by Peter Berg
This piece was originally published in Discovering Your Life-Place, written by Peter Berg, Planet Drum Books, copyright 1990.
An effective way to begin acquiring a sense of your own bioregion is by making a simple map that shows some of the basic natural characteristics where you live. The map-making process will be an absorbing exploration, but it is also personally empowering because it describes an immediate area for practicing reinhabitation and becoming native to your life-place. Since this map is your own personal view, it shows a territory that has never been drawn with these particular features before.
All you need is a fairly large piece of blank paper and several pens or pencils that can produce at least six colors. Put an X in the middle of the piece of paper. This represents the actual dwelling place where you live. Depending on the scale that you choose for this map, it can be as large as a city or as small as your house or apartment building.
In the upper-right-hand corner of the paper write the letter “N” to represent the north direction. If you don’t know which direction is north, try to remember where the sun rises (east) and then visualize what lies 90 degrees or a quarter turn of your head to the left from there. You can also find north by remembering where the sun sets (west) and shifting your mental picture 90 degrees to the right of that direction.
Knowing compass points is important for determining major characteristics of the place where you live. For example, you’ll want to know which direction gets the most sunlight and is therefore warmer because plants and animals respond to this phenomenon in many different ways. The warmest direction is also essential information for positioning a new house so that it can absorb the most heat during short winter days when the arc of the sun can become extremely low on the horizon depending on how far you are from the equator.
Compass points are also necessary for building up a dependable store of information about your lite-place. Using the letter to orient you, draw a few arrows on the side of the paper that matches the direction from which wind and rain usually come. This may actually be a different place depending on the time of the year, or there may be several places at any season. Hint: If you haven’t thought about this before and don’t know this direction, try to remember which doorstep gets wettest in a storm, which window sill inside the house gets damp, or which windows rattle when the wind blows.
Next, draw in the body of water that is nearest to the X that marks the spot where you live. It may be a creek, river, lake, pond, or even a marsh or swamp. In some cases it could be the shore of an ocean. This is the time when the scale of your map will become evident. If you are fairly familiar with a large area around the place you marked X you may want to show a very large body of water such as a major river, a very large lake, or an ocean bay. If you aren’t comfortable with a scale as big as that, start with a creek or pond that you know is nearby. If you can, show how it connects to a river or marsh. Most of the land in cities has been covered over with streets or buildings, so if you are a city dweller show the nearest river, or a lake or creek in a nearby park. Clue: The direction that rain runs in the street gutters may point to a body of water. Use a particular color such as blue for this so that the water system stands out clearly, and other colors for each of the parts of the map that follow.
The water body you drew is surrounded by high ground that causes rain or spring water to flow into it by the force of gravity. This elevated land might be hills if the scale of your map is small or a mountain range if the scale is very large. High ground sheds water, so the term “watershed” is used to describe all of the land that surrounds a particular body of water.
Draw in the hills or mountains that create the watershed where you live. Clue: Watersheds can be huge such as that for the Mississippi River with the Rockies on one side and the Appalachian/Allegheny Mountains on the other, or as small as the rise of ground that separates two creeks and the low hills around a pond in a park. Use a different color than the previous one showing water.
The next element to include in this map is soil. Use your memory of visits to different parts of the bioregion to draw in different types of soil such as sand, clay or black topsoil. Usually the highest ground is rockier than lower places because the lighter soil blows or washes away. If you remember seeing exposed rocks on hilltops, draw them in. The light soil that blew or washed away settles in valleys or other low places that are usually near bodies of water. Think of where this type of soil probably lies and draw it in. Clue: Farmers prefer nutrient-rich topsoil, so it can probably be found wherever you’ve seen fields and farm houses. Is there also sandy soil where you live? How about hard red clay? Use a new color (or colors) to draw these in. Add any other geological characteristics such as lava beds, granite cliffs, coral rock, caves, or salt beds that are unique to your bioregion.
Next draw in some examples of plants and animals that are native to the place where you live. “Native” means that these are wild animals rather than domestic ones like dogs and cats or horses and cows. It also means plants that are indigenous rather than most of the ones that are grown for food or were brought from other places for some other reason. For example, oak trees are native to North American bioregions but apple trees aren’t. Hint: Types of animals range from insects to fish and from birds to mammals. Plants include grasses, herbs, and shrubs as well as trees.
So far there haven’t been any signs of human beings in this map. There are usually so many of them in all of the places where people live that most of them wouldn’t fit. In order to focus your map on the present situation, draw in just two aspects of the human relationship to whatever other features you’ve drawn. The first one is a visual representation of the worst things people are doing. Hint: lt could be a source of wastes that threatens to pollute all of the water. It could also be bad farming practices that are eroding soil, mining that is creating hazardous dumps, or dams that block the passage of fish in a river.
Now show the best things people are doing to try to harmonize with the natural elements in the map. Hint: These may be organic produce or permaculture farms that maintain good soil, or recycling projects that reduce wastes. Some other beneficial activities could be renewable energy projects, efforts to restate forests or rivers, and other attempts to improve the balance between human needs and those of natural systems. Of course, this will be a matter of your personal opinion at this particular time—but that’s an important aspect of knowing how you perceive the place where you live.
Peter Berg (1937-2011) founded the Planet Drum Foundation (planetdrum.org) in San Francisco in 1973. His creative work and activism spanned decades, ranging from script-writing while a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and writing manifestos for The Diggers in the 1960s to presenting at the UN World Environment Day conference on urban sustainability and the Ecocity World Summit in the 2000s. In recognizing the significance of the connection between society and ecology, Berg was a leading early thinker in the development of the bioregional movement. Further biographical information available at https://planet-drum.net.