Does Bioregionalism Foster Feelings of Home?
How Scale Can Impact Caring for Your Environment
To what extent can the scale of a place, be it your living space, your city, your county, or Country, determine your sense of home. Logically, it follows that people rooted in a place would be more inclined to treat it better compared to transitory people moving in and out of a place. An analogy for me in coming to this conclusion is considering on a very small scale; the place I dwell. I take care of my home, i.e. cleaning and maintaining it, furnishing it, and making sure those that live and visit it are omfortable. In comparison, when I stay somewhere outside of my home, I would not be inclined to care for it in the same way and to the same extent. Increasing the scale to my community, my awareness to its life quality would be heightened since I would have an intimate relationship with the landscape, its qualities, and the people that live within in. The variables that would deepen or lessen this connection would be to what extent I have interacted with and learned about it.
Although “life place” and bioregion are used synonymously by some including UC Davis professor emeritus Robert Thayer, in which he states, “bioregion is literally and etymologically a ‘life place’“ (Thayer, 2003), this conflicts with the life place where the famous American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activitst, cultural critic, and farmer Wendell Berry describes it from a visceral and emotional level stating, “the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in” (Berry, 2002). On the other hand, Kirkpatrick Sale, debates with insightful logic in the book, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, people’s reaction to ethical and moral connections to environmental threats. He states, “The only way people will apply right behavior and behave in a responsible way is if they have been persuaded to see the problem concretely and to understand their own connections to it – directly, and this can be done only at a limited scale (Sale, 1991). I understand this reasoning. Regardless if someone is transient or rooted to a place, if they have not fostered a relationship with their place, there is an unconscious detachment to its needs. When the scale of that place grows larger, the challenge in developing a deeper connection with that place can be obstructed. On a smaller, manageable and tangible scale, author Sale states people “will do the environmentally “correct” thing not because it is thought to be moral, but rather the practical thing to do”, arguing this cannot be done on a global scale (Sale, 1991).
When I think about my life place, from Berry’s perspective, an emotional struggle wrestles inside me. I have resided in my home for 6 years, so can I really call it my “life” place? True, I am slowly developing an intimate knowledge about this place, and know more from an ecological perspective than any other life place I have inhabited. But I consider whether I have developed an intimate knowledge and emotional connection to my life place. Berry explains this phenomenon when he describes what Europeans may have felt when they came to America, noting they, “still [had] not, in any meaningful way, arrived in America” (Berry, 2002). I do not feel that I have not arrived, however, I know that I still have more “arriving” to do.
I know that my understanding is building an awareness inside of me, that is facilitating changes in my thinking and behaviors, that were not evident prior to learning about bioregionalism and what it means to have a “life place”.
References
Berry, W. (2002). The Art of the Commonplace. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.
Sale, K. (1991). Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Thayer, R. L., Jr. (2003). Life Place, Bioregional Thought and Practice (1st ed.). London, England: University of California Press.