Living in Place
- Home! A Bioregional Reader.
This introduction to Part Two introduces the term “living-in-place,” connecting it to the publications of Planet Drum in the 1970s, which “gave a common vocabulary and orientation to the experience of many people who were already living bioregionally but not calling it that.”
Don’t Move!
- By Gary Snyder. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Gary Snyder recommends staying in one place as the key to the investment and participation required for improved conditions.
Reinhabiting California
- By Peter Berg and Raymond F. Dasmann. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
This essay delves deeper into the concept of living-in-place, a method of “applying for membership in a biotic community and ceasing to be its explorer.” Using California as an example, authors Peter Berg and Raymond F. Dasmann offer a number of actions that must be taken to restore the bioregion and allow it to flourish.
Future Primitive
- By Jeremiah Gorsline and L. Freeman House. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
In the long span of human history, the move to an industrial culture is quite recent. Here, Jeremiah Gorsline and L. Freeman House argue for a reconnection with what worked before this transition, a world where “nature is the model for culture because the mind has been nourished and weaned on nature.” Interspersed without are first-person accounts of a version of this future world.
Living Here
- By Frisco Bay Mussel Group. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
The Frisco Bay Mussel Group explores the past, present, and potential future of the San Francisco Bay region, including the indigenous groups that for thousands of years “lived directly in it, native,” the native species of flora and fauna that have already been lost, and those that have managed to hang on.
At Home in L.A.
- By Sue Nelson. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
In this excerpt from her prose poem “The Land and the People 1989,” delivered at the 1989 US Green Gathering in Eugene, Oregon, Sara Nelson describes her experience of living in an LA where so much of the natural habitat has been lost to freeways, housing, and other development.
Mish Meditation
- By Lansing Scott. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Lansing Scott uses this poem to describe the various members, human and otherwise, of the “rainbow tribe” that makes up his home bioregion.
Metaphor for a City
- By Ernest Callenbach. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Ernest Callenbach explains why “a living eco-system” is the proper way to conceptualize a city.
Speaking in the Haida Way
- By Gwaganad. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Gwaganad, a member of the Haida tribe of British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, delivered this statement to the British Columbia Supreme Court in 1985, in response to a request for an injunction to prevent Haida from protesting logging roads in the area. She eloquently describes the past, present, and potential future of the relationship between the Haida and this land. “I feel that the people governing us should give us a chance to manage the land the way we know how it should be.”
The Earth
- By Baden Powell. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Baden Powell describes the interconnectedness of all things.
Home
- By Luanne Armstrong. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
A love letter by Luanne Armstrong to the home she was shaped by, “the most central, deepest and longest relationship of my life.”
The Hudson River Valley: A Bioregional Story
- By Wendell Berry. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
“Our role is to be the instrument whereby the valley celebrates itself.” Wendell Berry describes the joyous possibilities of true integration of everything within a bioregion, with New York’s Hudson River Valley as the point of reference.
The Salmon Circle
- By Fraser Lang and Alison Lang. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Detailed instructions, including music and diagrams, for a collaborative song and dance dramatizing the life cycle of the salmon.
