practices; what they tend to underemphasize is precisely what the bioregionalists understand so well: the essential role of place in developing those practices.51
For Kemmis, what was required of people was to recall what Stegner referred to as a “language of tradition and commitment” which Westerners share as a “community of memory.” This could be done only if people reengage themselves as neighbors before becoming citizens. Neighbors are, for Kemmis, “essentially people who find themselves attached to the same (or nearly adjoining) places.52
As neighbors, the theory goes, people would be brought into an automatic relationship to one another because each is attached to the same place, a common world which being political will create “the res publica, the ‘public thing.’53 Such a world would be a mixture of the natural and fabricated; and it was this recognition which served to identify our world as one commonly willed, created if you will, by humans. Life, then, particularly in the American West, became for Kemmis a “joint venture in which humans will be part of the world and agree among themselves to allow nature to
shape the remainder.”54
Such a conception is, of course, another romantic vision for the American West. Yet, Kemmis offered some practical policy recommendations. Kemmis called for economic self-determination among strong, indigenous communities, where the states and localities “have the capacity and will to keep some locally generated capital from leaving the region and invest that capital creatively and effectively in the regional economy.”55 This required the “procedural republic” of the empire, established through the Constitution and the notion of a frontier, be abolished for the common world of inhibitory politics.56 And, like Sale and Wilkinson, Kemmis invoked Jane Jacobs’ argument for city-based regional economies, marketplaces similar in size and scale of the city-state or polis, where city-regions join with their hinterlands into a basic political unit marked by a steady-state economy of import replacement which serves to interrupt the flow of dollars outside the community57 Such a system, he believed, would provide much more indigenous control over land and resources, as well as remove the paternalism toward local government that has marked federal and state relations. It is a politics, he argued, that “synthesizes realism and hope, blending them in the crucible which inhabiting hard country provides.”58
To best understand Kemmis’ position, a person must come to understand its reliance on the land. In an essay first delivered to an audience in Boulder, entitled “A Society to Match the Scenery,” Kemmis tried to forge a middle ground between Hegel and Jefferson by arguing:
Fredrick Jackson Turner still speaks in a voice of Jeffersonian democracy to which we need to attend if we are to understand what makes democracy possible. Turner speaks of how the frontier created democrats; he writes that the rigors of the frontier (and I would argue selected for) what Turner called a “competency” – a capacity to get things done what needed doing–which translated into a truly democratic confidence. Hard country breeds hard capable people–capable, among other things, of genuine democracy.59
Granted, Kemmis moved onto suggest competence is derived not from individuals, but from people bound together in ways that enable them to work together. Yet the land is the ultimate determinant.
Kemmis noted this later, when he argued the root of all true inhabitation was the practices that carry within themselves demanding standards of excellence:
It is these standards of excellence, arising out of the soil itself, brought forth in certain
habituated and deeply shared patterns of
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