‘We must choose between narratives’

Justin McGuirk (JM)

We have framed this first issue of Future Observatory Journal around bioregioning and, by extension, the idea of natural limits, both geographical and material. In your book Designs for the Pluriverse, you offer a vision of design that centres the interdependence of all beings. This emphasis on interdependence depends to some degree on respecting natural boundaries. How much does pluriversal thinking overlap with, or even depend on, some form of bioregioning?

Arturo Escobar (AE)

First, thanks so much, Justin, for the invitation for the interview. It’s an opportunity I welcome because while I am not an expert on boundaries and bioregioning, as you suggest, they are implicit in any conceptualisation of interdependence and pluriversality. Besides, I have long had the intuition that if the current politico-administrative divisions of the world are to be radically redrawn, it must be on the basis of bioregions; our current transition design project in Colombia’s Cauca Valley region incorporates this insight, as we shall see. There would be many directions in which to take this first question, and I will only be able to explore a few in this short answer.

Let me start by summarising what we mean by relationality and pluriversality. The most well-known definition of the pluriverse is the Zapatista notion of ‘a world where many worlds fit’, or, as Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser put it, ‘a world of many worlds’. 1 1 Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, eds, A World of Many Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.  The Zapatista formulation involves ontological, epistemic and political dimensions, and has influenced a multiplicity of inquiries, experiments and struggles on pluriversal thinking over a broad terrain – from politics to spirituality, from alternative economies and ecology to architecture, and from urban planning and design to the digital realm, including decolonial, anti-racist and transgender issues, among many other domains.

Along with pluriversality, relationality is strongly emerging as a basis for rethinking the human as well as many social practices. A growing perspective argues that relationality, by which we mean the radical interdependence of everything that exists, rather than separation, is the real foundation of life. The notion is being discussed in many fields (from quantum physics and postdualist social theory to designing and concerns with spirituality and the sacred) and in Indigenous, feminist and ecological activist practices. The principle of relationality counters modern dualisms, particularly the separation between humanity and nature, subject and object, and civilized and uncivilized – in other words, it responds to modernity’s pervasive anthropocentrism, rationalism and ethnocentrism. The southern African concept of Ubuntu – I am because you are, I exist because everything else exists – is becoming a popular metaphor to convey the sense of relationality.

Relationality characterizes those worlds or ontologies in which objects and persons do not pre-exist their relations, of which Indigenous peoples are a prime but not the sole example. It suggests that everything is mutually constituted; 2 2 Kriti Sharma, Interdependence: Biology and Beyond. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. a relational ontology does not posit the ‘external’ world as an outside place, but rather as an act of participation. Living beings are coparticipants in the constitution of the world through their perceptions and actions. This phenomenological view is also present in the yearning for more relational lives among many people and movements. Living relationally is an idea whose time has come, but it needs to be actively cultivated as an existential and practical horizon in our daily lives. This notion challenges head on the philosophical and practical tradition within which humans have lived, and in many cases thrived, in the modern age.

Now, what does this have to do with boundaries and bioregional thinking? For me, the issue of boundaries and bioregioning refers us to the questions of order, pattern and form, particularly concerning life on Earth, but ultimately in the universe. Let me draw on biological theories of self-organization and emergence (derived from physics and mathematics), which I hope we can the relate to bioregioning and boundaries.

Let me start with physicist David Bohm’s notion of the ‘unbroken wholeness’ of the universe – the universe as the common ground from which everything arises, including matter, life and consciousness. 3 3 David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge, 1980, 17. Humans tend to perceive a given order, instead of comprehending the totality of what is as a whole. This is particularly the case with modern dualist thought, in that it imputes independent existence to things, fragmenting them into parts. Bohm perceives this habit to be quite damaging and at the root of many of today’s problems. In the quantum view of the universe, all material processes are indivisible, and mind and matter are but abstractions from the universal flow. As he sums up, the universe reflects ‘the unbroken wholeness of the totality of existence as an undivided flowing movement without borders’. Bohm names this ‘the implicate order’, meaning that ‘everything is enfolded into everything’, which he contrasts with the ‘explicate order’ in which things unfold into locatable entities in space and time that mainstream physics then studies. 4 4 Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 218, emphasis added. Bohm posits ‘a certain sub-order’ within the implicate order, within which things have ‘an approximate kind of recurrence, stability and separability’ (236).  In the distinction between implicate and explicate orders, I find a parallel with the Buddhist notions of absolute and relative truths. How then are we to see ‘boundaries’, if we (following Bohm’s reading of quantum physics) can no longer locate them on ‘the Cartesian grid’ of mechanicist thought, even if pushed in this direction by our pervasive notions of order, science and the real? How do things gain some measure of stability? How do ‘bioregions’ come to be what they are?

Even this superficial account should alert us to the fact that boundaries do not pre-exist the myriad interactions and interdependencies that make up each form, pattern or structure. Biologist Lynn Margulis put it wonderfully in answering the question, What is Life? Life, she wrote, is ‘matter gone wild’, and physicist and complexity theorist Stuart Kaufman talks about ‘the mattering of matter’ as the source process of the evolution of life. 5 5 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s fascinating book, What Is Life?. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995; Stuart Kaufman, A World Beyond Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Revealingly, Margulis and Dorion Sagan claim that life ‘is a question the universe poses for itself in the form of a human being’. 6 6 What is Life?, 55. Well, this human is summoned today to reconsider how we have been ordering the world out of the complex cosmogenesis and evolution that have brought Earth to its current state. For Margulis, life is also autopoietic, or self-creating. Cells do create boundaries (the cell wall), and these are essential to maintaining their autonomy and continuous self-creation, but these boundaries do not isolate, they are crucial to interdependence. Let me add, finally, that for biologists like Margulis and for theorists of complexity and emergence, life is also consciousness all around; in fact, for some cosmologists it has been consciousness from the beginning of the universe. 7 7 Brian T. Swimme, Cosmogenesis. An Unveiling of the Expanding Universe. Berkely: Counterpoint, 2022.

I am glad your question does not ask about bioregions but bioregioning – always a verb, an action, an open-ended process. If the universe is an unbroken whole, and yet nevertheless its dynamic of matter/energy/consciousness creates forms, patterns and structures. And if, as Bohm would have it, this undivided whole exists without borders, how are we to think about boundaries? I’d like to enlist the help of anthropologist Tim Ingold to address this issue, to be explored further in subsequent answers. In a passing reference to Bohm, speaking about ‘the temporality of the landscape’, Ingold states: ‘in a landscape, each component enfolds within its essence the totality of its relations with each and every other. In short, whereas the order of [external] nature is explicate, the order of the landscape is implicate’. 8 8 Tim Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, in The Perception of the Environment. London: Routledge, 2000, 191. The landscape enfolds the times and lives of predecessors, human and not. As he explains,

Of course, boundaries of various kinds may be drawn in the landscape, and identified either with natural features such as the course of a river or an escarpment, or with built structures such as walls and fences. But such boundaries are not a condition for the constitution of places on either side of them; nor do they segment the landscape, for the features with which they are identified are themselves an integral part of it … [n]o feature in the landscape is, of itself, a boundary. It can only become a boundary, or the indicator of a boundary, in relation to the activities of the people (or animals) for whom it is recognised or experienced as such. 9 9 Ingold, ‘Temporality’, 192, emphasis added.

The landscape, moreover, is the result of the ‘taskscape’, by which Ingold means the work and actions humans perform as participants in a given place as we dwell in a world that we continuously co-produce with others, and with its forms (e.g. rivers, mountains), while moving alongside them. This is an embodied process that we reenact through our daily tasks. In short, in the implicate order, rivers and escarpments do not form boundaries, nor regions, even if they have their own dynamic of formation (mountains are the result of orogenesis, and they are always in movement, even if they look fixed in time). Boundaries thus belong to the explicate order; they are ‘relative truths’ with which we live, day in and day out.

There will be more to say about this, but for now I want to point out the need to rediscover the meaning of wholeness. As sister Ilia Delio states in her insightful exposition of the work of the Jesuit paleontologist and cosmologist Teilhard de Chardin, the reality of a conscious evolution happening out of the ever-growing complexity of matter leads to the irrefutable conclusion that only ‘our awareness of belonging to the whole’ can save us. 10 10 Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God. Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2023, 204.

JM

You mention that your pluriversal thinking has been influenced by the Zapatista movement, with its philosophy of ‘a world where many worlds fit’, as well as other Indigenous concepts such as buen vivir (living well). One of the reasons why Indigenous peoples are often cited as living ‘in harmony’ with nature is because of the way they understand, in a fundamental way, the limits of a terrain and its ability to support them. It seems to me that, rather than romanticising Indigenous wisdom, one might zoom in to that question of limits or boundaries.

AE

Let me clarify, first, some common misconceptions about the notion of the pluriverse. First, the pluriverse is not an additive concept (the addition of monoverses or universes that interact, as separate billiard balls) but an inextricable entanglement of interdependent worlds. This complicates the notion of boundaries concerning bioregions, as boundaries also connect, not only demarcate difference, as already suggested. Second, pluriversal thinking should not lead to a ranking among worlds on moral criteria (some worlds being inherently ‘better’ than others) nor to the relativist position that all ways of worlding hold equal validity; this doesn’t mean that one cannot make assessments about which worlds or ontologies ‘perform well’ and which don’t. On what criteria? Precisely in terms of respecting the relational foundation of existence and fostering symmetrical and non-hierarchical relations within and across worlds. Performing well from this perspective means adhering to the relationality of life, as Indigenous peoples attempt to do (more on this below). 

Third, pluriversality and ontological multiplicity do not apply only to Indigenous peoples or groups within the Global South. We are all within the pluriverse. Many academics subscribing to the ‘ontological turn’ fail to really take seriously ontological multiplicity within the modern West itself, locating it only wherever they perceive radical alterity. A growing number of movements point to this pluriversality. I have become increasingly aware of bioregional movements around the defense of rivers or forms of the commons in parts of Europe, whether they draw on both long-standing practices and current relational innovations. This points to the ontological heterogeneity of modernity, which I won’t be able to discuss here; suffice it to say that I find hopeful notions such as ‘non-dominant modernities’ or ‘alternative Wests’, which I often use to point not only at the diversity within the West (without effacing the historical colonial effects of all forms of the modern), but to avoid the slippage into romanticising the nonmodern or the non-West. Which takes me to my last caveat. 

Fourth, critics of pluriversal thinking often argue that in positing any kind of radical difference among worlds, pluriversal thinking reintroduces modern/nonmodern binaries, idealising the latter. But positing a degree of incommensurability among worlds does not turn them into self-standing, unconnected entities; what it means is that, while all worlds, to a greater or lesser extent, are today deeply shaped by the dominant form of modernity, no world can be wholly reduced to the terms of another. Anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena says it best with her use of a refrain: all worlds are modern, but not only; in their entanglement, Indigenous Andean worlds and the modern world, for instance, do not constitute two totally separate worlds, but they are not one either. This sense of entanglement-within difference, again, complicates thinking about boundaries. 

Finally, a brief comment about how Indigenous peoples understand boundaries and their practices of boundary making. This is such a complex question, that I only make some tentative remarks. One could re-read exemplary ethnographies of the past in this light. It is important to dispel, as you suggest, the romantic idea that all Indigenous peoples have lived in harmony with nature. At the same time there are many Indigenous practices that reveal unique features that are important for understanding bioregioning and boundaries. To begin with, Indigenous relational ontologies suggest that many groups do not function with the boundary between humans and ‘nature’, or only partly; their worlds are cosmocentric, not anthropocentric. Their being in the world stems from perception and action based on the deep awareness of the entire field of relations in which they are emmeshed, including all other beings; from rocks, plants and animals to spirits. They dwell on the Earth in ways those who separate drastically humans from non-humans do not.  

For many Indigenous peoples (certainly in animist ontologies), life is a continuous birth and all beings are constituted within this utterly complex relational field, as interwoven lines in meshworks of interrelation. As Ingold surmises, ‘what we have been accustomed to calling “the environment” might, then, be better envisaged as a domain of entanglement’. From this ceaseless ‘ravelling and unravelling’, beings contribute to the world’s ever-evolving weave, firmly anchored in place; the world is anything but a ‘ready-made’ surface. 11 11 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, 2011, 71.  Ingold adamantly rejects the abstractions of networks and space, insisting that we think only in terms of place, lines, trails, weaves, movement. I always wondered what giving up the notion of space might mean for geographical thought (including regions). 

Second, territory-based communities (farmers, Indigenous peoples, ethnic groups) ‘scape’ the land in manifold ways, often using tools, walking, working it, actively giving it texture and thus ‘regioning’ it through tasks and perception. For them, a landscape is not a vista or a mental representation in which they perceive ‘objects’, but something that is experienced and acted upon. Rather than detached observers, they are but embodied, engaged observants and participants of their world; it is in this sense, too, that feminist activists speak of the ‘body-territory’, implying a continuity between body, territory, landscape and often the spiritual world. These communities understand that the world is always in flux – a flux within which matter does its mattering, which they often understand in terms of cosmic forces – and engage with the landscape on this basis. 

Could one suggest that boundaries emerge from this ongoing weaving and engagement of a world that is always in formation? Following a theme from Deleuze and Guattari, one might say that territorialised peoples operate in a smooth space, rather than a striated one; they do not occupy an inert world (as moderns imagine we do), out of which humans carve out separations, political divisions and boundaries at will, but rather inhabit a living cosmos, in place. Therein lies what might more properly be seen as the wisdom of land-based peoples, rather in any ahistorical harmony with nature: in their ways of dwelling and inhabiting the Earth, grounded in place and attentive to the cosmos and the Earth.

Third, and crucially, the entire process is political, something that has become evident with contemporary struggles in defense of territories against extractive forms of development, such as large-scale mining, monocultures and dams. In Latin America, this has been the case since the time of conquest and colonialism. Beyond physical occupation, conquest and colonialism were strategies of ontological occupation: a non-relational way of being, knowing and doing occupied in a relational way; this process continues with development and globalization. It was thus that the grounded sense of boundaries was partially eroded by continued displacement, enclosure in reservations, barbed wire and borders. Yet the memory of other ways of being remains in the attachment to territory, in Indigenous struggles’ onto-political determination to recover the ancestral territory as a main strategy for the liberation of Modern Earth, as with the Nasa and Misak peoples of southwestern Colombia. Thus, more than an ecological issue, for Indigenous peoples boundaries and bioregioning are deeply historical, ontological and political processes. At issue in these struggles is, one may say, not only a different way of being, knowing and doing but of (bio)regioning. The political character could offer important insights for approaching bioregional issues in the Global North, as this should always be done historically relationally, decolonially and pluriversally.

JM

You are working on a collective bioregional transition project for the Cauca River Valley in Colombia, where 20th-century development models based on sugarcane plantations and cattle ranching are depleting the land and entrenching inequality. The vision you outline is for what you call ‘a pluriversal bioregion’. This factors in not just the health of ecosystems and natural species but, crucially, the many different kinds of people and communities who inhabit the region. Can you tell us briefly what you are trying to achieve and how your thinking about design is instrumental?

AE

Thanks for asking about our project. It is titled ‘Designing systemic regional transitions in times of social and climate emergency in Colombia’s Cauca River Valley’, and design is central to it. Its overall goal is to foster bioregional transitions for the Upper Cauca River Valley (UCRV), focused on the concept of pluriversal territorial peace (PTP). We aim to promote the convergence among existing transformative alternatives, by which we mean those that depart from the dominant development model and that, to a greater or lesser extent, move towards relational, care-centred life models. Our approach is intersectional, articulating the interrelationships between economic position, ethnicity/race, gender and sexuality, age and dis/abilities, but also country/city and ontology. 12 12 While our project started in September 2018, we only received our first year of funding from the Ford Foundation’s regional Andean office in Bogotá in February 2023. We received a second year of funding from the Luce Foundation (April 1, 2024 – March 31, 2025). We are grateful to both foundations for their support.  

The Upper Cauca River Valley bioregion is located in southwestern Colombia, around the city of Cali (2.5 million inhabitants). It is a network of inter-Andean ecosystems located on an extensive plain, bathed by the waters of the Cauca River, in between the Central and Western Andean cordilleras. This region of tropical dry and Andean forests, Cauca tributaries, lagoons, waterholes and wetlands with unusual biocultural wealth, has long been home to important Afrodescendant, Indigenous and peasant communities. The problematic we address is the development model based on sugarcane monoculture, extensive cattle ranching, agroindustrial development and the large-scale Salvajina Dam, all of which has generated a painful degree of social inequality, territorial dysfunction, ethno-racial segregation and ecosystem devastation, aggravated by persistent armed conflict and illegal economies.

A main aspect of our project was to define the sub-region of our focus. We decided to structure the project around three ‘territorial nodes’ with a high percentage of Afrodescendant population (two rural areas in Northern Cauca, the municipalities of Suárez and Villa Rica, and one urban node, in Cali’s large Oriente sector). Throughout a year of intense work, encounters and workshops, we identified close to 20 transformative alternatives in the three nodes. We arrived at the conviction that the best way to advance on the path of bioregional transitions is to build a design strategy based on these alternatives, in line with our hypothesis that even under the difficult conditions in which they operate, a socio-ecological transition is already occurring through multiple activities, most of them small, but in increasing number, both rural and urban. To further the reordering of the bioregion, we proposed as general objective to foster convergences among those transformative alternatives aimed at promoting gender, ethnic-racial, social, environmental and epistemic justice, and diverse capacities; the defense of water and food sovereignty; life-centred economies; adaptation strategies against climate change; and territorial planning, strengthening the capacity for joint action towards pluriversal territorial peace among them. To this end, we put together a CoLaboratory of Thought and Design for Regional Transitions and a CoLaboratory of Narratives for Transitions, with the participation of communities, academia and activists. It is a complex design strategy that we have developed throughout several years, partially in conversation with trends in ontological, transition, decolonial and regenerative design, and design for social innovation. 13 13 For a presentation of some of these trends, see A. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse, Ch. 5, and Pluriversal Politics. The Real and the Possible. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020, Ch. 8, plus the project’s funding proposals.  

We have identified two key organising principles for the project: the first is a set of three interrelated axes: 1) economic and productive transformations, oriented towards the promotion of food sovereignty and life-centred economies; 2) eco-ontological restoration (that is, of ecosystems, communities and worlds), aimed at creating a bioregional identity as a pluriversal territory of water; and 3) historical reparations, leading to territorial peace with racial, social, spatial, environmental and epistemic justice. We speak of eco-ontological restoration because for us it is clear that what need to be restored are not just ecosystems but entire worlds, especially those that have survived at the margins of the dominant model and that have partially maintained a different mode of engagement with the bioregion.

The second key principle has to do with our emerging collective conceptualisation of the bioregion as a pluriversal agropolitan, aquapolitan and multipolitan territory. This principle is based both on the work with the transformative alternatives and on our research on trends in territorial, urban and socioecological transitions. The aquapolitan perspective understands the UCRV as a water-based territory, deeply shaped by rivers, streams, wetlands and underground water, and the site of important environmental and justice struggles; the agropolitan perspective synergistically integrates countryside and city based on food sovereignty and the cosmovisions and competencies of the Indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant communities; and the multipolitan orientation seeks to counteract the growing metropolitanisation of the bioregion centred on the city of Cali as a global economic node, accentuating Cali’s disconnection with its rural hinterland, intermediate cities and surrounding towns.

Ultimately, we seek to generate regional conversations with diverse actors about alternative futures through the production of contents that will circulate on the web platform One Cauca River, Many Worlds and on social and print media, making visible the transformative alternatives, hopefully impacting institutional policies. Our Territorial Co-design Laboratory functions as an experimentation platform for the analysis of the spatial-temporal structures underlying the transformative alternatives present in the UCRV, from the perspectives of agropolitan, aquapolitan and multipolitan terriorialities.

To bring this answer to a close, I’d like to mention one of our most recent workshops, as it bears on the issue of bioregioning. The day-long workshop focused on what we call visionación and disoñación (visioning and dream-designing, or designing from our dreams). It was an invitation to think collectively about the futures we desire for the bioregion. The day started with an Indigenous conception of life as a spiral, highlighting their conception of time in which the future is actually behind (because it is what we do not see), while the past is in front of us, which is what we see; this was also inspired by the Ashanti conception of Sankofa. The workshop called for small group discussion of the problems that make the dreamed of futures unthinkable, how to deal with them, and imagining paths towards an agro/aqua/multi-politan region. For the latter part of the workshop we used the well-known Three Horizons methodology, adapted from its main application in the field of corporations and institutions to working with grassroots organisations. 14 14 Bill Sharpe, Anthony Hodgson, Graham Leicester, Andrew Lyon and Ioan Fazey, ‘Three horizons: A pathways practice for transformation’, Ecology and Society 21(2): 47, 2016.

What I’d like to highlight is that we wanted participants to do their imagination exercise starting with what we know about ‘the past’ (which, again, lies ahead), whether from environmental history and literature or from people’s memories; to this effect, we used quotes that describe the Cauca Valley ‘as it was’ up to the end of the 19th century, including from the well-known romantic novel La María, written by Jorge Isaacs, a love story between two young people that takes place in the colonial Hacienda El Paraíso, with the beautiful Cauca Valley as an always present backdrop. One of the main ideas that emerged was that of the eco-ontological restoration of the region into the amphibian space it once was, in which communities were still able to make their worlds and livelihoods.

The Andean cordilleras and Cauca River are still there (their hillsides denuded by cattle; the river’s historical meandering somewhat straightened by draining and desiccation); most of the springs and wetlands are gone, and so is the tropical dry forest in the valley, and the biodiversity has been greatly reduced; thousands of small peasant families (mostly Black) and independent farms have disappeared, displaced by the unstoppable expansion of sugarcane plantations, the people forced to resettle in Cali’s poor Oriente quarter. In short, the landscape has been profoundly altered, principally as the cane now covers most of the valley’s plain (about 260,000 hectares under year-long cultivation). There is no longer any seasonal flooding, especially after the building of the Salvajina Dam in the mid-1980s.  

Only historical traces remain from this potent transformation. The boundaries of the region are still the same in many ways (e.g. the mountain ranges to the east and the west), and with its mighty presence the Cauca River still shapes perceptions. Yet today, and since the 1920s in particular, the territory has been the product of a very active capitalist modernisation-driven bioregioning. Our project bets on the idea that another bioregioning is possible – pluriversal, just, peaceful. This, we may say, is the task for our bioregioning project: creating paths towards a certain restoration of the region and landscape locals as much as historians know existed, albeit of course appropriate to today’s conditions.  

JM

You have just published a book with Michal Osterweil and Kriti Sharma called Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human. One of your arguments is that modern society actively produces non-relationality – in other words, it makes us detached from each other and the living world. To achieve the necessary transition, you say, we need a new narrative, a new story. What lessons from that book apply to thinking and acting within boundaries? And does relational living require a radical shift away from the fully globalised economy to one of localised production and consumption, or is it more of a rebalancing?

AE

Our book is based on the contention of the critical role of narratives in shaping what humans make of the world, with detailed attention to the established modern story. We contend that we are at a time when we must consciously and purposefully choose between narratives. We also contend that narratives embody an incredibly designing force. We arrived at the idea of transitioning between stories as an enabling formulation of the task confronting us at present: changing the foundational myths that silently but effectively have constructed much of the world, placing it at the edge of the abyss. Succinctly, if our narratives are designed, and if our designed narratives design us, then the question of re-storying life is a central task of designing. Our goal was to provide a clearing for inquiring about other possible narratives in the making of our worlds. 

The new stories cannot come only, or even primarily, from academic thinking, no matter how persuasive. In fact, as we illustrate, powerful narratives are emerging at the multiple boundaries between the older ontology of separation and a slew of new or renewed ontologies, cosmovisions and practices linked to struggles for social justice and the defense of the Earth, whether humble grassroots struggles for sufficiency or self-conscious postcapitalist alternatives. This means that the crafting of new stories is necessarily a struggle with entrenched discourses, powers and institutions. It is a centrepiece of the political activation of relationality.   

I’d like to mention the two main sources that inspired us in this regard. The first was ecologist and theologian Thomas Berry’s formidable proposition about narratives. ‘It’s all a question of story’, he wrote in his last book. ‘We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not yet learned the new story.’ 15 15 Thomas Berry, ‘The New Story’, in The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988, 123–137.  Hence, we are in dire need of compelling new stories. How do we envision and help usher in these new stories? How does one exist in the in-between and go further? This is where we are at present.  

Our second source is Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s incredibly perceptive analysis of the mono-humanist notion of the human as naturally liberal, secular, rational and bourgeois. These narratives provided the ground for the very condition of possibility of the modern individual and its aggregates, such as ‘society’, ‘nature’ and ‘the economy’. We lean on Wynter’s definition of human beings as homo narrans – the ones who narrate ourselves – to convey awareness of how people create stories about life and about who we are, and how we live within the stories we create. The bioeconomic narrative, deeply connected with patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, slavery and secularism was essential to the production of non-relationality, by which we mean the vision of the human as separate from society, from nature and from other categories of human, ineluctably struggling to make it in a world determined by scarcity.  

Our point is that these apparent non-relationalities depend on a lot of relationships and institutions to appear as such. Individuals are always embedded in webs of relationships, systems, places, communities. The Covid-19 pandemic underscored the reality of our interdependencies. It is important to recognise, however, that in the very gestures and stories of separation, there is a kind of relationality. This double manoeuvre, which involves denying and hiding relationality while making dualism seem natural and inevitable, is what we call the active production of non-relationality. It also shapes perceptions of regions and landscapes, thus constraining from the outset any bioregioning otherwise.  

Relationality is a different foundational story of life and reality. Yet, it has been known and practiced widely. At its heart, relationality points to the radical interdependence of all things. It is challenging to write about it precisely because it entails the conditions of and for an emergent reality. Today, we are called to remember that scarcity, separation, the individual and supremacy are myths. The story of life is much bigger – we are simply caught in a tiny story. Life is capable of much more!  

We also examined novel narratives of life emerging in Latin America at the interface of popular struggles and critical scholarship; these narratives decentre the liberal, secular story of bioeconomic man and are articulated in terms of very different concepts, such as territoriality, communality, autonomy, re-existence, pluriversal transitions and care. This Latin American story of life enabled us to explore the idea that worldmaking – and, hence, designing – could be reimagined as a praxis of transitioning between stories. To this end and drawing from Latin American struggles against extractive forms of development, we proposed the concept of pluriversal contact zones (PCZs), defined as tense interfaces where relational (the emergent story) and nonrelational (the dominant story) narratives of life and worldmaking meet. Pluriversal contact zones are bridges that help us move between the dualist story of life and relational ones. 

How do we move from nonrelational to relational living and worldmaking? How do we interrupt the active production of nonrelationality by patriarchal/colonial capitalist social orders? How do we build on the ongoing political activation of relationality? Our book is an invitation to everyone to discover the awesome potential of acting from interdependence and care, in tandem with the myriad struggles and experiments engaged in redesigning life, politics and the human, toward more livable and pluriversal futures.  

To me, any bioregioning and bioregional transition project must engage in this ontological and political analysis, since it is within its confines that it moves. While boundaries and regions continue to be ‘naturally there’, bioregioning and transitioning movements need to acknowledge that they often take place within pluriversal contact zones, in order to tilt them toward the relational. All bioregioning, one may say, takes place by necessity in the PCZ, demarcated by the encounter and entanglement between relational narratives/ontologies (those embedded in the transformative alternatives mentioned for the UCRV, or in many attempts at regeneration, restoration, healing and so forth), and nonrelational ones (e.g. those of neoliberal development). A key inquiry would be the extent to which the latter undercuts attempts to live lives attuned to interdependence and care, and how, building on the former, we can move along relational paths.  

Thinking in terms of axes for transition strategies helps us imagine the kinds of actions that might be conducive to bioregions grounded on interdependence. We have been thinking in terms of six of them: the recommunalisation of social life; the relocalisation of activities; the strengthening of autonomies; the depatriarchalisation, deracialisation and decolonization of social relations; the reintegration with the Earth; and the support for self-organizing networks among transformative alternatives. 16 16 I explain these axes in ‘Reframing Civilizations’, Globalizations, Taylor & Francis Online, 2021. Source  Without autonomy, recommunalisation and relocalisation are easily re-absorbed into newer forms of delocalised globalization; besides, the power of relocalisation is increasingly undeniable when put side-by-side with the costs of global monocultures. Relocalisation has become a matter of survival for most communities. 17 17 See the excellent documentary, Planet Local. A Quiet Revolution (2022), featuring Norberg-Hodge and Vandana Shiva and Norberg-Hodge’s project: Local Futures. Source   How does one think about (bio)regioning in relation to these processes?  

JM

Do you have a closing thought in answer to that? 

I hope some of the ideas I have presented here are useful for thinking about boundaries and bioregioning. Can bioregioning, as a type of designing, become a praxis for the reconstitution and healing of the web of life? Contribute to heal the earth and the human? As I suggested, the best way for me to move in this direction is by crafting paths that point beyond/past the modern, based on the principles of relationality and care. These would be a multiplicity of paths that contribute to constructing pluriversal futures and a renewed sense of the human that harbours an active consciousness of belonging to a whole, predominantly lacking at this point in history. Ontologically mindful bioregioning could be a strategy toward this goal, in consonance with relationality and care: bioregioning as a type of mattering that enables other ways of worlding to unfold more freely out of the relational wholeness of life.