Page 16 RAIN November/December 1985 A hioregionai polity would seek the diffusion ofpower, with nothing done at a higher level than necessary, and all authority flowing upward from the smallest political unit to the largest. challenged, and in wars, collapse, and revolution,,the system ofpower redrawn. And, as he surveys the cataclysms of the 20th century, Isaacs shows that the fragmenting process has operated everywhere in our time, breaking down empires, throwing off new nations, distending and dividing old ones, “a great clustering into separateness": What we are experiencing, then, is not the shaping of new coherences but the world breaking into its bits and pieces, bursting like big and little stars from exploding galaxies, each one spinning off in its own centrifugal whirl, each one straining to hold its own small separate pieces from spinning off in their turn. The polihcal lessons are clear enough, I think: a biore- gional polity would seek the diffusion of power, the decentralization of institutions, with nothing done at a level higher than necessary, and all authority flowing upward incrementally from the smallest political unit to the largest. The primary location of decision-making, therefore, and of political and economic control, should be the community, the more-or-less intimate grouping either at the close-knit village scale of 1,000 people or so, or probably more often at the extended community scale of 5,000 to 10,0000 so often found as the fundamental political unit whether formal or informal. Here, where people know one another and the essentials of the environment they share, where at least the most basic information for problem-solving is known or readily available, here is where governance should begin. Decisions made at this level, as countless eons testify, stand at least a fair chance of being correct and a reasonable likelihood of being carried out competently; and even if the choice is misguided or the implementation faulty, the damage to either the society or the ecosphere is likely to be insignificant. This is the sort of government established by preliterate peoples all over the globe. The primary location ofdecisionmaking, and ofpolitical and economic control, should be the community. evolving over the years toward a kind of bedrock efficiency in problem-solving simply because it is necessary for survival. In the tribal councils, the folkmotes, the ecclesia, the village assemblies, the town meehngs, we find the human institution proven through time to have shown the scope and competence for the most basic kind of self-rule. t As different species live side by side in an ecosystem, so different communities could live side by side in a single city, and cities and towns side by side in a single bioregion, with no more thought of dominance and control than the sparrow gives to the rose, or the bobcat to the wasp. Sharing the same bioregion, they naturally share the same configurations of life, the same social and economic constraints, roughly the same environmental problems and opportunities, and so there is every reason to expect contact and cooperation among them. Even, for some specific tasks, maybe even confederation among them—but of a kind that need not mean diminished power or sovereignty for the community, but rather enlarged horizons of knowledge, of culture, of services, of security. Of course communities with a bioregional consciousness would find countless occasions that called for regional cooperation—and decision-making—on all sorts of issues from water and waste management, transportation, and food production to upstream pollution seeping into downstream drinking water and urban populations moving into rural farming country. Isolationism and self-sufficiency at a local scale is simply impossible, like fingers trying to be independent of hand and body. Communication and information networks of all kinds would be—would need to be— maintained among the communities of a bioregion, and possibly some kind of political deliberative and decisionmaking body would eventually seem to be necessary. The forms for such confederate bodies are myriad and their experiences rich and well-documented, so presumably working out the various systems would not be intractably difficult. We start, after all, with a clear identity of interest among these communities, a clear understanding of how they are interwoven into the bioregional tapestry, a clear historical record of their mutual needs and responsibilities and what happened when those were ignored. A confederation within bioregional limits has the logic, the force, of coherence and commonality; a confederation beyond those limits does not. Any larger political form is not only superfluous, it stands every chance of being downright dangerous, particularly in that it is no longer organically grounded in an ecological idenhty or limited by the constraints of homogeneous communities. If, as the scholars suggest, the goal of government as we have now come to understand it in the 20th century is to provide liberty, equality, efficiency, welfare, and security in some reasonable balance, a strong argument can be made that it is the areal division of power, divided and subdivided again as in bioregional governance, that provides them best. It promotes liberty by diminishing the chances of arbitrary government action and providing more points of access for the citizens, more points of pressure for affected minorities. It enhances equality by
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