Starting From and Staying with the Nature of Place

"Watershed maps are community maps." [o]

This essay is based on a keynote address by the author given at the Freshwater Summit in Traverse City, Michigan on October 30, 2025.

A disclaimer: I speak only for myself. I represent no organization, party, or institution. I was invited to talk about bioregionalism, and will offer the personal reflections, opinions, and hopes of a freelance writer who's a longtime bioregionalist. Though I am boundlessly grateful to the countless activists, authors, thinkers and doers who've taught me over the last fifty years, I'm solely responsible for my remarks.

Now. It is right and necessary always to acknowledge that this land, these watersheds, are located on the ancestral, traditional, and contemporary lands of the Anishinnabeg, who today are represented by the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians. Since time immemorial, these nations have lived, honored, worked in, and respected this place. Migwech.

Land acknowledgement and water protection count as core bioregional practices. They direct us to respect and honor the living earth and to learn from the people who have dwelled in these forests and along these shores for time out of mind, and who live here now.

In The Accidental Reef, what Lynn Healey wrote of the Bkejwanong and Aamjiwnaang First Nations down on the St. Clair River might be said of the Anishinaabeg up north as well: "perhaps their most powerful storying, their most radical act of resistance and renewal was this," she wrote. “They stayed.”

We look to our surroundings. We try to learn the patterns and flows, the lay of the land and the land-use history.

My late friend Richard Nelson's Koyukon hunting mentor in interior Alaska told him, "everything out there knows way more than you do," because most living creatures have been at their infinitely varied and intertwined ways of being a lot longer than our young species. Respect and humility in the presence of Others are always appropriate.

Likewise, every one of you, full of experience and expertise, knows something more than I do. Whatever you're doing, some heartfelt concern for water — essential, real, and sacred — most likely animates and sustains your commitment. What an awesome responsibility to study and care for the health of these inland seas and for the many beings that swim, nest near, and ply their predator-prey business in this place!

I honor you for your work and devotion. I hope some of these thoughts on bioregionalism will inspire your imagination and creativity, offer some encouragement and possibilities. This morning I can't begin to hint at the scope of the bioregional kinds of work going on around Turtle Island and Planet Earth.

It's quite a moment. Earth systems and human societies are stressed beyond tipping points. There's talk of collapse. The velocity of change tests our mettle to the utmost. In this perilous time, the imperatives are so many: The shift to renewable energy, wildlands preservation, population decline, watershed restoration, justice for all, the reclamation of democracy and the relocalization of governance and economies. My sense is that bioregions can offer tangible, coherent scales and frames of reference for these by keeping nature (the bio) and and terrain (the region) as the primary, but not exclusive, arena of concern.

Bioregionalists speak of reinhabitation: This means restoring or regenerating ecosystems and finding or rediscovering the ways and means of living well, as integral parts of naturally defined terrains, like watersheds. We call them life places. We look to our surroundings. We try to learn the patterns and flows, the lay of the land and the land-use history. We ask what forms of subsistence were and are practiced here? How might these inspire, or be adapted going forward? Starting from and staying with what we can learn from nature in our watersheds, our life places, the idea is to live in ways that are materially simple and inwardly rich. 

A few hundred years ago, people here lived pretty sustainably. Indeed, all over the planet indigenous people had myriad place-specific cultures. They may have appeared primitive but were highly sophisticated lifeways. While there's no going back, the capacity to live in reciprocity with nature, to learn from it, work with it, suffer the hard lessons, and experience communion with all beings is part of our evolutionary endowment. Knowing that can help one face today's daunting realities and envision good ways of life amid the ruins of the old. We are made for this.

It's about staying with the questions "Who are we? Where are we? What are we going to do about it?"

Water is life. We should know that in our very bones. The image attached below was taken by the late Dave Egan, an ecological restorationist and great friend, on a walk at Good Harbor Bay. When it's warm enough, I swim in those waters. Living here, in the midst of much of the fresh water on the planet, it's hard to imagine water scarcity or absolute contamination. Yet in cities and counties not so far south of here, water is toxic or privatized. Encouraging city and country people to perceive the connections, from the intake pipe or well, to the tap or the toilet, to the septic tank or the sewer has been basic to bioregionalism from the beginning. Fresh, clean water should be a natural right. It's a matter of justice and survival.

Good Harbor Bay, Michigan. Photo by Dave Egan.

In the fifty years since bioregional ideas began to percolate out on the Pacific Coast, from Shasta to Cascadia, and in the Ozarks, in the Kaw and Hudson River watersheds, up in the Gulf of Maine, here in the Great Lakes, and the Po valley in Italy, countless variations have sprung up around the world. Planet Drum Foundation's website publishes a directory of bioregional and watershed groups and projects. You're invited to list yours.

It's not easy to define bioregionalism. It's a countercultural movement, a value system, an orientation, a paradigm and a philosophy. Bioregionalism and "bioregioning" are the antithesis of generic, off-the-shelf programs. It's not technique or dogma, but place-based and adaptive. There are practices ranging from mapping to Green City directories to seed saving to youth programs running native plant nurseries. Bioregionalists join campaigns and coalitions to support and defend their life places. There are seasonal gatherings, online linkages, and even a Cascadian soccer team. It's empowering, participatory, and prefigurative, meaning that bioregionalists try to walk their talk. Individuals and neighborhoods, families, and organizations are engaged in doing pieces of the work to reinhabit their life places. Roses by many other names also smell as sweet.

In the 1970s, when I was a working ecology activist out in San Francisco, I became a bioregionalist. Then as now, and of necessity, grassroots alternatives flourished under the radar and all across the land: actions like recycling and composting, and demonstration projects like Berkeley's Integral Urban House. There were backyard organic food gardens and rabbit hutches. There were co-ops and communes, and moves back to the land. There was spit-and-baling wire improvisation of alternative and intermediate technologies. There were household energy conservation tricks, and pious anti-consumerist frugality. There were periodicals, ephemeral publications, and inspiration from bards and native peoples: Such were and are some of the elements of a simpler, if not easier, but more sustainable way of life.
 
It's no coincidence that the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth study¹, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and bioregionalism's beginnings shared an historic moment: those early 70s. That was when Planet Drum founder Peter Berg and the conservation biologist Raymond Dasmann began to articulate the tenets of reinhabitation. Bioregionalism differed from conventional environmentalism. The assumption was that globalized industrial civilization would prove to be unreformable.    

For hundreds of thousands of years the the matrix of our evolution was the ethos of human species groups living lightly and cooperatively, in loose terrains, by deep understanding of the natural communities to which they belonged. That ethos of subsistence through intimacy with place was forcibly and persuasively overpowered by modernity. Overpowered, but not negated. The exploitation of fossil fuels accelerated what was advertised as progress and the twentieth century's two World Wars revolutionized technology and trade, seeming to overturn what Stewart Brand dismissed as "the tyranny of geography". Our beginning to live what author Helena Norberg-Hodge, in her book Ancient Futures², calls “local futures” seems more likely to me. Sustaining the cultural and ecological diversity that persists, and working to regenerate our much-changed, multicultural life places, cities included, is the human species endeavor we're called to now.

Maps can be political. And maps can be revelatory. Mapping can be liberatory. It has been a basic bioregional activity to peel the lines off the maps. Unlike river basins or biomes, geopolitical borders are abstract, negotiated, sometimes arbitrary. Their geometries can slice through natural systems. But like rivers, deltas and coasts, they, too, are subject to change. We need to be able to understand place, not only as defined by surveyors and governments and property lines but as sketched by watersheds and landforms and ecosystems. Even in the flux of global warming and the extinction crisis, bioregions can be knowable terrains with resonant identities.

The Cascadia bioregion map defines the Pacific Northwest of North America by the watersheds of the Columbia, Fraser, and Snake River valleys from South East Alaska to Northern California, and from the crest of the continental divide to the Pacific coast westward as far as salmon swim. The map is by geographer Szűcs Róbert and available on the Cascadia Department of Bioregion website.

While nation states have their own rules and realities, bioregionalism peaceably addresses these life places, looking to revive their ecosystems and encourage mutual aid. Peter Berg's precepts were "Restore natural systems, meet basic needs, and support individuals". Thus we seek opportunities to restore essential local economic activity, especially food growing. The search image is: Largely self-reliant bioregional economies predicated on genuinely renewable flows of energy and materials. 

Seeing globalization falter, bioregionalists, among many others, anticipate the decentralizing, devolving, and relocalizing of our societies, hoping to steer the process towards life — the bio — and the notion of Beloved Community³. If our societies, permeably bounded by natural features, are scaled to our surroundings, some local approaches can fail without taking the whole ecoregion or biosphere down.

Bioregions are appropriate realms for adapting to inevitable resource constraints. Tom Bender, a long-ago champion of appropriate technology and energy frugality spoke of Sharing Smaller Pies. In our post-fossil fuel future, many right livelihoods will be found in reclaiming, repurposing, restoring, and raising the materials necessary to meet basic needs for healthy food, clean water, and comely shelter. The need for skillful, earth-savvy, muscular work is apt to be great.

Besides the grass-roots, life place politics, I was drawn to bioregionalism by the intense amateur interest in natural history, meaning what's naked-eye observable. Activities like belly botany, birding, fungus foraging, beach combing, and bug watching were all promoted and could lead to nature-knowledge pride. One heuristic is the famous "Where You At?" Quiz, first published in 1981 in CoEvolution Quarterly. It betrays its origins in the Shasta bioregion with the killer question about grasses. Here it might be about sedges. Learning the plants, and how to recognize tracks and scat, birdsongs and frog calls is all part of reclaiming the authority of our senses and the pleasure and wonder they can bring. 

Bioregionalism has long been about healing the dominant culture's ruinous alienation from nature. Bioregionalists honor wild, or self-willed nature, as a wellspring of beauty, challenge, resilience, and spontaneity. Wild and free places are the beating hearts of bioregions for their astonishing manifestations of life's diversity and its sublime, dynamic equilibrium. 

"Old growth landscapes represent nature's living memory," said Freeman House, a restorationist of the Mattole watershed in northern California. "Once they're gone, we will not be able to re-imagine their elegant complexities.” In an age of extinctions, saving native and endemic species in their habitats, and linking those places is urgent work. If we ally ourselves with our bioregions' living creatures and with the waters of our shores, creeksheds, and lake basins, they may teach us how to follow their logic and necessity upstream and inland to save the whole by saving the parts.

Acre by acre, woodland by woodland, marsh by marsh, these communities may revive to afford some natural provision for our species.

Bioregions are life support systems. In a time of technological encasement we need to be reminded that our lives are utterly dependent on other beings and natural processes. Without the microbiomes of soils, without the vultures, fungus, and beetles that tidy up and turn death into life, without the bats that devour disease-carrying mosquitoes, without the riparian vegetation that cleanses the runoff, without the inland forests exhaling oxygen, we two-leggeds are toast.

A joyful, compelling way to invite interest in, and solidarity with a bioregion's more-than-human community is the All Species Parade. The first was organized in San Francisco in 1978. New Mexican bioregionalist Chris Wells ran with and promoted the idea. Ever since, here and there, bioregionalists have mounted them. For a decade in the nineties they were part of Earth Day in Traverse City.

The community, especially kids, comes together to learn something about the shapes and forms, habits, and associations of the other living creatures in the vicinity. With paint, papier-mache, cardboard, thrift-store fabrics, and with help from artists and teachers, participants make costumes to impersonate and celebrate those beings. Then there's a parade down Main, or Front Street. It's fun, it's home-grown, it taps our talents and it affirms all manner of diversity — of ages, abilities, and understanding. Low carbon footprint, high spirits!

Lyla June Johnson, a brilliant young Dineh scholar of the many subtle and sustainable ways that indigenous peoples have cultivated and tended their lands, leads off "Thriving Where We Live", a recent video panel offered by Resilience⁴. She says "Don't be afraid. Life knows how to do life." Given half a chance, refuges of natural diversity — like many of our parks, conservancies, and public lands — can stabilize and become seed banks. Life knows how to do life. By and by, acre by acre, creekshed by creekshed, woodland by woodland, marsh by marsh, those communities may revive to afford some natural provision for our species — and countless others.
 
In preparing for this talk, I lost count of all the organizations hereabouts that are doing what could be seen as bioregional activity. There's a lot of good work towards being part of nature as learners and helpers. It all matters. There's the adaptive realism and citizen science of Assisted Tree Range Expansion⁵, which acknowledges that climate change and biotic invasions are remaking our forests, while striving to keep this a woodland biome. There's the willingness of householders to plant native wildflowers in pollinator gardens.

There are efforts like the plover protection and monitoring going on at the National Lakeshore, which may yet bring that brave and endearing migratory bird back from extinction's brink. There's the work by tribes and others to reinstate the mighty sturgeon to the Great Lakes aquatic ecosystem. These wild and sacred beings  —  and the grayling, whitefish, lake trout, sandhill cranes and wood frogs, the bobcats and coyotes, monarch butterflies, flying squirrels, and the troops of warblers nesting and moving through —  all these and others truly merit our care and devotion.

A landscape immediately following the clearing of a pine plantation in the Northeast Bioregion of Tasmania, Australia, and the same landscape four years after restoration. [o]

I see Great Lakes and Michigan peninsula maps on many rear windshields around here. Maybe we can build on the attachment to place they bespeak. Bioregional community organizing entails good faith dialogue with our neighbors, even if we disapprove of what they're doing in their yards. Can we enhance and inform that sense of place by encouraging a shared sense of loyalty to place without xenophobia? And while doing so, welcome new arrivals willing to join in restoring natural systems, meeting basic human needs, and supporting individuals? 

In light of the multitude of crises breaking in our time, almost everything about our ways of life needs revision. How can we illuminate and rectify the downstream consequences of our actions? There remains no way to do it but one day at a time, from the ground up, and imperfectly. It may seem like it's never enough. We cycle through grief, practice gratitude, and muster up some grit, again and again. It matters immensely to make common cause with a native species like the sturgeon, or to tend a wild preserve or organize a city neighborhood for composting, car pooling, tool sharing, conflict resolution, or child care. The magnitude of the changes we're called to make is very great. How else can we make them but daily, and in physical communities?

Facing disastrous times calls for wisdom and courage. I got some from a young friend, effectively a bioregionalist. She's a working mother who organizes seasonal commemorations, back yard theatricals, and folkloric choirs. She publishes zines, fostering physical, hyper-local social media, cheap and fun, still readable during power outages. 

She wrote, "Don't flinch away from the terrible beauty of it all, or from the human actions causing the destruction. Don't live as if the world wasn't burning, but as if a burning world was still worth living in (it is).” ≈ç

NOTES

1. The Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth study used a computer model to predict that continued exponential growth in population, industrialization, resource use, and pollution would lead to a global collapse by the 21st century. The study concluded that unchecked expansion would exceed the Earth's carrying capacity and that a transition toward global equilibrium was necessary to avoid this outcome.

2. Ancient Futures: Lessons from Ladakh for a Globalizing World. Helena Norberg-Hodge's 1991 book about the impact of modernization on the traditional Ladakhi culture in the Himalayas. The book uses the story of Ladakh to critique the global economy and advocate for the localization movement. However, the term "ancient future" can also refer to other concepts, such as the book Ancient Future by Wayne B. Chandler, which examines ancient Egyptian Hermetic principles, or the broader theme of blending ancient wisdom with future possibilities.

3. Beloved Community is a concept popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. that describes a society in which all people are cared for, and where conflict is resolved nonviolently. It is a vision of social equity, peace, and freedom from prejudice, where basic needs are met and where everyone is respected and has the opportunity to thrive.

4. "Thriving Where We Live" gets discussed in a recent video panel.

5. Assisted Tree Range Expansion (ATRE) is a conservation strategy that involves human assistance to help tree species move beyond their current geographical range in response to climate change. It involves planting trees in areas adjacent to their established range where the climate is projected to become suitable, mimicking natural range expansion that might be hindered by fragmented landscapes.

STEPHANIE MILLS, a longtime bioregionalist, was Assistant Editor and Editor at CoEvolution Quarterly from 1980 to 1982. She moved to Northwest Lower Michigan in 1984 where she joined the counterculture, helped build her house, started a local currency and wrote seven books.