WiserEarth Area of Focus Suggestions

The first attempt at proposing "green constitutional engineering" as a route towards sustainability. The argument of the bioregional state is that sustainability is unachivable without formal democratic institutional change (that would interact with other institutional additions in educational frameworks, local consumptive issues, and financial issues). Other people have offered other methods to get to sustainability of course. What about these different methods to get there? Other routes are only indirect, susceptible to corruption, and have a history of backsliding.

Bioregional democracy (or the Bioregional State) is a set of electoral reforms and commodity reforms designed to force the political process in a democracy to better represent concerns about the economy, the body, and environmental concerns (e.g. water quality), toward developmental paths that are locally prioritized and tailored to different areas for their own specific interests of sustainability and durability. This movement is variously called bioregional democracy, watershed cooperation, or bioregional representation, or one of various other similar names—all of which denote democratic control of a natural commons and local jurisdictional dominance in any economic developmental path decisions—while not removing more generalized civil rights
protections of a larger national state.

Ideas of more singular watershed or localist bioregionalism are of longer lineage, though the political architecture of a bioregional commonwealth across multiple watersheds is the novel contribution here.

The author, environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker, is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because
environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically out of sync. He argues that we are unable to reach sustainability without a host of additional ecological checks and balances. These ecological checks and balances would demote corrupt uses of formal institutions by removing capacities for gatekeeping against democratic feedback. Sustainability is a politics that is already here--only waiting to be formally organized.

Commodity Ecology: Related intimately to the book Toward A Bioregional State (2005), this PARALLEL blog will be a clearinghouse of interesting technologies and materials showing that the wider window of known possibilities that can be utilized, instead of reinvented, for institutionalizing sustainability materially, in a particular watershed. Unlike most blogs, it will be associated with a permanent number of 75 updated threads--one for each of the human commodity choices. (commodityecology.blogspot.com)

A 30 minute webcast interview about the bioregional state:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/waterfuel2007/2008/12/27/Mark-Whitaker