L'Art d'Habiter la Terre : la vision biorégionale

by Kirkpatrick Sale

Imaginons un monde structuré par la diversité culturelle et écologique, plutôt que par des paramètres nationaux et économiques. Sale offre ici une introduction magistrale au biorégionalisme – ce mode d’organisation alternatif de la société, à des échelles de territoires écologiquement salubres, avec des communautés attentives aux individus et des systèmes économiques renouvelables. Sale insiste notamment sur les répartitions naturelles de populations, les modes d’habitat et de soin des bassins-versants, ainsi que sur les propriétés communales et aux responsabilités de la terre. Cet ouvrage invite au développement réaliste de ces communautés biorégionales et des lieux où elles sont établies, afin de mettre en place une société propre à l’épanouissement social et écologique.

Genres: Nonfiction, Urban Planning, Nature, Environment, Politics, Philosophy, Ecology

340 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 1985

Reviews

[Robert Christie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kirkpatrick Sale was a pioneer in ecological consciousness.
Dwellers in the Land posits a "bioregional vision" that anticipates much of the most important ecological thinking that has followed.
It seems increasingly clear that only by restoring local and regional ecosystems around the world and learning to live within the means they provide will offer the best chance for human survival and prosperity (prosperity, that is, of a kind very different from the utopian dreams of glutenous wealth offered up by industrial-consumerist propaganda that currently drives our culture).
Those obsessed with the new may find Sale's work quaint, but it is remarkably enduring and highly relevant today.

[Yvonne Loveday · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book presents the philosophy of place. Found it in an Oregon library in the mid-'80s. Living in place is an ideal I have held ever since. In the intervening years, I have moved from Cascadia Bioregion to Katuah Bioregion. Both places are dear to my heart.

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a number of considerations that this book is missing, and they present some issues.

The first of these is the planned austerity scam we've been living under for quite some time. The great scourge of climate change just so happens to magically displace production from places where a pesky asset-holding middle class needs to be smothered. Climate emissions matter in America, and Western Europe, yet somehow, don't matter in countries where production would be cheaper and less efficiently profited from if there were American and European competition.

If you introduce the inefficiencies of climate considerations, firms pop up elsewhere and outcompete you. Without means to precommit or constrain other territories to the proposed inefficiencies, you'll be faced with an issue in competing.

An issue with restraining yourself to a purposefully smaller organization is that it looks an awful lot like the strategy of empires to squash opposition. The author points to this trend, but doesn't seem to get that it neutralizes threats and that's why it's being imposed. Look into the movement to cut Ukraine off from the Russian Church. Why is this being pushed? To cut up Orthodoxy into more manageable chunks. He even admits this when recounting a conversation with Leopold Kohr on page 132: "by dividing things you make them manageable". Everyone runs around talking about the "sowing of division", and here it is being advocated for. And why even manage? The system of private property manages itself.

The author doesn't seem to get that peoples lived roughly at subsistence levels, then moved towards transgressing against others. How then does subsistence existence prevent transgressing against others? Since we're on this issue: why not burn too many resources in the present to bet on capturing the frugal neighbor's lands and labor?

And how does he propose to centrally plan the relationship of the people to subsistence levels? Do you centrally plan reproduction?

In sum, I'd say the book is naive, and another failed left libertarianism.

[Jean-Sylvain · Rating 4 out of 5]

En son sens le plus basique, le biorégionalisme exprime ces idées essentielles que je crois nécessaire à la survie de l'humanité sur la Terre: la compréhension écologique, la conscience régionale et communautaire, la possibilité de développer un ensemble de sagesse et de spiritualités basées sur la nature, la sensibilité bio-centrée, l'organisation sociale décentralisée, l'entraide et l'humilité des groupes humains. (p. 28)

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good general introduction to the philosophy of bioregionalism, with a look into ancient antecedents. Very scant on the late 20th century on-the-ground efforts, experiments, or campaigns.

[Patrick Heizer · Rating 4 out of 5]

B

[Virginia Angiolini · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very revolutionary book or, as Sale would place it, « evolutionary ».
It made me have a very rare moment of wholeness while I was reading the final chapters.
We’re part of an ecosystem and « defining our purpose » means to define our role within the body of life in order to create some prerequisites conducive to new life.

A story that motivated me to define the « boundaries » of the bioregion in which I live to afterwards studying the strengths and weaknesses of my place.
It reminds me that we cannot save the world, we can only save places.
But when I think about this concept I am also wondering what would happen if everyone would be aware of the bio region in which he/she’s living and would fight to create a new relationship with the ecosystems ?

[Steven McKay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book 25 years ago and loved it at the time. I ought to reread it to see what I think now. Just last week, though, I found myself thinking about this book during a conversation about land use. It clearly had an impact on me.

[Tattered Cover Book Store]

Author/poet/rancher Linda Hasselstrom recomended this book as part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library's "A Reading List For the President Elect: A Western Primer for the Next Administration."

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is kind of dated at this point but it's still one of the few books discussing the issue of scale.