Bioregion
A bioregion is a geographical area defined not by administrative boundaries, but by distinct characteristics such as plant and animal species, ecological systems, soils and landforms, human settlements, and topographic features such as drainage basins. A bioregion can be on land or at sea. The idea of bioregions was adopted and popularized in the mid-1970s by a school of philosophy called bioregionalism, which includes the concept that human culture can influence bioregional definitions due to its effect on non-cultural factors. Bioregions are part of a nested series of ecological scales, generally starting with local watersheds, growing into larger river systems, then Level III or IV ecoregions, bioregions, then biogeographical realm, followed by the continental-scale and ultimately the biosphere.
Within the life sciences, there are numerous methods used to define the physical limits of a bioregion based on the spatial extent of mapped ecological phenomena—from species distributions and hydrological systems to topographic features and climate zones. Bioregions also provide an effective framework in the field of Environmental history, which seeks to use "river systems, ecozones, or mountain ranges as the basis for understanding the place of human history within a clearly delineated environmental context". A bioregion can also have a distinct cultural identity defined, for example, by Indigenous Peoples whose historical, mythological and biocultural connections to their lands and waters shape an understanding of place and territorial extent. Within the context of bioregionalism, bioregions can be socially constructed by modern-day communities for the purposes of better understanding a place "with the aim to live in that place sustainably and respectfully."
Bioregions have practical applications in the study of biology, biocultural anthropology, biogeography, biodiversity, bioeconomics, bioregionalism, bioregional mapping, community health, ecology, environmental history, environmental science, foodsheds, geography, natural resource management, urban Ecology, and urban planning. References to the term "bioregion" in scholarly literature have grown exponentially since the introduction of the term—from a single research paper in 1971 to approximately 65,000 journal articles and books published to date. Governments and multilateral institutions have utilized bioregions in mapping Ecosystem Services and tracking progress towards conservation objectives, such as ecosystem representation.
Background
The first confirmed use of the term "bioregion" in academic literature was by E. Jarowski in 1971, a marine biologist studying the blue crab populations of Louisiana. The author used the term sensu stricto to refer to a "biological region"—the area within which a crab can be provided with all the resources needed throughout its entire life cycle. The term was quickly adopted by other biologists, but eventually took on a broader set of definitions to encompass a range of macro-ecological phenomena.The term bioregion as it relates to bioregionalism is credited to Allen Van Newkirk, a Canadian poet and biogeographer. In this field, the idea of "bioregion" likely goes back much earlier than published material suggests, being floated in early published small press zines by Newkirk, as well as in conversational dialogue. This can be exemplified by the fact that Newkirk had met Peter Berg in San Francisco in 1969 and again in Nova Scotia in 1971 where he shared the idea with Berg. He would go on to found the Institute for Bioregional Research and issue a series of short papers using the term bioregion as early as 1970. Peter Berg, who would go on to found the Planet Drum foundation, and become a leading proponent of "bioregions" learned of the term in 1971 while Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg were staying with Allen Van Newkirk, before Berg attended the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm during June 1972. The Planet Drum Foundation published their first Bioregional Bundle in that year, that also included a definition of a bioregion. Helping refine this definition, Author Kirkpatrick Sale wrote in 1974 that "a bioregion is a part of the earth's surface whose rough boundaries are determined by natural rather than human dictates, distinguishable from other areas by attributes of flora, fauna, water, climate, soils and landforms, and human settlements and cultures those attributes give rise to.
Several other marine biology papers picked up the term, and in 1974 the International Union for Conservation of Nature published its first global-scale biogeographical map entitled "Biotic Provinces of the World". However, in their 1977 article "Reinhabiting California", director of the IUCN and founder of the Man and Biosphere project Raymond Dasmann and Peter Berg pushed back against these global bodies that were attempting to use the term bioregion in a strictly ecological sense, which separated humans from the ecosystems they lived in, specifically naming that Biotic Provinces of the World Map, was not a map of bioregions.
"Reinhabitation involves developing a bioregional identity, something most North Americans have lost or have never possessed. We define bioregion in a sense different from the biotic provinces of Raymond Dasmann or the biogeographical province of Miklos Udvardy. 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."This article defined bioregions as distinct from biogeographical and biotic provinces that ecologists and geographers had been developing by adding a human and cultural lens to the strictly ecological idea.
In 1975, A. Van Newkirk published a paper entitled "Bioregions: Towards Bioregional Strategy for Human Cultures" in which he advocates for the incorporation of human activity within bioregional definitions.
Etymology
Bioregion as a term comes from the Greek bios, and the French region, itself from the Latin regia and earlier regere. Etymologically, bioregion means "life territory" or "place-of-life".Bioregionalism
Bioregions became a foundational concept within the philosophical system called Bioregionalism. A key difference between ecoregions and biogeography and the term bioregion is that while ecoregions are based on general biophysical and ecosystem data, human settlement and cultural patterns play a key role in how a bioregion is defined. A bioregion is defined along the watershed, and hydrological boundaries, and uses a combination of bioregional layers, beginning with the oldest "hard" lines: geology, topography, tectonics, wind, fracture zones and continental divides, working its way through the "soft" lines: living systems such as soil, ecosystems, climate, marine life, and flora and fauna, and lastly the "human" lines: human geography, energy, transportation, agriculture, food, music, language, history, Indigenous cultures, and ways of living within the context set into a place, and its limits to determine the final edges and boundaries. This is summed up well by David McCloskey, author of the Cascadia Bioregion map: "A bioregion may be analyzed on physical, biological, and cultural levels. First, we map the landforms, geology, climate, and hydrology and how these environmental factors work together to create a common template for life in that particular place. Second, we map flora and fauna, especially the characteristic vegetative communities, and link them to their habitats. Third, we look at native peoples, western settlement, and current land-use patterns and problems, in interaction with the first two levels."A bioregion is defined as the largest physical boundaries where connections based on that place will make sense. The basic units of a bioregion are watersheds and hydrological basins, and a bioregion will always maintain the natural continuity and full extent of a watershed. While a bioregion may stretch across many watersheds, it will never divide or separate a water basin. As conceived by Van Newkirk, bioregionalism is presented as a technical process of identifying "biogeographically interpreted culture areas called bioregions". Within these territories, resident human populations would "restore plant and animal diversity," "aid in the conservation and restoration of wild eco-systems," and "discover regional models for new and relatively non-arbitrary scales of human activity in relation to the biological realities of the natural landscape". His first published article in a mainstream magazine was in 1975 in his article Bioregions: Towards Bioregional Strategy in Environmental Conservation. In the article, Allen Van Newkirk tentatively defines a bioregion as: "biologically significant areas of the Earth's surface which can be mapped and discussed as distinct existing patterns of plant, animal, and habitat distributions as related to range patterns and… deformations, attributed to one or more successive occupying populations of the culture-bearing animal....Towards this end a group of projects relating to bioregions or themes of applied human biogeography is envisaged.
For Newkirk, the term "bioregion" was a way to combine human culture with earlier work on biotic provinces. So, he called this new field "regional human biogeography" and was the first to use terms such as "bioregional strategies" and "bioregional framework" for adapting human cultures into a place. This idea was carried forward and developed by ecologist Raymond Dasmann and Peter Berg in an article they co-authored called Reinhabiting California in 1977, which rebuked earlier ecologist efforts to only use biotic provinces, and biogeography, which excluded humans from the definition of bioregion.
Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft founded the Planet Drum Foundation in 1973, located in San Francisco which celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023. Planet Drum, from their website, defines a bioregion as "a geographical area with coherent and interconnected plant and animal communities, and other natural characteristics plus the cultural values that humans have developed for living in harmony with these natural systems. Because it is a cultural idea, the description of a specific bioregion uses information from both the natural sciences and other sources. Each bioregion is a whole 'life-place' with unique requirements for human inhabitation so that it will not be disrupted and injured. People are counted as an integral aspect of a place's life."
At a 1991 Symposium on Biodiversity of Northwestern California, Peter Berg stated "A bioregion can be determined initially by the 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."
Thomas Berry, an educator, environmentalist, activist, and priest, who authored the United Nations World Charter for Nature, and historian of the Hudson River Valley, was also deeply rooted in the bioregional movement, and helping bioregionalism spread to the east coast of North America. In 1984 he wrote "A bioregion is simply an indenfidable geographic area whose life systems are self-contained, self- sustaining and self renewing. A bioregion, you might say, is a basic unit within the natural system of earth. Another way to define a bioregion is in terms of watersheds. Bioregions must develop human populations that accord with their natural context. The human is not exempt from being part of the basic inventory in a bioregion."
Kirkpatrick Sale another early pioneer of the idea of bioregions, wrote in his book Dwellers in the Land, "A bioregion is a part of the earth's surface whose rough boundaries are determined by natural and human dictates, distinguishable from other areas by attributes of flora, fauna, water, climate, soils and land-forms, and human settlements and cultures those attributes give rise to. The borders between such areas are usually not rigid – nature works with more flexibility and fluidity than that – but the general contours of the regions themselves are not hard to identify, and indeed will probably be felt, understood, sensed or in some way known to many inhabitants, and particularly those still rooted in the land."
One of the other early proponents of bioregionalism, and who helped define what a bioregion is, was American biologist and environmental scientist Raymond F. Dasmann. Dasmann studied at UC Berkeley under the legendary wildlife biologist Aldo Leopold, and earned his Ph.D. in zoology in 1954. He began his academic career at Humboldt State University, where he was a professor of natural resources from 1954 until 1965. During the 1960s, he worked at the Conservation Foundation in Washington, D.C., as Director of International Programs and was also a consultant on the development of the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. In the 1970s he worked with UNESCO where he initiated the Man and the Biosphere Programme, an international research and conservation program. During the same period he was Senior Ecologist for the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Switzerland, initiating global conservation programs which earned him the highest honors awarded by The Wildlife Society, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Working with Peter Berg, and also contemporary with Allen Van Newkirk, Dasmann was one of the pioneers in developing the definition for the term "Bioregion", as well as conservation concepts of "Eco-development" and "biological diversity," and identified the crucial importance of recognizing indigenous peoples and their cultures in efforts to conserve natural landscapes.
Because it is a cultural idea, the description of a specific bioregion is drawn using information from not only the natural sciences but also many other sources. It is a geographic terrain and a terrain of consciousness. Anthropological studies, historical accounts, social developments, customs, traditions, and arts can all play a part. Bioregionalism utilizes them to accomplish three main goals:
- restore and maintain local natural systems;
- practice sustainable ways to satisfy basic human needs such as food, water, shelter, and materials; and
- support the work of reinhabitation.