Brian Holmes on Wed, 12 Jul 2017 15:59:40 +0200 (CEST)


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<nettime> Bioregions (was: Democracy is not possible...)

Well, the bioregion is definitely not the nation, but it is the outside in you! So maybe outernationalism comes home in bioregions?
I and an Argentinean friend, Alejandro Meitin, tried a true outernationalist collaboration, which is a shared map of our respective river basins. He lives at the mouth of the Paraguay-Parana river, and I live on the divide between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi: 

http://ecotopia.today/livingrivers/map.html

http://ecotopia.today/riosvivos/mapa.html
As long as we accept that the human purpose is to accumulate more than your neighbor and the devil take the consequences, well, democracy wil not only remain impossible, but also, the attempt to totally artificialize and mortify the earth will go on toward its predictable conclusion. So anyway, our work was about turning science into sensitivity and competition into collaboration. My part mainly delved into the amazing environmental science that is publicly produced in North America. Alejandro has been doing grassroots campaigns for twenty-five years, and he has the idea that it is not the state and the corporations, but instead, the local inhabitants who maintain the dynamic equilibrium of the territory. Both of us are extremely critical, but not only.
I am actually off for a few days in the woods without internet but glad to see the word bioregions on this list! I am totally curious who might right back. Surely Frederic has something interesting to say about it, and anyone who wants, feel free to contact me with your projects and inventions and tales... 

BH

On 07/12/2017 12:45 AM, jan hendrik brueggemeier wrote:

dear nettimers -

i am very curious about and would very much appreciate to hear some
views on the concept of the "bioregion" in the context of this thread
about "outernationalism" (Frédéric).

this is not meant as "the solution" to the humanitarian crisis we are in
(including finding the much needed rallying cry) but more like as a
productive concept to work through...

i guess one way to look at it would be my immediate environment as the
extension of my body and the bioregion as the extension of the local
environment, inter-bioregions > ... > global > interplanetary etc

it is, of course, at this stage more of a scientific concept than a
cultural one.

cheers,
jan

On 12/7/17 12:18, Brian Holmes wrote:

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 5:49 AM, Frederic Neyrat <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

     the question is: how to refuse simultaneously the authoritarian
     Euroland and any sort of nationalism? The only answer is: with a new
     form of internationalism. On which basis? The fact that a human (I
     continue here another nettime conversation) is always more than a
     mere human, that a local place is fortunately more than itself, that
     a political fight contains an "ideological" surplus that connects it
     to other places, etc. We need a narrative able to give a face to
     this surplus, this "more than", and we also - more than anything
     else - need a people of tellers able to produce this Great Narrative.


This is true common sense, the great missing rallying cry from which
everything else can spring.

I see it exactly as you do, Frederic. Everything that inspires me to go
on working and loving and striving in the national context comes from
outside it, whether that "outside" is an inner core of resistant
otherness or a distant solidarity borne on language's wings. The nation
is an irrevocable problem, which I accept as such, because the others
exist and call me beyond it.

What does the tale tell? That someone came from a far-distant place,
maybe just down the road, maybe here in our midst, and said "Your land
is a trash heap and a sorrow and a blight on the face of humanity, like
mine. But we could do better, if we ourselves were otherwise."

I've been hearing that tale, always different and new, for decades. It
continues to make me into whom I was not the day before.

Thanks for that, Brian


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