by Michael Crofoot
This piece was originally published in Home! A Bioregional Reader, edited by Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, New Society Publishers, copyright 1990.
The bioregional and permaculture movements have been evolving in tandem for ten years or more, each with its own distinctive flavor. Having attended both the North American Bioregional Congresses, and the first and second International Permaculture Conference, I see confluences yet unspoken and divergences of which we might take heed.
Both movements spring from common concerns for a life of equality and empathy with the natural world. Bioregionalism speaks of knowing home and staying put while the permaculture design process begins at the home and works outward. Each movement is decentralized and anarchistic in character, now seeking to strengthen their commitment and widen their influence. Permaculture uses basic ecological concepts, like succession and the stability of species diversity, within a construct of design principles, such as stacking functions and creating edge, to develop sustainable agricultural and cultural systems. Based on natural systems, permaculture tends to be scientific and goal-oriented. It seeks to work natural systems into cultural ones. Bioregionalism began as a cultural endeavor, finding ways to hone the processes of culture in the dynamics of reinhabitation. Acknowledging the patterns which connect mind to matter, civilization to wilderness, bioregionalism works cultural systems into natural ones.
Now as both maturing movements come of age and make plans for their third biennial events, let us find our common grounds and meet the world together.
Bioregionalism and permaculture originally had their humanistic blindspots but have since met and become broadened by the biocentrism of deep ecology. One of the criticisms of permaculture—that it ignores natural wisdom through the wholesale introduction of exotic species—is less and less deserved. Permaculture principles are now used for wilderness restoration and useful native species are increasingly utilized in human-centered designs.
While bioregionalism has been refining ways of knowing home, permaculture has busily gone about internationalizing. At the recent conference at Evergreen State College in Washington, 600 participants from 10 or more countries heard keynote addresses from Masanobu Fukuoka of Japan, Wes Jackson from Kansas and, of course, the irrepressible Bill Mollison of Tasmania. Permaculture projects are underway in Papua New Guinea, Brazil, the Pyrenees, and India, to name a few.
But some would say that as permaculture has begun to think globally, it has lost some of its ability to act locally. This is where bioregionalism stands most firmly. Though the bioregional ethic runs as an undercurrent through permaculture work and in its design courses, it is not often consciously so. Permaculture designers who would “farm in the image of the forest” may benefit greatly from the woods savvy of the bioregionalist living in place. More than ever, permaculture needs the grounding which is the wellspring of bioregionalism.
Similarly, the kind of agriculture and local economy necessary for a sustainable reinhabitation could well be improved by the permaculture strategies garnered from age-old work found in Bali, Hawaii, or the outback of Australia. Permaculture’s collective experience with economic alternatives and cottage industry innovations would prove useful to any serious bioregional initiative.
Bioregionalism is much more than just another back-to-the-land movement; while permaculture is more than just another form of organic agriculture. They are qualitatively greater, I would submit, because they are intrinsically rooted in natural systems.
I am writing with a proposal of marriage, not a smudgepot of two equals becoming One as in ‘‘permaregionalism,” but rather, in the spirit of mutual respect and mutual aid. Perhaps it is best said in Kahlil Gibran’s Prophet, where he speaks on marriage: “Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. And stand together yet not too near together; for the pillars of the temple stand apart and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” In these volatile times where crisis becomes opportunity, it would strengthen us both to watch each other’s dance closely and maybe even learn some of the movements.
Excerpted from North American Bioregional Congress II Proceedings, 1987.
Michael Crofoot is from New Zealand where he actively promotes the permaculture movement “down under.” He was an organizer of the Third International Permaculture Conference held in New Zealand in 1989, and has been wooing bioregionalists with offers of marriage since before the second North American Bioregional Congress, which he attended.
