Bioregional Political Consciousness
= "the moment a scattered set of practices recognizes itself as a politics". [1]
Discussion
What would it mean for bioregionalism to become a politics?
Benjamin Life:
I want to start with a contestable frame. I do not believe that bioregionalism is inherently separatist. At its core, it is simply an insistence on right relationship: between people, between communities, and between human systems and the living systems that hold them. It reorganizes attention around watersheds, foodsheds, and ecological communities rather than around the arbitrary lines drawn by empires. The separatist impulse that runs through parts of the movement, one that I often and in many cases share, is the natural response of people who look at how deeply out of right relationship our institutions are, and conclude that starting over is the only honest move. As I will attempt to further explain later on in this essay, I believe that the only viable move is to develop a political consciousness that focuses on what connects us as interdependent people of place rather than further divides us by way of borders or ideology.
Political consciousness is what happens when a scattered set of practices recognizes itself as a shared condition with a shared purpose or cause. Labor became a political force when workers in different trades and towns recognized themselves as a class. Bioregionalism is full of practices, seed libraries, watershed councils, community land trusts, worker co-ops, mutual aid networks, local currencies, Land Back partnerships, that have not yet recognized themselves as a single politics with an account of power, a theory of legitimacy, and a path to governing. When they do, the claim at the heart of the movement, that we are nature, stops being a sentiment and becomes a political ethos: the vitality of each of us depends on the thriving of all of us, and our institutions should be built accordingly. The political program of such an ethos is neither traditionally leftist nor conservative. In the words of Wendell Berry, “a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.” What we hold in common, the common cause that cinches together the bioregional political identity, is our mutual embeddedness within a bioregional context. Our interdependence is the source of our politics, a populism that includes the water and the soil and our more-than-human relatives alongside the basic dignity of workplace democracy and direct democratic assemblies.
I think this is precisely what a generation of young people on the left are looking for as they walk away from corporate Democratic and Republican Parties that are so enmeshed in the machinery of war and extraction that they cannot speak the problem aloud, let alone solve it. Bioregional political consciousness offers them something rare: a cosmovision, a story of the good life that grounds collective flourishing in its most practical attributes and social structures.
It describes:
- an economy — cooperative ownership, local circulation, finance aligned with life rather than extraction;
- a democracy — direct, nested, and subsidiary, with decisions made at the smallest scale capable of making them well;
- an ecology — rights of nature, and an understanding of human flourishing as inseparable from the health and vitality of place;
- a history — honest about colonization, with Land Back as a foundation rather than a footnote;
- a posture toward power — communities that are sovereign and interdependent, because, as I’ve argued elsewhere, sovereignty and solidarity are two faces of one phenomenon.
And here is what I think makes it politically potent rather than merely appealing: it crosses the aisle in an unusual place. Its eco-anarchist root, no top-down institutions, sovereign communities governing themselves, speaks directly to libertarians and to the populist right’s justified distrust of distant elites. Its commitment to collective flourishing speaks to socialists and progressives. What unites them is a shared enemy that neither party will name: consolidation of wealth and power. The libertarian hates it when it wears a government badge; the socialist hates it when it wears a corporate logo. Bioregionalism notices they’re the same merger.
The closest living precedent is probably the democratic confederalism of Rojava in northeast Syria, communes and councils, gender co-chairs at every level, ecology written into a founding charter its authors pointedly called a Social Contract. It was, for more than a decade, one of the most ambitious experiments in direct democracy on earth. It is also a sobering lesson. Over the past year, under military pressure from a new government in Damascus, much of that confederal system has been forcibly folded into the Syrian state. A social contract declared as an enclave, against the states around it, survives only as long as the military balance allows. We’ll return to that fact again shortly.
There’s one more ancestor worth naming, and it comes from an unexpected place. In 1931, in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI articulated the principle of subsidiarity: that it is an injustice for a larger, higher association to claim functions that smaller, more local communities can perform themselves. Those affected by a decision should have the greatest say in it. The same Church that wrote the Doctrine of Discovery, the theological engine for abstracting power away from place, also gave us, nearly five centuries later, a precise description of the cure. Both doctrines are still on the books. We get to choose which one to build on.
Because that abstraction is the mechanism of our capture. A continental republic that concentrates the political will of hundreds of millions of people into a few hundred offices, that recognizes the capture of our democratic system by corporate interests as “speech,” has made power purchasable, and purchasable power flows, like everything else, toward whoever already holds the most capital."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-law-of-the-land?)
what might a bioregional refounding of this continent actually involve?
Benjamin Life:
"Not a blueprint, but a few principles I’d bring to the table:
- Truth before terms. A public reckoning with the record, treaty by treaty, case by case, not as a ritual of guilt, but as the truth and reconciliation we’ve never had the courage to do as a nation.
- Nation to nation, first. Restore the treaty relationship that Congress unilaterally ended in 1871, and honor existing treaties as the nations who signed them understood them, which is, again, what Congress itself promised in 1988. Bioregionalists can begin to rebuild this trust even before the US government is ready to earnestly come to the table.
- Pull out the root. Legislatively and judicially end the Doctrine of Discovery and the plenary power built on it. The Church has begun the theological half, disowning the doctrine and teaching care for creation as a spiritual duty. The legal half is overdue.
- Nested assemblies to draft a new social contract. Neighborhood and watershed assemblies, federated into bioregional councils, federated into a continental compact, with randomly selected citizens’ assemblies doing much of the drafting, so that no party, donor class, or faction can own the process.
- The grandmothers’ clause. A standing council of elders, kept structurally apart from the decision-makers, seated by the direct democratic assemblies rather than by campaign, and barred from holding other office. It holds the two powers the Great Law gave the clan mothers and the Constitution withheld: to remove those who betray the compact, and to ask of every major decision, before it is final, who will bear it seven generations from now. Wales offers a modern precedent in its Future Generations Commissioner, whose recommendations bind no one; this clause would add a suspensive power, a pause on any decision that mortgages the unborn.
- Rights of nature and economic democracy, in the founding text. Watersheds as rights-bearing entities; cooperative ownership, commons, and community land trusts as constitutional forms, not afterthoughts.
- Redistribution by consent. Land Back, reparations, and the decommodification of land, negotiated in council, not seized in anger, with the Lakota’s refusal to sell the Black Hills as the moral precedent: some things are restored, not purchased.
- Jefferson’s sunset. The new compact expires, and must be re-consented, every generation.
None of this requires a single dramatic convention, and I’d be suspicious of anyone promising one. Refounding, in practice, would look like a thousand smaller transfers of consent: parallel institutions, co-ops, neighborhood assemblies, bioregional councils, tribal co-management bodies, building the capacity to govern, and people inside existing institutions, mayors, legislators, judges, agency staff, passing the enabling laws that hand power into those vessels. Public banks. Participatory budgets. Municipal charters that recognize the rights of a river. Federal lands returned to tribal stewardship. The outside movement builds a vessel legitimate enough to hold a nation that consents to its own creation; the inside institutions pour their legitimacy into the new vessel. That’s where the reformer and the revolutionary finally meet, not as rivals, but as two halves of the same transfer."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-law-of-the-land?)
History
Benjamin Life:
"If colonialism is the core wound, then the modern environmental movement should have been its natural healer. In its early, most urgent forms, it nearly was. The ecological politics of the 1970s, The Limits to Growth in 1972, Barry Commoner and Ted Kaczynski’s distinct critiques of industrial production, Murray Bookchin’s social ecology, the bioregional vision that Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann articulated in 1977, understood the environmental crisis as a crisis of relationship: between people and place, between production and life, between an economy premised on endless growth and a planet that is finite. It was, at its core, a critique of extraction, which meant it was, whether it used the word or not, a critique of capitalism as it actually operates.
Over the following decades, the frame narrowed, from a broken relationship with the whole to a single problematic molecule. The 1987 Brundtland Report reconciled growth with the environment under the banner of “sustainable development.” The 1997 Kyoto Protocol built carbon markets, making the atmosphere tradable. And in 2004, BP’s advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather, rolled out a personal “carbon footprint calculator” as part of the company’s “Beyond Petroleum” rebranding. Hundreds of thousands of people used it in its first year; the campaign later won a gold Effie, advertising’s Oscar. The world’s sixth-largest oil producer had successfully taught the public to measure the climate crisis in units of individual guilt.
Was the narrowing deliberate? Some of it demonstrably was. In BP’s case, we have the receipts. The rest, I suspect, was something subtler and more effective than a conspiracy: the system’s immune response, metabolizing a threat into a market. Either way, the result was the same. Carbon reductionism did two things at once. It made the problem global, which meant no particular place, community, or owner was responsible. And it made the solution technical, which meant the solution could be sold. You can buy an offset. You can lease a solar panel. You can’t buy your way back into right relationship with a watershed.
This is why even the high-water marks of climate politics, the Green New Deal resolution of 2019, the subsidies of 2022, read, from a bioregional vantage, as insufficient. Necessary, perhaps, but small: an attempt to decarbonize the existing structure of ownership rather than to change it. Nothing in that agenda asks who owns the foodshed, where supply chains begin and end, whether a town’s wealth circulates or leaks, whether the people downstream of a decision had any say in it. Carbon has no neighborhood. A watershed has relationships. The moment you shift the unit of analysis from the molecule to the place, the environmental question becomes, again, a political one. The question of ecological and human wellbeing is ultimately a question about ownership, consent, and power."
(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/the-law-of-the-land?)
The North American Bioregional Congress of 1984
Benjamin Life:
"In May of 1984, a couple hundred people gathered near Excelsior Springs, Missouri, for the first North American Bioregional Congress, convened by David Haenke and the Ozark Area Community Congress. Among the working groups was one on Green politics, which proposed launching a Green political organization in the United States. The Green Party’s own history describes the bioregional assembly as initially hostile to the idea, and the working group nervously holding its breath as the proposal was read aloud in the closing session. That August, sixty-two people met at Macalester College in St. Paul and founded the first national Green organization, which they named the Committees of Correspondence, after the revolutionary-era networks that had organized resistance to the Crown. Even the Greens, it turns out, reached for a founding myth.
What followed, as the elders at TIBC told it, was a slow divorce. The Greens found the bioregionalists too radical, too unwilling to engage the machinery of electoral power. The bioregionalists found the Greens too reformist, too willing to accept the legitimacy of a system they believed was the problem. The Greens went on to win ballot lines, run presidential campaigns, and build a durable, if small, third party. The bioregionalists kept their vision intact and their influence marginal.
Forty years later, neither produced what the moment needed: a mainstream ecological politics. The Greens became a party without a movement. The bioregionalists became a movement without a legible politics. Each was right about the other’s blind spot. And I think the lesson for this generation is not to choose between them, but to refuse the choice, to hold a vision that won’t accept the frame of the nation-state, and a willingness to put hands on the levers inside it."