bioregional education

Human imagination defines the landscape. “Flat, brown, and ugly,” or “cactus infested armpit of an industrial wasteland” are two of the more common negative descriptions of the area around Midland. In most places, there is little education that helps us connect to the place where we live (the town, its watershed, its economy, its socioeconomic dynamics, its history or ecology.) Even here, we are often alienated from the land, as evidenced by the quotes above. We tell ourselves we are here for the money, and that same money can buy us anything, including a sense of being at home. With enough money we can buy a second home where it is pretty, and go there on long weekends and vacations, and someday retire there.

A person becomes a native by actively participating in defining and shaping how we perceive our home. Being a native, a citizen of one place, means understanding a place’s history of social behavior, and like most places today, our economy is driven by powers operating on a global scale. Being local and being global simultaneously is a challenge, but modern technology makes it easier. Having most of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips via a smartphone at any place or time is revolutionizing how we educate ourselves.

We live in what is known by the chamber of commerce appellation “Permian Basin.” An older name for the region, El Llano Estacado, is almost never used.  There is a longer history of European exploration here than in Plymouth and Jamestown, but local history is only superficially taught. Few people know the most common native organisms and their habitats of their surroundings. A good number do know the geology and hydrology, for that knowledge is useful in the local economic engine.

Since there is not an organized way of learning about our home, a person has to do it on their own. Print media and educational institutions teach more about things on a state and national scale, than a local scale. All local print, radio, and television everywhere presently publish a limited perspective, based on what “sells” – crime and scandal first and foremost. Publishers of books have always had to sell to the state and national level, as well, so over the last 60 years we have forgotten how to be local, or how to be native.

A number of educators from around the world are pondering how to shift the educational paradigm, writing books, holding conferences, and organizing. An Amazon.com search turns up 130 books with the word bioregional in the title. Over 1200 groups have joined the “Leave no child inside” coalition, which encourages people to explore their own home landscapes in a myriad ways. Educators are also learning to deal with shifting pedagogical paradigms – from “knowledge retention” to “project-driven.”

People from both sides of the political spectrum have come to the conclusion that it would be a good thing for people anywhere to know a lot more about their own home – not only from a management and planning aspect, but also as part of a social contract that binds people closer together as well as enriching their life. Some are convinced it helps unify people of different religions, races, and cultures that must live together (as happens in many towns all over the world) because of the needs of the global markets, and the tragedies of human politics.

Here, on the Llano Estacado, one of the many ways to learn about one’s home is make an effort to conserve our most limited resource –water. It is not just book learning about what needs to be done, but also learning a new way to garden, a new way to handle wastewater, and new ways of collecting water. Everyone has been learning – from various governmental agencies having to work together to develop a water pipeline to the city, to every homeowner.

 The issue of limited waters has encouraged us to think more bioregionally and more long term than we have in the past. With modern extraction techniques we have another fifty years or more of the oil industry shaping our landscape. It behooves us to know how our bioregion is important to other bioregions, and which bioregions are most important for our survival – for we are not self-sustaining.

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