New York Green City Program
- Home! A Bioregional Reader.
This action plan developed by a coalition of New York City-based groups presents seven broad goals the local government must meet, with bullet points providing more specific demands for each of them.
On Permaculture and Community
- By Bill Mollison. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Bill Mollison explains why permaculture “promises freedom from many of the ills that plague us.”
To Learn the Things We Need to Know: Engaging the Particulars of the Planet’s Recovery
- By Freeman House. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
In this essay, Freeman House zooms in on the Californian watershed that’s home to the Mattole king salmon. He discusses the importance of preserving this native salmon population, steps that local inhabitants have taken to do so, and how these actions could ripple outward to the larger community.
Watersheds
- By David McCloskey. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
The importance of watersheds as both shapers of the landscape and systems of “temporal wholeness.”
Taking Steps Towards a Restoration Ethic
- By Jamie Sayen. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
“The goal of restoration,” argues Jamie Sayen, “must be natural recovery.” He explains why humans, as the ones who created ecological destruction in the first place, cannot let themselves be the ones who guide the undoing of that damage. Instead, they should “rely upon the resiliency of Mother Earth.”
Wilderness
- By Aldo Leopold. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
How humans’ use of the “raw material” of wilderness to create civilization has led to wilderness destruction and cultural flattening.
Wilderness for Science
- By Aldo Leopold. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Humans have interfered with the health of the planet, and now must look to the planet’s own own self-regulation to restore that health, because “the most perfect norm is wilderness.”
Fantasy of a Living Future
- by Starhawk. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Starhawk describes a typical day in an imagined future world. This world is filled with communities based on cooperation, care, and respect for all, including the earth.
Self-Government
- Home! A Bioregional Reader.
This introduction to Part 5 outlines the essays included in the section, which show that bioregionalism is a new word for an old concept, and that bioregional activists “organize across a wide spectrum” of specific but interconnected areas of interest.
…Ecotopia Emerging…
- By Ernest Callenbach. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Six excerpts from Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia Emerging, imagining life in the future “shadow country” of Ecotopia.
Devolutionary Notes
- By Michael Zwerin. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Michael Zwerin contrasts nations, bound by forms of genuine commonality and connection, with states, artificial constructions superimposed over them. He traces a line of the common experience of occupation and oppression across various separatist and revolutionary movements.
The Swiss Example
- By Leopold Kohr. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
Switzerland’s union of cantons, each functioning as their own independent organized unit, is presented as “not only a principle of government, but the principle of government.”
Bioregionalism and the Greens
- By Brian Tokar. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
A discussion of the need to bring together oppositional and reconstructive forms of ecological activism, offering the Greens and their embodiment of the principle “think globally, act locally” as a solution.
Growing a Life-Place Politics
- By Peter Berg. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
What qualifies as a life-place politics, and how can bioregionalists develop it? Peter Berg answers these questions by zooming in on the specific conditions of his own bioregion in northern California, and then explaining how the same basic principles can be applied to other areas. “Restore natural systems, satisfy basic human needs, and develop support for individuals: those are the most fundamental requirements for sustainability.”
Municipal Libertarianism
- By Murray Bookchin. Home! A Bioregional Reader.
An argument for decentralization of power and local autonomy, using historical precedent.
