How we manage natural resources into the long term is the critical chal;lenge and opportunity of our time. Communities have stewarded natural resources for millenia before the brief blip of the modern industrial that has depleted over 70% of the worlds natural resources in just a few decades. Communities can and must play a role in regenerating these resources and taking back sovereignty over our lands, waterways and places. The writing below is copied from my Msc in Agroecology research into modern and historic examples of community governance and place-based resilience. It's in rather wordy academic format but I hope it gives some grounding and real-life examples to the emerging bioregional vision for community resilience that is unfolding in our Avon context. See Weareavon.com for more info on this, and get involved!
Introduction and context
Communities have self-organised to manage their resources for millenia (Bell, 2013). Human settlements and civilisations have been largely defined by the base natural resources of soil (Hyams, 1976) and water (Bell, 2013). Sustainable communities (human and more-than-human) have historically governed these resources, typically around a set of principles (such as reciprocity; see Kimmerer, 2013) and in ecologically distinct areas called bioregions, often based around a river catchment area. Bioregionalism is defined by McGinnis (1999) as a well-established philosophy that seeks to better connect communities with the governance of their local environment. This involves devolving powers to local communities of practice, empowering self-determination towards more holistic environmental governance and utilizing local, indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge (Aberley, 1999; Sale, 1985). This essay builds on the interplay of bioregionalism and self-organisation, in order to synthesise lessons for effective regional stewardship of natural resources. Three case studies are discussed to make the argument that natural resource management is most effective when rooted in a relational ontology, co-design principles and bioregional epistemologies of place. This offers an alternative to both profit-orientated top-down resource management approaches and traditional conservationism, both of which have largely failed to govern resources sustainably, let alone regeneratively (Shiva, 2016). These approaches have typically been dominated by sectoral interests and ideologies rather than communities of place nested in ecology (Pepper, 1999).
The best examples of sustainable (and regenerative) natural resource management often come from the more-than-human communities such as fungi, forests, soil and microbes; the next best examples come from those human communities who have partnered with these processes (Kimmerer, 2013). Despite the pressing context of the Anthropocene and depletion of global resources, there are numerous cross-cultural and cross-temporal examples of human communities sustainably managing their resources. The case studies selected for analysis here aim to bridge ancient knowledge practices with modern place-based applications. The former is explored through the case study of Terra Preta, the Amazonian dark soils. The latter brings a perspective of a more recent bioregional project in the UK called the Westcountry Rivers Trust. The selection of these examples reflects the cross-temporal and cross-cultural applications of ecological principles and participatory design in practice. The examples also highlight the centrality of community resilience to this discussion, utilising social technologies and ecological democracies of place to steward resources into the long term. In order to effectively self-organise in bioregions over time, communities and ecologies must be resilient together.
This discussion takes a broad normative definition of self-organisation as a process of shared understanding that results in the co-emergence of ordered structures (Nederhand et al., 2016). This mirrors a similar paradigm shift in other disciplines, away from specific natural science understandings, and towards socio-cultural understandings of community, resilience and self-organisation (Shiva, 2016). Underpinning the epistemological shift is an ontological shift in how we relate to natural resources, from the traditional conservationist worldview of top-down human management and control (predicated on separation), towards instead a more indigenous ontology of interconnectedness, of ‘we are nature’ and reciprocity with life (Kimmerer, 2013). In terms of organisation and scale, bioregionalism and community resilience represent a shift away from centralised control of natural resources, and towards a political ecology of relationality. As the case studies evidence, this is not necessarily a polarised shift from one pole (e.g. hierarchy and centralisation) to another (e.g. anarchy and decentralisation) but more akin to a panarchy, an integration of top-down and bottom-up forces that play a role in community resilience nested within complex systems (Berkes and Ross, 2016).
Case study 1: Terra Preta
Starting chronologically, with a case study from over 5000 years ago; ‘Terra Preta’ in the Western Amazon is a stark and hopeful case study of how an intergenerational and self-organising community has managed its most important resource - soil (Mann, 2002). Using composite sample surveys and molecular analyses combined with anthropological investigation, Kim et al. (2007) demonstrated the beneficial relationship between these communities and their soils, evidencing a significant impact on soil organic matter, bacterial diversity and microbiology (supported by Lima et al., 2002). Cultural practices using ‘Traditional Ecological Knowledge’ such as ‘slash and burn’, biochar production and mulching were utilised for centuries to maintain and improve soil health (Mann, 2002). Crucially, these knowledge systems were underpinned by a relationality ontology and a kinship with place (Kim et al., 2007), a common thread across examples of self-organised ecological communities. This example highlights the potential of not only sustainable resource management (e.g. keeping soil organic matter constant over time) but goes further to indicate regenerative and resilient resource management. The former describing a healing and improvement of soil health over time, and the latter referring to the ability of these soils to withstand shocks and bounce back from challenges such as climate change.
Case study 2: the Nuu-chah-nulth-aht tribe
Soil and water are society’s fundamental resources and life forces (Shiva, 2017). This second case study of the Nuu-chah-nulth-aht tribe emphasises the lessons of water resource governance alongside resilient food systems. Literature around indigeneity can be limited by the observer effect and over-reliance on western scholar/anthropologist observational interpretations of complex unspoken processes (often beyond the observers worldview and epistemology), and evidence can be further weakened by romanticisation of indigenous cultures. This case study however draws on direct relationship and first hand evidence from Cote et al (2016) who is from the Nuu-chah-nulth-aht tribe on Vancouver Island. Cote offers a useful critique of food sovereignty and brings a deeper indigenous ontology to the previously limited principals which did not recognise food and water as sacred, and therefore disregards the ontology that is required for intergenerational regeneration of soil and water.
The Nuu-chah-nulth-aht tribe provide a stark example of indigenous food and water sovereignty, rooted in respectful and meaningful relationships with their place. The Nuu-chah-nulth-aht are actively engaging decolonization and sustainable self-determination through reinstatement of authority over their ha-huulhi(ancestral territory). The nodes within their panarchic governance have developed strategies and implementation of policies aimed at the sustainable production and consumption of traditional foods. This was enacted through a Tribal Council constituting 14 community nodes. These communities have millennia long relationships with the salmon and rely on healthy waters and fishing rights removed from them by colonial forces. In a decade long response to this the council organised, held sacred salmon festivals, went to court and in 2009 reinstated their rights to autonomy over their ancestral fishing waters. The key piece to this self-organisation is an ecologically sound food system/web that honours sacred relationships to land, water, plants and all living things (Cote et al., 2016). This approach re-politicises philosophy and re-philosophises politics; re-situating the politics of place as a nested system within ontology, relationality and worldview (Kimmerer, 2013). Philosophies of hishuk’ish tsawalk, (everything is one), uu-a-thluk (taking care of), and iisaak, (respect) weave a culture together across time to honour the wisdom and values of ancestral ecological knowledge in maintaining responsible and respectful relationships with the natural world.
Case study 3: The West Country River Trust
Bridging these ancient examples with modern applications of bioregioning, this final case study from the UK aims to highlight the multiple manifestations of a place-based relational ontology. The West Country River Trust (WRT) aims to “secure the preservation, protection, and improvement of the rivers, streams, watercourses and water impoundments in the Westcountry and to advance the education of the public in the management of water” (WRT, 2012). This mission is akin to many tribal contexts whereby custodianship of water and passing on this knowledge were the key purposes to a successful community of reciprocity (Kimmerer, 2013). The WRT example diverges from typical water management in contemporary western societies which has taken a centralisation and privatisation turn since the mid 20th century (Cook, 2016). A UK example of this is a series of parliamentary water acts in the 1940s including the River Boards Act of 1948 whereby catchment area authorities were mandated to govern the resources of that place (Bell and McGillivray, 2000). Whilst this Act technically comes from a ‘bioregional’ perspective on a surface level, the place-based ontology and relationality clearly did not underpin this form of natural resource governance, and neither did the process of co-design and participation of communities. What followed was a water system that has inhibited the population’s access to water whilst degrading the quality of the rivers and their ecosystems to crisis point (Rivers Trust, 2024). Privatisation of UK water in 1989 relinquished further control away from communities and the UK maintains one of the poorest records for water quality in Europe (Rivers Trust, 2024). In contrast to the centralising trend of water management, there is a groundswell of place-based and community led organisations such as the WRT offering a lens of active hope with successful track records of improving water quality, access and governance across the UK.
The WRT is an environmental charity established in 1995 working with 200 partners to sustainably manage natural resources in South West England (WRT, 2012). The WRT takes a bioregional approach beginning in the Tamar then widening across the South West (see figure 1) and their vision statement highlights “a commitment to the resilience of the region’s freshwater resources” (WRT, 2024). Originating as a self-organising community who cared about their rivers, places and natural resources, the Trust has evolved to over 30 staff members working across 80 bioregions. From a natural resources perspective, their work focuses on water, land and community engagement. This includes 22km of river restoration, 8 hectares of new wetland habitat, 10,300 riparian tree plantings, Salmon and Beaver habitat protection and a significant Citizen Science programme (Cook et al., 2014).
As the WRT has grown in scale and impact, the structures and partnerships have necessarily evolved and to a larger extent merged with the more dominant actors in the landscape. Whilst the charity structure is on paper a typical hierarchical structure with CEO, Directors and a Business Board, the wider nested systems of organisation and implementation represent a Complex Adaptive system, with over 600 volunteers collecting citizen science, a wide diversity of partner organisations and 300 farmer partnerships (including horizontal learning between these nodes). Some companies on the Board seem paradoxical, such as agrifood businesses and water companies like Arla and South West Water respectively. Given that approximately half of UK river pollution is rooted in agricultural practices from the industrial models of Arla, and the remaining half is from water companies such as South West Water, there are causes for concern when these actors step into community-led processes for natural resource governance.
Discussion and conclusion
This complexity links to the potential shadow of scale and co-option of local process (Shiva, 2016). And yet there is perhaps a necessary engagement with the existing dominant actors in order to transform beyond them, particularly in these complex situations that Levin (2012) coined ‘super-wicked problems.’ From a critical perspective this could be seen as a watered-down regeneration narrative (Shiva, 2016), co-opted by mainstream actors that currently dominate the national food and water system, hence re-creating old patterns/mindsets in new forms. However, the ability of this project to sit between reformist and radical polarities is also its greatest strength - able to navigate a pragmatic middle way with diverse stakeholders whilst not giving its power to them. The partnerships have evidently led to more empowerment of local farmers and communities rather than siphoned off to the agri-food companies. In this vein, the WRT have taken an ‘adaptive co-management’ approach, which determines that rights and responsibilities should be shared among those with a claim to the environment or a natural resource (Plummer, 2009).
Natural resource management has fallen under different names, approaches and cosmologies over anthropological time. In the best examples, this must go beyond typical management approaches and typical sustainability worldviews (e.g. traditional conservatism or sustaining business as usual). The examples above have, to varying degrees and in different contexts, demonstrated the potential of community self-organisation to not only sustain but regenerate land, water and food systems. Crucially, these exemplars go beyond even typical representations of agroecology (Altieri, 2002) and food sovereignty (Patel, 2009), in an ontological shift to indigenise these concepts and practices (Cote et al., 2016). Bioregionalism, to be an effective lens for community resource resilience, must also embark on a reflexive decolonising journey, rooting in place-based ontologies without appropriating or commodifying them (Wiebe, 2021; Ross, 2021). Bridging this to modern times and our environmental predicament, this may take the form of re-commoning food/land systems (Rossi et al., 2021) through self-organised regional groups like the WRT and, underpinning this, a wide-scale re-engagement of people with place; cultivating the relational and reciprocal ontologies that nurture transformative resilience. This may include new (and ancient) definitions of community, bridging the human with the more-than-human in a political ecology of interconnected co-transformation (Kimmerer, 2013). From this lens and the countless historical case studies of custodianship, communities can only ‘sustainably manage’ resources by going beyond the management approach, and beyond the separational and hierarchical ontology that underpins this. Instead, a paradigm shift to a relational worldview is urgently required in resource governance, whereby self-organisation is nested in social ecologies beyond the self.
References
Abarca-Alvarez, F.J., Navarro-Ligero, M.L., Valenzuela-Montes, L.M. and Campos-Sánchez, F.S., (2019). European strategies for adaptation to climate change with the mayors adapt initiative by self-organizing maps. Applied Sciences, 9(18), p.3859.
Aberley, D. (1999). Interpreting bioregionalism. Pages 13-42 in M. V. McGinnis, editor. Bioregionalism. Routledge, New York, New York, USA.
Altieri, M.A., (2002). Agroecology: the science of natural resource management for poor farmers in marginal environments. Agriculture, ecosystems & environment, 93(1-3), pp.1-24.
Bell, A. (2013). Peak Water: How We Built Civilisation on Water and Drained the World Dry. Luath Press Ltd.
Berg, P., (1991). What is bioregionalism?. The Trumpeter, 8(1).
Cooke, P., (2006). Global bioregions: Knowledge domains, capabilities and innovation system networks. Industry and Innovation, 13(4), pp.437-458.
Cook, H., Benson, D. and Inman, A., (2014). Partnering for success in England: the Westcountry Rivers Trust. In The Politics of River Basin Organisations (pp. 119-139). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Cook, H. F. (2016). The protection and conservation of water resources: a new British perspective. Wiley International, London, UK.
Cox, M., Arnold, G., & Tomás, S. V. (2010). A review of design principles for community-based natural resource management. Ecology and Society, 15(4).
Coté, C., (2016). “Indigenizing” food sovereignty. Revitalizing Indigenous food practices and ecological knowledges in Canada and the United States. Humanities, 5(3), p.57.
Cracknell, M.J. and Cowood, A.L., (2016). Construction and analysis of hydrogeological landscape units using self-organising maps. Soil Research, 54(3), pp.328-345.
Cunha, T.J.F., Madari, B.E., Canellas, L.P., Ribeiro, L.P., Benites, V.D.M. and Santos, G.D.A., (2009). Soil organic matter and fertility of anthropogenic dark earths (Terra Preta de Índio) in the Brazilian Amazon basin. Revista Brasileira de Ciência do Solo, 33, pp.85-93.
Gray, R. (2007). Practical bioregionalism: a philosophy for a sustainable future and a hypothetical transition strategy for Armidale, New South Wales, Australia. Futures 39(7):790-806. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2006.12.003
Hyams, E. (1976). Soil and civilization. John Murray.
Islam, S. T., Rahman, S. H., Matin, M. A., Dey, A., Talukder, B., Sanyal, N., ... & Akand, K. (2024). State of the World's Rivers. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 49.
James, R.F. and Cato, M.S. (2014). A bioregional economy: A green and post-capitalist alternative to an economy of accumulation. Local Economy, 29(3), pp.173-180.
Kim, J.S., Sparovek, G., Longo, R.M., De Melo, W.J. and Crowley, D. (2007). Bacterial diversity of terra preta and pristine forest soil from the Western Amazon. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, 39(2), pp.684-690.
Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed editions.
Kropotkin, P. A. (1974). Fields, factories and workshops. George Allen and Unwin, London, UK.
Leach, W. D., and N. W. Pelkey. (2001). Making watershed partnerships work: a review of the empirical literature. Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management 127(6):378-385. http://dx.doi.org/10.1061/(asce)0733-9496(2001)127:6(378)
McCarthy, J. and Prudham, S. (2004). Neoliberal nature and the nature of neoliberalism. Geoforum, 35(3), pp.275-283.
McGinnis, M. V., editor (1999). Bioregionalism. Routledge, New York, New York, USA.
Patel, R., (2009). Food sovereignty. The journal of peasant studies, 36(3), pp.663-706.
Pepper, D. (1996). Modern environmentalism: an introduction. Routledge, London, UK. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780203412244
Pezzoli, K., (2016). ‘Bioregionalism’, in Keywords for Environmental Studies. United States: NYU Press, pp.1-25.
Ross, A., (2016). ‘Indigenous Bioregionalisms (Love Mother Earth) Relationship, Creation, Ethics, Love’, The Canadian geographer, 63(4), pp. 553–572.
Rossi, A., Coscarello, M. and Biolghini, D.(2021). (Re) commoning food and food systems. The contribution of social innovation from solidarity economy. Agriculture, 11(6), p.548.
Sabatier, P. A., W. Focht, M. Lubell, Z. Trachtenberg, A. Vedlitz, and M. Matlock. (2005). Swimming upstream: collaborative approaches to watershed management. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Sale, K. (1985). Dwellers in the land: the bioregional vision. Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, California, USA.
Shiva, V., (2016). Water wars: Privatization, pollution, and profit. North Atlantic Books.
Taylor, B. (2001). ‘Earth and Nature-Based Spirituality (Part II): From Earth First! and Bioregionalism to Scientific Paganism and the New Age’, Religion (London. 1971), 31(3), pp. 225–245.
The Rivers Trust (2024). State of our rivers report. https://theriverstrust.org/key-issues/state-of-our-rivers
Wiebe, J. (2021). Cultural appropriation in bioregionalism and the need for a decolonial ethics of place.’ The Journal of religious ethics, 49(1), pp. 138–158.
Westcountry Rivers Trust (2012). Westcountry Rivers Trust. Westcountry Rivers Trust, Stoke Climsland, Callington, UK. http://www.wrt.org.uk/
Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT), and A. Rickard. (2013). The ecosystem approach and rivers trusts: the Westcountry Rivers Trust. Westcountry Rivers Trust, Stoke Climsland, Callington, UK. [online] URL: http://www.theriverstrust.org/environment/ecosystem/ eco_approach.html
Comments