Material on bioregions.

Policy

• Who Will Pay Back the Earth? Revaluing Net Energy through the Sustainable Yield of Regional Ecosystems. By James Quilligan. Global Perspectives (2024) 5 (1): 122343. [1]

Quotes

Technology Should Be Bioregional

"Each agroeconomic region is so unique that the concept of transfer of technology is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the transfer of the capacity to develop technology and institutions that are consistent with the cultural endowment and the resource endowment of each region. Until that’s done, a sustained solution to the problems of hunger and poverty will not be attained.

We have to understand how to develop local capacity to screen ideas from the rest of the world and to invent technologies that are region-specific, and also to invent the kind of land tenure system that will work for whatever population density and land conditions prevail. In both the invention of technology and the invention of institutions I see an interaction between the resource endowment of a particular area and its cultural endowment."

- Vernon Ruttan [2]

What Lies Beyond the Nation-State: Cosmo-local Bioregionalism Supported by Partner States

Devolving Sovereignty: Planetary Cooperation for Regional Self-Organization

"Why are nation-states not the appropriate tool for global ecological restoration and 'planet-saving purposes' ? And thus, why we need a bioregionally oriented cosmo-localism with nation-states as partner states for cosmo-local bioregional 'development':

"As the ecological limits of humanity’s demand for energy are crossed and ecosystem deficits expand across the planet, many people are questioning the capacity of state sovereignty to address the relentless disintegration of planetary habitability. The main problem is that sovereign states cannot account empirically for the sources of natural energy that empower their economies because the social data that is measured within their political boundaries is not aligned with the ecological data measured within their ecosystem boundaries . The areas don’t match. Nations contain ecosystems, but nations are not ecosystems (except for some tiny nations and small island states). Because this data must be computed within a naturally bounded ecosystem, national measurements like energy extraction or economic growth cannot be used to evaluate the carrying capacity of a nation’s resources for its population."

- James Quilligan [3]

Key Resources

Key Articles

• Planetary Cooperation for Regional Self-Organization. James Quilligan.