Page 28 RAIN May/June 1984 A Bioregional Vision Kirk Sale's words last graced the pages of RAIN two pears ago (RAIN VIII:6), when we interviewed him about the subject of his book Human Scale. These days he's working on a new book on American regionalism. Last fall, he delivered one of the two Schumacher Lectures at the third annual meeting of the E. F. Schumacher Society (Box 76, RD3, Great Barrington, MA 01230). That speech, entitled "Great Mother of Us All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism," is excerpted here. —TK by Kirkpatrick Sale "If all wisdom was acquired from without, it might be politic to make our culture cosmopolitan. But I believe our best wisdom does not come from without, but arises in the soul and is an emanation of the earth-spirit, a voice speaking directly to us as dwellers in the land." —AE, in The Interpreters To become "dwellers in the land," to regain the spirit of the Greeks, to fully and honestly come to know the earth, the crucial and perhaps only and all-encompassing task is to understand the place, the immediate, specific earth, whereon we live. It must mean something that the early human societies which occupied the world for our first 50,000 years or so regarded the sacredness of the earth as a truth so profound that it could be accurately described as almost innate; it must have significance that in most subsequent societies until quite recently the earth and its behavior formed the basis of all folk knowledge, not merely in matters of agriculture and nutrition but in medicine, religion, art, and even government. So, too, for us: "In the question of how we treat the land," as Schumacher says, "our entire way of life is involved." We must somehow live as close to it as possible, be in touch with its particular soils, its waters, its winds, we must learn its ways, its capacities, its limits, we must make its rhythms our patterns, its laws our guide, its fruits our bounty. That, in essence, is the bioregional vision. What the bioregional vision suggests is a way of living that not merely can take us away from the calamities of the present, the diseases of our quotidian lives, but can provide its own indwelling enrichments and satisfactions, a widening of human possibilities. Imagine, if you will, the joy of knowing, as we can imagine from the scholarly record, what the American Indians knew: the meaning of the changes of wind on a summer afternoon; the ameliorative properties of everyday plants; the comfort of tribal, clannic, and community ties throughout life; the satisfaction of being rooted in history, in lore, in place; the excitement of a culture understandable because it is imminent in the simple realities of the surroundings. Imagine a life primarily of contemplation and leisure, where work takes up only a few hours a day—an average of less than four, according to the studies of nonliterate societies—where conversation and making love and play become the common rituals of the afternoon, and there is no scramble for the necessities of life because they are provided regularly, equally, joyfully, and without charge. Imagine a life—and here I am paraphrasing an anthropologist's description of a California Indian tribe— where people feel themselves to be something other than independent, autonomous individuals ... deeply bound together with other people and with the surrounding nonhuman forms of life in a complex interconnected web of being, a true comujunity in which all creatures and all things can be felt almost as brothers and sisters . . . and where the principle of nonexploitation, of respect and reverence for all creatures, all living things, is as much a part of life as breathing.
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