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"one more player in the construction of community,” the bioregionalist as postmodernist can use myth and ritual as a means for hearing new voices and seeing new things outside the traditional western tendencies of logical speech and abstract formulations. Although similar in kind to Martin Buber’s humanistic geography or Thomas Berry’s dream of the earth, in that both are associated with feeling rather than reason,35 the land plays a much more active role in the liberation of man from his egoism and of the society from its totalizing organizational schemes.
It is ironic, when looking back upon the theoretical foundations of bioregionalism, to find its scientific origins have now taken on such spiritual dimensions. It is also ironic a movement, which started out to be a unifying principle, has resulted in such a separation among causes and goals. It is as though the movement itself appears to be confused:
One wing of the movement wants to treat bioregionalism as a ‘science,’ while the other wing views it as an environmental ethic and as a cultural sensibility … The ‘scientific’ approach is characterized by a tendency to reason ‘from first principles.” It is also characterized by environmental reductionism and by a deification of ‘the laws of nature..36
It might be for this reason the more mainstream theorists writing on the American West from a bioregionalist perspective have chosen to redefine the term either as an ethic of place or through the politics of place, because there they return to the essential foundations of bioregionalism as a “practical idealism,” a vehicle for change.
What can we learn from environmentalism? Man has a symbiotic relationship with his environment, one which informs his thinking on culture, society, politics, and economies.
The Science, Ethics, and Politics of Place
Kirkpatrick Sale’s book, Dwellers in the Land, represents the first serious attempt at articulating the science of bioregionalism on a policy level. Sale’s thesis can be summarized as follows: scale is the single critical element of all human constructs. Thus, whether one wishes to construct a building, a system, or a society, a person simply has to determine the scale appropriate to the job. And he argued, when constructing a policy framework for human development, the “optimum scale is the bioregional, not so small to be powerless and impoverished, not so large to be ponderous and impervious, a scale at which at last human potential can match ecological reality.”37
Sale underpinned his sociology with scientific parameters that outline the various biological levels through which a bioregion might be constructed, and he provides specific examples:
Ecoregion
The widest natural region, of perhaps several hundred thousand square miles, which takes its character from the broadest distribution of vegetation and soil types. One can identify approximately 40 ecoregions across the North American continent. An example would be the Sonoran Desert of perhaps 100,000 square miles that stretches from the southern foothills of the Sierra Nevada and the Mohave Desert down along the Gulf of California to the Sonora River and the northern edges of the Sinaloan forest.
Georegion
A subunit of an ecoregion, of perhaps 20,000 square miles, with distinctly clear physiographic features such as river basins, valley, and mountain ranges, and often with some specific flora and fauna. An example would be the Central Valley of California, which is within the Northern California ecoregion: a lush stretch of 20,000 square miles along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, whose native wildlife before the dominance of agribusiness included a variety of animals and a mix of Indian tribes and whose vegetation
and climate is quite different from the coastal forests, Sierra foothills, and Klamath