A brief history of bioregions and bioregionalism in scholarly literature
You’ve probably noticed that the word “bioregion” has been cropping up in conversations lately. I was recently at an investing conference in Boston and was surprised to hear several people referencing bioregions in the context of investment strategy!
I’ve found, however, that people are really confused about what, exactly, the term means. To bring some clarity to the situation, I just published a detailed piece on One Earth called What is a Bioregion? which delves into the myriad definitions found in both the scientific literature and in more philosophical writings.
It’s not surprising that people are confused. I count 22 different approaches to defining bioregions within the field of biogeography — the branch of biology that deals with the geographical distribution of plants and animals. It’s clear that bioregions can take many forms and operate at many scales — from very small ecosystems or ‘biotopes’ to ecoregions (which can be nested at different scales) to continent-scale distributions of plants and animals, like biomes or realms. All of them, technically, are considered bioregions.
When you look at Wikipedia, you see a different definition of bioregions presented, one that specifically refutes the tens of thousands of academic papers written using the term. The current ‘Bioregion’ page on Wikipedia states, “A key difference between an ecoregion and bioregion, is that while ecoregions are based on general biophysical and ecosystem data, human settlement and cultural patterns play a key role in how a bioregion is defined.”
This is incorrect. While it’s true that bioregions could be defined or informed by human-influenced processes or cultural patterns, that doesn’t mean they always are. Bioregions are a broad category that encompass a myriad of approaches to delineating geographical boundaries informed by biological processes. But there is a community of practice — centered around a philosophy called bioregionalism — that refers to bioregions in a very different way from the more common uses of the term in academia.
Bioregionalism is a beautiful concept. It was popularized by Peter Berg, who influenced a generation of ecological thinkers and practitioners through the idea that human communities should live sustainably and harmoniously with nature, meeting their basic needs for a happy and healthy life — food, feed, fiber, water, shelter — all from regional sources. Bioregionalism seeks to reverse the extractive paradigm that has resulted in the polycrisis we now face, characterized by accelerating biodiversity extinctions, the rapid depletion of freshwater supplies, and the destruction of our soils.
Equally important, bioregionalism weaves in concepts of bioculturalism — the complex system of interrelationships between humans and nature in a particular place. This can include ancient relationships, like those developed over centuries by Indigenous peoples, or modern relationships, for example sustainable community design. One website reflecting this school of thought boils it down to this: “’Bio-region’ is simply short for ‘bio-cultural region’”.
This statement would surely raise some eyebrows in the academic world. To date, there have been about 65,000 scholarly journal articles or books that reference the term “bioregion”, the large majority of which focus on mapping populations of plants and animals, not on bioregionalism. The overall trend in this field in fact has been towards increasingly data-driven approaches that remove human sentiment from the equation altogether.
How did it all start?
A contemporary scholar of bioregionalism, Richard Evanoff, wrote a piece in the Aoyama Journal of International Politics crediting Allen Van Newkirk with the invention of the term “bioregion” in his titular essay of 1975. This is cited as fact in the Wikipedia page, and I wondered if that was actually true. So I rolled up my sleeves and dug into the Google Scholar archive to unearth the history of four related terms found in scholarly literature — “bioregion” “bioregions” “bioregional” “bioregionalism”.*
I created a Google sheet that you can peruse, and below is a summary view. On the left is the year, followed by the number of citations in that year (with an estimate for duplicates removed), a prominent paper from that year, and the author/s of the paper. There’s more info on the sheet, which I’ll be adding to over time:
The first thing you’ll notice is a rapid growth of papers and books related to bioregions, from just a handful in the 1970s to about 4400 last year alone, roughly doubling in volume since 2010. Going way back in time, I found a couple 1960s references to “bioregion” in Poland and Czechoslovakia, but I wasn’t able to confirm those.
The very first confirmed use of the term I found is in a paper on, of all things, blue crab populations of Louisiana. Interestingly, the author used the word “bioregion” to refer to the area that provides the crab with all the resources it needs throughout its entire life cycle (not too dissimilar from the bioregionalist perspective). This inference, however, didn’t stick. The term was quickly adapted to describe a much broader set of macroecological phenomena.
Several other marine biology papers picked up the term from 1972 to 1976, and it’s fascinating that right then, in 1975 — when scientists were using “bioregion” to discuss crustaceans in Australia and reef fishes in Mexico — Van Newkirk published his paper “Bioregions: towards bioregional strategy for human cultures” in the academic journal Environmental Conservation. He describes his starting point as the IUCN ‘Biotic Provinces of the World’ published in 1974, but he weaves in the role of humans on the landscape:
“Bioregions are tentatively defined as biologically significant areas of the Earth’s surface which can be mapped and discussed as distinct existing patterns of plant, animal, and habitat distributions as related to range patterns and… deformations, attributed to one or more successive occupying populations of the culture-bearing animal (aka humans).”
So basically his idea is to acknowledge that humans are animals too, and understanding the role they play within natural landscapes could “..aid in the conservation and restoration of wild ecosystems.” Peter Berg latches on to this idea and publishes an influential essay in 1977 on the “North California Bioregion” followed by an anthology in 1979 of “essays, poems, stories, prose, interviews, and oral histories (which) speak of the region’s ecological integrity and biological and cultural history”.
By 1980, we are off to the races. The term “bioregion” is used with increasing frequency, and the bioregionalists in particular were on fire. It was interesting to see how many new concepts that we now take for granted were introduced during that decade. In the early 80s, the idea of using watersheds (or hydrological basins) as a governing principle is introduced, epitomized by J.J. Parson’s influential essay “On ‘Bioregionalism’ and ‘Watershed Consciousness’” in 1985.
Anthropologists lean in to the term as well, for example, a paper about Zuni sacred theater, which defines a tribal “Zuni bioregion”. The critical theory people join the party, adding new concepts like “deep ecology” and “ecofeminism” to the mix. The urban planning people start contributing ideas around “green cities” and “sustainable development”. Probably the most important book of the decade was Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision by Kirkpatrick Sale (put out by the Sierra Club), which really brought bioregions into the mainstream.
Concurrently, even in the early 80s, you see agronomists starting to use the term in reference to building “sustainable farming systems”, taking a more pragmatic approach to defining bioregions by climate type, hydrology, and soil characteristics. In 1983 we get the landmark paper on biodiversity conservation “A Regional Landscape Approach to Maintain Diversity” by Reed Noss, who is later known as the father of “ecoregions” (and also one of the lead reviewers of the One Earth bioregions).
Something strange happens in 1990 with the publication of an essay by Donald Alexander entitled “Bioregionalism: Science or Sensibility?” which sets up a sort of ontological battleground, pitting scientists against philosophers around the definition of bioregions. An early-career philosopher, Alexander was the product of a time when post-structuralist theory was all the rage and used to critique every academic discipline under the sun.
He makes that claim that all the hard work by scientists — people studying the distribution of conifer forests, or the life cycles of serpents, or the seasonal migrations of bison — “…mystifies the concept of region, discounting the role of subjectivity and culture in shaping regional boundaries and veers toward a simplistic view of ‘nature knows best.’”
This is such a strange thing to say. We still have so much to learn about the intricate web of life upon which we humans depend. Instead of embracing new knowledge about the ecosystems of the world, Alexander frames science as a problem. It strikes me that centering human experience above all else is precisely the reason why we’ve gotten ourselves into the mess we’re in, crossing every planetary boundary on our road to maximum fulfillment. But I digress..
In the 1990s we see a big ramp-up of publishing on the topic of bioregions — increasing 10-fold from about 100 per year to 1000 per year by Y2K. During this time, a lot of progress is made applying biogeographical frameworks to the fields of both biodiversity conservation and natural resource management.
This includes an important textbook by K.R. Miller Balancing the scales: guidelines for increasing biodiversity’s chances through bioregional management (1996), which describes an ecosystem as a type of bioregion. A couple years later we have the first application of bioregions to the development of a national-scale plan for protected areas (in Australia). And in 1999 we have the first textbook on Applied Biogeography that compares the relative strengths of global bioregional frameworks.
In the 2000s there is an increased volume of scientific publications on bioregions alongside an increased sophistication as to the use of the term. In particular, we see research produced specifically to inform models for conservation policy, including everything from “A bioregional approach to tropical forest conservation” (in Costa Rica) to fire-driven ecosystems in California to the montane lakes of New England. The first bioregional map of “Global seagrass distribution and diversity” also comes out in 2007, and the same year the first complete set of marine ecoregions and provinces is created.
Throughout the decade, there is still a healthy output of material on bioregionalism like the 2003 book LifePlace: Bioregional thought and practice, which is described as a “…provocative meditation on bioregionalism and what it means to live, work, eat, and play in relation to naturally, rather than politically, defined areas.”
By 2010, there were roughly 2500 scholarly articles and books being published annually on bioregions, and it is during the 2010s that we enter the modern era of biogeography. With the advent of affordable satellite-based remote sensing products and advanced computer modeling capabilities, novel insights were generated daily about how ecosystems function and what we can do to more effectively protect them. Just a tiny selection of titles illustrates the depth of scientific knowledge created by leveraging bioregional frameworks:
- “Bioregion heterogeneity correlates with extensive mitochondrial DNA diversity in the Namaqua rock mouse”
- “Improving bioregional frameworks for conservation by including mammal distributions”
- “Building a bioregion through transboundary conservation in Central America”
- “Distribution, abundance, diversity and habitat associations of fishes across a bioregion..”
- “Descriptive bioregionalisation and conservation biogeography: what is the true bioregional representativeness of protected areas?”
- “Big data suggest migration and bioregion connectivity as crucial for the evolution of Neotropical biodiversity”
- “A network approach for identifying and delimiting biogeographical regions (bioregions)”
This was also the decade that brings us a big update to the terrestrial ecoregions framework (Dinerstein et al. 2017), which would later provide the foundation for One Earth’s bioregion framework. New advanced approaches to delineating bioregions are developed, for example, based on distribution patterns of particular species, such as “Infomap Bioregions” (Edler et al. 2017). A big update to the Köppen-Geiger climate classification maps comes out at an enhanced 1 km resolution, and we see governments starting to utilize bioregions, for example the U.S. Geological Survey in its 2017 guide to Bioregions of the Pacific U.S.
During this decade we also see some major works on bioregionalism, including The Biosphere and the Bioregion, a compendium of the writings of Peter Berg, and the aforementioned essay by Richard Evanoff, “Bioregionalism: A Brief Introduction and Overview”. The word’s first “bioregional bank” — One PacificCoast Bank — is formed in 2011 by Ecotrust, signifying another big trend in the decade, the application of bioregionalism to mainstream economic theory and the financial sector, as summarized in the book The Bioregional Economy by M.S. Cato.
That takes us more or less to the present day. In 2020, roughly 3500 scholarly articles were published referencing bioregions, most of them concerning issues of biogeography but expanding to other fields of research including public health, in particular disease transmission and nutrient flow models. 2020 sees the release of two major biogeographical references — a comparative analysis of quantitative approaches to “Determining marine bioregions” (Hill et al.) and the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology (2.0) — concurrent with the release of the review version of One Earth’s own bioregions framework.
Just last year, there were roughly 4400 articles published in the field and there seems to be no sign of things slowing down in 2024 (with over 600 papers published in just the past few weeks). While the large majority of these papers are concerned with the biological sciences, particularly macroecology, there is a steady undercurrent of literature on bioregionalism (roughly 10% of the recent total), spanning fields such as agroecology, the social sciences, and environmental philosophy.
One paper that just came out is a great example of the huge breadth of meanings that can be contained within the scope of bioregionalism. “A Critical Biocultural Identity Framework” (Cavaliere & Branstrator, 2023) explores social science strategies for the conservation of biocultural identity in rural Alaska. “This research extends place identity by applying critical ecofeminist-posthumanistic epistemologies that analyze the structural power components of biocultural identities.”
I’m not exactly sure what it all means, but I do know that we should expect to see many more, and increasingly more varied, uses of the word “bioregion” in the future. It’s a perfect word for a time that invites all of us to embrace complexity fully, in all its glory. From frogs to feminists, serpents to scientists, bison to bankers — it is the bioregion that connects us all together.
*Note: This was a bit tricky because the term “bio region” (with a space) is used commonly in DNA research and academic literature concerning genetics. To get a really accurate count of the papers concerning bioregions, we would need to scrape all the records from Google Scholar and run a program (or maybe an AI process) to removed redundant records. I’ve found for example, Google Scholar will count a reference even if the target word is found at the bottom of a web page showcasing related articles. This is a pretty major flaw IMO, so any AI folks who want to take this one on, please reach out!
