Restoring Natural Flow

Imagine a world map where the boundaries drawn are based on nature. No more nation-states defined by politics. Or economics. Or the military. Or the military-industrial complex. What kind of a world would you dream up? Who would make up your community? How would its declaration of interdependence read? Who would rule — and why? What kind of flag would fly? What goods and services would you produce? To what spirits would you pray? What would the inhabitants say about how to live honorably?

The need for a new dream is now. We know the industrial economy is becoming obsolete; it is an artifact of cheap oil. That party is over. We also know the current system is broken. The United States of America, as it is now formed, is too powerful, too rich, and too destructive. This is a wild and rash overgeneralization that will be offensive to many people, but maybe we need to hear that it’s okay to give up hope for our nation and the industrial political economic system upon which it stands. Rather than continuing to react to the symptoms of a dying system, why not seize the initiative and allow ourselves to be guided by a bolder vision than we ever have dared to imagine? We have to. Everything about our circumstances and survival is changing in the face of global heating — that’s what James Lovelock calls it. Global “warming” is far too gentle and benign a term.

TO SURVIVE AND PROSPER
So here’s my dream: bioregions. Forget nations. A bioregion is an area where people and communities are entirely defined by the unique geographical and environmental conditions by which they live. These bioregions encourage dense development within urban growth boundaries, which are (ideally) surrounded by open space and farmland and forestland and intact watersheds. These bioregions will survive and prosper; they will have a reliable water supply, clean air, access to local, cheap building materials, and local, diverse sources of energy.
    Let’s consider the competitive advantages of bioregions and then consider the bioregion in which I live, as an example. First, bioregions are governed by nature, which is more powerful and longer lasting than industry, technology, and politics together. Nature does a lot of useful things for free, such as maintaining life-support systems, including the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil in which we plant. Replacing nature with technology, it turns out, can be difficult, expensive, time consuming, and ultimately, self-defeating.
    Second, the bioregion concept makes more sense and is naturally more efficient, if you consider that it recognizes the central (and commonly ignored) law of existence: Human systems actually are wholly subsidiary parts of natural systems. Reliable prosperity is an outcome of natural economic and ecologic development — evolution underlies both as well. It’s not that we should copy nature for a model of economic development; it’s that there simply is no other model. Bio-mimicry, or designs based on mimicking nature, is as good a design principle as there is.
    Third, the world is, in some ways, self-organized into bioregions already. We don’t have to reconfigure counties, states, and nations and reorganize them around bioregions because they already are so organized. We just need to recognize them. That’s not easy, however, because you can’t make a bioregion. It either is a bioregion or it isn’t, and understanding the difference is everything. We need to study the distinctive conditions and qualities of each and every region and go from there, building the organizations and businesses and shadow governments that are based on each region’s distinctive qualities. 

FOLLOW THE FISH
Let’s start with the place where I live in Oregon. Of what bioregion am I a part? What are the essential environmental conditions, the natural flows of energy, and the most powerful networks of relationship that connect us here? At Ecotrust, the nonprofit I run that employs a dozen scientist-experts, including economists, biologists, hydrologists, and geneticists, we’ve been trying to figure out the nature of this bioregion for 20 years — to the tune of about two million dollars a year. Finally, we all came to the same conclusion: This bioregion is defined by salmon. We probably could have saved a lot of money by asking the native people who live here or by asking the kids what they thought about the bioregion. Actually, we did, during a brainstorming session, and this is what one 10-year-old said: “Follow the fish!”
    If you follow salmon, the bioregion of which we are a part is the entire North Pacific. It includes parts of China, and the far east of Russia, and Alaska and British Columbia, and Washington and Oregon and California. The region begins somewhere north of Hawaii, where the water becomes too warm for the salmon, and it goes all the way up to the Arctic. This is the area that author Terry Glavin called “the last great sea,” a sea of extraordinary abundance.
    This bioregion is defined by water — gorgeous coastlines, estuaries, rivers, streams, and lakes — as well as mountains, forests, grasslands, and high desert. On the eastern shores of this great North Pacific bioregion is the largest temperate rain forest in the world. This magnificent forest of redwoods, cedars, Sitka spruce, hemlock, and fir goes all the way to Alaska.
    Along with its rich biodiversity, it has 10,000 to 15,000 years of history supporting dense populations of First Nation hunter-gatherer people in relative prosperity, with extraordinary mythologies of place. We could invent a lot of iconic names for this bioregion. But places are defined as much by events as by geography, and the event that has defined this place for thousands and thousands of years is the return of the salmon — millions and millions of salmon.
    The people and land and water and salmon have co-evolved here over a long period of time. The streams followed the last glacial retreat, together with the forests and the grasslands. Salmon connect us. They tell us things. When salmon populations decline, it tells us that our farming, fishing, forestry, road building, energy, or transportation systems are destroying our streams and rivers. When 30,000 big, wild, bright, fall Chinook salmon come back to their home waters in the Klamath River and die, as they did a couple of years ago, we know that our governance, our economy, and our politics are failing.

RECOGNIZE YOUR HOME
I’m constantly reminded of what environmentalist Dave Foreman said to a college student who asked him, “What is the single most important thing that I can do to save the environment?” He replied, “Stay home!” It’s so simple. That’s what native people have always done (and in a sense, we’re all native people). So, the challenge is to answer the question, “What is home?” What are its distinctive characteristics? What are the concentric circles of interconnected social, environmental, and economic relationships that sustain us? And how do we leave home just a little bit better than we found it? I’ll never forget something an Aboriginal woman said at the launch of a big international conference on world conservation a few years ago in Australia: “If you’ve come here to save me, you can go home now. But if you see my struggle as part of your own survival, then maybe . . . maybe we can work together.”
    We also need to keep in mind that the only truly unlimited, untapped resource left in a world of increasing scarcity is the infinite creativity of the human imagination. With even the slightest nod of encouragement and a very small amount of money, the poorest and least advantaged among us are completely capable of improving our lives, and the lives of others around us. Aren’t we?
    Let’s create a new cosmology, or at least a deep understanding of the old mythologies to drive things our way. Societies do what societies think, and today we are an “orange” society. We segment everything in our mind. We segment philanthropy and business and economics and the environment and culture and art. We need to become an “apple” society and be whole again.
    My struggle, my dream, is to put flesh on the bones of a bioregional narrative of a story that we call “Salmon Nation.” My struggle, my dream, is to figure out how to support those people, organizations, businesses, and governments, and especially the First Nation people, who recognize that their self-interests lie in being a part of a larger bioregional movement to improve social, environmental, and economic conditions at home. What’s yours?

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Spencer Beebe is president of Ecotrust in Portland, Oregon. He spent 14 years with the Nature Conservancy and founded Conservation International. Read more here.