Peter Berg is the Director of the Planet Drum Foundation. His writings appear throughout this website. Here is an index to easily locate them.
Peter Berg's Essays, Dispatches, Presentations, Tributes, and Notes on Art
Essays:
 | Amble Toward Continent Congress is a manifesto to overcome the
politics of extinction, the Earth-colonist globalism which exhausts whole continents,
their people, and moves now to devastate deep floors of our planetary oceans. This piece
was distributed with one of the early Planet Drum Bundles, and was written to counter the
patriotic fervor of the US Bicentennial in 1976. [Note: Amble is also available
as part of one of the original Planet Drum bundles. Please
visit our Publications page for more information.] |
| The Bioregional Approach for
Making Sustainable Cities This article discusses sustainable cities'
foundation in ecology and includes a guide for starting the transition
to achieve bioregional sustainability in any city. There is a section
with examples from Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador. |
| Learning to Partner with a
Life-Place is the outline of a first year bioregional curriculum.
It was first published as Dispatch #1 from Ecuador, 2004. |
|
Metamorphosis for Cities is an article by Peter from 1995 that outlined the blueprint for transforming urban areas to bring them into "balanced reciprocity with natural systems." Subsequent work by Planet Drum Foundation in cooperation with the Eco City movement in Ecuador stems from the vision this article described. |
|
New Weather and You appeared in The Messenger, a free newspaper in San Francisco serving independent culture and community. It was published by Independent Arts & Media as part of the Seventh Annual Expo for the Artist & Musician, September, 2006. |
Presentations
|
The Post-Environmentalist Directions of |
| Bioregion and Human Location was a talk
that Peter gave at the University of North Carolina in 1982 (published originally in All
Area #2, Spring 1983). It lays out the argument that "there has to be a new politics
based on reincorporating the social and natural sciences together in a way that is
appropriate for developing a planetarian civilization." |
Dispatches
In his numerous peregrinations, Peter sends us dispatches from distant bioregions, our eyes and ears, a sort-of latter-day combination of Darwin (as chronicler of minute botanical/zoological detail) and Bakunin (as pollinator of the Reinhabitory Movement)
Ecuador
|
The index of Ecuador Dispatches is on the Eco Ecuador Works page. Mexico |
| Bioregionalism Meets Local Autonomy in Mexico reports on the November 1996 Turtle Island Bioregional Gathering (TIBG) in Tepoztlán, Mexico. |
Asia--Japan, China, Mongolia
| August 2001: Reports from the Planet Drum Bioregional Asia Tour by Peter Berg. |
Japan
| Autumn 2004: Japan Dispatches, 2004 |
| Summer 2005: Japan Dispatches, 2005 |
Northeast (USA)
|
October 2005: Dispatch from Planet Drum Foundation's Northeast (USA) Tour in the form of a poem, Hudson Loan. |
Peace Boat (off Baja California)
| October 8, 2006: Finding a Bioregion in the Sea is a Dispatch written while teaching on the Peace Boat. |
Tributes
| Peter Berg's tribute to Raymond F. Dasmann, who died in Santa Cruz, California on November, 2003. |
| Murray Bookchin was
one of the most influential thinkers in the formation of the anarcho-bioregional movement. Peter Berg's homage to this most inscrutable
luminary, August 2006. |
| Meeting Thomas Berry,
Biospherean was written in 2008 to go into a "book of appreciations"
celebrating Berry's 93rd birthday. |
| On January 24, 2001 a memorial for Gregory Corso
was held at the New College in San Francisco. Peter Berg
sent Standing on a Street Corner Doing Nothing is Power
as a Dispatch from Ecuador for that occasion, and it was read there by
Judy Goldhaft . |
| Nanao Sakaki 2008 was an internationally renowned as a contemporary Taoist sage/poet. Peter put together a tribute to him when he died at the end of 2008. |
Notes on Art
| Overview of John Berger |
| Review
of Francois Truffault's Shoot The Piano Player |
| Painter Hiroshi Yoshida’s Bioregional Perception of Place |
Books
| Reinhabiting
a Separate Country |
| Green City Program |
| Discovering
Your Life-Place |
| Envisioning Sustainability |