In terms of origin, etymology, and epistemology, bioregionalism combines bio (“life”) and region (“area/territory”), literally “life-region” or “place of life,” a term that took shape in the 1970s North American environmental movement.
Bioregionalism is an ecological, political, and cultural philosophy that argues societies should organize their economies, governance, and ways of life around bioregions—areas defined by watersheds, landforms, climate, ecosystems, and the human cultures that have adapted to them—rather than by arbitrary nation-state borders. It promotes “reinhabiting” places: learning the limits and possibilities of a specific life-place, strengthening local food and energy systems, revitalizing Indigenous and local knowledges, and fostering forms of self-governance that emerge from the ecological and cultural particularities of each region.
The related term bioregion was first elaborated by Allen Van Newkirk and then popularized by Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann, who described a bioregion as both a geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness—a physical place and a way of knowing how to live well there. Epistemologically, bioregionalism is a critique of abstract, universal, state-centric and capitalist planning: it insists that valid knowledge is situated, embodied, and place-based, emerging from ongoing interaction with local ecosystems and communities, and it advances a prefigurative politics that seeks to “grow a new society in the shell of the old” through concrete, localized practices rather than primarily through top-down reform.