Page 36 - ECOlogic Book

With this speech, Blanchard announced the Great lakes initiative which
sought to unite the various micro-regions around their common concerns for
the region. While this can hardly be called a grass-roots effort, Blanchard
was, without question, responding t grass-roots pressure, and regardless of
what you may think of Blanchard’s environmental record, this initiative
stands as an important example of bioregional political action. Although
concerns of sovereignty presented a difficult hurdle, nationalism such as the
giddy post-war delirium we’ve seen in recent months, had no place here.
Nationalism, as Gary Snyder says, “is the galloping ghost of lost
community.” When our primary concern is for our bioregional community,
flag-waving disappears.

The Great Lakes bioregion, still in danger, is a community of life. It is the
home of the Three Fires Council: the Potawatomi, Ojibwa, and Chippewa
Indians who once lived here (and still do). The Menomini, Ottawa, Sauk,
Fox, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Huron, Tobacco and Neutral Indians also once
roamed this region.. It is an area characterized by lush hardwoods and
conifers that (before the “big cut”) covered this land in dense forests and
oak openings. It is a region of diverse geological formations: Michigan’s
Lower Peninsula lakes have limestone, which can neutralize acid rain; the
Upper Peninsula has granite, which cannot. Walleye Pike, trout and bass,
bald eagle, beaver (before beaver hats became popular), fox and deer were
once abundant here.

To remember these things is to begin the process of Reinhabitation. Though
many of us are of European heritage, we belong to this land. It took the
native people many, many generations to figure it all out, and it ill take us a
long time too. We do, at least, have a species memory to draw upon and
Native American teachers willing to share their wisdom with us. We can
develop in ways that are integral to the natural systems that already exist
here. This is hard work, akin to a spiritual practice. There is a further
deepening, when one begins to sense, with Jim Dodge, “the importance of
natural systems both as the source of physical nutrition, and as the body of
30
metaphors from which our spirits draw sustenance.”

Through these deep connections, we can begin to experience the power of
ceremony, where metaphor comes to life. The spirit ways of native peoples,
their totems, indigenous to each region, make a kind of heart-sense, and as
Dodge says, "There is no single religious practice for this sense of

30 Op. Cit. Dodge

36