Page 203 [203]
OCR
FOOD SUPPLY AS A GLOBAL CHALLENGE 201 Compared to the approaches of other green movements (Monbiot 2007; Daly 2007; Smith, R. 2016; Baer 2019), permaculture rejects the central state and regards political decentralization as one of the best social systems (Leahy 2021). Due to the energy descent, the decentralization of food and energy systems is inevitable; this creates an opportunity for political decentralization. Permaculture aims to achieve this through grassroots organization and bioregional networking, together with care for people (Leahy 2021: 195). One of the standard references of the permaculture movement, the Designers Manual, aims to increase local autonomy, because the more people are capable of satisfying their food, energy, and housing needs locally, the more difficult it will be to impose economic and political control over them (ibid.). Supporters of permaculture include some anarchists and degrowth advocates who also propose rural self-sufficiency and political autarchy (Kropotkin 1975[1899]; Schneider — Nelson 2019; Leahy 2021). Bioregionalism A bioregion is a geographically and ecologically definable unit which is also culturally meaningful. From a geographical point of view, bioregions are usually designated in the academic literature based on rivers’ catchment areas, but their characteristic features also include topography, soil types, climate characteristics, flora and fauna; in short, all the facets that hold an area together in an ecological sense. Bioregionalism also makes attempts to identify the cultural unity of a community living in a territory, including the political aspects. In this, it is driven by the intention to create sustainable practical and conceptual frameworks for the fabric of life around the planet. Bioregionalism may contribute to scientific work aimed at the formation of local food systems and the organization of food sovereignty on the scale of the landscape in two ways. On the one hand, it assigns to the otherwise “empty” notion of locality, important substantive — and specifically political — elements, thus satisfying the strong requirements of sustainability. On the other hand, it also provides tangible help to actual regional planning, which, according to experience, often falls outside the purview of the academic literature. Among ecolocalisms, bioregionalism represents a more radical form than usual, insofar as it is also strongly connected to anarchist traditions with the idea of a self-governing system of autonomous small communities. The principles of anarchism — especially of eco-anarchism — play an important role both in the formation of the community’s internal relations and in its operation, as well as in the relations between bioregions. What makes bioregionalism particularly important, in our view is its ability to provide a generally applicable but not universalistic framework for local efforts in which they can be combined in a form that can be interpreted politically in a mutually reinforcing way. The objective of political action is to create a world in which the principles of ecological sustainability, social justice and sovereignty organize relations within and between communities. The most important tool for this goal within the bioregion is what Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, in their article, “Reinhabiting California” (1977), called “reinhabitation”. This term is the manifesto of the movement. According to the original definition, it means the
