by Doug Aberley
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.
What follows is a step-by-step process by which a bioregional approach to sustainable economic development could be implemented in the rural regions of British Columbia, or any other bioregion. These steps are:
1.Define the borders of a bioregion by charting areas denoted by the following biophysical or cultural phenomena:
- plant and animal communities
- watersheds
- physiographic regions
- aboriginal territories
- historic and current land use patterns
- psychophysical sites
- cognitive homelands
- climate, etc.
2. Overlay the above boundary demarcations to show a composite border of the bioregion. Group discussion will evolve the logical biocultural limits of a life-place. Borders can be either hard, as a well-defined watershed height of land, or soft, where a less definable area may be jointly shared by two bioregions.
3. Compile a huge and incredibly detailed atlas of the natural and human elements which act and/or reside within your bioregion. This atlas will be the work of many people, and over a succession of years will be the accumulated wisdom by which means ecological and cultural regulation of human activity will evolve.
4. Compile a history which describes the evolution of biophysical and cultural environments within the bioregional. Special attention will be given to understanding how the bioregion environment has been used to increase or decrease the health and well-being of human populations.
5. Expand the bioregional history to include detailed understanding of the quantity and value of bioregion natural resources which have been harvested. This investigation will enable comparison of the contribution that the bioregion’s economy has made to provincial and federal coffers to be measured against return services that have been received from central governments.
6. Complete a survey of how current structures of governance and development are organized and operate in your bioregion. This review should provide charts showing government and corporate organization, their theoretical rules of operation, and their actual performance. Special attention should be made to document the positive and negative effects which have resulted from outside control of local environments and economies.
7. From the above analysis a list should be compiled of any institutions, corporations, laws, or policies which are detrimental to the health of the bioregion. This list should be detailed and periodically updated for wide circulation.
8. Organize a sustained resistance against forces which are named as neglecting or destroying bioregion health. This activity would oppose large-scale export-based developments, centralized control of the bioregion economy, perpetual resource extraction tenures granted to corporations, ecosystem destruction, or any similar disregard of quality of life in rural regions. The suggested means by which this resistance may occur include individual and group efforts to lobby, letter-write, take legal action, petition, protest, forming of alliances, and an array of other nonviolent actions.
9. Spend equal effort evolving alternatives to the structures of governance and development which neglect or destroy bioregions. This essential activity requires a sustained public education process which never fails to take advantage of an opportunity to raise issues of bioregional identity and needs. It will be necessary to concurrently expand a bioregional perspective into all levels of community life by running for public office, writing letters to the editor, promoting cultural events, participating in small business enterprise, and other related activities.
10. The ultimate goal of the preceding steps will be to provide the means by which existing structures of governance and development will be reformed, and eventually replaced by those based on bioregional principles. Rear guard resistance, and forward-looking alternatives would combine to create a potent sustainability movement in any rural bioregion. Implementation of the bioregional alternative can be completed through slow grafting of small parts of the alternative vision on to current institutions, or by creating what can be called a parallel society. Bioregional practice thus becomes a vital mix of changing the existing control structures wherever possible, while at the same time building alternatives independent of government support. The eventual result will be a growing public expectation that institutions should more quickly adopt bioregional configurations. Over an extended period of time there is every possibility that the bioregional alternative would predominate.
(From “Sustainable Development in Rural British Columbia: A Bioregional Context,” 1989.)
Doug Aberley is a city planner, mapmaker, and professor based in British Columbia. He worked for sixteen years as the town planner for Hazelton, BC, where he became interested in bioregionalism as a method of linking culture, environment, and economy in a way that wasn’t covered in traditional city planning. He also taught for ten years in the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. He’s written books on mapping as local empowerment and ecological planning. Currently, he’s director of the Treaty and Natural Resources Department for the Namgis First Nation.
