The great secret of human adaptability is culture. Culture provides a “soft” layer between the biology of Homo sapiens, and the environment we relate to. Culture is learned, and as such, culture can adapt far more quickly than biology. Humans have evolved as cultural creatures: we are born not as perfect tabula rosa, but certainly without all the parameters set. Disgust is an excellent example, felt so deeply that it has often been taken to be innate, even cosmic in nature. Yet what we feel disgust about is largely culturally constructed. We have a deeply-felt, biological response, but it is felt in response to arbitrary, cultural stimuli. Because of responses like that, humans were able to move out of Africa and, developing new cultures, adapt to nearly every bioregion on the planet. As such, a healthy, functional culture must meet two ends: (1) it must suit our evolved, biological, human nature, and (2) it must adapt us to our local environment.

On this site, we have explored in depth the many, many ways in which civilization defies human nature—societies far beyond our neurological capacity (Dunbar’s Number), that necessitate hierarchical structures that defy our evolved need for egalitarian social engagement, forced on a diet that we can barely digest, rife with poisons we can’t metabolize that make us sick and put us in an early grave, and so on. But now, it’s time to turn to the second point—a healthy, functional culture must adapt a human community to a local environment. On that point alone, any homogeneous, globalized culture is fundamentally dysfunctional. No “one size fits all” solution can stretch across the whole world; an attempt to impose it requires massive expenditures of energy to eradicate biodiversity, and thus, to eradicate the foundations of life. The alternative, if any single human culture is to suffice, would be a greatly reduced human range and a shift from our generalist approach, to a much more specialized approach. Plenty of specialists have evolved; koala bears, for instance, will only eat eucalyptus leaves. But humans are nomadic omnivores, perhaps the most adaptable generalists the world has ever seen. A lack of biocultural diversity is a contradiction of human nature, and it creates a fundamentally dysfunctional culture. The green lawns of Phoenix, Arizona, or the tourists in the Australian Outback who pass out every year rather than strip down as the Aborigines do, don’t even scratch the surface of the abundant examples our culture provides of how foolish a monolithic culture becomes.

Any true rewilding is fundamentally local. It is a process of repairing relationships with local plants, local animals, and other local life, reconciling yourself to local patterns of living, local seasonal cycles, local climate patterns, local geography and geology. It is always a question of local reinhabitation. Humans have often used their culture to become native to a new place; civilizations use their culture to defy the tendency to become native, to retain alien practices and customs as long as possible, and to retain as long and as much as possible the characteristics of an invasive species. If we wish to change that, if we wish to rewild, if we wish to become native, these things only make sense in the context of a specific place.

That is the message of bioregionalism, as well.

Defining “Bioregionalism”

I came across a wonderful Spanish term—querencia—usually translated as “love of home.” It is that, to be sure, but colloquially it means much more than that too, as I came to learn. Querencia is the deep sense of inner well-being that comes from knowing a particular place on the Earth; its daily and seasonal patterns, its fruits and scents, its soils and bird-songs. A place where, whenever you return to it, your soul releases an inner sigh of recognition and realisation.

That is pretty much what bioregionalism is.¹

The above was written by Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, and an important voice in the bioregionalist movement. His use of the Spanish term querencia brings home much of the emotional weight of bioregionalism, and simultaneously illustrates how we can find this concept honored even within the very civilizations that have, from time immemorial, undermined it.

Even as far back as Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic project sought to undermine bioregionalism, by imposing one of the world’s earliest forms of “globalization.” Whether in ancient Greece or the modern West, the fact remains that such systems are never equal; Greece was influenced by India, Egypt and other cultures, but not to nearly the same degree that they had Greek culture imposed on them. Modern Americans eat sushi and hummus, but the impact of foreign cultures on America pales in comparison to the utter decimation of other cultures that globalization was subsumed. The result of these processes is the emergence of a homogeneous culture that is forced onto other locales and other ecologies where it may be highly maladaptive. Bioregionalism tries to roll that process back. Later on, Sale offers a more down-to-earth definition of bioregionalism:

It is a way of living and thinking which views the world in terms of the actual contours and life-forms of the Earth—measured by the distinct flora and fauna, the climate and soils, the topology and hydrology, and how all these work together: regions defined by nature, not by legislature. But it does more: it pays respect to these natural ecosystems by seeing them as coherent and empowered social and political entities as well, necessarily living by ecological principles of sustainability dictated by the limits of the land itself.

In the United States, it is easiest to think of watersheds as the defining bioregional unit—the Hudson Valley, for example, where I live, or the Potomoc estuary, or the Kansas River area. But there are myriads of other discrete territories, such as deserts, mountain ranges, peninsulas, and islands, that function as bioregions. What gives particular weight and authenticity to viewing America this way is that it conforms remarkably to the way that the original people lived here before the European invasion.²

Because bioregions observe the real boundaries created by differing ecologies, they appear often, and unintentionally. After all, it takes significant energy to defy these natural boundaries: to keep two bioregions together that are dealing with different ecologies, and thus different economies, and thus with vastly different needs, cultures, languages and basic approaches, or to divide a natural bioregion along an arbitrary border, and try to keep two halves of a single culture seperated from one another. Such mismatches between political fantasies and ecological realities have led to conflicts and crises the world over, and continue to be some of the most important, on-going causes of conflict in the world.

Bioregionalism treats political boundaries as the ineffective, irrelevant fantasies that they are, and instead focuses on the real boundaries of life: watersheds, climate zones, continental divides, mountain ranges, plateau, and so forth. Taken seriously, bioregionalism brings with it a call to become part of your bioregion, to become attuned to its seasonal cycles and its ecological changes, and to identify with the ecology that supports you. In that sense, bioregionalism includes many other environmental causes, and solves many of our social and ecological problems:

• Eat from your foodshed. The term “foodshed” was coined by comparison to “watershed,” and refers to eating locally grown food. Even more important than “organic food,” (an increasngly meaningless term, anyway) is eating locally, as emphasized by efforts like the “100 Mile Diet,” and even ties into the Slow Food movement.
• Learn your ecology. Can you give directions to where you live, without referencing any man-made roads or structures? How can we expect to have any concern for the ecology we live in, the ecology that gives us air to breathe and water to drink, when we are so completely cut off from it? Bioregionalism can start to illustrate what was already true—how much your life depends on all the other living things around you. With that awareness also comes the passion to stand up and defend that life, once you understand how your own life is rooted in it.
• Living in ways adapted to your bioregion. How much energy does the city of Phoenix waste each year on air conditioning units and sprinklers to keep Western-style homes with green lawns? Native construction techniques used adobe, emphasized cross-breezes, and built into the ground to keep buildings naturally cool. Trying to impose a vastly different bioregion leads to disastrous results. Adapting to the place you live makes life easier, less expensive, and ultimately, more fulfilling as you form a relationship with the place you live, rather than constantly fighting to keep yourself insulated.
• Building community. Homogeneous culture isolates human beings. Social isolation is growing in the U.S., with the breakdown of neighborhoods and the imposition of automobile culture, creating seperate areas for work, play and sleep. This compartmentalization leads to a breakdown of community, and the social isolation we see today. A bioregional focus also strengthens communities, bringing them together in a shared commitment to the ecology they all depend on, at the extreme end even allowing for local currencies.

This simply scratches the surface, of course. If we are to sum up, then, how do we define bioregionalism? The following seems to hit all of the major points admirably:

The bioregional approach advocates ignoring the man-made, historically arbitrary political boundaries of nations, states and counties. Instead it suggests using natural ecosystem features, such as watersheds, mountain ranges and the entire biotic communities as the defining features of a given region. The primary values, from a bioregional perspective, are not “property rights” and “development” but the preservation of the integrity of the regional ecosystem, the viability of the biotic community, and maximizing economic self-sufficiency within the region. Political control should rest with the community of people actually living in the region: this is the concept of “reinhabitation.”³

Environmental Determinism

Of course, one question that immediately springs to mind is, to what degree does bioregionalism recapitulate environmental determinism? The idea that culture is rooted in a given ecology and adapts to that ecology has an immediate, if superficial, similarity to the basic ideas of environmental determinism. The appeals that bioregionalists make to pre-existing Native cultures strengthens this comparison, suggesting that even where no obvious cultural diffusion is taking place, cultures will nonetheless tend towards a common norm as they are shaped by the same environment.

The fundamental argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly that of climate, influenced the psychological mind-set of individuals, which in turn defined the behaviour and culture of the society that those individuals formed. For example, tropical climates were said to cause laziness, relaxed attitudes and promiscuity, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle latitudes led to more determined and driven work ethics. Because these environmental influences operate slowly on human biology, it was important to trace the migrations of groups to see what environmental conditions they had evolved under.⁴

Enviornmental determinism was a virulent kind of racism in vogue in the early 20th century that now stands as an embarrassing chapter in geographic history. However, the failing of environmental determinism is not in its arguments that environment forms culture, but rather, on the value judgments placed on those cultures, fitting them into the common view of unilineal cultural evolution from “savages,” to the supposed pinnalce of cultural evolution in the Victorian businessman. This is something bioregionalism avoids.

Unlike environmental determinism’s implied racial or social hierarchy, bioregionalists assume that regional characteristics should be conceptualized in a socially unstratified manner. Each place or collection of places is just another bioregion—not better or worse, simply different from all others. In fact, diversity for the bioregionalist is celebrated in an almost postmodern fashion, emphasizing local voices and communities in place of, for example, the allegedly universal expression of consumerism in Western urban society.⁵

Some have nonetheless tried to argue that even if it is unacknowledged, there is an inescapable hierarchy of bioregions, and thus, of bioregional cultures, that can be derived. Such arguments invariably rely on judging bioregions by a single criteria, as in the case of agricultural productivity.

Like environmental determinists, bioregionalists posit a normative relationship between environment and culture, interpreting the suitability of any given lifestyle on its conformance to climate and topography. From a strictly ecological point of view, it is clear that a bioregion with relatively infertile soil, inadequate water supply, or harsh climate would be labeled as poor for growing crops. Would the poor agricultural potential be reflected in a correspondingly impoverished culture and political organization? If so, how, in light of the excessive focus on the local and particular, could bioregionalists avoid deterministic social hierarchies based on climate or environment?⁶

What does an “impoverished culture and political organization” look like? We have examined elsewhere on this site and in detail the significant failings of civilization and political organization in general. The surviving hunter-gatherers who give us some of our best glimpses of healthy human cultures also live in the most agriculturally unproductive areas imaginable, places where agriculture is not simply poor, but simply impossible. It is assumptions like these that create racial, ethnic and bioregional stratification, not bioregionalism itself.

Bioregionalism is a kind of environmental determinism, in that it argues that culture must be properly based in ecology, and thus, culture is a function of ecology. All the healthy cultures of a particular bioregion will share remarkable similarities in language, aesthetics, values, subsistence patterns and so on, that adapt to the specific plants, animals, minerals, climate, seasons, watersheds and elevations of that bioregion. This recognition that human culture is shaped by more than simply the independent human will is something desperately needed in our examinations of culture, ethnography and anthropology, and something we commonly find in the healthy, “old growth cultures” that have become fully native to a given bioregion.

Cultures colonized by these conceits tautologically confirm the interior sources of their intelligence. Minds colonized by such conceits think and conceive of themselves in this grammar of possessive individualism. Onkwehonwe (unassimilated, traditional Haudenosaunee), in contrast, regard any assumption concerning the existence of autonomous, anthropogenic minds to be aberrations that violate the unity, interrelation, and reciprocity between language and psychology, landscape and mind. The ecology of traditional Haudenosaunee territory possesses sentience that is manifest in the consciousness ofthat territory,and that same consciousness is formalized in and as Haudenosaunee consciousness.Of course, other beings manifest that consciousness in their literature of tracks, chirrups, and loon calls.⁷

That said, the usual implications of environmental determinism—the ranking of societies according to “lazy” cultures of the tropics, to the “industrious” cultures of the mid-latitudes—is an imposition wholly alien to the basic notion of culture determined by environment implied by the name. If culture is determined by environment, as bioregionalism suggests, then no “ranking” of cultures is possible. Each culture must be evaluated, as Franz Boas observed, according to how well it adapts to its specific context—chiefly, its ecological context. To what extent does a given culture relate humans to their ecology? That is the question of a culture’s success, and it is remarkably similar to the very criteria Boas used to suggest cultural relativism, the prevailing anthropological paradigm that shattered the racist, imperialist apologia anthropology had so often offered up in the past to justify simplistic, unilineal views of cultural evolution.

Bioregionalism illustrates why there can never be a single “best” culture, because there is no single ecology to relate to.

Blot und Boden

Bioregionalism is by no means new, and if the sketchy connections to environmental determinism serve to cast a shadow on bioregionalism, its long-standing connections with nationalism in general, and the Nazi party specifically, are positively chilling. In the wild human mind, the two most important elements in life are family and land.⁸ Just as states have formed dysfunctional, abusive “families” that posit the state as some grandiose parent, so, too, has the natural biophilia⁹ (as E.O. Wilson calls it) or querencia (to use Kirkpatrick Sale’s favorite word) been perverted into “nationalism,” also known as, “patriotism.” Consider how easily this love of one’s ecology bleeds into nationalist jingoism, as exemplified in this Weimar-era pamphlet:

In every German breast the German forest quivers with its caverns and ravines, crags and boulders, waters and winds, legends and fairy tales, with its songs and its melodies, and awakens a powerful yearning and a longing for home; in all German souls the German forest lives and weaves with its depth and breadth, its stillness and strength, its might and dignity, its riches and its beauty — it is the source of German inwardness, of the German soul, of German freedom. Therefore protect and care for the German forest for the sake of the elders and the youth, and join the new German “League for the Protection and Consecration of the German Forest.”⁸

In his history of the ecological underpinnings of the Nazi party, “Fascist Ecology: The ‘Green Wing’ of the Nazi Party and its Historical Antecedents,” Peter Staudenmaier comments on this piece and finds in it the beginnings of much of the Nazi party’s ideology.

The mantra-like repetition of the word “German” and the mystical depiction of the sacred forest fuse together, once again, nationalism and naturalism. This intertwinement took on a grisly significance with the collapse of the Weimar republic. For alongside such relatively innocuous conservation groups, another organization was growing which offered these ideas a hospitable home: the National Socialist German Workers Party, known by its acronym NSDAP. Drawing on the heritage of Arndt, Riehl, Haeckel, and others (all of whom were honored between 1933 and 1945 as forebears of triumphant National Socialism), the Nazi movement’s incorporation of environmentalist themes was a crucial factor in its rise to popularity and state power.⁹

The role of ecology in the rise of Nazi Germany is routinely overlooked. Many of the founding figures in ecology were also founding figures in Nazi ideology; Ernst Haeckel, for instance, coined the term “ecology,” and was also one of the prominent early figures in forming Nazi ideology. Martin Heidegger was an important early phenomenologist, quoted extensively by David Abram in Spell of the Sensuous (1997), but he was also an ardent member of the Nazi party, and never disavowed or repented his commitment, even decades after the war’s end. The Nazi party brought much of Romantic ideology to the fore, and was propelled in large part by the völkisch peasant movement of the Weimar era. Their slogan, “blot und boden“—”blood and soil”—still has a certain bioregional ring to it.

“The unity of blood and soil must be restored,” proclaimed Richard Walther Darré in 1930. This infamous phrase denoted a quasi-mystical connection between ‘blood’ (the race or Volk) and ’soil’ (the land and the natural environment) specific to Germanic peoples and absent, for example, among Celts and Slavs. For the enthusiasts of Blut und Boden, the Jews especially were a rootless, wandering people, incapable of any true relationship with the land. German blood, in other words, engendered an exclusive claim to the sacred German soil. While the term “blood and soil” had been circulating in völkisch circles since at least the Wilhelmine era, it was Darré who first popularized it as a slogan and then enshrined it as a guiding principle of Nazi thought. Harking back to Arndt and Riehl, he envisioned a thoroughgoing ruralization of Germany and Europe, predicated on a revitalized yeoman peasantry, in order to ensure racial health and ecological sustainability.¹⁰

Walther Darré, Reich Peasant Leader and Minister of Agriculture from 1933-1942, is a particularly important figure in this regard. He was no minor figure in the Nazi government; the Agriculture department was the fourth most well-funded department in the government, even well into the war. Darré said that “The concept of Blood and Soil gives us the moral right to take back as much land in the East as is necessary to establish a harmony between the body of our Volk and the geopolitical space.”¹¹ He also introduced some of the first organic farming laws, which he called lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise, or “farming according to the laws of life.” He was also a virulent anti-Semite; he referred to Jews as “weeds,” and according to one account, it was Darré who convinced Hitler and Himmler that the Jews and Slavs needed to be eradicated.

No aspect of the Nazi project can be properly understood without examining its implication in the holocaust. Here, too, ecological arguments played a crucially malevolent role. Not only did the “green wing” refurbish the sanguine antisemitism of traditional reactionary ecology; it catalyzed a whole new outburst of lurid racist fantasies of organic inviolability and political revenge. The confluence of anti-humanist dogma with a fetishization of natural ‘purity’ provided not merely a rationale but an incentive for the Third Reich’s most heinous crimes.¹²

In many ways, the Nazis epitomize the logical end result of any nationalist project. The villification of the “rootless peoples”—in the case of Germany, Jews and gypsies foremost—can easily be manipulated with agrarian concepts of “purity.” The Romantic, ecological furor could identify “rootless people” with “weeds” that contaminated the “ecological purity” of the German people. Yet we can also see that these are agrarian concepts—”weeds” and “purity” are impossible to identify in a wild ecology. The ecological foundation of the Nazi party was a specifically agrarian ideal, and thus, one that also allowed for the justification of conquest that Darré cited: agriculture always needs more lebensraum.

It would not be fair to suggest that all Nazis were environmentally-minded, either. The “Green Wing” of the Nazi party, while powerful, was not the only element at work, and eventually fell out of favor.

Ecological initiatives were, of course, hardly universally popular within the party. Goebbels, Bormann, and Heydrich, for example, were implacably opposed to them, and considered Darré, Hess and their fellows undependable dreamers, eccentrics, or simply security risks. This latter suspicion seemed to be confirmed by Hess’s famed flight to Britain in 1941; after that point, the environmentalist tendency was for the most part suppressed.¹³

The experience of the “Green Wing” of the Nazi party illustrates that the basic human love for land can be just as easily manipulated and perverted as the love for family; just as the state can form itself into a giant, dysfunctional and abusive family, so, too, can the natural human love for the ecology that supports us be perverted to serve the interests of the state—then, it is called “nationalism” or “patriotism.” Ask a “patriot” what they love about their country, and the most honest answers you’ll recieve will revolve around love of their homeland, or love of principles that a state supposedly champions. As Jeff Vail pointed out, however, the final leap that displaces love of homeland or principle to a particular government is always a failure of reasoning.

Rather than digress into a debate over the relative merits of freedom vs. equality, let’s just assume that these noble principles are in fact “noble”, and worthy of our support (whatever they may be). Accepting this assumption highlights the logical fallacy of the second argument: there is no justification for transference of “love for a noble principle” to “love for a Nation-State that exhibits that principle”. It may justify a love for the policy of a Nation-State that upholds such a principle as individual freedom (for example), but no matter how many times one iterates this process it never makes the final leap of logic to justify love for the Nation-State itself.¹⁴

As Vail goes on to explain, states can (and more than often, do) betray the principles they identify with, so a love of principle can never be transferred to a government. Likewise, no government ever truly is the land, regardless of its delusions of grandeur. States can (and more than often, do) betray the lands they claim to protect. In the United States, for example, nearly the only Western country where patriotism has not yet been recognized as an irrational and terrible malady, “patriots” have transferred love of land to love of a state which increasingly dismantles environmental protections, encourages ecological destruction, and systematically destroys the very land on which American lives depend.

Bioregionalism has a certain amount of history in common with the rise of the Nazi party, in the same way that a healthy, loving family has certain things in common with abusive and dysfunctional families. When allowed to follow its own internal logic, however, and not used to justify and excuse the inherently tyrannical power of the state, bioregionalism—like family itself—is a nurturing and essential part of healthy human life.

The Nine Nations of North America

Forget the maze of state and provincial boundaries, those historical accidents and surveyors’ mistakes. The reason no one except the trivia expert can name all fifty of the United States is that they hardly matter. … Consider, instead, the way North America really works. It is Nine Nations. Each has its capital and its distinctive web of power and influence. A few are allies, but many are adversaries. Several have readily acknowledged national poets, and many have characteristic dialects and mannerisms. Some are close to being raw frontiers; others have four centuries of history. Each has a peculiar economy; each commands a certain emotional allegiance from its citizens. These nations look different, feel different, and sound different from each other, and few of their boundaries match the political lines drawn on current maps. It’s valuable to recognize these divergent realities. ‘The layers of unifying flavor and substances that define these nations help explain the major storms and excursions through which our public affairs pass.¹⁵

Joel Garreau, author of the above, was not particularly interested in bioregionalism when he wrote The Nine Nations of North America in 1981. In fact, Garreau has more recently written about transhumanism, and the “Singularity,” practically the antithesis of bioregionalism. But there is a curious similarity between Joel Garreau’s “Nine Nations,” derived purely in sociological terms, and, for instance, the distribution of Native American cultural groups. What Garreau called “the Foundry,” for instance, covers much of the land once claimed by Iroquoian-speaking confederacies, like the Hurons, the “Neutrals,” and of course, the Iroquois themselves. What Garreau called “MexAmerica” covered the land of the Mesoamerican civilizations, and the hinterlands that drew so much of their culture from Mesoamerica, and just as often conquered Mesoamerica (as did the Toltecs and the Mexica). Garreau’s “Ecotopia” corresponds to what was once home to the tribes of the Pacific Northwest.

If Garreau’s “Nine Nations” correspond to pre-Columbian, Native American culture groups, then it should be little surprise that they also correspond roughly to Native American language groups. The boundaries of North America’s watersheds might seem problematic at first, unless we cut some of them in half, north-to-south, to reflect differing climates. Then we can see, once again, many of the same patterns.

Is it really so surprising to discover that the sociologically-derived “Nine Nations of North America” correspond to Native American cultural groups, and further, to geographical realities like climate zones and watersheds? If we suppose that humans are seperate from the world they live in, it might, but if “old growth cultures” are correct that every culture is a product of human relationship with a living landscape, then it’s not surprising at all. The people of “the Foundry” are being shaped by the same seasons, plants, animals, climates, rivers, winds and skies that influenced the Iroquoian-speaking leagues, and the same salmon that formed the backbone of Kwakiutl culture still maintains the “Salmon Nation.”

Garreau’s “Nine Nations” give us as good a starting point as any to examine the bioregions that make up North America. What his analysis lacks is a bioregional foundation and an appreciation for how these “nations” arise from ecology, and how they arose from ecology in the past. In this series, we’ll be taking a deeper look at the history, sociology, and future of each of the “Nine Nations” from a bioregionalist point of view.

1. Mexamerica includes not only much of Mexico (Northern Mexico and the Baja penninsula), but also the territories conquered from Mexico by the United States in one of its most blatant imperialist adventures, the Mexican-American War. Today, the “immigration crisis” on the U.S. side of Mexamerica highlights the folly of trying to drive an artificial border through a bioregion. Garreau pointed to Los Angeles or Mexico City as the “capital” of this “nation,” though Mexico City—built on the ruins of Tenochtitlan and today home to 8.7 million people—is clearly the stronger choice.
2. The Longhouse is what Garreau called “the Foundry,” including the “Rust Belt,” and much of the decaying, post-industrial northeast U.S. around the Great Lakes. These lands were once home to the Iroquoian-speaking confederacies, complex political structures that tried to bring large groups together and respect individual freedom at the same time. Is it any surprise that this region also produced so many of the “Founding Fathers” of the United States, who espoused the same aspirations? Garreau named Detroit as the “capital” of this “nation.”
3. Atlantica corresponds to Garreau’s “New England.” Atlantica is notable as one of the “Nine Nations” that has made efforts towards regional integration. Garreau named Boston as the “capital” of this “nation.”
4. Dixie is one of the two “Nine Nations” that has ever seriously pursued secession. The old Confederate States of America was put down in the Civil War; while the people of the Longhouse still see that war as a question of freeing slaves, in Dixie, it’s still often seen as a failed struggle for independence from a foreign country. Garreau named Atlanta as the “capital” of this “nation.”
5. The Breadbasket takes up the Great Plains, and produces a huge percentage of the world’s food. Garreau named Kansas City as the “capital” of this “nation.”
6. The Islands include the Caribbean islands, parts of Venezuela, and southern Florida. Garreau identified Miami as the “capital” of this “nation.”
7. Cascadia aligns well with what Garreau called “Ecotopia.” Cascadia has long had a strong sense of itself as a bioregion, and has done more to align itself bioregionally than any of the others. The long, thin, coastal corridor of Cascadia is very much defined by salmon, both now and in its past. Kwakiutl society was formed around salmon, and today bioregionalists called their land “Salmon Nation.” Garreau named San Francisco as the “capital” of this “nation.”
8. The Empty Quarter was named for Rub’ al Khali, the “Empty Quarter” in Saudi Arabia. It covers most of the Rockies, and holds huge energy reserves. Garreau named Denver as the “capital” of this “nation.”
9. Québec is the other “nation” that has actively pursued secession, though it has yet to press the matter to the point of civil war. Garreau named Québec, obviously enough, as the “capital” of this “nation.”
10. Aberrations also appear, and Garreau addresses them: Washington, D.C. inside the Beltway, Manhattan south of Harlem, Hawai’i (which Garreau considered as much an Asian aberration as a North American one), northern Alaska, and southern West Virginia, which seems more like a borderland that shows traits of both Dixie and the Foundry.

James Patterson and Peter Kim’s 1991 book, The Day America Told the Truth, followed many of Garreau’s “Nine Nations” as they looked at “moral regions.” Often cited by Christian preachers to condemn those bioregions where ecology has given rise to differing ethics, these “moral regions” nonetheless help emphasize the extent to which ecology influences culture, even to the extent of influencing ethics, philosophy, and religion. Patterson and Kim split “Dixie” into the “New South” and “Old Dixie,” and “the Foundry” into “Metropolis” (the eastern seaboard) and the “Rust Belt.”

The People Without Place

One of the most important books to be published in anthropology in the past 30 years is undoubtedly Eric Wolf’s Europe & the People Without History. Of course, the cultures in question do have history, and that’s very much Wolf’s point. They have rich, deep histories preserved in an oral tradition rooted in the land itself. A Sioux proverb says, “A people without history is like wind on the buffalo grass.” However, while the “people without history” were simply a matter of our own ethnocentric blindness, modern Westerners actually are a people without place.

And nowhere more so than in the Americas [sic], especially the part settled by successive waves of European immigrants, pushing on from one ocean to the other for three centuries and creating a United States in which mobility, upward and outward, has always been its most treasured characteristic. And if today 20 per cent of its population changes residence every year (as against 8 per cent in the U.K., for example), where social cohesion is so thin that its murder and incarceration rates are the highest in the world, and the barest minimum of civic participation (i.e., voting) engages less than half the population at best, and then but once every four years, that is the inevitable result of being what historian Samuel Morison has called a “tenacious but restless race”—never knowing, except in rarest incidences, the comfort of querencia. Surely that is why this nation, and the industrialised system it has spawned, has so little regard for the natural world. We don’t live on any one part of the land long enough to know very much about it, and it enters our consciousness mostly only when we wish to exploit it. In that sense Americans today are the true inheritors of the early settlers whom Alexis de Tocqueville described as “insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature” and “unable to perceive the mighty forests that surround them till they fall beneath the hatchet.” And for all our efforts here in America to establish a huge park system and protect wilderness areas, our truest character is revealed in our unabated urban-suburban sprawl, a paving over of three million acres of U.S. farmland by 1995 and now gobbling up more than twice as much land as just 15 years ago.¹⁶

This last suggestion is especially interesting, particularly if we take a look at Phoenix, a city built literally on the ruins of the lost Hohokam civilization, named for the firebird by Lord Darrell Duppa to express the hope of civilization reborn from the ashes. The Hohokam built huge irrigation ditches to turn the desert into a garden, and likewise, the city of Phoenix strives to look like a city of the northeast United States. Phoenix doesn’t just lack a connection to its place; it is founded on the dream of defying its place as a principle. Phoenix is also expanding its sprawl at a rate of over an acre every hour—24 acres every day, 7 days a week. Its sprawl now matches the size of the state of Delaware. Could we ask for any example more out of touch with its place—or where such gross ecological destruction is so normative? These are not unconnected phenomena whatsoever.

There is a deep-seated madness to civilized society that has made a common theme for authors, poets and filmmakers over the past 50 years especially, though they had other artists to inspire them even before. Ecopsychology (the term was coined by Theodore Roszak in his 1992 book, The Voice of the Earth) provides a tenable suggestion that this is the result of our rootlessness. Without a connection to the living earth, we are fundamentally cut off from the relationships with non-human Others that sustain and enrich us. This view resonates strongly with the views of healthy cultures, a fact that should remind us immediately that our vision of the human psyche as an anthropocentric and isolated subject is arbitrary and suspicious.

Modernity’s invention of imagination as an anthropocentric quality dismisses those who comprehend that their very being manifests stories, ideas, and life forces. Those who know that they are composed of and by these beings and places also realize those beings are long Indigenous to the spiritual, psychological, temporal, and spatial dimensions of traditional landscapes.That is why when things happen only in traditional landscapes, they are understood as needing to happen there. Because those places possess mind and those places orchestrate psychological and spiritual ecologies wherein ideas live simultaneously visible and invisible lives.This does not deprive spiritual ecology from being volitional; instead, it humbly recognizes more-than-human nature’s psychoactive reach. If the qualities modernity discounts as imaginative to distinguish them from putative realism were undertaken within ecosystem logic, spiritual ecology would be revealed as a living entity of reconciliation and balance between mind and Creation for Creation comprehends and encompasses everything. And just as stories that want to be told find their tellers, the expression across species diversifies itself by thinking in the consciousness ofall beings. One need only keep company with coyotes, wolves, or foxes to know this with certainty. Yet as the experience ofbiodiversity wanes, so wanes the capacity for thinking with nature and beyond species-specific consciousness.That reciprocity and ecological capacity was deemed to be imaginary only after it had reaped capital punishment as paganism or witchcraft.¹⁷

Some 150 miles northeast of Phoenix, you can find Dishchiiʼbikoh (”Cibecue” in English), home to some of the Western Apache studied by anthropologists. There, natives tell stories called ‘agodzaahi (”that which has happened”) whenever someone acts improperly. These stories tell the consequences of breaking social norms, not in terms of punishment, but rather, as the unpleasant consequences of the behavior itself. More importantly, these stories always begin and end with a statement locating where the story took place. They call this “shooting” someone with an “arrow.” One elder said, “The place will keep stalking him … It doesn’t matter if you get old—that place will keep on stalking you like the one who shot you with the story. Maybe that person will die. Even so, that place will keep on stalking you. It’s like that person is still alive.” Thus, for the Apache, every place is bound with stories, and the relatives that told them—lessons, morals, and the people who first “shot” you with their “arrows.” The land itself is constantly telling you how to live your life, in the voices of your family. The same elder tells of his time in Los Angeles, and how he “start[ed] drinking, hang around bars all the time. I start getting into trouble with my wife, fight sometimes with her. It was bad. I forget about this country here around Cibecue. I forget all the names and stories. I don’t hear them anymore. I forget how to live right, forget how to be strong.”

In such cultures, the storied landscape is also the context of individuality, personal identity and the sense of self. The living world provided the context of how to live one’s life, as well as the meaning and purpose that life held. While uprooted civilizations consider “the meaning of life” an axiomatically unanswerable question, “old growth cultures” are quite literally surrounded by the answer.

In indigenous societies such as the Native Americans and also the Australian Aborigines, great importance attaches to the relatedness of a person to a particular named place. Such a person might introduce themselves by saying: “I am from this place, and my father’s family comes from these mountains, and my mother’s from this river.” It is only after describing in some detail their relationship to that place, that land, that they can proceed with the business at hand. In Euro-American society, we are much more likely to introduce ourselves and friends by saying “what they do,” their profession, accomplishments, and the like. We don’t know where we are “from” very often; even if we own a house somewhere, we might not really be “inhabiting” that place with consciousness, or feel at home and rooted there. The Indo-European tribes have always been nomads, wanderers, emigrants and invaders. They invaded Europe, conquering and dominating the aboriginal civilization known as Old Europe, thousands of years before they set sail for the so-called “New World.” It has been aptly said, that as the Euro-American descendants of the European invaders and colonizers begin to understand the true story of what happened, perhaps the time for the real discovery of America has now come.¹⁸

From this perspective, our cultural madness is not only understandable, but self-evident. A rootless life, without connection to the living, storied landscape, is the intellectual, emotional and psychological equivalent of inbreeding, leaving us with an extraordinarily limited viewpoint, that of only a single species, and disconnected from the ecological context of all relationship. Without reference to the non-human world, human intellect is left simply talking to itself. It is precisely the kind of madness we have afflicted upon “old growth cultures” by uprooting them and “relocating” them, an event even more traumatic than we have normally understood.

It should be easy, now, to understand the destitution of indigenous, oral persons who have been forcibly displaced from their traditional lands. The local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless—or to render their speech meaningless—to dislodge them from the very ground of coherence. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind. (Abram, 1997)

Such an understanding provides us not only with the cause of our affliction, but points us in the direction of its remedy. If we have grown predictably insane from our lack of connection with the living world, our rootlessness thus starving us of our much-needed nourishment from such contact, then the answer must be to grow those roots, and to find our place. Ecopsychology’s suggestion of “nature-as-self” begins to shift our definition of self more in line with that found in healthy cultures. But the real work must always be local in nature; we are not starved of connections to abstractions like “nature,” but of real connections to real ecologies, real seasons, real living communities. In short, bioregionalism offers a kind of therapy to the insane culture of the “people without place.”

Bioregionalism also involves something like a consciousness-raising practice, or we might say, an ecopsychological practice. Such a practice can affect our sense of identity, our self-image. As Wendell Berry has said, if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. By creating bioregional maps that depict watersheds, rivers, forests and mountain ranges, rather than roads and cities, we come to a renewed appreciation of the actual natural complexity of the place we inhabit. There is a bioregional self-questionnaire, which tests our knowledge of the place where we live. My favorite consciousness-expanding question on it is: “could you direct someone to the house you live in without using any human-made buildings or signs?” When I first attempted to do this, it led me to notice much more of the landscape through which I was mindlessly driving every day. Another principal question is whether you can identify the four directions in the place where you live or where your are. This again connects us to the Native American practice (also found in other parts of the world) of beginning every meeting, whether political council or religious ceremony, with a prayer in the four directions.

What better way to come into communion with the natural energies and features of a place or region, than by tuning into the four directions? Here in California, for example, it is hard to escape the dominant presence of the Pacific ocean in the West, even when you can’t see it. The native practice of aligning ourselves with the four directions (as well as the Above and Below, or Father Sky and Mother Earth), coincides with the bioregional practice of attaining a deeper sense of the place, and reminds us of ancient, pre-Christian European concepts of the “spirit of place,” the genius loci. Surely the spirit of a place is constituted by the whole system of interdependent relations, in the bioregion. The biotic community is also a spiritual community—if we approach it from the intuitive, perceptual, subjective stand-point, and do not confine our observations to those that can be quantified.¹⁹

Learning the Names

Linguists consider arbitrariness to be a defining feature of human language. There is nothing inherent to the sound nada that forces it to mean “no.” Spanish speakers agree that that is what the sound means; in Croatian, Serbian or Bosnian, for example, the same sound instead means “hope.” Arbitrariness makes language a wholly human function, situated entirely in the human mind—just like intellect and imagination.

And, just like intellect and imagination, this is a view not shared by “old growth cultures.” David Abram (1997) challenged this view by reference to the languages of “old growth cultures” and their ecological context. He cites the experience of the Peruvian doctor, Manuel Cόrdova-Rios, who lived with an Amazonian tribe and learned their language, not from the speakers, but by careful attention to the sounds of the environment, the animal calls and the ambient soundscape; “the tribe’s language, which remained largely meaningless to Cόrdova-Rios for six months or more, became understandable to his ears only as his senses became attuned to the subtleties of the rain forest ecology in which the culture was embedded.” Abram also discusses the Koyukon language, which incorporates the sounds of various birds so thoroughly that Koyukon speakers can carry on comprehensible discussions with birds. “Sometimes people will hunt the loon,” one Koyukon is quoted as saying, “but me, I don’t like to kill it. I like to listen to it all I can and pick up the words it knows.” At twilight, the hermit thrush gives a call remarkably similar to the Koyukon words, sook’eeyis deeyo, “it is a fine evening.”

In 2005, Edge’s annual question was, “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” George Dyson’s answer went along the same lines:

During the years I spent kayaking along the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, I observed that the local raven populations spoke in distinct dialects, corresponding surprisingly closely to the geographic divisions between the indigenous human language groups. Ravens from Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, or Tlingit territory sounded different, especially in their characteristic “tok” and “tlik.”

I believe this correspondence between human language and raven language is more than coincidence, though this would be difficult to prove.²⁰

This challenges the ordinary understanding of linguistic arbitrariness, by suggesting that human language is not a matter of purely human invention, but rather, as “old growth cultures” insist is the case also for intellect and imagination, a matter of relationship with a given landscape.

While these theorists aim to effect a deconstruction of all philosophical foundations, Merleau-Ponty’s work suggests that, underneath all those admittedly shaky foundations there remains the actual ground that we stand on, the earthly ground of rock and soil that we share with the other animals and the plants. … Unlike all the human-made foundations we construct upon its surface, the silent and stony ground itself can never be grasped in a purely human act of comprehension. For it has, from the start, been constituted (or “constructed”) by many organic entities besides ourselves. (Abram, 1997)

The mechanism by which this seemingly mystical communion with nature is effected is so simple, straightforward, and indeed necessary, that the question of humans learning to speak from animals and the rest of the living world becomes not only plausible, but inescapable.

Hunting, for indigenous, oral community, entails abilities and sensitivities very different from those associated with hunting in technological civilization. Without guns or gunpowder, a native hunter must often come much closer to his wild prey if he is to take its life. Closer, that is, not just physically but emotionally, empathically entering into proximity within the other animal’s ways of sensing and experiencing. The native hunter, in effect, must apprentice himself to those animals that he would kill. Though long and careful observation, enhanced at times by ritual identification and mimesis, the hunter gradually develops an instinctive knowledge of the habits of his prey, of its fears and its pleasures, its preferred foods and favored haunts. Nothing is more integral to this practice than learning the communicative signs, gestures, and cries of the local animals. Knowledge of the sounds by which a monkey indicates to the others in its band that it has located a good source of food, or the cries by which a particular bird signals distress, or by which another attacks a mate, enables the hunter to anticipate both the large-scale and small-scale movements of various animals. A familiarity with animal calls and cries provides the hunter, as well, with an expanded set of senses, an awareness of events happening beyond his field of vision, hidden by the forest leaves or obscured by the dark of night. Moreover, the skilled human hunter often can generate and mimic such sounds himself, and it is this that enables him to enter most directly into the society of other animals. (Abram, 1997)

The living landscape is, in addition to a ground of social meaning and self-identity, also an extended set of senses, further underlining the importance of land in the construction of “old growth cultures”: seperation from the native land is not just putting the truly native person “out of his mind,” as mentioned previously, but effectively gouging out his eyes as well.

This also underlines a further element of bioregionalism: language. If, as “old growth cultures” maintain, human language is not our sole, arbitrary invention, but a means of relating to a wider, more-than-human world, then language becomes an intractable part of relating to a particular place. Part of a native culture is a native language, meaning a language informed by the ambient soundscape of a particular ecology: bird songs, animal calls, the sound of the winds and waters, and so on. The Haudenosaunee typically named trees for the sounds the wind made blowing through them, for instance.

This highlights an important difference between the approaches of what we might call “native” and “invasive” languages. In Genesis 2:19, Adam names the animals to express his power and dominion over them. “Our power to name is one of the ways in which we behave like God. In Scripture, the name conveys the essence—the defining characteristic—of a thing or person.”²¹ This is the “invasive” approach. The “native” approach seeks a relationship with the rest of a living community, rather than power over it; it has little interest in behaving like gods. “Old growth cultures” see themselves not as “naming” things, so much as learning the names that things already have. As the Koyukon quoted above said, “I like to listen to [the loon] all I can and pick up the words it knows.”

Place-names naturally extend this practice. Europeans named places as they settled across the “New World,” eradicating the “old growth cultures” before them that had carefully learned the names of those places. When place-names are learned, rather than assigned, significant patterns can emerge.

The Apache seem to take great pleasure simply in uttering the native names of various locations within the Cibecue valley. For instance, while stringing a fence with two Apache cowboys, Basso noticed one of them talking quietly to himself. When he listened more closely, Basso discovered that the man was reciting a long series of place-names—”punctuated only by spurts of tobacco juice”—that went on for almost ten minutes. Later, when Basso asked him what he’d been doing, the man replied that he often “talked names” to himself. “I like to,” he told the anthropologist. “I ride that way in my mind.” Another Apache told Basso that his people like to pronounce place-names “because those names are good to say.”

The evident pleasure derived from saying these names is clearly linked to the precision with which Apache place-names depict the actual places that they name. Basso himself mapped 104 square kilometers in and around Cibecue, and within this area recorded the Apache names of 296 locations. He found that all but a few of these place-names take the form of complete sentences, each name invoking its place through a succinct yet precise visual description. Here are a few such names: “big cottonwood trees stand spreading here and there”; “coarse textured rocks lie above in a compact cluster”; “water flows down on top of a regular succession of flat rocks.” Upon pronouncing, or hearing, such a name, Apache persons straightaway feel themselves in the presence of that place; hence, when reciting a series of place-names, the Apache experience themselves “traveling in their minds.” (Abram, 1997)

This is similar to Aboriginal Australian songlines, which likewise found songs woven into the landscape. These songs called the land into being in the Dreamtime, when the shapeshifting, totemic ancestors first walked them. Yet the Dreamtime is not a “once upon a time,” and creation is not a finished act for Aboriginal cultures as it is in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Rather, every Aboriginal Australian sings the songlines as they walk, recreating the path of their totemic ancestor, and helping to create the world anew. The first time a baby kicks, the spirit left behind by the totemic ancestor has brought that baby to life—throughout his life, the child is as much the child of that particular spot, that particular songline, as of his own flesh-and-blood parents.

“Old growth cultures” map their surroundings in place-names, songs, stories and emotions; giving directions becomes a string of place-names—and a map of emotion overlaid upon the physical geography—that relies as much on feeling as geology. From the perspective that feelings are internal human properties, this is nonsense; from the “old growth” perspective, however, feelings originate from the landscape, not the independent human brain.

These preconquest people had no standard way to partition lands, to measure time and distance, to project abstract boundaries onto regions, or to impose abstract spatial concepts. Geographic sensibility was simply affect relationships thrust out onto surroundings. Such geography was haphazard and rarely uniform. It fluctuated over time, from place-to-place and from individual-to-individual.

Meaningfulness emerged from the affect associated with a place—e.g., comfort, excitement, enjoyment, eagerness, interest, delicious foods, good company, etc. Such ‘geographical’ entities had recognizable centers, but they overlapped and graded imperceptibly into one another—just as did their kinship and their languages. Such geography, though clear enough at centers of rapport, was indistinct and fuzzy where affect association lessened or became ambiguous. All boundaries, spatial and otherwise, were therefore hazy, inconsistent, and ambiguous.

Navigating such affect-space is not at all like barreling down the Beltway to Bethesda or even going to Mars. Feelings mattered, not hours, kilometers, or abstract directions. When I meandered through the forests within the affect-space of New Guinea friends, one and then another would branch to complex, divergent different paths, regrouping variously along the way—because that’s how their affect-geographies were panning out that day. At first traveling in affect-space seemed entirely unworldly—much too indirect, labyrinthine, snail-paced, and intellectually disorderly. I conceived space through maps and compasses, schedules and boundaries, and was geared mentally to a Euclidean sense-of-space. I was map cognitive. Among these people, feelings about locales were what mattered, and it was feelings that defined them. Arbitrary geographical divisions were devoid of such meaning, so had no relevance to them and were unrecognized. A locale’s name varied according to the numerous affect relations different people had with it. There were no abstract sectionings of space, no geometric projections onto space, no projected boundaries to undo their sense of interdigitation.

To get directions to go somewhere required shared knowledge of local place names. Due to the deeply dissected, convoluted, densely forest covered mountain setting, no locales were reachable except via obscure winding jungle trails on which any sense of direction was very soon befuddled. There were no direct ways to go even out to somewhat distant gardens. When asking how to go somewhere, a string of local names is what I’d get, and not always the same ones. Even simple abstractions (like right and left or east and west) did not enter in. Instead of saying turn right at some forking of the trail, they would say ‘take the path to wherever.’ And so forth. Locations could be pointed at, if visible—much as one might point to a person or a house. But to point was not to tell you how to get there. They might point at some landmark in the distance, such as a mountain, and tell you that the place you asked about was behind it. If they thought you knew how to get to some mutually recognized place on the mountain, they would then spit forth the string of trail-connected names beyond (if they knew them).²¹

Such affect maps can create startling patterns. It is by no means uncommon, for example, for “old growth” place-names to paint giant pictures on the geography, often over so vast a distance that only elders ever glimpse the larger pattern.

The Blackfoot Nation just completed a project where, using a map of western Canada, they took out the modern names and, on consultation with elders, put in the old names of Blackfoot geography. When they were through with Bow Mountains, Elbow River, Flat Tummy Plains, and something with head and foot included, out popped a picture of Nabe the creator as a hunter. Thus, wherever they were on their land, they were also inside the creator’s body, always relating to the heart.²²

These glimpses of “old growth culture” provide us with enough to conclude that language and names are important parts of how we relate to an ecology, and reflect our attitudes about ecology’s role in our lives. That alone suggests just how alienated we have become from our ecologies, and how much may be involved in our reconciliation. Learning the native languages spoken in your bioregion can help reconcile you to your ecological soundscape. As such, the extinction of local native languages is an excellent measure of how far monolithic, globalized culture has succeeded in imposing a single, homogeneous culture that defies bioregional realities of place—by 2100, it’s expected that nearly 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages will be extinct, nearly half of humanity’s accumulated wisdom of relating to a specific genius loci.

Becoming Native

The great challenge that bioregionalism poses, the challenge that humanity must either meet or perish, is to become native. In the foregoing, I’ve used Joe Sheridan adn Dan Longboat’s term, “old growth culture,” to describe the “primitive” societies that had a long-standing relationship with their landbase, and were in fact not just related to their ecosystems, but fully part of them. I’ve also referred to “native” and “invasive” approaches to language and place-names. Each of these terms derive from the study of plants in ecologies, and the relationships they form inside of ecologies over time.

It takes thousands of years for the species of an area to co-evolve, to adapt to each other and to the peculiarities of their physical environment. This is why a plant species which has survived in the area for a few decades or even a couple of centuries isn’t considered to be native. …

Can an immigrant plant ever become native—in the biological sense? Yes, after thousands of years. No one can give a precise time, for the moment a plant enters new territory, the forces of evolution begin: any time the new environment (including, remember, animals and other plants) favors one genetic trait of the newcomer over another, natural selection begins. I would expect that after even just a few hundred years, some species (particularly insects and other invertebrates with short life-cycles) would adapt to the presence of a newcomer, for a food-source (i.e. any other organism) will not go forever unused.²³

The difference between “native” and “invasive” species is fundamentally one of relationship, and thus, of one’s place in the ecosystem. So-called “invasive” species are simply new to an ecosystem and have yet to establish any ecological relationships. The result is generally difficult at best, giving invasive species their reputation as environmental problems. Without predators, their numbers proliferate, and, overpopulated as they are, they can have an extremely negative effect on the ecology.

However, the general notion that invasive species are “bad” is far too simplistic, and leads directly to the questions of “purity” that allowed the basic human love of land to be perverted into the nationalistic impulses of the Nazi party.

As one illustration, the author describes the native-plant campaigns of Hitler’s followers, though he is very careful not to call exotics-haters Nazis. He believes invasion biology is rooted in the same fears and prejudices that power Nazism and other racist, genocidal ideologies. A desire for genetic purity and preservation of the homeland, dissatisfaction with current status, an easily identified enemy, and a simplistic answer—extermination—are elements that these ideologies share. And he does call invasion biology an ideology, demonstrating that it cannot justifiably be called a science. In no scientific discipline can data be suppressed or used selectively to support a preconception as is done in invasion biology. Pseudoscience is known for refusing to acknowledge conflicting data, not testing assumptions, exaggeration of limited truths, and circular arguments. (”If it’s not native it’s bad, and the reason it’s bad is because it’s non-native.”) Invasion biology fits this pattern.²⁴

Invasive plants are not “bad,” and ecologies are not “pure”; from the moment of their introduction, ecologies work to integrate invasive species, to form relationships, and ultimately, to make the invasive species native. Had the Nazis actually followed nature’s lead, the result would not have been to pull up the “weeds” of people like Jews and gypsies, but rather, to integrate them more fully into German culture, so that the whole “ecosystem” of Germany could be enriched by the added diversity. Purity in nature is suicide—just like a monocropped field of wheat. There is a reason that centuries of farming leaves deserts behind.

The problem with invasive species is not that they are “bad,” but that they have yet to find their place. Once they do, the entire ecology is enriched by their prescence.

Evidence is mounting that the vigorously growing blends of native and non-native plants that “invade” damaged land are yet another example of nature’s wisdom and resourcefulness. Nature creatively mingles both native and exotic without prejudice, using all resources available to throw a green Band-Aid over ravaged landscapes. We demean her intelligence and set back the healing process when we hack away these recombinant communities.²⁵

In our culture, however, we actively resist reconciliation with the living landscape. Invasiveness is no mere coincidence in our own civilization, but a goal, and a principle. Just as Adam asserted his godlike power over the living world by naming the animals in Genesis 2:19, so does Genesis 1:28 not only justify “invasiveness,” but even demands it: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Seperation from the living community is intrinsic to our view of humanity. “Artificial” is the opposite of “natural”; a beaver’s dam is “natural,” while a human’s is “artificial.” Healthy cultures relate humans to a living community; our culture specifically, intentionally and methodically works to keep us from becoming native to our place, to stay invasive, to keep us aloof and seperate, and to make sure we do not relate to the living community.

This is not a necessary feature of all cultures; in fact, it is a sign of a deep pathology, and a culture’s failure to achieve the most basic goals that a culture has. While plants take thousands of years to become fully native, humans cultures can help us become native in fractions of that time. By the time Columbus arrived in the New World, some of the Inuit had been here only 500 years, and yet few would deny that they were native. Europeans have since been in North America just as long, and yet we remain invasive. The difference is cultural: the Inuit used their culture to become native, while we have used our culture to actively defy that. Look no further than Phoenix vs. Cibecue for your evidence.

To live in defiance of the ecology that gives you life takes a great deal of energy, and as civilization fails, we will be forced to become native, or die. Invasiveness is, itself, unsustainable. We can see what the development of languages in sustainable communities will look like. Even though most groups will more likely “stumble” into sustainability than consciously pursue it, sustainable life involves a close relationship with the living world, and an appreciation for the modes of speech used by other forms of life. Influenced by the same ecological soundscape, the sustainable cultures of the future will no doubt develop many of the same phonemes, sound symbolism, and speech patterns of “old growth cultures” that lived in the same ecologies before them. They will no doubt continue to have great difference in vocabulary, grammar, and other elements, but the basic sound of the various Englishes that will cover North America in a hundred years will start to sound very much like the various Native American language groups that once filled the country.

In “The Realities of Going Primitive,” Brent Ladd illustrates why the architecture and even building materials used by Native Americans will probably continue to be the primary modes of sustainable cultures in the future, in their various ecosystems:

Generally (and I emphasize generally), one cannot improve upon what has worked for thousands of years for indigenous people. We would prove this time and time again; often the hard way. Shelter has been a prime example. We exerted more energy than I care to think of in attempting to build the “perfect primitive” shelter, only to return to the basics in the end.²⁶

This echoes Daniel Quinn’s sentiment that “Nothing evolution brings forth is perfect, it’s just damnably hard to improve upon.” Ladd goes on to describe his experiments with earth lodges before falling back to native-style wigwams and lodges. With these, he learned the hard way why natives only cut saplings, and why they used birch bark:

Hard lesson number 179: basswood bark cracks and splits and curls horrendously upon drying. It is very marginal for shelter coverings. Ash also cracks and curls, but much less so. Soon it was back to square one ñ what the natives used: birch bark. Birch bark is tough, rot resistant, water proof and beautiful. Thus, we finally succumbed and got our permit to harvest birch bark. If done properly, it doesn’t kill the tree as long as direct sunlight doesn’t shine upon the inner bark of the tree.²⁷

Using the same materials, inspired by the same scenes, talking to the same animals, living in the same seasons, even art, culture, religion and ethics are eventually shaped by bioregional forces—as “old growth cultures” so readily attest. It would be shocking if the cultures developed ended up being identical, but by the same token, as time goes on, more than a token resemblance will begin to appear.

This is very much part of what Michael Green has explored in Afterculture, where he coins the incredibly apt term, “biocultural diversity.” With “old growth cultures” that relate to a particular ecology, cultural diversity becomes a subset of biodiversity.

They look like us: a mixture of races and backgrounds, and there are hints that much of the knowledge gathered in our time remains alive in oral tradition. But they are also profoundly unlike us. They know themselves as part of the web of life. Seeing the natural world as an expression of the sacred, they have simplified their lives the better to move in balance with it.²⁸

Afterculture has often fallen just short of being displayed in very prominent places, on the suspicion of cultural appropriation.

We live in a time when great numbers of European-Americans, profoundly discontented with consumer culture, are turning to Traditional people for guidance. This search is often a two-dimensional attempt to acquire “soul” in the same way one acquires an SUV. But Traditionals themselves are divided in their response. Some see themselves as victims of a grotesque rip-off, while others welcome the opportunity to draw the conqueror into the Ways of Human Being People.

There is probably no single “right” response. But one thing is certain. It is what is happening. Cut off from authentic, sacred, earth-honoring life, European peoples are turning to Native peoples and Native wisdom. We were all Native peoples once, but Europeans, separated from their own tribal wisdom by millennia, turn spontaneously to the aboriginal peoples of this land for a living transmission. And while there is also a strong intuition that an earth-honoring life grows right from the place where your feet touch the ground, from a “Spirit of Place,” to move in harmony with its rhythms, it is wise to turn to those already more in tune with it.²⁹

Cultural appropriation is an important issue; the theft and denigration of native cultures is simply the last step in the ongoing genocide of native peoples. Running off into the woods to “play indian” doesn’t help anyone. By the same token, native peoples don’t have a monopoly on non-suicidal ways of life. Europeans had a culture like that once upon a time as well. We’ll need to find a new one if we are going to survive—we need to become native.

Like an invasive species, becoming native is not a matter of shedding one’s distinctiveness. When an invasive species becomes native, it enriches the ecology by bringing its own distinctiveness to the living community. Neither should we look to simply copy native cultures. What lies before us is the challenge of synthesis and syncretism, to find what is workable in our own culture and to weave that through a sustainable way of life. By all means, learn your local pidgin and the native languages once spoken in your land; these things will help you understand the soundscape you live in. But don’t think that’s the completion of the challenge; that only marks the beginning of the creative work necessary to build a new language that draws upon that wealth, and still weaves in what our own cultural experience contains.

Becoming native is a daunting challenge, but our culture can be made into an ally in that cause, rather than the warden that keeps us forever invasive. We must reintegrate ourselves into our ecologies, find our place in our bioregions, and become rooted in a soil and a living landscape that can sustain us, physically, socially, psychologically, and yes, even spiritually. Without that, there can be no life.

What then, in essence, is it to be native? To describe a person as a native is not only to say of them that they were born in a particular place—since this after all can be said of everyone—but that they belong to that place, that they are made of its matter and imbued with its distinctive character. To be native is to have one’s identity shaped by the place to which one belongs: one is a creature of its topography, its colours and textures, saps and juices, its moods, its ghosts and stories. As a native, one has one’s taproot deep in a particular soil: one has grown in that soil, and continues to be informed and sustained by its essence. One is kin to all the other beings who arise out of and return to that patch of earth, and one draws one’s substance and one’s templates for meaning from it. The native is thus one born into a world which prefigures, predetermines, her being in every detail. She grows into the space that has been prepared for her, as a chick grows into its shell. She respects that space, never jeopardizing the perfect fit between herself and her world by taking radical initatives or assuming hard-to-accommodate shapes of her own. The world as it is given affords material sufficiency, mythic inexhaustability and a rich vocabulary for both pragmatic and imaginative purposes.³⁰

Works Cited

• Abram, D. (1997). Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage.