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.
Van Andruss, co-editor of Home!, lives among friends in the interior mountains of British Columbia. A student of Fred Brown’s, in the 70’s he dropped out of Civilization, returning to nature, and has only come back in order to participate in the ’Turnaround Decade” of the 90’s. Interested in regional organizing, forest defense, all aspects of grassroots democracy, he is also a writer, husband and father.
Christopher Plant is one of the editors of The New Catalyst magazine, a bioregional journal published in British Columbia. One of the editors of Home!, he also co-authored Turtle Talk: Voices for a Sustainable Future—a collection of interviews with key activists that explores the full breadth of the bioregional view and which is the first of The New Catalyst’s Bioregional Series of books. He also helped organize the third North American Bioregional Congress, held in British Columbia in 1988.
Judith Plant has raised three children, and lots of good food. She is also a co-editor of Home!, The New Catalyst magazine, and Turtle Talk: Voices for A Sustainable Future, and editor of Healing The Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. An ecofeminist and practicing bioregionalist, she helped organize the third North American Bioregional Congress held in British Columbia.
Eleanor Wright, co-editor of Home!, has been learning to live-in-place beside a cool, clear mountain stream in the dry forested transition zone between the Coast Mountains and the interior plateau of British Columbia. She and other members of her community share their homeplace with Douglas Fir, Ponderosa Pine & Juniper; Mule Deer & Mountain Goat; Cougar, Coyote & Bear; Pileated Woodpecker, Water Ouzel & Golden Eagle; and, of course, Salmon. Along with her community she is actively engaged in trying to preserve enough of the ecosystems in their 400-square-mile wilderness watershed that life as it is there now will be able to continue in spite of tremendous pressure from logging, mining and hunting interests from outside the valley. She was also a member of the Site Committee for the third North American Bioregional Congress.
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Doug Aberley lives in Northwest British Columbia where he has been administrator/planner for the historic community of Hazelton since 1979. He became involved in the bioregional movement in the mid-1970s after training in traditional regional planning failed to link culture, environment and economy in an ecological context. His main bioregional interests include writing a bioregional mapping primer, researching the history of regionalism, and exploration of North Pacific coast bioregions via Zodiac.
David Abram is a native of Paumanok, the long, fish-shaped island poised at the mouth of the Hudson river, where he has lived as close neighbor to black- crowned night herons and the fiddler crabs of the salt marsh. A sleight-of-hand magician, he has traded magics with indigenous sorcerers in the ocean islands of Indonesia and the sky islands of the Himalayas, and has lived and worked in the coastal islands of western Canada, where he was tutored by harbor seals. Author of numerous articles on ecological philosophy, he is currently writing a book on the interdependence of land and language.
Akwesasne Notes: A Journal for Native and Natural People, is the official publication of the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, near Rooseveltown, N.Y. Beginning as a local newsletter about a bridge blockade 20 years ago, Notes has evolved into an important voice covering events and analyzing stories about Native Peoples from Malaysia to Montreal.
Luanne Armstrong was born and raised on the east shore of Kootenay Lake in south-eastern British Columbia. She spent twelve years there as an adult, farming and raising four children. Now she works in Merritt, B.C., teaching in a native college. She has been active in various peace, feminist and environmental groups.
Peter Berg is the founder and present director of Planet Drum Foundation, an educational and organizing group that publishes information, presents talks and workshops, creates forums, and pursues research about the relationship between human culture and the natural processes of bioregions. He edited Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California and co -authored Eco-decentralist Design and A Green City Program for San Francisco Bay Area Cities and Towns. Bioregional organizing trips have taken him throughout the U.S. and to Canada, Mexico and Europe to speak, hold workshops and (of late) perform eco-comedy.
Thomas Berry is an historian of cultures committed to the view that history is now being made primarily not within nations or cultures or between nations or cultures but between the human community and the life systems of the earth. His book The Dream of the Earth is concerned with this subject as are the various essays he has published. Presently he is Director of the Riverdale Center of Religious Research in Riverdale, New York.
Murray Bookchin is a founder and director of the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont, and is perhaps best known for his book, Toward An Ecological Society (Black Rose 1980). A historian, his view that human nature is essentially cooperative—what he terms “social ecology”—and that humankind, if freed from the tyrrany of centralized, hierarchical power structures, can be self-organizing, has had considerable impact upon the alternative movement. A bioregional sympathizer, he is mainly active with the Vermont Greens.
Kelly Booth is an erstwhile bioregional philosopher and community accountant from British Columbia, whose current pre-occupations center around gardening and the eco-rock band, Zumak, for which he plays bass guitar. His head ached for many months following the third North American Bioregional Congress for which he acted as a successful financial comptroller—one of the reasons for his having since given up the financial arts.
Ernest Callenbach grew up on ten acres in Appalachia, where he raised chickens, turkeys, and pigs, and learned that nature generally knows best. In 1954 he migrated west to Berkeley, where he has been on the staff of the University of California Press. He has a garden, a compost bin, and walks to work. Besides Ecotopia Emerging, he has written Ecotopia, The Ecotopian Encyclopedia, and (with his wife Christine Leefeldt) a children’s book, Humphrey the Wayward Whale. With Michael Phillips, he wrote A Citizen Legislature: a proposal to end U.S. electoral corruption through choosing representatives by lot. He is associated with the Elmwood Institute.
Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman, Victoria Stockley, the authors of the Bioregional Quiz, lived together for 17 years at Root Hog Ranch in the Alta Pacific bioregion. Collectively, they were the founding partners of an environmental consulting company. Kathryn Cholette, Ross Dobson, Kent Gerecke, Marcia Nozick, Roberta Simpson and Linda Williams are six Canadians who attended the Green Cities conference held in Chicago in 1989 and who are each active within Green and/or bioregional circles in different regions of Canada.
Gary Coates is Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University and the editor and author of Resettling America: Energy, Ecology and Community. He has published numerous articles on the topics of participatory design, organic and ecological architecture and the design of sustainable buildings, towns and cities. He frequently lectures and conducts workshops on these and related topics in America and Europe.
Julie Coates is Director of Information Services for Learning Resources Network, an international association of adult educators. In addition to her work in community education and development, she has been instrumental in developing a statewide awareness of the folklore and folk history of Kansas. She has published numerous articles on adult and community education and lectures frequently in the United States and Europe on topics related to the development of community education programs.
Michael Crofoot is from New Zealand where he actively promotes the permaculture movement “down under.” He was an organizer of the Third International Permaculture Conference held in New Zealand in 1989, and has been wooing bioregionalists with offers of marriage since before the second North American Bioregional Congress, which he attended.
Raymond Dasmann has worked for the past forty and more years in the field of ecology and conservation with a particular interest in wildlife and wild country. His work with UNESCO, IUCN, and the World Wildlife Fund has taken him to many countries and developed an awareness of the need to protect cultural diversity as well as biological diversity. At present he is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Jim Dodge lives in the Coast Range of northern California, which he calls the Alta Pacific Bioregion. He is the author of Fup (a story), Not Fade Away (novel), Palms to the Moon (poems), and, most recently, Stone Junction (a novel). After fifteen years on an isolated homestead, where he worked in environmental restoration with the Cazadero Forest Workers’ Cooperative and as a land use consultant for Leonard Charles and Associates, he’s now teaching part-time at Humboldt State University.
Caroline Estes teaches consensus and facilitation out of long experience in Quaker meetings, plus facilitating large meetings that are run on consensus. She has facilitated all three North American Bioregional Congresses and several Green meetings, as well as sessions of the Fourth World Assembly and a bioregional gathering in Cascadia, where she lives at Alpha Farm, an intentional community she co-founded in 1972.
Pat Fleming has been involved for many years as a psychologist and social worker exploring alternatives to traditional psychiatry. She has also worked with peace, environment and women’s groups internationally. She helped establish the Interhelp Network in Great Britain and Australia. For the past several years she has been conducting Council of All Beings workshops and other empowerment tools using voice and movement.
Helen Forsey has her roots on both the Quebec and Ontario sides of the Ottawa River. Her love for the land led her to study agriculture, and she worked for a number of years in international development. Since 1984 she has made her home at Dandelion, a small ecofeminist intentional community in Eastern Ontario. As a writer and activist she tries to “think globally, act locally” to resist and reverse the patriarchal destruction of the planet.
Frisco Bay Mussel Group (FBMG) operated as a regularly meeting study group for the San Francisco Bay Area and Shasta Bioregion between 1975 and 1978. Members included natural scientists, political activists, community organizers, and artists who wanted to learn from each other about local natural systems and characteristics. As a result of information presented at FBMG meetings, the group was the first to oppose the Peripheral Canal scheme to divert Northern California’s Sacramento River water to Southern California. Its full- page newspaper ad explaining the Canal’s adverse effects on San Francisco Bay prompted established environmental groups such as the Sierra Club to also speak out which eventually led to ballot defeat of the proposal.
Jacqueline Froelich is an inspired bioregional artist and expert printer. Among her many activities over the years, she has been involved with the Eureka Wate; Center’s work in Arkansas, and has been central to local and North American Bioregional Congresses.
Jeremiah Gorsline has lived for the last 14 years in the Olympic Peninsula. He has worked as a tree-climber, dairy milker, landscaper and bookseller. In 1976 he began working with cooperatives, contracting reforestation work with State, Federal and Corporate forest-managers through the Pacific Northwest. For the past six years he has been part of the worker-owned Salal Cafe in Port Townsend. Active as a conservationist, especially in the area of plant-ecology and timber management issues, he is currently one of the directors of the Washington Native Plant Society and chairperson of the Olympic Peninsula Chapter. He is a contributing editor for Empty Bowl, a non-profit cooperative publisher, and is editing a volume in the Dalmo’ma series on Indian-White relations on the north Olympic Peninsula.
Tom Greco, Jr. is a freelance networker, writer, publisher, econimist and consultant whose work is focused upon social, economic and monetary restructuring. He has special interest in community economics, cooperative enterprise, local economic development, personal responsibility and growth, and natural and social ecology. His articles have appeared in The Whole Earth Review, The Catholic Worker, and Green Revolution. He is the author of Money & Debt: A solution to the Global Crisis
Milo Guthrie, also known as Milo Pyne, is still wondering what he will do when he “grows up.” A biosexual bioregionalist, ecofeminist, and eclectic buddhist-pagan by inclination and necessity, and a botanical consultant by profession, Milo docs a lot of idle speculative thinking on what kind of life the human species could live and wonders where we went wrong (and why so many people seem to think things arc just fine). Milo assisted in the formation of the Short Mountain Sanctuary, a fairie (spiritual gay male) community in Tennessee, as well as the Cumberland-Green Council, a bioregional network in the upper mid-south. He is presently studying botany in North Carolina, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Piedmont Bioregional Institute, in Uwharria Province.
Gwaganad, also known as Diane Brown, is a member of the Haida Nation, ts’aalth clan. She has been married to Larry Brown, off and on, for twenty-four years. She has two children, Jud, 17, and Lauren, 15. For twenty years she been the Community Health Representative for Skidegate, in Haaida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands).
David Haenke has been immersed in total systems ecological work since arriving in the Ozarks in 1971. He co-founded the Ozark Area Community Congress (OACC)—the first bioregional congress—in 1977, conceptualized and organized the North American Bioregional Congress from 1981 to 1984, was one of the five organizers and convenors of the U.S. Green Committees of Correspondence in 1984. He has been the Coordinator of the Bioregional Project of New Life Farm, Inc., since 1982, and also directs the Ecological Society Project of the Tides Foundation, while remaining active in OACC and ecological work on many levels in the Ozarks and around North America.
Freeman House practices watershed restoration and bioregional speculation near Petrolia, California. Born in California, and misinformed there about the nature of nature, he went home to the Coast Range after his perceptions were given a long bath in the pearly mists of Puget Sound, Ish River country. His early association with Planet Drum Foundation provided a context for the transition. He is a co-founder of the Mattole Watershed Salmon Support Group and the Mattole Restoration Council.
William Koethke has lived at Big Mountain on and off since 1980 and for periods of months in the Jila Forest with campfire and sleeping bag. He is completing a book on the planetary eco- crisis which features a complete social-permacultural proposal for the San Francisco watershed. This book is intended to answer the question “How Do We Live in Balance with Nature?”
Leopold Kohr, born in Austria in 1909, wrote The Breakdown of Nations in 1957, presenting the theory that bigness is the source of all social misery. His ideas had a most important effect on E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful and consequently on the bioregional movement today.
Alison Lang has long experience of living in the dry Fraser bioregion, near Lillooet, British Columbia where she also practices Zen. An artist and drum-maker, she also helped to organize the third North American Bioregional Congress, held near Squamish in 1988.
Fraser Lang is a bioregional poet from the mountains of British Columbia; he also is a singer/song-writer/musician with the eco-rock band, Zumak, and was also a member of the site committee for the third North American Bioregional Congress.
Gary Lawless is a native of the Gulf of Maine bioregion. He lives on Damariscotta Lake. In 1977, he edited The Gulf of Maine: A Bioregional Reader. He is co-owner of Gulf of Maine Bookstore, and editor/publisher of Blackberry Books. He was one of the organizers of the Gulf of Maine Bioregional Congress, and was on the site committee for the fourth North American Bioregional Congress. His latest book of poems is First Sight of Land.
Jeffrey Lewis was involved with the 1986 and 1988 Cascadia Bioregional Congresses and lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works with young children. His interests include grassroots economics and reclaiming the cities. He has been active with the People of Color Committee of the North American Bioregional Congress.
Aldo Leopold is the author of the environmental “classic,” A Sand County Almanac, first published in 1949. A collection of Leopold’s essays on wilderness and the importance of land health and ecological diversity, the book remains key reading for bioregionalists and wilderness lovers everywhere; it concludes with his famous statement of the “land ethic.”
Michael Linton is the originator of the LETS (Local Exchange Trading System) system, first begun in the town of Courtenay, British Columbia. Using “green” dollars in place of regular currency, LETS is an alternative economic system that facilitates exchange and trading of work and skills among people even when “the system” isn’t working.
Joanna Macy, from Berkeley, is a teacher of world religions and an activist in movements for peace and justice. She is the author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age and Dharma and Development, a book about the Sarvodaya self-help movement in Sri Lanka. She is co-founder of the international Interhelp Network, a global network of people from all walks of life who strive to integrate political, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of the work for peace and justice.
Lynn Margulis, along with her son, Dorian Sagan, has contributed greatly to making biological theory accessible to a wide audience. Their book Micro-Cosmos, a “saga of the life of the planet,” helps greatly to replace the view of evolution as “chronic competition” with a cooperative view of life as being a product of networking.
Jerry Martien has lived in the Humboldt Bay region of northern California for twenty years. In addition to cultural organizing—a term he finds silly and redundant—he has several times over-committed himself to the editing of bioregional publications, most recently Upriver/Downriver. He has published three poetry chapbooks, all of intense local interest. Despite a life-long obsession with economics, he somehow makes a living as a carpenter.
David McCloskey originated near the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette rivers in Oregon and now lives with his family in the Snoqualmie watershed, in Ish River country, in Cascadia on the northeast rim. He teaches Sociology, Anthropology, Human Ecology, and Geography at Seattle University. He has been teaching and writing on the significance of place and bioregionalism for over a decade. He recently authored an “Environmental Bill of Rights” amendment to the Washington State Constitution.
Rob Messick was born in the piedmont of North Carolina, spent some time at The Farm in Tennessee, and is now co-editor, graphic artist and technician, photographer, and bookkeeper with Katuah Journal in North Carolina. He has learned much about the complexities, joys, and difficulties of sustaining a bioregional journal through working with his friends at Katuah and the growing network of people involved in environmental concerns throughout the region. He is a self-taught artist, along with being a naturalist, theoretical scientist and somewhat of a mystic.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, besides editing Konza (Kansas Area Watershed—KAW—Council Newsletter) and organizing KAW Council events, is involved in planning the founding Congress of The Great Prairie Bioregional Congress. She teaches poetry and fiction writing at the University of Kansas and through local elementary school programs. She lives close to the Kaw River in Lawrence, Kansas with her husband, Ken Lassman, and son, Daniel. Her poetry has appeared in many literary journals and is forthcoming in several anthologies.
Bill Mollison, from Tasmania, received the 1981 Right Livelihood Award for his work in environmental design. He is Executive Director of the Permaculture Institute, which he established in 1979 to teach practical design of sustainable soil, water, plant and legal and economic systems to students the world over. In 1974, he and David Holmgren developed and refined the Permaculture Concept, leading to the publication of Permaculture One and Permaculture Two. His latest book, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual is a landmark publication on building sustainable ecosystems.
Mamie Muller lives with her family in the Little
Sandymush Creek watershed, near Asheville, North Carolina. She is a founder and co-editor of Katuah Journal: Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians, a quarterly publication which explores sustainable human-Earth relations in that region. She served on the Coordinating Committee for the first North American Bioregional Congress in 1984, as well as NABC II in 1986. Currently, she is involved in designing programs and curriculum for conceptually and kinesthetically accessing what Thomas Berry refers to as “The Dream of the Earth.”
Sue Nelson is a long-time resident of the center of Los Angeles and remembers it before the days of solid freeways and other “development.” A committed community activist, much of her work involves perpetual struggle against continued “developments” that would further diminish the natural and human diversity of this city; she has also contributed much energy to the North American Bioregional Congresses.
John Papworth lives in London, England, and is an Anglican clergyman, economist, journalist, author, social critic, broadcaster, ecologist, futurist, husband and father. He was a founder and editor of Resurgence magazine and also founded and now edits The Fourth World Review as well as being an associate editor of The Ecologist. He was also founder of the Fourth World Assemblies, and author of Prerequisites of Peace and New Politics and the Economics of Humanism.
Geraldine Payton, from Chesaw in Washington state, is one of the editors of Columbiana magazine, as well as being an active bioregionalist.
Wilfred Pelletier, an Odawan elder from Manitoulin Island on Lake Huron, has been working as co-director of the Nishnawbe Institute, an Indian educational and cultural project in Toronto. Together with Ted Poole, he wrote No Foreign Land: The Biography of a North American Indian—an eloquent account of one man’s belief in his people and their traditions.
Sheila Purcell was Planet Drum Foundation’s first intern, doing work on the “Listening to the Earth” Conference in 1979; later, in 1981, she was the first Planet Drum networker. Since then she has practiced environmental law and mediation. Currently she is working on air quality by way of promoting carpooling/vanpooling and use of public transit in San Francisco.
Kirkpatrick Sale is a co-director of the E.F. Schumacher Society, co-founder of the Hudson Bioregional Council (and its Wetlands Restoration Project), and the author of Human Scale, and Dwellers In The Land: The Bioregional Vision. He divides his time between two homes in the Hudson estuary, upriver in Cold Spring, New York, and downriver in Manhattan.
Jamie Sayen is a coordinator of Preserve Appalachian Wilderness (PAW), a grassroots group working to restore future Old Growth throughout the Appalachians. PAW has made a proposal to create a Northern Appalachian Evolutionary Preserve on lands currently owned by out-of-region multinational timber and paper corporations (and suffering liquidation clear-cuts and herbicide sprayings). He is also an editor of The Glacial Erratic, the radical environmental journal of the Northern Appalachian bioregion. He is also a wild raspberry farmer.
Lance Scott has been active in various movements for social change over the years, particularly the Green and bioregional movements. He has been editor of RAIN magazine and the Portland Alliance, and is currently editor of the Seattle Community Catalyst, a local activist monthly. Lance is a fifth-generation resident of the Seattle area.
Gary Snyder lives in eastern Shasta Nation in the Yuba river drainage. One of the west coast’s most widely published poets, he is finishing up a prose book, The Practice of the Wild, dealing with bioregionalism and several other concepts, and their application to our times.
Starhawk is the author of The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion Of The Great Goddess, Dreaming The Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics and Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery. A feminist and peace activist, she also teaches at several San Francisco Bay Area colleges. She travels widely lecturing and giving workshops, and in San Francisco works with the Reclaiming collective which offers classes, workshops and public rituals in the Old Religion of the Goddess, called Witchcraft. She is presently working on a novel.
Daniel Stolpe’s work has appeared in several issues of Raise the Stakes. His art has evolved into symbolic language out of an extended living and working relationship with the Swinomish Indians of Puget Sound.
John Todd and Nancy Jack Todd have been actively pursuing their work in planetary ecology for over twenty years. In 1969, they co-foundcd, along with Bill McLarney, the New Alchemy Institute, which was dedicated to exploring the potential of alternative, ecologically designed technologies for providing basic human needs. In 1982, they created a new organization, Ocean Arks International, to disseminate the ideas and practice of ecological sustainability throughout the world. Together with The Lindisfarne Association, they publish “Annals of Earth”, edited by Nancy Jack Todd.
Brian Tokar has been an activist in the peace, antinuclear, and environmental movements for eighteen years, and has been active in bioregional politics since 1985. He is the author of The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future, and has written and lectured across the U.S. and Canada on Green politics, bioregionalism, and other emerging ecological movements. Brian lives on an organic vegetable farm in the upper Winooski River Valley, east of Vermont’s Green Mountains.
Frank Traina is director of Sunrock Farm, an educational farm outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. About 25,000 school children visit Sunrock Farm each year to learn about and experience the Earth and the Ohio River Region. He publishes a local bioregional newsletter, Four Rivers Earthworks, and is committed to the Bioregional Education Committee of the North American Bioregional Congress. Frank also gives workshops and talks on developing a sense of kinship with the Earth and one’s bioregion, year ttle piece of Earth. He publishes Pollen: A Journal of Bioregional Education on behalf of the Bioregional Education Committee of the North American Bioregional Congress.
Chris Wells is a many-talented artist and environmental educator from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is also one of the co-founders of the All-Species Project, a cultural arts/education program working in schools and diverse communities culminating in a yearly event: an All-Species Day celebration of our connection to the Earth and all species.
Michael Zwerin has been jazz critic for The Village Voice, European editor for the same paper, and is now culture writer for the International Herald Tribune. He has also played trombone with Miles Davis, Earl Hines, Eric Dolphy and Mingus Dynasty. Close Enough for Jazz is his autobiography.