Seminar: Bioregionalism: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy
Meets on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 23
Seminar Organizers
Paul Lindholdt, Eastern Washington University
Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
DESCRIPTION AND GOAL OF THE SEMINAR
In this workshop we will examine some of the tenets of bioregional theory – local knowledge, reinhabitation, watershed consciousness, sustainable dwelling, and activism – and ponder their viability for writing, analyzing, and teaching literature of place. We will likewise consider some of the pitfalls of bioregionalism and discuss possible strategies for avoiding them. Those pitfalls include home as a site of privation and isolation for women, the neglect of global contexts, and the fraught terrain where a bioregional narrative of belonging can be twisted into complicity with a settler-colonial narrative of displacing Indigenous people. Our goal will be to develop a viable approach to recovering bioregions and to collaborate on ways to analyze, write, and/or teach their literatures.
BACKGROUND
When the environmental movement was developing in the 1970s, a school of thought emerged which called itself bioregionalism. Arising primarily from western North America, this movement included thinkers such as Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, Gary Snyder, and Stephanie Mills. They sought to address environmental issues with a politics derived from a local sense of place; such an approach would complement national and international efforts, they asserted. Hence bioregionalists began to craft sorts of parallel cultures that shifted loci from existing but mostly arbitrary political boundaries (e.g., nations, states, counties, cities) in favor of those that emerged from ecologically determined frameworks based primarily on biotic communities or watersheds.
In addition to establishing ways of delineating place, bioregional thinking also implies a political and cultural practice that manifests as an environmental ethic in the day-to-day activities of ordinary residents. There is no official bioregional program or ideology. Rather, there is an evolving dialogue about a set of ideals and ideas being continually tested by practice and inflected by the particularities of diverse places and cultures. This seminar will be conducted in the inclusive spirit of such dialogue.
While political and social ideas regarding bioregional agendas have been well developed, the aesthetic and cultural dimensions have been underexplored and rarely theorized. Yet these dimensions are essential to creating a bioregional consciousness that underlies the sociopolitical projects and motivates and inspires people to engage in bioregional praxis.
By suggesting that human identity may be constituted by our residence in a community of natural beings – our local bioregion, replacing or supplementing national, state, ethnic, or other more common bases of identity – bioregionalism raises questions such as these:
What does it mean to be a resident not simply of Vancouver, British Columbia, but also of Cascadia? Not just of Nebraska, but also of the tallgrass prairie? Not just of northern California, but of the Shasta bioregion? Not simply of Milan, but of the Po River Watershed? Not only of Las Vegas, Nevada, but also of the Great Basin Desert?
What, in short, are the broad implications of a bioregional approach to living-in-place? The goal of this seminar is to explore a wide variety of answers to this question.
Seminar participants will read selectively in the titles below and write a 5- to 7-page response – scholarly, creative, pedagogical, or synthetic – to these questions:
Participants will upload their short essays to a common digital space (format yet to be determined) and share them with other participants. Tentative deadline: June 1. These essays will form a basis for seminar discussions. Following the seminar, we will post revised versions of the essays on a website.
BIOREGIONAL READING LIST
Aberley, Doug, ed. Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment. Gabriola Island, BC: New Catalyst, 1993. Print.
Andruss, Van, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, eds. Home! A Bioregional Reader. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990. Print.
Berg, Peter. Envisioning Sustainability. San Francisco: Subculture, 2009. Print.
---, ed. Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. Print.
Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Ed. Norman Wirzba. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002. Print.
Cheney, Jim. “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative.” Environmental Ethics 11 (Summer 1989): 117–34. Print.
Evanoff, Richard. Bioregionalism and Global Ethics: A Transactional Approach to Achieving Ecological Sustainability, Social Justice, and Human Well-Being. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010. Print.
Forsey, Helen. “Community: Meeting Our Deepest Needs.” Andruss, Plant, Plant, and Wright 83-85.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
House, Freeman. Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Print.
Jackson, Wes. Becoming Native to the Place. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1994. Print.
Lindholdt, Paul. In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Print.
---. "Restoring Bioregions Through Applied Composition." Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Ed. Christian Weisser and Sidney Dobrin. Albany: State U of New York P, 2001. 235-52.
---. “Literary Activism and the Bioregional Agenda.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3.2 (Fall 1996): 121–37. Rpt. in The First Decade of Ecocriticism from ISLE: Charting the Edges. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003. Print.
Lopez, Barry. The Rediscovery of North America. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990. Print.
Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, eds. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. Print and Web through Project Muse.
Lynch, Tom. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2008. Print.
McGinnis, Michael V., ed. Bioregionalism. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.
Mills, Stephanie. In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting the Damaged Land. Boston: Beacon, 1995. Print.
Plant, Judith. “Revaluing Home: Feminism and Bioregionalism.” Andruss, Plant, Plant, and Wright, 21-23.
Plotkin, Mark. “What the People of the Amazon Know that You Don’t.” TED Global. Oct. 2014. Web.
Prajznerova, Katerina. “Women Farmers’ Dream of Home: A Bioregional Analysis of Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Hunter’s Horn and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer.” South Bohemian Anglo-American Studies 1.1 (2007): 102-06. Dec. 29, 2014. Web.
Ricou, Laurie. The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest. Corvallis: Oregon State UP, 2002. Print.
Robinson, Tim. Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom. Dublin: Penguin, 2012. Print.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1985. Print.
Sanders, Scott Russell. Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print.
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point, 1990. Print.
---. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974. Print.
Thayer, Robert L., Jr. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Print.
Thomashow, Mitchell. Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change. Cambridge: MIT, 2002.
Tim Robinson: Connemara. Dir. Pat Collins. Harvest Films, 2011. Film.
Tredinnick, Mark. The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2009. Print.
Vitek, William, and Wes Jackson, eds. Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.
Seminar Organizers
Paul Lindholdt is an English professor who specializes in environmental studies. His written and edited books include Cascadia Wild: Protecting an International Ecosystem and Holding Common Ground: The Individual and Public Lands in the American West. Lexington Books is publishing his Explorations in Ecocriticism: Advocacy, Bioregionalism, and Visual Design in 2015.
Tom Lynch is an English professor specializing in place-conscious and ecocritical approaches to literature. He is a co-editor (with Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster) of The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, and the author of Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. He is currently editor of the journal Western American Literature. He is also engaged in a long-term research project examining the literature of the US West and the Australian Outback from ecocritical and settler-colonial perspectives.
Seminar Organizers
Paul Lindholdt, Eastern Washington University
Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
DESCRIPTION AND GOAL OF THE SEMINAR
In this workshop we will examine some of the tenets of bioregional theory – local knowledge, reinhabitation, watershed consciousness, sustainable dwelling, and activism – and ponder their viability for writing, analyzing, and teaching literature of place. We will likewise consider some of the pitfalls of bioregionalism and discuss possible strategies for avoiding them. Those pitfalls include home as a site of privation and isolation for women, the neglect of global contexts, and the fraught terrain where a bioregional narrative of belonging can be twisted into complicity with a settler-colonial narrative of displacing Indigenous people. Our goal will be to develop a viable approach to recovering bioregions and to collaborate on ways to analyze, write, and/or teach their literatures.
BACKGROUND
When the environmental movement was developing in the 1970s, a school of thought emerged which called itself bioregionalism. Arising primarily from western North America, this movement included thinkers such as Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, Gary Snyder, and Stephanie Mills. They sought to address environmental issues with a politics derived from a local sense of place; such an approach would complement national and international efforts, they asserted. Hence bioregionalists began to craft sorts of parallel cultures that shifted loci from existing but mostly arbitrary political boundaries (e.g., nations, states, counties, cities) in favor of those that emerged from ecologically determined frameworks based primarily on biotic communities or watersheds.
In addition to establishing ways of delineating place, bioregional thinking also implies a political and cultural practice that manifests as an environmental ethic in the day-to-day activities of ordinary residents. There is no official bioregional program or ideology. Rather, there is an evolving dialogue about a set of ideals and ideas being continually tested by practice and inflected by the particularities of diverse places and cultures. This seminar will be conducted in the inclusive spirit of such dialogue.
While political and social ideas regarding bioregional agendas have been well developed, the aesthetic and cultural dimensions have been underexplored and rarely theorized. Yet these dimensions are essential to creating a bioregional consciousness that underlies the sociopolitical projects and motivates and inspires people to engage in bioregional praxis.
By suggesting that human identity may be constituted by our residence in a community of natural beings – our local bioregion, replacing or supplementing national, state, ethnic, or other more common bases of identity – bioregionalism raises questions such as these:
What does it mean to be a resident not simply of Vancouver, British Columbia, but also of Cascadia? Not just of Nebraska, but also of the tallgrass prairie? Not just of northern California, but of the Shasta bioregion? Not simply of Milan, but of the Po River Watershed? Not only of Las Vegas, Nevada, but also of the Great Basin Desert?
What, in short, are the broad implications of a bioregional approach to living-in-place? The goal of this seminar is to explore a wide variety of answers to this question.
Seminar participants will read selectively in the titles below and write a 5- to 7-page response – scholarly, creative, pedagogical, or synthetic – to these questions:
- What does it mean to identify primarily as a resident of a bioregion rather than as a resident of a political nation, state, etc.? What are some implications for culture and literature?
- What is the role of mapping in bioregional consciousness in general, and bioregional literature in particular?
- What seem to be the gender/race/class implications of bioregionalism?
- How do distinctive local texts from your region contribute to a bioregional agenda? How might a bioregional approach to those texts enhance your perception and teaching of them?
- Critics have charged that bioregionalism privileges rural life over urban. Do you agree? Why? If so, what might be done about it?
- Is a cosmopolitan bioregionalism possible? What might it look like?
- What role does/should literature have in developing a local bioregional consciousness?
- What are some advantages, limitations, and challenges of teaching bioregionally?
- What seems to be the relationship between bioregionalism and Indigenous communities? In what ways might a bioregional sense of belonging (of "becoming native to our place") be seen as a settler-colonial displacement of Indigenous communities? How might this pattern be avoided?
Participants will upload their short essays to a common digital space (format yet to be determined) and share them with other participants. Tentative deadline: June 1. These essays will form a basis for seminar discussions. Following the seminar, we will post revised versions of the essays on a website.
BIOREGIONAL READING LIST
Aberley, Doug, ed. Boundaries of Home: Mapping for Local Empowerment. Gabriola Island, BC: New Catalyst, 1993. Print.
Andruss, Van, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright, eds. Home! A Bioregional Reader. Philadelphia: New Society, 1990. Print.
Berg, Peter. Envisioning Sustainability. San Francisco: Subculture, 2009. Print.
---, ed. Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California. San Francisco: Planet Drum, 1978. Print.
Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Ed. Norman Wirzba. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002. Print.
Cheney, Jim. “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative.” Environmental Ethics 11 (Summer 1989): 117–34. Print.
Evanoff, Richard. Bioregionalism and Global Ethics: A Transactional Approach to Achieving Ecological Sustainability, Social Justice, and Human Well-Being. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010. Print.
Forsey, Helen. “Community: Meeting Our Deepest Needs.” Andruss, Plant, Plant, and Wright 83-85.
Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
House, Freeman. Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Print.
Jackson, Wes. Becoming Native to the Place. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1994. Print.
Lindholdt, Paul. In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. Print.
---. "Restoring Bioregions Through Applied Composition." Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches. Ed. Christian Weisser and Sidney Dobrin. Albany: State U of New York P, 2001. 235-52.
---. “Literary Activism and the Bioregional Agenda.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 3.2 (Fall 1996): 121–37. Rpt. in The First Decade of Ecocriticism from ISLE: Charting the Edges. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003. Print.
Lopez, Barry. The Rediscovery of North America. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990. Print.
Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, eds. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2012. Print and Web through Project Muse.
Lynch, Tom. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2008. Print.
McGinnis, Michael V., ed. Bioregionalism. London: Routledge, 1999. Print.
Mills, Stephanie. In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting the Damaged Land. Boston: Beacon, 1995. Print.
Plant, Judith. “Revaluing Home: Feminism and Bioregionalism.” Andruss, Plant, Plant, and Wright, 21-23.
Plotkin, Mark. “What the People of the Amazon Know that You Don’t.” TED Global. Oct. 2014. Web.
Prajznerova, Katerina. “Women Farmers’ Dream of Home: A Bioregional Analysis of Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Hunter’s Horn and Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer.” South Bohemian Anglo-American Studies 1.1 (2007): 102-06. Dec. 29, 2014. Web.
Ricou, Laurie. The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest. Corvallis: Oregon State UP, 2002. Print.
Robinson, Tim. Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom. Dublin: Penguin, 2012. Print.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1985. Print.
Sanders, Scott Russell. Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World. Boston: Beacon, 1994. Print.
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. San Francisco: North Point, 1990. Print.
---. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974. Print.
Thayer, Robert L., Jr. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Print.
Thomashow, Mitchell. Bringing the Biosphere Home: Learning to Perceive Global Environmental Change. Cambridge: MIT, 2002.
Tim Robinson: Connemara. Dir. Pat Collins. Harvest Films, 2011. Film.
Tredinnick, Mark. The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2009. Print.
Vitek, William, and Wes Jackson, eds. Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.
Seminar Organizers
Paul Lindholdt is an English professor who specializes in environmental studies. His written and edited books include Cascadia Wild: Protecting an International Ecosystem and Holding Common Ground: The Individual and Public Lands in the American West. Lexington Books is publishing his Explorations in Ecocriticism: Advocacy, Bioregionalism, and Visual Design in 2015.
Tom Lynch is an English professor specializing in place-conscious and ecocritical approaches to literature. He is a co-editor (with Cheryll Glotfelty and Karla Armbruster) of The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place, and the author of Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. He is currently editor of the journal Western American Literature. He is also engaged in a long-term research project examining the literature of the US West and the Australian Outback from ecocritical and settler-colonial perspectives.