Bioregional Travel

There is no bioregion on Earth that is boring. All are dynamic and full of inexhaustible mysteries. Airplanes are carbon dragons. They are but one of many destroyers woven into the world we were born into, of course. I mean, where to begin? Lives dependent on habitat destruction and the burning of condensed solar energy extracted from subterranean realms. Animal agriculture. “Supply chains.” Millions of square miles of what was once prairie paved over with asphalt made with materials wrenched from other subterranean realms… Returning to sanity and skills that may rescue us from overshoot is a multi-generational process and it is not clear that it will ever be accomplished or accomplished in time. Bodies too fucked up to garden, racked with chronic injury & pain. Children socialized into digital non-habitats, socialized into believing that the marvelous only exists over there and far away. It is not true. 

I have found that addictions cannot be replaced with nothing, only with engagement in other positive and regenerative activities. It is why I propose focusing on travel within one’s bioregion as an alternative to plane travel… Learning a language people spoke in your region before their displacement by the people who came from Europe. Worlds that were here before the destructive project really took hold. Carlos Fuentes called it “the buried mirror” — what lies beneath the Old Navy, the AT&T store, the Chipotle.