In the early ‘70s, I remember driving through Nova Scotia on my way back to Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) in St Johns. I stopped in Heatherton (near Antigonish) to meet with Allen van Newkirk, and his wife, Susan. Allen was a poet from Detroit who had set up the Institute for Bioregionalism Research.
I was teaching Biogeography and Computer Mapping in the Department of Geography at MUN.
Fast forward, almost fifty years, I have pulled off the bookshelf my collection of books on Bioregionalism. They include:
Reinhabiting a Separate Country. A Bioregionalism Anthology of Northern California, Edited by Peter Berg.
Bioregionalism, Edited by Michael McGinnis.
Bioregionalism and Civil Society, by Mike Carr.
In the McGinnis book, there is an excellent chapter by Doug Aberley.
“The term Bioregionalism was first conceived by Allen Van Newkirk who had been active in eastern US radical politics and who met Berg in San Francisco in 1969 and again in Nova Scotia in 1971.”
As conceived by Van Newkirk:
“ Bioregionalism is presented as a technical process of identifying biogeographically interpreted culture areas ….called bioregions. Within these territories, resident human populations would ‘restore plant and animal biodiversity’, ‘aid in the conservation and restoration of wild ecosystems’ and ‘observe regional models of new and relatively non-arbitrary scales of human activities in relation to the biological realities of the natural landscape.”
This led me to further research the writing and life of Peter Berg (see reference).
Meanwhile, from Chelsea Green Publishing:
‘Books provide a window into places we’ve never been and help us nurture imagination and explore new ideas from our own home‘.
This includes Rob Hopkins From What Is To What If: Unleashing the Power of the Imagination to Create the Future We Want.
From Edward Wedler, he forwarded a link to the bookstore in Parrsboro, Nonesuch.
They are offering a surprise package of five books on any topic you are interested in for $60 includes delivery. I should send my $60, my topic would be ‘Bioregionalism’.
Finally, Saturday, we took a quick day trip to New Glasgow to check on Heather’s Dad. It was a pure pleasure to drive through a different landscape, in this case, the Rawdon Hills from Windsor to Truro.
Acknowledgements
Edward for the link to the Parrsboro bookstore. Heather, for sharing the drive to New Glasgow and back.
References
Michael McGinnis (Ed.) 1999. Bioregionalism. Routledge.
Peter Berg (Ed.) 1978. Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregionalism Anthology of Northern California. Planet Drum books
Mike Carr.2004. Bioregionalism and Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism. UBC Press.
Cheryll Glotfelty and Eve Quesnel (Ed.) 2014. The Biosphere and the Bioregion: Essential Writings of Peter Berg. Routledge Environmental Humanities Series.
Ernest Blair Experiment 