Planetary

Here’s a piece I submitted to the upcoming Long Now London newsletter on the ‘planetary’

Mercator projection of the Earth centred on Burnham-on-Crouch (or is it London?)

‘Think Globally: Act Locally ‘has been a familiar refrain of the Green movement for decades now. It poses the problematique at the planetary level but advocates for action at a smaller ‘here’. The scale of this here is never entirely clear but the bioregionalist Raymond Dassman confronting the ecological crisis in the 1970s made a distinction between “biosphere people,” who exploit resources from the entire planet and “ecosystem people,” who can achieve a high-quality of life within their local bioregions. The bioregionalists encouraged us to provision ourselves primarily from our local watershed and to reinhabit this more discrete bio-geo-ecological unit as other species do. “The world”, poet Gary Snyder wrote is “places.”

Continue reading “Planetary”