I am a geographer. I say this if you ever wondered what a geographer looked like, but also because while I love my life in geography, being blinkered into the fragmented world of disciplines (only seeing the world through the discipline of choice) has never been acceptable to me. I see the world as the complex web that it is. Everything is connected. So this book is written with many other "worlds" included so that students outside of geography may find their way into geography, and the study of a holistic and bioregional geography can become a part of their world.
One of the reasons that geography worked for me was because it offered so many other facets than the way geography (states, capital and rivers) was defined by the populace. Geography, to me, was the most holistic of the disciplines. Its advantage was that it was interconnected and without a center. But holism was not the geography I found in the textbooks. I like the idea of a regional geography, the physiographic divisions of Nevin Fenneman [1] were a good and somewhat holistic start, but I knew there was more.
A regional or bioregional geography is a natural way to observe our changing landscape. Regional geography has been a long-standing way to examine the United States and Canada,[2] two contiguous nations sharing a common background and a long peaceful border. Adding bioregionality to the equation follows a path that was first chosen by the two nations when they created the 49th parallel as their dividing line. The line was not arbitrary but an 1818 approximation of the northern and southern watersheds. However, as time went on the divisions for the states and provinces became increasingly political rather than ecological and today we bear the scars of those choices.
But it was not the land alone that created how the region could be divided. The regional divisions of Fenneman were geologic, but climate, vegetation, and culture also followed the regional divides. All come together to form a complex and interconnected pattern that if respected would end many of the "problems" in our countries. If we made decisions based on our regions, climate, vegetation, watersheds and cultures rather than political motivations.....ahhh, but I dream. That is not going to happen. We do not have any new continents to sail to, "discover" and possibly start anew. Nonetheless, I often will ask my classes, "would we change how we have treated our land if we had the chance?" Have we learned? They usually respond that we would continue as we have been - set in the modern mindset of reductionism and fragmentation of knowledge. So perhaps it is time for a new mindset. It has happened before. It was called the Renaissance.
This book therefore, contains references to many disciplines, art, literature, everything from the Rolling Stones, to botany, to Chaos Theory. All had a part in forming our country, our world and need to be examined. There are many authorities to question and good reasons for it, so I have begun to ask: "why are we continuing to live our lives in the same mindset as we have since we were founded?" Many things have changed not the least of which is our population growth (U.S./Canada and the world) and our consumption patterns. Humans are not just consumers meant to use up the natural world for their benefit alone. Humans are individuals who (hopefully) are part of their own and ecological communities. We are a connected part of this world. We need to own up to that. At least that is my opinion, and I offer this book as justification toward that opinion.
America's trip through the light fantastic of world power has brought us to where we are now. Sorry, I see problems with it. We have so much room for learning and thinking. The global economy is a nice dream, but does not seem to be giving people what they need: a sense of worth and belonging to the ecological world.
The American economy has taken an unusual turn for a leading world nation. In the past, colonies played the role of providing primary sector resources to the mother country: Cotton from the Americas to England; mineral resources from African colonies to the ruling nation. The colony provided the primary goods, the mother country manufactured them (The most value added is from the secondary manufacturing sector), and the colony was expected to purchase the finished goods. This made the mother country wealthy and the colony poorer. Riots and revolutions were based on this pattern. And yet in the late twentieth-century American industrialists somehow decided to voluntarily outsource our raw goods to foreign countries. This was done of course to save labor and environmental costs. But what it has done is give other countries, most notably China, the massive profits of the secondary sector. This has devastated the American economy in several ways.
1. Millions of jobs have been lost
2. It has fostered a huge dependence on fossil fuel transport
3. The bulk of the profits have made China the new leading economy
4. The environmental costs are not sent "away" but ultimately are ours. There is no "away," We all live on this one world.
4. The economy is still dependent on the old Industrial Revolution ideas of the late nineteenth century.
Rather than evolve into a new manufacturing economy, one that would lead the world in sustainable cradle-to-cradle production, the Americans decided to send their labor and environmental problems "away," as if there were a wall surrounding the U.S. protecting it from this form of fragmented thinking.
This book seeks another type of economy based on living with the world instead of conquering it. Along the way the book examines who we and our Canadian neighbors are: the geographic bases of our history and settlement, distribution of population and our natural resources. All play a part in how we live in our world, and how we can choose to live.We have outsourced most of our manufacturing and have also made strange choices in food production. We chose to eat foods that were processed and heavy in fats and carbohydrates. The result has been a nation of overweight people.
You will find that there is a larger section on agricultural geography than many of the other books. I am an agricultural geographer, and for a reason. The food we eat is important and what has happened to our food has become, since I started writing this book, a subject that is on many people's minds. It has been on mine from the beginning when I started studying my dissertation subject on the factory farms in Oklahoma. I knew that commoditizing our food was very wrong. I continued to look at our agricultural landscape with questioning eyes. Are we doing with our agriculture, with our food, what is best of Americans and Canadians or what is best of some company's bottom line? There is nothing wrong with making a profit, but at what expense to the common good? Therefore I question the sustainability of many of the crop and livestock choices we have made in the past half century.
I come by my ideas in agriculture by studying with one of my main mentors during the graduation experience (mentors are something every college students should nurture): the iconic agricultural geographer, Professor JF Hart. He taught me the basics and introduced me to his world in the agricultural fields and with the farmers and ranchers of America. But Dr. Hart and I are of two different times, and I found myself questioning some of his principles. We had many a discussion. I knew I was going to go a different route, still using all the knowledge that had been bestowed upon me, but taking a new angle. I searched for and found another voice that I could resound to:
My point is that food is a cultural product; it cannot be produced by technology alone. Those agriculturists who think of the problems of food production solely in terms of technological innovation are oversimplifying both the practicalities of production and the network of meanings and values necessary to define, nurture, and preserve the practical motivations. That the discipline of agriculture should have been so divorced from other disciplines has its immediate cause in the compartmental structure of the universities, in which complementary, mutually sustaining and enriching disciplines are divided, according to "professions." into fragmented, one-eyed specialties. It is suggested, both by the organization of the universities and by the kind of thinking they foster, that farming shall be the responsibility only of the college of agriculture, that law shall be in the sole charge of the professors of law, that morality shall be taken care of by the philosophy department, reading by the English department, and so on. The same, of course, is true of government, which has become another way of institutionalizing the same fragmentation.
However, if we conceive of a culture as one body, which it is, we see that all of its disciplines are everybody's business, and that the proper university product is therefore not the whittled-down, isolated mentality of expertise, but a mind competent in all its concerns. To such a mind it would be clear that there are agricultural disciplines that have nothing to do with crop production, just as there are agricultural obligations that belong to people who are not farmers. [3]
Mr. Berry was speaking to me and many others (I hope!). When I teach in the university my students can expect most anything to enter into the discussion. It is all connected. Offering the connecting tendrils spanning disciplines I hope to pull whatever class I am "professing" to include something that the students can hold onto and find as part of their world. In the process, if we are both lucky, we all learn more. I believe there is hope and offer this book as a start to understanding what the world can be. It is the start of an ecological age as radical a break as the Renaissance was from the Medieval.
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[1] Nevin Fenneman, 1916 and 1928. "Physiographic Divisions of the United States," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 6 (1916); Vol. 18:4 (Dec 1928).
[2] JF Hart, "The Highest form of the Geographer's Art," Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 72:1 (March 1982).
[3] Wallace Berry, The Unsettling of America, Sierra Club Books, 1977. Third edition, 1996, p. 43.