Page 35 - ECOlogic Book

bioregionalists will be “out of there”, for bioregionalists, whom many,
including themselves, have called “anarchists”, harbor distrust toward top-
down decision-making. “Anarchy”, explains Jim Dodge “doesn’t mean out of
control. It means out of their control. Most of the 220,000 people, says
Dodge, are capable of representing themselves . . . people do much better;
express their deeper qualities, when their actions matter. Obviously one
way to make government more meaningful and responsible is to involve
people directly day-by-day, in the process of decision-making, which only
seems possible if we reduce the scale of government. A bioregion seems
28
just the right size.”

One might well speculate about the extent to which the Reagan-Bush
campaign rhetoric about decentralization (never mind the distortions that
followed) tapped into a deep intuition in the American psyche of the value of
local decision-making.

Defending and renewing a bioregion means doing at least two things at
once: “letting go” to the laws of nature, and going to boring meetings.
Because our political structures are, as Peter Berg put it, “welded to the
industrial direction of society”, it means becoming politically astute, as well
as becoming sensitive to the ways of the natural world.

We have, in the Great Lakes Bioregion, an interesting example of political
actions taken on the regional level that could never, in all likelihood, have
been taken nationally. Leaping across international boundaries, eight states
and two Canadian provinces coordinated, in 1984, an initiative to protect the
Great Lakes from further environmental degradation and from water
diversion proposals from other states. In an impassioned speech to
Michigan’s United Conservation Clubs, then Governor Blanchard said, “Great
Lakes water is not a commodity, it is a resource – and we must reject the
dangerous psychology that regards our water as no more than a liquid dollar
sign.”

He then said, “We cannot expect Washington (or Ottawa, ed.) to initiate
measures to protect the Great Lakes. The states and provinces (that border
on the Great Lakes) must take the initiative . . . countless state and
municipal governments abut the Great Lakes. These boundaries are an
artificial distinction of man’s . . . for nature does not respect our
29
boundaries.”

28 Op. Cit. Dodge

29 Blanchard, james, 1984 speech to the United Conservation Clubs of Michigan.

35