As our New Haven bioregional initiative has continued to unfold over the last couple of years, we have sought to increase our connections with our local lifeplace in several ways. We have walked, canoed, and bicycled — getting outside to see things for ourselves. We have engaged in bioregional conversations and screened movies in order to educate ourselves about bioregional thinking. We have met for potlucks in order to provide opportunities to enrich our connections with each other and, through food, with the earth. Finally, we added the Bioregional Garden Project, getting our hands into the dirt, making connection in this other really basic way.

Now we are launching another project: the New Haven Bioregional Mapping Group.

Mapping is a powerful practice through which people create and disseminate knowledge and images of the earth and its regions. Maps are selective by nature. You cannot include everything that is in the territory, in your map. In fact, you must limit what you include quite ruthlessly; otherwise the map will become too large and cumbersome to be of use.

Most maps — almost all maps — are made and paid for by those who are heavily committed to the normal vision of economic and technological development which guides our society and its institutions. The information selected is intended to support and extend the current paradigm. This is why we need to roll up our sleeves and create our own maps. As bioregionalists we hold to an alternative vision of the human future, one in which humans will nest in nature rather than dominating it as bulldozers do. We are very interested in making — inventing — new links, new connections, with the life region where we reside. Consequently, we will include a lot of information on our bioregional maps which is not found on most generally available maps.

The Bioregional Mapping Group will use brainstorming and research to develop a range of possible kinds of information to include in our maps. This can become — together with our other practices — a way to change our very idea of where we are, our images of our lifeplace. Furthermore, once these maps exist they may become potent tools for spreading bioregional awareness in our locale. Through maps we will create linkages between ourselves and our place, and also among the rich diversity of people and groups that live here.

Bioregional mapping could lead us to a new knowledge of who and where we are. It could be a practice which would enable us to move together toward a new place-based community, loyal to the earth in the concrete particulars of our lives.


Frederick R. Cervin

January 23, 2008

 

Read other essays by Fred Cervin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had the first meeting and it was lively and well attended. We brought maps of the area, old and new, and spent time looking at them. Then Domingo Medina led us through some of his findings using a computer, this discussion was complemented by our other expert who was consulting with us, Tony Dominski. Consider joining us for this exciting new Bioregional project to learn more about our local lifeplace.