Bioregionalism did not arrive fully formed in 1973. It emerged over decades from indigenous reinhabitory traditions practiced for millennia, from ecological science finding its public voice, from poets and watershed organizers, from the back-to-the-land movement, and from a stubborn recognition that the boundaries drawn on political maps had little to do with the boundaries drawn by water, soil, and weather. The contemporary movement is now more than fifty years old, with a clear lineage of texts, gatherings, organizers, and bioregional councils. This page traces that arc.
Indigenous Foundations
Any honest history of bioregionalism begins long before the word existed. Indigenous peoples around the world have practiced what later thinkers would call bioregional governance for thousands of years, organizing food systems, ceremonial life, kinship structures, and political authority around watersheds, coastlines, mountain ranges, and seasonal cycles. To inhabit, in this older sense, meant to fit into and be part of a habitat: a living place composed of plants, animals, soils, water, landforms, and climate. Reinhabitation, the central verb of the modern bioregional vocabulary, is in part a settler-society project of catching up to ways of knowing that never went away.
Brandon Letsinger, writing for the Department of Bioregion, makes this starting point explicit. What bioregionalism represents, identification with place and living within the laws of the natural world, is new only for people who come out of the Western industrial-technological heritage. Writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, working in the lineage of Potawatomi knowledge, have shown how indigenous knowledge systems sustain balance through sophisticated, time-tested practice rather than through romantic abstraction. Bioregionalism, when it is honest about its sources, takes that lineage seriously.
Dr. Dan Longboat (Roronhiakewen), founding director of the Indigenous Environmental Studies Program at Trent University, has framed the bridging aspiration directly. Bioregionalism, he writes, means seeing beyond the two-way path, weaving the best of indigenous ecological knowledge and wisdom with the best that science can offer. That formulation, often called two-eyed seeing in adjacent traditions, rejects a false choice and grounds the movement in something older than the 1970s.
1973 to 1977: Coining the Words
The contemporary bioregional movement coalesced in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s, in the wake of the first Earth Day, the Stockholm Conference, and the experimental theater and political counterculture scenes that ran through the city. Peter Berg, an actor and writer who had moved to San Francisco in the early 1960s and worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers, became the central organizer. A cross-country drive between 1970 and 1972 showed him environmental devastation in every region. The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm convinced him that governments alone were not going to fix what was broken.
In 1973, Berg and Judy Goldhaft co-founded the Planet Drum Foundation in San Francisco. Planet Drum became the organizational engine of the early movement. Between 1973 and 1979 it produced nine bundles of bioregional lore: poems, polemics, posters, and essays printed on loose sheets and assembled in envelopes, each one rooted in the life and culture of a particular place. In 1979, Planet Drum launched Raise the Stakes, a periodical that served as a meeting place for a highly decentralized and far-flung community of organizers and writers.
The pivotal text came in 1977. Peter Berg and the ecologist Raymond Dasmann, a pioneer of conservation biology who had helped articulate the concept of biogeographical provinces for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, published “Reinhabiting California” in The Ecologist. The essay introduced “bioregion” and “reinhabitation” as paired terms. Dasmann’s scientific framing of nested ecological regions met Berg’s cultural and political framing of place-based community, and the synthesis became the founding charter of the movement. Berg later described a bioregion as both a geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness: a place, and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.
Late 1970s and 1980s: Building a Canon
Gary Snyder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Zen practitioner, was a foundational voice from the start. His 1969 essay “Four Changes,” widely circulated through the early environmental movement, called for division by natural and cultural boundaries rather than arbitrary political ones. By the 1980s Snyder was the poet-naturalist face of the bioregional vision, and his 1990 collection The Practice of the Wild, published by North Point Press, gave the movement some of its most enduring language. Snyder famously located himself by watershed and forest community rather than by state or county: on the western slope of the northern Sierra Nevada, in the Yuba River watershed, in a community of Black Oak, Incense Cedar, Madrone, Douglas Fir, and Ponderosa Pine.
In 1985, the cultural historian Kirkpatrick Sale published Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision through Sierra Club Books. Sale brought bioregionalism to a mass audience for the first time, arguing that industrial civilization had severed its relationship with the living earth, that overlapping crises followed from that severance, and that bioregionalism offered an alternative paradigm of nested natural regions, localized economies, decentralized governance, and the integration of urban, rural, and wild environments. Sale also traced the genealogy of the idea backward through earlier traditions of regional planning, anarchism, and utopian thought, connecting figures such as Lewis Mumford, Patrick Geddes, and John Wesley Powell to the bioregional project.
In 1990, Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright edited Home! A Bioregional Reader for New Society Publishers. The Reader collected the central voices of the first wave: Berg, Dasmann, Snyder, Sale, David Haenke, Stephanie Mills, Dolores LaChapelle, Starhawk, and many others. Judith Plant’s essay “Revaluing Home” offered one of the most widely quoted formulations of the bioregional project. Bioregionalism, she wrote, means learning to become native to place, fitting ourselves to a particular place rather than fitting a place to our predetermined tastes, living within the limits and the gifts provided by a place, and creating a way of life that can be passed on to future generations.
The Bioregional Congresses
The success of bioregionalism as an idea became visible through gatherings. In 1980, the Ozarks Area Community Congress (OACC) held its first meeting, motivated by a shared sense of the unique Ozark bioregion. The OACC became an umbrella for reinhabitory homesteaders, businesses, artisans, communes, and environmental groups. Among its leading organizers was David Haenke, who would become, alongside Berg, one of the most visible movement organizers of the decade. Haenke’s Ecological Politics and Bioregionalism (1984) named the practical platforms of bioregional work: regenerative agriculture, appropriate technology, renewable resource stewardship, cooperative economics, ecologically grounded health policy, and place-based land tenure.
By the mid-1980s, it had become clear that a continental constituency existed. Haenke and a group of fellow Ozarkians organized the first North American Bioregional Congress (NABC I), held near Kansas City, Missouri, from May 21 to 25, 1984. Nearly three hundred delegates attended. Working by Quaker rules of consensus, eighteen committees produced resolutions covering agriculture and permaculture, education, forestry, economics, water, Native peoples, culture and arts, communities, spirituality, and what the proceedings called eco-defiance. The Congress proclamation opened with two words that became a kind of bioregional greeting: Welcome Home.
NABC II convened in 1986 on the shores of Lake Michigan at Camp Innisfree, in the Great Lakes bioregion. NABC III followed in 1988 near Squamish, British Columbia, co-sponsored by Cascadian organizers and held in Squamish Nation longhouses, with participation from nations as far as Haida Gwaii. David McCloskey, founder of the Cascadia Institute, helped introduce celebratory and place-naming culture into the movement at that gathering. Subsequent Congresses convened in the Gulf of Maine (1990), the Edwards Plateau in Texas (1992), the Ohio River Valley (1994), Cuauhnahuac in Mexico (1996), the Prairie in Kansas (2002), and the Katuah bioregion in the Southern Appalachians (2005). Over time, the Congresses adopted the name Turtle Island Bioregional Congress (TIBC), reflecting a deepening commitment to indigenous recognition and to maps that honored the continent’s older names.
After NABC IX in 2009, the Congress entered what organizers have since described as a hibernation period. The work did not stop; it dispersed. Watershed councils proliferated. Regional iterations took root in Cascadia, Greater Appalachia, the Klamath-Siskiyou, the Hudson, and elsewhere. The continental gathering itself, however, paused for more than a decade.
1990s and 2000s: Dispersed Practice
Through the 1990s and 2000s, bioregional thinking moved from a small circle of named texts and Congresses into a wider terrain of regional practice. Watershed councils became common across the western United States, often grounded in salmon recovery, water quality, and forest stewardship. Wendell Berry’s writing from rural Kentucky developed a parallel argument for fidelity to place and the moral claims of small communities. Kim Stafford, working from the Pacific Northwest, brought a poet’s attention to local knowledge and storytelling.
In 2003, Robert L. Thayer Jr., professor emeritus of landscape architecture at the University of California, Davis, published LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice with the University of California Press. Thayer’s book offered a portrait of his own home, the Putah-Cache watershed in the Sacramento Valley, and marked the moment at which bioregionalism entered mainstream landscape architecture, regional planning, and place-based education.
Through the same decades, bioregional thinking was absorbed into adjacent movements. Permaculture, formalized by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in Australia in the late 1970s, shared its commitment to working with place rather than against it. Transition Towns, beginning in Totnes, England, in 2006, applied a related logic to community-scale climate response. Regenerative agriculture and place-based education carried bioregional commitments forward under different names. The vocabulary diffused; the underlying argument did not weaken.
2020s: A Second Wave
The COVID pandemic, accelerating climate disruption, and the broader sense of polycrisis brought bioregionalism back into wider public conversation in the early 2020s. The argument that resilience runs through watersheds, food sheds, and the intact relationships of local communities, rather than through global supply chains and remote political abstractions, found a new audience. A second wave of bioregional organizations and platforms emerged: Salmon Nation, Ma Earth, Really Regenerative CIC, ASHA, Reconnecting Northlands, the Bioregional Learning Centre in Devon, and Ecotrust, each in different ways. Vandana Shiva’s long-running argument for biological and bioregional sovereignty, advanced through Navdanya in India, framed the global stakes.
Indigenous-led organizing has been central to this second wave. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work on decolonizing methodologies, alongside the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer and a generation of indigenous scholars, has reshaped how settler bioregionalists understand their own work, insisting on relationship, accountability, and the rejection of extractive forms of knowledge production.
The continental Congress is also returning. The Turtle Island Bioregional Congress 11, the first in more than a decade, is scheduled for September 15 to 19, 2026, in Vernonia, Oregon. The Department of Bioregion, founded as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2019 and operating under that name from 2026, has emerged as one organizational expression of the second wave. Cascadia is one example among many; parallel formations are taking root in California, the Northeast, the British Isles, the Nordic and circumpolar north, and across the Global South.
A Movement, Not a Museum Piece
Histories of social movements often read as obituaries. The bioregional history is not that. Its first wave produced a clear set of texts, a continental gathering tradition, and a generation of organizers, writers, and scientists who established the vocabulary the movement still uses. Its long middle period dispersed that vocabulary into watershed councils, permaculture networks, transition towns, and place-based education. Its second wave, now under way, is rebuilding continental and international infrastructure for the work, with indigenous leadership and climate urgency at the center rather than at the margin.
The history matters because it answers a recurring question: is this new? It is not. It is more than fifty years old as a contemporary movement, and far older as a way of living. What is new is the scale of the work now being asked of it, and the breadth of the alliance willing to take that work on. Bioregionalism, in 2026, is not a museum piece. It is its second wave.