Re: <nettime> Bioregionalism

It's so cool to see bioregionalism on nettime! I'm headed through Idaho right now, on my way back home from Cascadia.

Joe, you never cease to amaze with the range of your engagements. To go a little further with the planetary gardener thing, geologists like Ruddiman think that Earth's temperature was stabilized at the human-friendly temperatures of the Holocene by the methane emitted from wet-rice agriculture, starting some five or six thousand years ago. So way back then, humans were already responsible for climate change, but for the better from our perspective!

I don't think it's going to turn out for the better this time, but I just can't derive any satisfaction from the "civilizations fall" story, true as it may be. One can fall gracefully or murderously, and these are issues that can engage us in our own lifetimes. Bioregionalism matters because it's a turn away from the worst of contemporary civilization.

Bioregions are a moving target, and for many in Washington state and British Columbia right now, it's all about the Salish Sea. I thought I might explore its shores this summer, but instead I zoomed in on Vashon- Maury Island where I spent a month. There, as throughout the Americas, people are realizing that the "light symbiosis" of indigenous peoples with their environment actually involved a lot of intervention, including seasonal burning among other things. There's a great book about the new scientific understanding of indigenous civilizations in the Americas, it's called 1491, Joe and Gregory might be interested.

On a local scale, this leads to the realization that we are part of nature, or to put it another way, we get the ecology we deserve. What's called "ecosystem restoration" is always a lot like gardening with a light touch. Perhaps the best term for it is "biocultural restoration."

I think this has important ethical value, in an age of civilizational despair tempted by nihilism and war. In fact I became so moved by the efforts of people on Vashon to preserve some of their island's watersheds that for the first time in my life I did a project that's basically exempt of critique. Instead I wanted to see what happens when people turn to making their environment better - in full knowledge of the forces that are simultaneously making it worse.

Seems to me that Rilke's beauty and terror remains the fundamental aesthetic of the Anthropocene.

All my bioregional best, Brian

https://vashonresidency.ecotopia.today

On Thu, Jul 20, 2023, 15:24 Joseph Rabie via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org> wrote:

This raises interesting questions:

What human activities are permissible, given the effect that we have on the planet?

Was the passage from a hunter-gatherer society to a grain-cultivation society “the original sin”?

Or was it inevitable, given the particular intellectual and practical skills with which evolution unintentionally endowed us?

Are we to regret the fact that human societies transformed the world through agricultural activities, albeit in a way—before industrialisation—that changed the biosphere, but did not destroy it?

That is, we turned what was originally wilderness into a no-longer wholly natural garden, but a garden nonetheless? That is to say, though not undestructive, creating new biodiverse harmonies?

Joe.

> Le 20 juil. 2023 à 21:44, mp via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org> a écrit :
>
>
>
>> On 7/20/23 18:11, Joseph Rabie via Nettime-tmp wrote:
>>
>> The issues in Europe are very different from those in the "New"
>> World, where local populations lived in light symbiosis with the land
>> until the colonialists arrived. Nature in Europe has been transformed
>> over millennia by agricultural society, that has created largely
>> humanised urban and rural landscapes (even seemingly natural mountain
>> forests have been the object of husbandry), yet in harmony with the
>> biosphere, until the industrial age turned vast swathes into an
>> open-air factory.
>
> See (geomorphologist) David Montgomery on soil and the plough. Then the idea of "harmony with the biosphere" appear rather difficult to entertain.
>
> In general, ideas of profound discontinuity and "modernity before/after thinking" hide the the shared, basic parameters of all grain-based civilisations the last 5/6/7000 years: plough and extract until collapse.
>
> In that sense, such ideas of paradigmatic ruptures paradoxically serve the very type of system that they confront, keeping the shared underlying dynamics hidden from view, whole focusing on "exceptions".
>
> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/587916.Dirt
>
> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36236132-growing-a-revolution
>
> ...
> ..
> .
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