Much of the bioregional vision should appeal to conservative sentiments. As the pitiful remnant of America’s agrarian culture again falls victim to drought and depression, the bioregionalists call for a return to the land, a reconstruction of self-sufficient farm life, and a reverence toward the soil as the organic bond of human generations. As Ortega y Gasset’s revolt of the masses enters its final phase, the bioregionalists stress local self-determination, freedom from the tyranny of mass institutions, and human-scale activities such as potlucks, workbees, and barn dances. In a rootless age, the bioregionalists work toward “reinhabitation,” the recovery of a sense of living-in-place, the restoration of community by force of will, the creation of “new natives.” Movement leaders even claim as ancestors the anti-industrial regionalists of the old South and the Vanderbilt “Southern Agrarians” of the 1930’s.

In truth, though, these are not the children of Calhoun. The movement has more recent origins. The “bioregion” idea was actually born in a 1973 monograph by biologist Raymond Dasmann. He defined the term as an ecologically uniform area where the native species of plants and animals varied by no more than 20 percent. Humans, Dasmann continued, formed natural bonds to such bioregions as they learned to recognize its flora and fauna, to respond to its climatic regime, and to grow familiar with its limits. As another writer from the 1970’s put it, bioregions represent “a terrain of consciousness—a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.” Dasmann predicted that if persons could somehow be freed from the tyranny of industrialism and big government, “some new array of ethnobiotic entities would take the place of the existing nation states.”

The bioregional idea took root among scattered survivors of the 1960’s “counterculture,” and dozens of new entities took shape, including Ozarkia, Cascadia, Siskiyou (northern California), and Katuah (the southern Appalachians). Publications with bucolic tides such as Tilth, Rain, Talking Oak Leaves, and Earthbank wove together the campaign. In May 1984, the first North American Bioregional Congress met in Ozarkia (formerly Missouri), where 200 representatives from 80 bioregions and support organizations carved out a shared agenda. Their platform might best be summarized as ecological anarchism bound to an agrarian romance. The second Congress met this summer in the Great Lakes Bioregion (formerly Michigan) and declared its adherence to a “Green” vision of the future, constructed within the decaying political order.

The antimodernist right, always alert to signs of an authentic back-to-the-land movement, will find any lingering illusions about bioregionalism dispelled by Kirkpatrick Sale’s Dwellers in the Land. The author—best known as the admiring historian of the Students for a Democratic Society—offers a candid explanation of bioregionalism, revealing its agenda as nothing less than the full destruction of Western Christian civilization.

Sale opens with the image of Gaea, “earth mother” to the Greeks, “a living creature, one and visible, containing within itself all living creatures.” Through various contortions of history, he argues that Gaea-styled females have been the natural deities in all healthy human societies and that female goddesses, and probably female priests, were dominant in all early Mediterranean religions. Such female gods brought to their worshipers “a liberating, psychically healthy sense of wholeness, of oneness, of place,” and an awareness of being inhabitants within “a world alive.”

The corruption, Sale argues, came from “the male-god Indo-Europeans” who invaded the Mediterranean world in 4500 B.C. and imposed male monotheism on the inhabitants. The “old, simple, almost vegetable unity between man and nature” collapsed, and “the poisons” of the male gods took its place. In Greece, he says, the triumph of Zeus over Gaea brought ecological disaster, the fall of the Mycenaeans and the Greek Dark Ages. Sale avoids mention of how the Classical Greeks put their civilization back together but does emphasize the “ecological hubris” of the Romans, “whose cumulative assaults on the Mediterranean ecology were almost certainly a central factor in the collapse of their empire.” The worship of male gods and inattention to nature, he says, also brought the destruction of the Sumerians, the Mayans, the T’ang and Han dynasties, and “numerous other imperial peoples who matched the dominance of humans with their dominance of nature.”

Then came the peoples of the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—who battled for two millennia to purge most forms of goddess worship. For Sale, though, the Christians were surely the worst. It was they who abandoned Gaea on an unprecedented scale and gave birth to that vilest of abominations: the scientific world view. “Nature was no longer beautiful or scary,” he writes, “but merely there, not to be worshipped or celebrated, but more often than not to be used . . . by humans, for humans.” Christian Europeans also besoiled the New World, where two continents, “pristine jewels of unimagined glories, were perceived as nothing but empty spaces for unwanted populations, repositories of wanted ores, tracts of trees to fell and fields to plow, virgin territories with no other purpose but to be worked.” Then came nationalism, then capitalism, and the world now stands on the brink of another, yet far greater, ecological catastrophe.

What can be done? Sale is clear: the Abrahamic ascendency must be crushed; science abandoned; the American Imperium destroyed. In their place, we must contrive “the modern equivalent of the worship of Gaea,” learn that the ecosphere is sacred, and discover “a holy way to comfort her and her work.” The beginning of this task is “to become Dwellers in the Land, to relearn the laws of Gaea” in the immediate place where we live. And that, he says, is bioregionalism.

Disillusioned with Marx and Lenin, it seems. Sale has sought consolation in the arms of discarded ancient deities. The loony confrontation in the film Ghostbusters pitting Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray against a reborn Hittite fertility goddess actually bears an uncanny similarity to Sale’s earnest vision of environmental apocalypse and rebirth. That the Sierra Club—respectable if always strident—feels comfortable in publishing a book of this nature is disturbing, symbolic not only of the profoundly dangerous turn that America’s environmental movement has taken but also of the true philosophical sickness that afflicts our tired civilization.

 

[Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, by Kirkpatrick Sale (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books) $14.95]