How could a society learn to practice the kind of restraint that Michael Gregory talks about?
Peter Berg has an intriguing speculative text called "Figures of Regulation" that I was turned onto by the artist Sarah Lewison, my guide in all things bioregional. Here it is:
https://tinyurl.com/figures-of-regulation.
Berg is suggesting customs - that is, actual iterative and reiterative practices - that could rebalance society with the biosphere. He imagines, for instance, a kind of barn-raising party that would build greenhouse additions to ordinary dwellings, serving for both food production and passive solar heating. He wants this to be, not a professional activity, but a collective, disalienating customary practice, involving skill-sharing and mutual learning, but also respecting specific individual wants and needs. I suspect that in the back of his mind, he is thinking of something like the seasonal round of the Coast Salish peoples (
https://tinyurl.com/seasonal-round). But in the front of his mind he's thinking San Francisco, modern society, with all its troubles and aspirations. He writes this:
"The idea of a figure as a series of movements in a dance is useful for understanding the multi-layered nature of figures of regulation. The performance of a dance follows a distinct sense of rightness that would otherwise exist only as an idea, and it suggests connectedness with many other activities and ideas. It is a process that makes the invisible visible. As a dance unfolds it implies further action that is self-referenced by what has gone before. Figures of regulation are assemblages of values and ideas that can similarly become ingrained in patterns of activity."
Such figures are meaningful, for Berg's bioregional purposes, when they correlate with wider and necessarily more abstract concepts of how an ecosystem works, and crucially, how it remains in a balanced condition - or a 'metastable state', to use a fancier cybernetic term. Thus he writes, "A bioregional model can identify balance points in our interactions with natural systems, and figures of regulation can operate to direct or limit activities to achieve balance."
Now, you could definitely see the work parties that are typically organized by ecosystem restorationists as being such an iterative custom, with all the qualities of festivity, disalienation, skill-sharing and reciprocal learning mentioned above. What's more, in Cascadia, aka the Pacific Northwest, almost all restoration is now carried out with a shared bioregional model in mind, developed through long attention to the life cycles of salmon and the ways they integrate the ocean and the forest, the land and the sea. People will now stand up and give very detailed presentations about how certain kinds of nearshore grasses are essential to the lives of the tiny fish that young salmon eat - and then they'll invite you to a workshop about taking down the bulkhead that is meant to protect your beachfront property from erosion, but unfortunately, also destroys all that nearshore habitat, and the salmon with it. The salmonid cycle of birth, migration to the ocean, and return to the place of origin for death and rebirth, has become a full-fledged figure of relation for all those who recognize themselves in what the Portland-based group, Ecotrust, once called "Salmon Nation." In this way an entire ecosystem, and our own sustaining activities within it, become visible.
More recently, that visibility has extended to the lives of Orcas, who like to eat Chinook salmon and who are particularly endangered in the southern reaches of the Salish Sea (which used to be called the Puget Sound). I was fortunate to meet Donna Sandstrom, the driving force behind the Whale Trail, which now extends from Southern California to the northern reaches of Vancouver Island (
https://thewhaletrail.org). What Donna has understood, through both empathy and science, is that the sounds of motorboats - and the crowds of tourboats that continually surround the Orcas - are driving these magnificent animals to despair. You know, they communicate by singing to each other, and they locate their food by natural sonar, aka echo-location. How to sing in the underwater equivalent of a freeway tunnel? So she's trying to institute a cultural change that has everything to do with the restraint that Michael talks about. The point of the Whale Trail is to indicate spots at which people can gather - seasonally, almost ritually - to watch the whales from land. That is, she is teaching people to celebrate these marvelous creatures without pressing up close, getting your closeup photo, trying to pet them or feed them - and killing them in the process. Don't take that tour! But don't forget that Orca either!
How to create a new collective custom, beautiful and memorable like a dance, and meaningful like a biocultural cycle? How to restrain your capitalist self, and release your bioregionalist self? How to participate in a figure of regulation?
Thanks to all for this discussion,
Brian