping to find less stressful means to live within industrial economies that would bring value to human life. Lewis Mumford’s observation could well have been Turner’s: the environment does not act directly upon man; it acts rather by conditioning the kinds of work and activity that are possible in a region. The place does not determine human institutions; but it sets “certain conditions.”21
As Van Newkirk would point out, a bioregion should not be understood as a biotic province where nature itself was a value that took priority in organization. Instead, bioregions
were biogeographically-determined cultural areas whose study, he wrote, might be called ‘regional human biogeography.’ He spoke of ‘bioregional strategies’ for cultural adaptation and the restoration of the earth’s natural plant and animal diversity within a ‘bioregional framework.’ Language, poetry, and myth were among the research tools he saw as appropriate for the study of bioregional cognition, bioregional history, habitat perception, and the restoration of altered habits.22
This framework allowed Peter Berg to understand bioregionalism to be a “kind of unifying principle, a way of thinking about land and life within a regional framework.”23
It was not long before the way of thinking assumed a value: that is, thinking about bioregions became transformed into an ideology, an –ism that had to be defended in logic because it was good in-and-of-itself. Bioregionalism, in the words of James Parson, “is a moral philosophy … a framework for action that celebrates the geographic and cultural
diversity, the sacredness of the Earth, and the
responsibilities of local communities to it.”24 The focus shifted from study to debate. The concept of bioregionalism had become politicized through the politics of “place.”
The first political confrontations surrounded the idea of planning and the concept of place. In the 1960s, counter-culturalists of the communitarian tradition used theories of bioregionalism to argue for their spiritually motivated desire to return to nature. Today, this tradition is carried forward by environmentalists like Kirkpatrick Sale and Wendell Berry, who argue for sustainable development, and by political activists, who, for reasons of scale and power, oppose the idea of the nation state and other administrative divisions associated with industrial societies because their artificiality alienates people from the land. The arguments of these individuals derive from the belief in natural law, and the idea of social justice that stems from the Lockean tradition of property which, of necessity, requires a person to live within one’s means.
The second wave of political confrontations developed when feminists put together the idea that just as men had exploited nature, so, too, men had exploited women. Initially, traditional feminism provided enough of a foundation to support this argument; but soon, the theoretical underpinnings moved beyond beyond traditional feminism to encompass the more radical concepts of the deep ecology25 and radical feminist perspectives: for example, the Gaia principle, where Mother Earth was described as a living, conscious organism capable of revealing the value of matriarchial organizations through general laws that have guided nature.
It would not be long before ecofeminism emerged as a movement in the 1970s, being officially coined as a term, ecofeminisme, in 1974 by French writer Freancoise d’Eaubonne, finding new life in the 1980s when feminists in the United States argued both women and nature could be liberated together.26
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