Bioregionalism

Definition

A socio-cultural process of remembering belonging to place and ecology. Bioregionalism proposes that watersheds, soil communities, and ecological boundaries are the natural units of governance rather than arbitrary political boundaries.

Significance

Modern governance operates on political boundaries drawn by colonial history, not ecological reality. Bioregionalism regrounds human organization in the living systems that actually sustain communities — recognizing that a watershed doesn’t care about county lines.

This is not nostalgia for pre-industrial life. It’s a recognition that effective coordination requires alignment between governance scale and ecological scale.

Core Principles

• Ecological boundaries over political ones — Watersheds, not counties
• Place-based identity — “Person of place” as civic identity
• Nested sovereignty — Local self-governance within larger ecological contexts
• Indigenous knowledge integration — Honoring first peoples’ relationship to land

Related Concepts

• Cosmolocalism — The local/global balance
• Polycentric Governance — Nested decision-making
• Commons Governance — Shared resource stewardship

References

• Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land (1985)
• Peter Berg, Reinhabiting a Separate Country (1978)