The Parish of the Watershed
" Is Bioregionalism Dead? " I woke to familiar birdsong but in an unfamiliar bed. Looking around, I was in an oaken cabin, on a foam pad on a hard oak bed, glimpsing the dawn light through windows whose wooden shutters I had pried open the night before to let the cool breezes pass, in the process dislodging a year or more of abandoned paper wasp combs. I was in Montgomery Bell State Park to attend the 41st annual Memorial Day retreat of the Cumberland Green Bioregional Council and the Green Party of Tennessee. Ninety-three years earlier, in the spring of 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law a program so straightforwardly sensible that only a civilization in the advanced stages of ideological dysfunction could have allowed it to lapse. He took three million unemployed young men—hungry, restless, the kind of demographic that history has repeatedly demonstrated will, if left to its own devices, find something to do that everyone later regrets—and he put...
