Bioregional Pasts & Futures - David Haenke & Daniel Wahl in Conversation (Part II)
Channel: Daniel Christian Wahl
Date: 2021-03-18

On February 24th, 2020, David Haenke and I reconnected after our initial conversation on February 15th was interrupted by heavy snow causing bad connections in the Ozarks. 

David's work has been "guided by Gaia" for over 5 decades. He has been a community focussed healer of the Earth for most of his life. His chosen home/life region - the Ozark mountains - has been the main focus of his own process of reinhabitation and lead him to co-create the Ozarks Land Trust.

In this conversation we speak about:
- the various waves of 'back to the land' movements
- ecological integrity
- the notion of evolutionary fitness being about fitting into place/context
-  the importance of Thomas Berry's work and how David was the one who planted the seed of bioregionalism in Berry's work
- the Ozark Community Congress as the process that lead to the first North American Bioregional Congress
- "The Total Ecology Program Platform" (a piece by David I will soon share)
- "The Regenerative Investment Fund" (another piece by David I will share)
- gender balance, indigenous participation, and diversity at the first North American Bioregional congresses
- bioregionalism as a globally cosmopolitan pathway to planetary health (and interbeing) rather than a separatist, life-boat, political ideology
- the long path towards bioregional reinhabitation and working with existing structures like 'nation states'
- the mutually reinforcing relationship between localism and bioregionalism (bioregionalism as the 'missing link' that will make subsidiarity possible
- the "necessity of scale" 
- bringing an "ecological design platform underneath of everything"
- climate change as a symptom, the myopia of the carbon lens, the need to heal regional hydrological cycles, ...
- sustainability and how working regeneratively is different from conventional approaches
-The work of Thomas Berry and the Ecozoic Age ... and David Haenke's hope for the evolution of 'Eco sapiens' from the non viable mutation of the human species  'Homo techno-industrialis'
- ... Planet Drum Foundation's archives ... Isabel Carlise's 'Bioregional Learning Centre' ... weaving the web of cosmopolitan bioregionalism into regenerative futures 
...

The North American Bioregional Congress
https://www.context.org/iclib/ic03/haenke/

Alford Forest
https://alfordforest.org/management#forest-management-guidelines

"that a bioregion's environmental components (geography, climate, plant life, animal life, etc.) directly influence ways for human communities to act and interact with each other which are, in turn, optimal for those communities to thrive in their environment. As such, those ways to thrive in their totality—be they economic, cultural, spiritual, or political—will be distinctive in some capacity as being a product of their bioregional environment."
- M. Ryan 'Bioregionalism: Place shapes identity'