Perspective matters. What makes a Bioregional Politics different from State-centric thought is the imperative to see things out-side the perspective of the managing class of people. Earlier we thanked the dreamers among us, and were not doing so in a purely rhetorical fashion. Imagination makes reality, and we need to be bold, clear and lucid with our dearest dreams. Gardens and Gardening are essential to the world we need to create; but in addition to the loving care we give to plants we need to articulate the way we will build well loved patches of yard into the institutions to carry us through the turbulent first years of the post-carbon era. In this venture we want to present the models and thinkers that (in our limited perspective) are shaping and have shaped the possibilities of the Emergent Cascadian culture.
We can demarcate three main paths we are taking towards Cascadia
Resistance: What forces are hurting our bioregion and our human kin? Why are so many groups systematically not having their needs met? What are the true causes of social ills and how can we address them as a social body? What kinds of forces make it so difficult to live a principled life in economic certainty? How can we organize against them?
The first part of any resistance is the ideological resistance. Here, the avant-garde works to create new ways of understanding and articulating their thoughts and desires, in order to develop transformative action. Cascadia’s rebel history (from the oral traditions of this land’s indigenous peoples to the pamphlets of the Wobblies to the hyper-linked documentation of the Occupy rebellion) needs to be the basis of our perspective. Cascadia for the last half century has been at the heart of the environmental movement as a whole as well as being a nucleus for militant action in defense of life. Those who have stood for the wild and the people have paid terrible prices and can teach us invaluable lessons. Their stories need to be told so that that the greater narrative of Cascadian Resistance can emerge.
Resilience: What have we as a culture done to the places that we live and how can we restore them? How can we meet our needs as a human population while healing the land? What have people done to create better ways of meeting human needs in Cascadia? How do we create a local food culture in a time of massive land and wealth inequity?
While some have fought the oppressive systems that threaten us, others (and sometimes the same) have opted not to fight but to turn to the land and plan for the day when the river of Babylon runs dry. These organic farmers, permaculturalists, food security activists and even government employees are all part of a food security trend that we need to encourage and put in perspective of bioregional development. In the southern Willamette Valley, plant breeding techniques crushed by the “Green Revolution” (birth of industrialized farming) are being revived to develop new crops for lands where we live. Add to this the youth WWOOFing culture, economic experiments and coops, food webs and community gardens and you can begin to see the outlines of how a localized food system can be defined and supported.
Culture: What binds Cascadian’s together? What is our culture like now and how do we want to change it? What shared identities will help us move into the future we want? What kind of collective action can help build these identities?
Culture forms an inseparable third to the other two categories. Cascadian identity is an emerging subculture made possible by a multitude of experiences and narratives. How do we share these experiences and put them in a context that matters? How do we turn people from a voyeuristic idealization of Nature to an intimate relationship with the beings that make up our world? How can we build our sense of place amongst ourselves? How can we build our values to the point that we will act upon them?