Bioregionalism

Bioregion denotes the conflux of cultural and ecogeographical features in human-defined territories. Bioregionalism has been promoted by geographers as a pragmatic research framework for understanding, and discovering solutions to problems within human-ecological relations. In many regards, bioregionalism is a comfortable fit for a discipline long concerned with the human place in larger ecological systems. Bioregional thought has a strong normative character, rooted in the North American environmental social movements of the 1970s. Essentially interdisciplinary, bioregional thought views communities of land and life as overlapping and internested. As a political philosophy, it proposes that political units need to be defined according to this combination of features and that decisions would be more socioeconomically and ecologically sustainable if they were taken at smaller, local levels than is ...