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For Cosmopolitan Bioregionalism www.ecologicalcitizen.net LONG ARTICLE For cosmopolitan bioregionalism This article sketches a vista of human inhabitation within the expanse of the natural world Eileen Crist freed from human physical and discursive ownership. In that future, humanity is downscaled within the ecosphere, where the sixth extinction has been averted, climate change made About the author tractable, and chemical poisons banned. To live bioregionally is to live in concord with Eileen has been teaching the land and in accordance with its affordances; it is to belong with all its members, non- at Virginia Tech in the human and human, equitably and generously. To live as cosmopolitans is to be open to, Department of Science and connected with, and hospitable toward all Earthlings. Also cosmopolitan, in this article’s Technology in Society since 1997. She has written and argument, is the pursuit of self-realization by a creative mash-up of cultural shards – a kind co-edited numerous papers of intra-individual cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan bioregionalism is an imaginary founded and books, with her work on belonging to place and planet. It is a way of life inspired by the desire to remain near focusing on biodiversity Earth’s being and cosmic wealth, with all the existential biddings of respect and delicacy loss and destruction of wild such nearness entails. places, along with pathways to halt these trends. Eileen lives in Blacksburg, VA, USA. “Bioregionalism is the entry of place into the meaning ‘good place’ (eu-topos).1 the dialectic of history. Also we might say Despite the bad rap utopian thought Citation that there are ‘classes’ which have so far regularly gets as wishful speculation, Crist E (2020) For been overlooked – animals, rivers, rocks, creating the contours of ‘good place’ in the cosmopolitan bioregionalism. and grasses – now entering history […] We individual, household or collective mind The Ecological Citizen seek the balance between cosmopolitan is a positive exercise. For even if utopian 3(Suppl C): 21–9. pluralism and deep local consciousness. ideals fail to materialize for any number We are asking how the whole human of reasons – their corruption, unforeseen Keywords race can regain self-determination in circumstances, strong obstacles or Human supremacy; societal place after centuries of having been insufficient willpower – the alternative change; visions disenfranchised by hierarchy and/or to aspiring towards utopia, or good-place centralized power. Do not confuse this vision, is far less desirable. exercise with ‘nationalism,’ which is The default alternative to intentional exactly the opposite, the impostor, the action towards an envisioned destination puppet of the State, the grinning ghost of is to let things happen as they will. Letting the lost community.” things happen as they will tends to mean allowing the past to (more or less) reassert Gary Snyder (1990: 42–3) its clout, colonize the present and manifest itself into (and as) the future. Indeed, inertia is the continuous reiteration of the isions are often associated with past into the future via living in the present utopian thought, both in their with minimal mindfulness or higher V articulation as social ideals and purpose. Letting things happen can signify in their dismissal as castles-in-the-sky helter-skelter living by the seat of one’s doomed to fail given the messiness and pants, lazy thinking that extrapolates inherent imperfection of human life. The from current trends to future realities word ‘utopia’ was intended by its 16th (thus empowering current trends to become century coiner, Thomas More, to mean future realities), and, when problems ‘no place’ (from the Greek ou-topos), arise, navigating haphazardly or muddling while simultaneously leading the ear to through. This pattern of letting things The Ecological Citizen Vol 3 Suppl C 2020 21 For cosmopolitan bioregionalism www.ecologicalcitizen.net happen as they will is pervasive at personal Nature and social levels. The way the international That the natural world does not belong to community has (not) dealt with climate humanity is a self-evident truth. Humans change is a case in point. Letting things have embezzled the planet by means of happen does not make for meaningful the ascension and spread of the worldview living. It disavows the power of intention, of human supremacy, the shared belief- which, when activated, is formidable, system that the human is a distinguished intelligent and generates momentum not and entitled entity invested with absolute simply to arrive at an intended ‘good place’ sovereignty over everything not human. but to feel increasingly empowered, alive Through this worldview’s ideological and awake on the way. brainwash, human beings exercise the At the same time, it is important not to power of life and death over all non- get too specific about envisioning ‘good humans and the prerogative to control all place,’ because that would yield utopia in geographical space. the negative (i.e. unrealizable) sense of the Any person with clear sight can directly word. First, when people get too specific in perceive that non-humans are beings who the articulation of a vision, quibbling over are subjects-of-their-lives, who command the nitty gritty may ensue and the collective respect by their inherent awesomeness and impulse to move enthusiastically in a certain who deserve nothing but our gratitude, direction wanes. Second, when thinkers get love, care and amazement. Non-humans over-detailed in their description of vision, co-create the world in ways that are leeway for a desired destination to emerge experientially extraordinary, ecologically organically and realistically, and to be complex, evolutionarily fecund, materially shaped by future people, will be forestalled. abundant and unutterably beautiful. Therefore, good-place vision must remain Only eyes blinded by a superiority-and- fluid and open, but without losing its entitlement complex, and minds made backbone, without sacrificing its values and shallow by the delusion of human pride, without foregoing its inspirational thrust. are unable to countenance these truths “Ecocentric vision Ecocentric vision must navigate that and experience their full existential must navigate that razor’s edge of being neither too nebulous force. Because human supremacy has nor too specific. Yet ‘seeing-forward’ the yet to be superseded and discarded as razor’s edge of being unfolding of the human sojourn on Earth the disgraceful ideology that it is, non- neither too nebulous can help inspire collective willpower to humans are considered usable, ignorable nor too specific.” move in that direction. In that spirit, I offer or dispensable, treated as though ethical a sketch of cosmopolitan bioregionalism considerations do not apply to them, as an Earth-centric vision for human and reconfigured as resources for taking inhabitation. Its core value is universal or slaying, while their homes can be freedom for all, humans and non-humans. legitimately stolen. Human supremacy As I have argued elsewhere, freedom is has soldered a distorting lens onto human the highest value in existence because it cognition and perception, enabling an enables and empowers cultivation towards ignorant and violent inhabitation of Earth self-realization (Crist, 2015; 2019). Freedom seem sound and normal. is neither a human-concocted nor human- When humans finally free themselves exclusive concept. Human beings discerned, from this dark legacy – and desist from and subsequently conceptually distilled, the behaving like the Ku Klux Klan of planet ideal of freedom by witnessing the living Earth – Earth and all its beings will be set world’s state of being – manifesting in flows free to be who they are, live as they will and of organic and inorganic movement, in become who they may, and our relations unexpected happenings, in life’s rebellions with them will be restored on foundations against confinement and in the creative of goodness and reciprocity. potentiality inherent in constant dynamism At first blush it may appear a non sequitur and becomings. to claim that the above argument entails, 22 The Ecological Citizen Vol 3 Suppl C 2020 www.ecologicalcitizen.net For cosmopolitan bioregionalism among many other changes, the abolition of power over national territory, and this the nation-state. Yet one of the foundational remains largely uncontested as a political pillars of the nation-state is territory – the modality and matter of justice. annexation and subjugation, as national Nation-states empower and authorize property, of a portion of Earth’s body. economic industries – intensive agriculture, Collectively, nation-states are constructed concentrated animal feeding operations, through a jigsaw-puzzle division of Earth mining, forestry, fishing, infrastructure into contiguous segments, with each and manufacturing – to ravage places geographical subdivision belonging to the and Earthlings. Relations among nation- corresponding nation and people. By virtue states, especially in a post-Bretton Woods of their design, nation-states are premised world, have enabled nature’s ravaging to go on a core feature of human supremacy – global. The journalistic platitude that the namely, geographical appropriation and global economy is ‘deregulated’ is hugely occupation for whatever use, purpose or overstated. The global economy is, in fact, whimsy is deemed desirable. governed and facilitated by state power Contemporary liberals, and many on many levels, including: national laws; environmentalists
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