Sch-Dwellers in Land

Weary of the American dream, of the nightmarish destination of the natural world, I looked for another way of life and discovered bioregionalism. All sources pointed to this book, a 1991 classic introduction. And rightly so: it covers the economic, political, and societal necessities for change: things that have not gone of out date over the past two decades. The fact is our planet cannot sustain the American consumerist lifestyle for six-plus billion people. This book presents a better way.

If you've come to suspect that most of the world's problems--pollution, warfare, crime, transnational piracy, mental illness--are inherent in a civilization in decline, you might like this vision of small, face-to-face communities living in respectful accord with the natural world.The author makes the same point as ecopsychologists and the great whale researcher Roger Payne: built by millions of years of evolution to live in close contact with the wilderness, we who have penned ourselves behind fences and buildings carry with us a ten-thousand-year-old wound....a self-inflicted wound of aching alienation (hence our tendency to alienate--to marginalize--other people).Read this book, then tour the decidedly un-zoolike San Diego Wild Animal Park while seeing how you feel there. For some this might offer a glimpse of a sanity so centering that you can feel it throughout your body.

Kirkpatrick Sale has written a vision of the future that should be drilled into politicians' subconscious and taught in grade school. Sustainable, sane, ecologically minded bioregions. I was particularly struck by his definition of "querencia"--"a deep, quiet sense of inner well-being that comes from knowing a particular place of the earth, its diurnal and seasonal patterns, its fruits and scents, its history and its part in your history . . . where, whenever you return to it, your soul releases an inner sigh of recognition and relaxation." Sale is a wonderful writer, balanced in perspective, and able to distill complex problems into a form that the average mind can comprehend, despite all the arguments pro and con. Read it.