“Reinhabiting California” contained the first clear definition of the term bioregion from a reinhabitory perspective and applied it to a specific place, northern California (Shasta Bioregion). It is both a description of and manifesto for northern California as “a separate country”. It was also the first time the term bioregion was defined to include human beings (“a geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness”), and it introduced reinhabitation as the appropriate cultural response for living in a place.
The evolution of this essay involved an important step in the development of bioregional thinking. Much of it was originally written solely by myself as “Strategies for Reinhabiting the Northern California Bioregion” and published in Seriatim (Journal of Ecotopia). Raymond F. Dasmann, chief ecologist at the Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Switzerland, sent it for republication to England’s The Ecologist. According to Dasmann, Edward Goldsmith, who edited that pioneering magazine, wasn’t able to follow the original essay’s style or content. Ray proposed rewriting the beginning and some other parts himself so that Goldsmith could understand it better, and that we then publish it as co-authors. With that suggestion bioregionalism built a bridge between ecological science and cultural change that is essential for its fullest application and development.
—Peter Berg, Envisioning Sustainability (2009)*
Reinhabiting California (with Raymond F. Dasmann)
Reinhabiting A Separate Country, A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California,
Peter Berg, ed.; Planet Drum Books, San Francisco, 1978
A change is taking place in California. The change involves the spread of communities of people who are trying a new approach to living on and with the land. We call this phenomenon reinhabitation, a process that involves learning to live-in-place.
Living-in-place means following the necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a particular site, and evolving ways to ensure long-term occupancy of that site. A society which practices living-in-place keeps a balance with its region of support through links between human lives, other living things and the processes of the planet — season, weather, water cycles — as revealed by the place itself. It is the opposite of a society which makes a living through short-term destructive exploitation of land and life. Living-in place is an age-old way of existence, disrupted in some parts of the world a few millennia ago by the rise of exploitative civilization, and more generally during the past two centuries by the spread of industrial civilization. It is not, however, to be thought of as antagonistic to civilization, in the more humane sense of that word, but may be the only way in which a truly civilized existence can be maintained.
In nearly every region of North America, including most of California, natural life-support systems have been severely weakened. The original wealth of biotic diversity has been largely spent and altered toward a narrow range of mostly non-native crops and stock. Chronic misuse has ruined huge areas of once-rich farm, forest, and rangeland. Wastes from absurdly dense industrial concentrations have left some places almost unlivable. But, regardless of the endless frontier delusion and invader mentality that came to dominate in North America, removing one species or native people after another to make-a-living for the invaders, we now know that human life depends ultimately on the continuation of other life. Living-in-place provides for such continuation. It has become a necessity if people intend to stay in any region without further changing it in ever more dangerous directions.
Once all California was inhabited by people who used the land lightly and seldom did lasting harm to its life-sustaining capacity. Most of them have gone. But if the life-destructive path of technological society is to be diverted into life-sustaining directions, the land must be reinhabited. Reinhabitation means learning to live-in-place in an area that has been disrupted and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place, restore its life-supporting systems, and establish an ecologically and socially sustainable pattern of existence within it. Simply stated it involves becoming fully alive in and with a place. It involves applying for membership in a biotic community and ceasing to be its exploiter.
Useful information for reinhabitants can come from a wide range of sources. Studies of local native inhabitants, in particular the experiences of those who have lived there before, both those who tried to make a living, and those who lived-in-place can contribute. Reinhabitants can apply this information toward shaping their own life patterns and establishing relationships with the land and life around them. This will help determine the nature of the bioregion within which they are learning to live-in-place.
Reinhabitation involves developing a bioregional identity, something most North Americans have lost or have never possessed. The term refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness — to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place. Within a bioregion the conditions that influence life are similar and these in turn have influenced human occupancy.
A bioregion can be determined initially by use of climatology, physiography, animal and plant geography, natural history and other descriptive natural sciences. The final boundaries of a bioregion are best described by the people who have lived within it, through human recognition of the realities of living-in-place. All life on the planet is interconnected in a few obvious ways, and in many more that remain barely explored. But there is a distinct resonance among living things and the factors which influence them that occurs specifically within each separate place on the planet. Discovering and describing that resonance is a way to describe a bioregion.
The realities of a bioregion are obvious in a gross sense. Nobody would confuse the Mojave Desert with the fertile valley of Central California, nor the Great Basin semi-arid land with the California coast. Between the major bioregions the differences are sufficiently marked that people do not usually attempt to practice the Sonoran desert way of life in the Oregonian coastal area. But there are many intergradations. The chaparral-covered foothills of Southern California are not markedly distinct from those of the coast ranges of Northern California. But the attitudes of people and the centers to which they relate (San Francisco vs. Los Angeles) are different and these can lead to different approaches to living on the land.
The northern California bioregion is ringed by mountains on the north, east and south and extends some distance into the Pacific Ocean on the west. Since the boundaries depend in part on human attitudes they cannot be clearly mapped. These attitudes however, have been persistent since prehistoric times. The region is separated from Southern California by the barrier of the Tehachapi Mountains and their extension through the Transverse Ranges to Point Conception on the seaward side. Flora and fauna change to some extent on either side of this boundary, but human attitudes are more important in the separation. Eastward, the region is enclosed by the Sierra Nevada which stops the rain and defines the dry Nevadan bioregion. Northward the volcanic Cascade Range and the geologically ancient Klamath Mountains separate the Oregonian bioregion. Along the coast the boundaries are fuzzy, but one could draw a line at the northern limit of the coastal redwood forests, at Oregon’s Chetco River.
Biologically the California biotic province, which forms the heart of the bioregion, is not only unique but somewhat incredible — a west coast refuge for obscure species, full of endemic forms of plants and animals. It is a Mediterranean climatic region unlike any other in North America. It is a place of survival for once widespread species as well as a place where other distinct forms evolved. Anthropologically it is also unique, a refuge for a great variety of non-agricultural peoples on a continent where agriculture had become dominant.
During the century and a half that invader society has occupied northern California, a primary sense of location has been provided by surveyors dividing up the land. We know more about property lines than we do about the life that moves under, over, and through them. People are bombarded with information about the prices of things, but seldom learn their real biospheric costs. They are encouraged to measure the dimensions of things without ever learning their places in the continuity of bioregional life.
Within the bioregion is one major watershed, that of the Sacramento-San Joaquin river system which drains from all of the Sierra-Nevada, Cascade, and interior Coast Ranges and flows through the broad plain of the Central Valley.
Coastally, smaller watersheds are significant, those of the Salinas, Russian, Eel, Mad, Klamath and Smith rivers. The Klamath River is anomalous in that it drains from an area that belongs to a different bioregion. So too does the Pit River which joins the Sacramento. Otherwise the drainage systems help to define and tie together the life of the bioregion, and the characteristics of watersheds point to the necessities which those who would live-in-place must recognize.
Our real period of discovery has just begun. The bioregion is only barely recognized in terms of how life systems relate to each other within it. It is still an anxious mystery whether we will be able to continue living here. How many people can the bioregion carry without destroying it further? What kinds of activities should be encouraged? Which ones are too ruinous to continue? How can people find out about bioregional criteria in a way that they will feel these exist for their mutual benefit rather than as an imposed set of regulations?
Natural watersheds could receive prominent recognition as the frameworks within which communities are organized. The network of springs, creeks, and rivers flowing together in a specific area exerts a dominant influence on all nonhuman life there; it is the basic designer of local life. Floods and droughts in northern California remind us that watersheds affect human lives as well, but their full importance is more subtle and pervasive. Native communities were developed expressly around local water supplies and tribal boundaries were often set by the limits of watersheds. Pioneer settlements followed the same pattern, often displacing native groups with the intention of securing their water.
Defining the local watershed, restricting growth and development to fit the limits of water supplies, planning to maintain these and restore the free flowing condition of tributaries that are blocked or the purity of any which have been polluted and exploring the relationships with the larger water systems connecting to it could become primary directions for reinhabitory communities. They could view themselves as centered on and responsible for the watershed.
People have been part of the bioregion’s life for a long time. The greatest part of that time has been a positive rather than negative experience for other life sharing the place. In describing how as many as 500 separate tribal republics lived side by side in California for at least 15,000 years without serious hostility toward each other or disruption of life-systems around them, Jack Forbes points out a critical difference between invaders and inhabitants in the California Historical Quarterly (Sept. 1971). “Native Californians…felt themselves to be something other than independent autonomous individuals. They perceived themselves as being deeply bound together with other people (and with the surrounding non-human forms of life) in a complex interconnected web of life, that is to say, a true community…. All creatures and all things were…brothers and sisters. From this idea came the basic principle of non-exploitation, of respect and reverence for all creatures, a principle extremely hostile to the kind of economic development typical of modern society and destructive human morals. (It was this principle, I suspect, which more than anything else preserved California in its natural state for 15,000 years, and it is the steady violation of this principle which, in a century and a half, has brought California to the verge of destruction.)”
Reinhabitants are as different from invaders as these were from the original inhabitants. They want to fit into the place, which requires preserving the place to fit into. Their most basic goals are to restore and maintain watersheds, topsoil, and native species, elements of obvious necessity for in-place existence because they determine the essential conditions of water, food, and stable diversity. Their aims might include developing contemporary bioregional cultures that celebrate the continuity of life where they live, and new region-to-region forms of participation with other cultures based on our mutuality as a species in the planetary biosphere. Shifting to a reinhabitory society, however requires basic changes in present-day social directions, economics, and politics.
Economics
Northern California is biologically, rich, perhaps the richest bioregion in North America. Its present-day economics are generally based on exploiting this richness for maximum short-term profits. The natural systems that create conditions of abundance in the region are both short-term and long-term. There is water, and it usually comes every year. There’s good soil, but it took thousands of years to form. There are still some great forests left but they grew over centuries; and none have fully recovered that were logged in historical times.
Reinhabitory economics would seek sufficiency rather than profit. They might be more aptly termed ecologics since their object is to successfully maintain natural life-system continuities while enjoying them and using them to live. Most current forms of economic activity that rely on the bioregion’s natural conditions could continue in a reinhabitory society, but they would be altered to account for the short and long-term variations in their cycles.
The Central Valley has become one of the planet’s food centers. The current scale of agriculture there is huge; thousands of square miles under constant cultivation to produce multiple annual crops. Fossil-fuel-dependent heavy equipment appears at every stage of farming operations, and there is a steadily rising rate of artificial fertilizer use. Most of the land is owned or leased by absentee agribusiness corporations. It’s a naturally productive place. Northern California has a temperate climate, a steady supply of water, and the topsoil is some of the richest in North America. But the current scale of agriculture is untenable in the long-term. Fossil fuel and chemical fertilizer can only become more expensive, and the soil is simultaneously being ruined and blown away.
There needs to be a massive redistribution of land to create smaller farms. They would concentrate on growing a wider range of food species (including native food plants), increasing the nutritional value of crops, maintaining the soil, employing alternatives to fossil fuels, and developing small-scale marketing systems. More people would be involved, thereby creating jobs and lightening the population load on the cities.
Forests have to be allowed to rebuild themselves. Clear-cutting ruins their capability to provide a long-term renewable resource. Watershed-based reforestation and stream restoration projects are necessary everywhere that logging has been done. Cut trees are currently being processed wastefully; tops, stumps, and branches are left behind, and whole logs are shipped away to be processed elsewhere and sold back in the region. Crafts that use every part of the tree should be employed to make maximum use of the materials while employing a greater number of regional people. Fisheries have to be carefully protected. They provide a long-term life-support of rich protein, if used correctly, or a quickly emptied biological niche, if mishandled. Catching fish and maintaining the fisheries have to be seen as parts of the same concern. Reinhabitory consciousness can multiply the opportunities for employment within the bioregion. New reinhabitory livelihoods based on exchanging information, cooperative planning, administering exchanges of labor and tools, intra- and inter-regional networking, and watershed media emphasizing bioregional rather than city-consumer information could replace a few centralized positions with many decentralized ones. The goals of restoring and maintaining watersheds, topsoil, and native species invite the creation of many jobs to simply un-do the bioregional damage that invader society has already done.
Politics
Beginning with the Spanish Occupation, the distinctiveness of Northern California’s ongoing bioregional life has been obscured by a succession of alien super-identities. The place to fit into simply wasn’t recognized.
First, it was part of New Spain, a designation that tells nothing of this specific place and lumps it with a dozen barely related bioregions radiating out from the Caribbean. California was a fictional island created by a 16th century Spanish novelist and it became the next rough label pasted over the bioregion when it was adopted for the Pacific side of New Spain. Alta California actually approximated the bioregion by accident; its real use was simply to acknowledge further Spanish explorations above the “baja.” Mexico held it (along with half the western U.S.) in the early 19th century, but since the middle of last century almost the whole bioregion has been included in the annexed portion of Mexican territory that was sliced out as the State of California along with totally foreign pieces of the Great Basin desert and similarly dry stretches below the Tehachapi Mountains.
The bioregion that exists largely in what is now called northern California has become visible as a separate whole, and, for purposes of reinhabiting the place, it should have a political identity of its own. It is predictable that as long as it belongs to a larger state it will be subject to southern California’s demands on its watersheds. Its rivers already run through pipes to Los Angeles. Its control over use of the Central Valley is preempted by policies tailored for southern monocultures. From a reinhabitory point of view, both are bioregional death threats. Elections over the last decade have shown a distinct difference in voting sentiments between northern and southern California. It is likely that this difference will continue and increase on vital bioregional issues on which the population weight of southern California will prevail.
The bioregion cannot be treated with regard for its own life-continuities while it is part of and administered by a larger state government. It should be a separate state. As a separate state, the bioregion could redistrict its counties to create watershed governments appropriate to maintaining local life-places. City-county divisions could be resolved on bioregional grounds. Perhaps the greatest advantage of separate statehood would be the opportunity to declare a space for addressing each other as members of a species sharing the planet together and with all the other species.
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*There are several versions of “Reinhabiting California.” This is the final one edited by Peter. It includes his introduction to the essay, the section about politics and the quotes from Jack Forbes.
References
1. Berg, Peter, editor, 1978. Reinhabiting a separate country. California Arts Council. Planet/Drum, San Francisco.
2. Dasmann, R.F., 1973. A system for defining and classifying natural regions for purposes of conservation IUCN Occ. Paper 7, 47 pp., IUCN, Morges, Switzerland.
3. Forbes, Jack D., 1971. The native American experience in California History. California Historical Quarterly September, pp. 234-242.
4. Udvardy, Miklos D.F., 1975. A classification of the bio geographical provinces of the world IUCN Occ. Paper 18, 48 pp., IUCN, Morges, Switzerland.