The Parish of the Watershed
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 them to work in the woods.
Montgomery Bell State Park was created by the National Park Service, CCC, and WPA, and then transferred to Tennessee in 1943. Its 4000 acres had previously been a patchwork of Depression-ravaged farms and timberland occupied by about 30 landowners, with homes, cemeteries, a school, and a church. In 1935, the federal government relocated all those people to more fertile bottomland. The park project was named for the ironmaster whose crude forges produced Jackson’s cannonballs for the Battle of New Orleans.
Montgomery Bell turned his war profits into vast plantations, making him perhaps the largest slaveholder in Tennessee at the time (a partial list of the enslaved is in the Nashville Public Library’s Enslaved and Free People of Color Database). Bell eventually emancipated his 250 slaves, beginning in 1835, after hiring a teacher from Philadelphia to teach them how to read and write at a time when this was illegal. Historian Richard Blackett said, “Perhaps at age 85 with no direct descendants to look after, it was one of life’s joys.” The 100 of Bell’s slaves who migrated to Liberia in 1835 started iron forges there, and those became Liberia’s most important industry until Ford arrived to plant rubber trees a century later.
The Tree Army
Just downslope from my window is Lake Woodhaven. Spring-fed, it is not a natural lake but the result of Depression-era labor and planning. It was built with two-man handsaws, not chainsaws, and shovels more than dozers. Combatting present and future Dust Bowls, it held water high in the landscape, recharged the aquifer, and opened a door to wildlife in-migration. As in the rest of the park, the CCC approach emphasized a few recurring principles: minimize visual intrusion, keep lines simple and horizontal, use native materials, and incorporate craftsmanship that looks traditional even when it is federally funded. CCC structures feel rooted in their sites rather than imposed on them.
CCC stonework, like the foundations of this 90-year-old cabin, pushed park architecture toward a rustic, landscape-fitting style rather than a formal or urban one. The core idea was to use local stone, rough timber, and hand-crafted ironwork so buildings and site features felt like part of the setting. That style became influential because it set a standard for “parkitecture:” low-profile forms, heavy stone bases, irregular masonry, and materials that matched the surrounding geology and vegetation. In many parks, CCC masons shaped stone by hand and used it to build walls, shelters, bridges, dams, and pavilions, giving sites a durable, low-maintenance, but natural look.
Roosevelt called the CCC his “tree army,” which is either the most wholesome military metaphor ever coined—I think of Treebeard and the Ents assailing Isengard—or a masterpiece of unintentional irony, depending on how the forests in your watershed are holding up with this emerging super El Niño.
Three Billion Trees
They planted three billion trees. Let that number sit for a moment, the way a hiker might let a surprising organism sit with them before reaching for the field guide. Three. Billion. Trees. They built 800 parks. They strung 89,000 miles of telephone line through wilderness that had no particular need for telephone line but which benefited enormously from the men stringing it, who were learning, in the process, that the land was something you could be responsible for rather than merely extractive toward. They constructed trails, bridges, fire lookouts, fish hatcheries. They fought erosion on land so stripped by industrial agriculture that it was blowing, literally blowing, across state lines and into the lungs of people in cities who had thought themselves safely removed from the consequences of cheap food.
They were not safely removed. No one ever is, which is the foundational lesson of ecology and the one our civilization has proved most resistant to. But not forever.
“Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words ‘Too Late’.”
— Martin Luther King, 1957
The program lasted nine years, employed three million men, cost the federal government roughly $3 billion, and is today remembered primarily by people over seventy-five and the occasional historian who notices that the trails they’re hiking were built by young men earning thirty dollars a month during the worst economic catastrophe in the nation’s memory. Twenty-five of those dollars went home to their families. Five they kept. On this arrangement, they replanted a continent and saved a nation from starvation.
The Global Hormuz Depression
Compare this, if you will, to the present moment, in which a different sort of civilian army—largely self-organized, entirely digital, operating from ergonomic chairs at altitudes well below equilibrium sea level—is engaged in the project of generating content about the environment, attending conferences about the environment, and investing in technologies that will, it is hoped, somehow address the environment without requiring anyone to actually go outside and touch it.
Forests are burning at scales that would have seemed apocalyptic to the CCC. The coral reefs—those cities of the ocean that took millions of years to construct and which we have managed to half-destroy within a single human lifetime—are bleaching. Kelp forests are shrinking. Aquifers are dropping. Pollinators are disappearing. The permafrost, that vast northern library of ancient carbon that was never supposed to be opened, is thawing ahead of schedule and releasing its contents into the atmosphere, augmenting the methane problem caused by fracking for the last drops of ancient sunlight needed to keep the grift going.
Amidst all this chaos and decline, we are entering upon another Great Depression. It is being brought about by the sudden curtailment of 20 percent or more of the world’s oil and gas, plus fertilizer, and rare elements like helium, lithium and neodymium. It is crashing the petrodollar. It is turning the U.S. Navy into the Spanish Armada. Decline of empire may be welcome, but is never pretty. Amory Lovins used to compare it to a dying dinosaur thrashing its tail. Xi Jinping warns of the Thucydides Trap—a structural fracture that generates a violent clash.
Li Beng Yue Huai
During a meeting in Beijing with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez in April, Xi used a Chinese phrase that denotes not only intense geopolitical chaos but also systemic and moral decay—“礼崩乐坏” (lǐ bēng yuè huài). By the “Spring and Autumn period” (770–476 BCE), the central Zhou kings were losing their grip, which they had maintained for 700 years through brutal repression. Local provinces started using the specific rites, dances, and music that had been reserved strictly for the king. It was a low-key (but in key) protest movement reminiscent of Estonia’s Singing Revolution. While the Zhou Dynasty descended into betrayals, assassinations, and endless civil wars, rendering the old moral code useless, a paradigm shift emerged. It is the one often referred to by President Xi.
Confucius witnessed the Zhou’s societal breakdown firsthand. He may have coined Xi’s folk phrase. He said Lǐ (rites) without heart is meaningless. He proposed Rén (humaneness or empathy), which he defined as treating everyone with genuine respect. He championed the “Junzi” (gentleman/exemplary person) as the ideal leader everyone should emulate and elevate to political authority. IMHO, this is the source of Xi’s power in China today, not the Western stereotype of the Tiananmen Square tank man or the 2 million Uyghurs sent to “vocational education and training centers” ringed with razor wire or the children of Muslim Turkic minorities including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks being sent to state-run boarding schools to erase their culture.
Roosevelt’s Rén
Roosevelt proposed to reconcile man and nature. It was very Confucian and Taoist. Operating without benefit of planetary boundary science, with no satellite imagery, no atmospheric modeling, no peer-reviewed literature on tipping points, FDR nonetheless grasped something essential: that a civilization and its land are not two separate things conducting an arm’s-length transaction. They are one system. Damage the land, and you damage the civilization. Heal the land and—here is the part we have somehow forgotten—you also heal the civilization, including the unemployed, the desperate, and the young men and women who are not yet sure what they’re for. You can even repair the climate, and you know what? That is what those young people are for. A billion of them.
This is not a complicated idea. It is, in fact, considerably simpler than building a city on Mars and has the added advantage of being located on the planet where humans already are.
There are currently between 15 and 40 million unemployed or underemployed young people in the United States alone, depending on how honestly you count. Soon there will be many, many more unemployed—ask any 20-year-old. The land, meanwhile, requires approximately everything. It requires reforestation on a scale that makes the CCC’s three billion trees look like a respectable opening bid. It requires wetland restoration, which is to say, the rebuilding of the planet’s water filtration, flood control and hurricane-surge systems, which we drained in the twentieth century with the breezy confidence of people who had not yet met the twenty-first. It requires soil regeneration, the slow and microbially complex process of returning carbon to the ground rather than the sky—a project that cannot be accomplished by an algorithm, a blockchain, or a well-intentioned podcast, but is being confidently undertaken by legions of youth volunteering at Ecosystem Restoration Camps.
It requires, in other words, bodies. Human bodies, outdoors, doing physical work in specific places, learning the particular grammar of particular landscapes. The CCC boys who spent a season clearing trails in the Smokies came home knowing something about the Smokies. That knowledge was not nothing. It was, in fact, the beginning of a relationship—between a person and a place—that is the basic unit of a functioning ecological civilization and the thing most conspicuously absent from our current arrangements.
We have a climate corps on the books. A pale descendant, chronically underfunded, perpetually one appropriations battle or DOGE mania from extinction, wearing the CCC’s legacy like a hand-me-down that hasn’t quite been altered to fit. It plants some trees. It does some good. It is not three million people, and the forests know it.
The genuine article—a real mobilization, at the scale the emergency warrants—would require a political imagination that can hold two thoughts simultaneously: that young people need meaningful work, and that the living systems that support all human activity need labor-intensive, place-based, ecologically informed attention.
Roosevelt understood that you cannot separate an economy from its ecology. The roots hold the soil. The soil holds the water. The water holds the civilization.
Berg’s Question
There is a question that my late friend and digger-poet-mime-ecologist Peter Berg began asking people in the 1970s. “Where does your water come from?”
Not the tap. Before the tap.
The inability to answer this question is, in a precise and non-metaphorical sense, a diagnosis. It describes a civilization that has systematically severed the informational loop between people and the living systems that support them—replacing intimate geographical knowledge with supply chains, replacing watershed with water bill, replacing place with address.
Bioregionalism is about repairing that loop—reconnecting it.
The idea is almost insultingly straightforward: that human communities ought to be organized around the ecological realities of the places they inhabit rather than the administrative conveniences of the places they govern. That a watershed is a more coherent unit of civilization than a county line. That the flora, fauna, soils, precipitation patterns, and carrying capacity of a specific landscape constitute a kind of operating system, and that cultures which learn to read that operating system—and govern themselves accordingly—tend to persist, while those that ignore it tend to produce the kind of headlines we have become accustomed to reading.
Indigenous peoples, it should be noted, did not require Peter Berg to explain this to them. They had been practicing bioregionalism for millennia under a different name, which was simply: living somewhere.
Today, the idea is experiencing a renaissance in proportion to the scale of the emergency that has made it newly urgent. In Cascadia—that magnificent Pacific watershed stretching from northern California through British Columbia—a bioregional identity has taken sufficient root to generate its own flag, its own economic frameworks, and a quietly serious conversation about governance that transcends the border bisecting its salmon runs. The salmon, predictably, do not recognize the border either.
In Europe, river basin authorities are increasingly making decisions that nation-states cannot make sensibly alone—because water, carbon, and migratory species have always been magnificently indifferent to the Treaty of Westphalia. In West Africa, the Great Green Wall initiative is rebuilding the Sahel not along political boundaries but along the ecological logic of the land itself. In dozens of bioregional mapping projects worldwide, communities are asking Berg’s question and then doing the harder, more rewarding work of answering it—identifying their food sheds, their energy landscapes, their seasonal rhythms, their biological neighbors.
The first North American Bioregional Congress convened in 1984, and the Cumberland Green council—named for the watershed formed between the Green River in Kentucky and the Cumberland River in Tennessee—shortly thereafter. Several of us went as delegates to the Second Continental Congress in 1986 at Camp Innisfree on the shore of Lake Michigan in the Sleeping Bear Dunes. The Michigan congress helped turn bioregionalism from an idea into a more organized movement with recurring meetings. A council of Native elders and leaders was an important part of the Innisfree event.
Bioregioning
My friend and mentor Daniel Christian Wahl, in the recent Festival of Wild & Kind Ideas, argued that the future of bioregionalism is not just an environmental preference but a practical survival path for humanity. He prefers “bioregioning” to describe the practice, rather than a place. Bioregions are small enough to be understandable and large enough to support real change in social and ecological systems. There are excellent examples of that.
So, for Wahl, bioregionalism’s future is less about nostalgia for rural localism and more about building resilient regional cultures that can function in a more energy-constrained, climate-disrupted world. Permaculture is one of the toolkits that can help make that worldview real.
Indigenous peoples, it should be noted, did not require Peter Berg to explain this to them. They had been practicing bioregionalism for millennia under a different name, which was simply: living somewhere.
Given all of that, the Cumberland Greens should find themselves at the cusp of expansion, well-funded, staffed, and taking on CCC-like projects. Instead, the business meeting on Sunday morning was pretty gloomy. Fewer than 30 people had registered for the weekend retreat. The auction—its annual fundraiser—generated less money than the campground rental cost. Looking around the group, I would say most were over 60, and a number of us were in our 70s and 80s. The mailing list was similarly populated. I’m told the Ozark Area Community Congress and the Kansas Area Watershed (KAW) have also declined to the point of folding their tents.
Is it that young people do not see the value of bioregionalism? Driving home on the Natchez Trace Parkway (another CCC project), I was delighted at the sight of wild turkeys and grazing does and fawns at the roadside, undisturned by passing cars and bicycles. I was saddened by all the downed trees—and the same at Montgomery Bell. Normally, six months after an ice storm, park rangers would have been out with chain saws and perhaps—thanks to the coalition of the US Forest Service and our sponsored Biochar on Site program—making biochar from those deadfalls, mitigating both fire and drought risk. Instead, the rangers were doing less with fewer—nearly a quarter of the workforce has gone since January, thanks to DOGE layoffs and hiring freezes. Thank you, Elon. Enjoy Mars.
Deferred maintenance funding cuts targeted campgrounds, visitor centers, roads, trails, and water systems. Meanwhile, NPS money was diverted to returfing the Ellipse, building a Stargate on the White House Lawn, and repainting the Mall’s reflecting ponds. Rural Rangers are being pushed toward front-facing visitor tasks while resource management, species monitoring, permit coordination, and long-term maintenance are shunted aside.
Economy, in a bioregional framework, is not something imposed upon a landscape. It is something that emerges from one—shaped by what the land can genuinely offer rather than what the market temporarily demands.
This, admittedly, is a radical proposition in a civilization that has spent three centuries treating geography as a constraint to be engineered around. But the watershed doesn’t negotiate. It simply reminds you, eventually and without particular sympathy, where you actually live. It offers full employment doing righteous, essential, fulfilling, historic work. This is our role as planetary citizens now—planetary emergency technicians.
FDR nailed that. Just as he nailed the wrought iron 12-pennies that hold together these oaken walls around me. Thank you, Franklin. You did good.
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#RestorationGeneration.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion.
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