An insidious notion, neither left nor right, has been seeping its way slowly into the subconscious of the American people. What is so dangerous about this notion is that it is fundamentally anti-American to its core. And for that reason, it poses a very real threat to undermining the foundation of our nation. It started first as a cultural virus, worming its way into the psyche of disillusioned students, activists and artsy types. Philosophically, it seeks to undo the Christian spiritual ethos and essential view of mankind. Finally, in our current time, it had found its way into the economic and policy-making sphere that governs our society, boosted by the misanthropic billionaire class.
To understand this notion, we must start with one of its virulent proponents, author-activist Kirkpatrick Sale.
Kirkpatrick Sale: Architect of Decentralization, Secession, and Neo-Luddism
Kirkpatrick Sale, born in 1937一slightly before the Boomer generation he helped shape一cut his teeth as a journalist for Leftist publications. His first notable book, SDS: Ten Years Toward a Revolution, was an expose on the radical 1960s New Left organization, Students For a Democratic Society. Sale was a founder and officer of the E.F. Schumacher Society, as well as the Middlebury Institute, which pledged to “create a movement that will place secession on the national agenda, encourage secessionist organizations, develop communication among existing and future secessionist groups, and create a body of scholarship to examine and promote the ideas and principles of secessionism.” For this reason Sale is considered “one of the intellectual godfathers of the secessionist movement.”
In addition to being a stenographer of the New Left movement, and a highly motivated secessionist, what Kirkpatrick Sale is perhaps most famous for is reviving Luddism. In 1995, Sale performed a publicity stunt where he smashed a computer on stage. A few months later he published Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution.
If there is one mechanism Sale reveres as the driver behind his ideological goals, it would be ‘decentralization.’ True to the anarchist ethos, he believes that decentralization can solve virtually any problem. According to Sale, if you can de-develop, devolve, retrench, and break anything down to smaller pieces, you will improve the condition of reality. After all, Sale is an acolyte of E.F. Schumacher the author of the hippy cult book Small is Beautiful. This obsession with decentralization naturally extends to his advocacy for bioregionalism, a framework that seeks to align human societies with the ecological boundaries of their environments.
What is Bioregionalism?
As its name suggests, bioregionalism purports to combine biology with geographic regionality. Watersheds are the key concept in demarcating a “biological-region” made up of specific flora and fauna. Bioregionalism isn’t merely a modern academic diversion; its roots stretch deep into America’s formative debates.
John Wesley Powell & Watersheds
Originally, the Western half of the North American continent had been considered an infertile desert. Early promoters of Manifest Destiny challenged this notion and saw the West not as a desert, but an Eden, ripe for development to nurture a growing population. William Gilpin, a close ally of Abraham Lincoln and first governor of the Colorado Territory, was a vocal supporter of an American Manifest Destiny that took the shape, first as the Transcontinental Railroad and later was to be developed into a Cosmopolitan Railroad that would “bind the nations of the earth together as peaceful members of one family.”1 Gilpin argued that the American continent had the capacity to support a vast population through industrial and agricultural development. His vision stood in stark contrast to Malthus’s warnings about overpopulation and resource scarcity.
A geologist, John Wesley Powell, emerged as an antithesis to the optimistic American spirit of development and growth. Powell was perhaps the first to suggest the idea that regional governments be organized locally around “watersheds.”
In 1890, Powell unrolled another map, this time in front of the U.S. Senate. The western half of the U.S. looks as though a manic paintball player has shot it with a riot of colorful splotches, each one representing a watershed. He explained the importance of keeping water within watersheds, tying water legally to the land it flowed within, creating independent communities within watersheds, limiting federal involvement in local decisions about water usage, and creating mechanisms for monitoring meteorological and ecological developments.2
Though Powell’s ideas remained unpopular in his time, they were later picked up by the growing ecological movement of the mid-20th century—one that emphasized physical limitations and natural boundaries which mankind should restrict himself within. The writer Wallace Stegner revived and glorified the work of John Wesley Powell, whose intellectual lineage was then passed down through authors like Wendell Berry and Kirkpatrick Sale. Powell’s geologic approach to small regions that mimic “nature’s limitations” was a perfect framework for the movement. But if you listen to the loudest proponents of bioregionalism today, you’ll hear a much less “scientific” or even material basis for their cause.
Bioregionalism: Science, Sentiment, or Ideology?
When asked to define bioregionalism in a recent roundtable discussion, Director at Bioregional Learning Centre Isabel Carlisle flatly stated that it’s more than just a geological and geographical demarcation. According to her, it’s not even a scientific process, but a feeling.
So bioregions are defined by geology and geography but it’s really a felt sense. This is not a scientific process, I have to say defining your bioregion. It’s very much a felt sense of: do you feel at home?3
Carlisle is hardly the first to describe bioregionalism in this way. Pete Berg, a co-founder of the Planet Drum Foundation in 1973, which helped to popularize the concept of bioregions and bioregionalism, said that “the term [bioregion] refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness — to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place.”
What first presents itself as an objective and scientific method for organizing society, quickly drifts into metaphysical concepts of consciousness and feelings. At this point, bioregionalism has clearly crossed the line into an ideological concept. But what is the ideology behind it and what are the goals of this movement?
From Nation States to Nature States
Samantha Power, a former World Bank employee who founded The Bioregional Financing Project (BioFi) last year and Finance for Gaia two years prior, weaves a distinctly political and historically biased perspective into her body of work. A few months ago she wrote on her Medium blog:
America is a story. And one that is rapidly losing its power. A more beautiful and, I would argue, more true (from a scientific and anthropological perspective) story is gaining traction in its place. This is a story about a diverse tapestry of ‘nature states’ nested within the lands we have identified for nearly 250 years now as a ‘nation state.’4
Power is clearly harkening back to a time prior to the American Revolution, invoking the romantic notion of a ‘nature state’ (strangely implying that the people here before Europeans were somehow part of nature, akin to the flora and fauna). Could the destruction of the nation state, perhaps to replace it with a ‘nature state,’ really be the ultimate agenda of the bioregionalist movement?
Kirkpatrick Sale vs. Lincoln: A Revisionist Defense of the Confederacy
Abraham Lincoln is one of the most popular, universally beloved Presidents in United States history. Despite this, he still has a few critics. In 2012, Kirkpatrick Sale penned a short book called Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought by the Emancipation Proclamation. Sale’s utter contempt for Lincoln is present from the very beginning, claiming that the President was guilty of “distortion of history by declaring that ‘a new nation’ had been created in 1776,” in order to make a “subtle reference to the Declaration of Independence and its assertion that all men are created equal,” and that Lincoln was “entirely false” to assert that it was “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
What good faith Sale completely lacks for President Lincoln, he makes up for with extreme sympathy to Southern secessionists. It becomes clear why Sale holds contempt for our Declaration of Independence and the equality of all mankind when he expounds on the ‘massive loss of property’ suffered by the South; the ‘property’ being a reference to slaves themselves:
And some 3.5 million slaves, reckoned in 1860 to be worth $3.5 billion in 1860 (in 1860 dollars, $10 trillion today), were taken from their owners, what historian R. R. Palmer has called “an annihilation of individual property rights without parallel…in the history of the modern world,” no people anywhere having “to face such a total and overwhelming loss of property values as the slave-owners of the American South.”5
His bias shows a little further when he denigrates the government that coalesced in the South in the immediate post-war period by referring to post-Civil War Southern Black societies as “mired in theft, bribery, fraud, dishonesty, and corruption” even going so far as to blame them for the creation of the Klu Klux Klan:
Exactly what these black societies did is a matter of some dispute some argue they acted only when threatened by unresponsive whites, others (such as an English visitor, Robert Summers) that they caused “a real reign of terror among the whites” the response of whites in many places in the South was to create white secret societies of their own, the most important of which was the Ku Klux Klan, started in Tennessee in December 1865.
In Sale’s mind, the secessionists never truly lost, referring to the Northern states as a “foreign military” within the South. His utter contempt for President Lincoln echoes loudly as he places every negative consequence of the war solely at his feet while treating the South as blameless victims in the conflict. He concludes his manifesto by declaring that our most beloved president “Abraham Lincoln has a lot to answer for.”
It might be considered strange to most that an avowed Leftist like Kirkpatrick Sale would write a book so sympathetic to a cause underpinned by the idea of a racial hierarchy of mankind. But Sale’s actions in the real world very much support the inflammatory ink he spilled.
Working in Coalition with Race Separatists
In November of 2006 the First North American Secessionist Convention was held in Burlington Vermont, spearheaded by Sale himself. The event was sponsored by the Middlebury Institute, which was founded by Sale along with members of the Second Vermont Republic.
The Convention brought together a strange mix of seemingly disparate political groups ranging from Neo-Confederates, Libertarians, Fundamentalists, Populists, Indigenists and Green Leftists. The League of the South, the Confederate Legion, the Free State Project, Christian Exodus, Free Hawaii, the Alliance for Democracy, the Abbeville Institute, and the Center for Democracy and the Constitution were all in attendance.
A diverse lot, indeed, but as Ian Baldwin, Vermont Commons publisher, told the meeting: “It isn’t a left and right thing. The point is we are decentralists, all of us, and we’re up against a monster.”6
Their common enemy was empire, specifically the American empire. “The American system cares nothing for people,” said a representative of the League of the South. “It provides no security for anyone.” This comment should be read with great irony considering the actual American System of protectionism, growth via the expansion of capital-intensive forms of labor and international cooperation promoted by Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln was explicitly anti-empire.
A more accurate point of unity to describe the coalition of secessionists might be to call them “decentralists.” The antidote to the American empire, according to these groups, was a heavy dose of Small is Beautiful ideology:
For this group, the most effective way to resist the Empire was to simply withdraw from it, chip away at its geographic foundation. Secession was seen as a way to restore democracy and promote freedom through reducing the scale (in both the senses of spatial scope and size) of government.7
Even though these leftists, rightists and centrists have come together over how they want to fight tyranny, it’s still hard to fathom how a bunch of crunchy leftists could justify working with people they stand in supposed moral objection to. Racism has always been a fraught issue for Americans, and the way our political culture has unfurled in recent history has further proven to underscore that tension. To put it in blunt terms, why would anti-racists and racists work in coalition? To answer this question, we must understand the real point of intersection among seemingly disparate political groups; their view of mankind.
Misanthropic Endgame: Population Limits and the War on Progress
Once again, Kirkpatrick Sale is a useful character for mapping the entire program. Perhaps the fact that he does not beat around the bush, and has a knack for saying the quiet part out loud, is the reason why he’s no longer promoted as a central figure in the movement today.
In an interview with Harold Channer in 1996, Sale states clearly what he thinks the problem is and what we ought to do about it.
“Western Civilization is the problem, teaching us the wrong relationship with nature… Increasing material standard is the problem, there’s too many of us… World cannot have higher levels of prosperity… The key idea of bioregionalism is understanding the limits of human populations… All other species have right to blossom so we should reduce our human population”8
Western Civilization and its ethos of creating the conditions of an ever-expanding human population along with increasing material standard of living is the root of the problem for Sale. Thomas Malthus, Charles Darwin and all of the people who have followed in their footsteps are correct, according to Sale. We must understand our limits and bioregionalism is the key idea in accomplishing this. We can no longer put the human species above all else. We must curb our species in order to allow for others the “right to blossom.”
As we have seen, the spiritual, philosophical and ideological underpinning of bioregionalism have been laid bare by one of the most important figures in the movement. A closer examination reveals that these underpinnings are still the driving force of the movement today.
Bioregionalism as Cultural Subversion: The Religious and Ideological War on the Nation-State
A 2024 report titled Narrative Analysis – Beyond the Carbon Fixation: Pathways to Regenerative Futures from a “a decentralized network of narrative practitioners” called ‘Culture Hack Labs’ describes the “root ideology” at the heart of the problem, which they frame as “the separation of humans from nature:”
This separation is stemming from the Ancient European mythologies and Judeo-Christian ideologies which places emphasis on human superiority (anthropocentrist), reified in the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Neo-classical eras when a particular rationalist strand of western thought prevailed.9
This framing isn’t a groundbreaking insight at all; it is, in many ways, a modern remix of the arguments originally presented in Lynn White Jr.’s seminal 1967 essay, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis. Just as White argued that ancient European mythologies and Judeo-Christian ideologies promoted an anthropocentric view that prioritized human superiority—a perspective further entrenched during the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and Neo-classical eras—this report reiterates the same critique under new guises.
One “expert” quoted in the report flat out states:
“Christianity, that’s the root cause.” (Sikowis Nobiss, Great Plains Action Society)
The essence of this movement relies on a view of mankind that is fundamentally at odds with the ethos on which the United States of America was founded. The philosophical and religious underpinning of the bioregional movement is one of monism, of earth worship, or as the activists often paraphrase it, “we are nature defending itself.”
Along with the Culture Hack Labs report is an essay titled Mythic Roots of the Metacrisis which includes an excerpt from a book called The Myth of the Goddess (1991). In the book the authors explain that the Babylonian creation myth “is the first story of the replacing of a mother goddess who generates creation as part of herself by a god who ‘makes’ creation as something separate from himself, indelibly changing the way people saw and understood the world.” The authors continue describing the implications of the myth: “In this way the essential identity between creator and creation was broken, and a fundamental dualism was born from their separation, the dualism that we know as spirit and nature.”10
Kirkpatrick Sale echoes this spiritual sentiment and reverence for Gaia worship in his 1983 lecture for the E.F. Schumacher Center, Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism:
So after all, there seems to be no doubt about it. The earth, the biosphere, is alive, a living creature, one and visible, containing within itself all living creatures. Like any living entity it can be stressed or injured or diseased, as it surely is now. But it will live— of that we can be sure—one way or another, and it will resettle itself, restore itself, with humankind or without… We must make the goddess Gaea part of—no, I want to say the whole of—our lives, even though that may be, as John Todd has suggested, a change of consciousness as profound and as wrenching as that which accompanied the origination of agriculture some 10,000 years ago.11
It is clear from our Declaration of Independence that our nation was founded on the dualistic notion of man and Creator, and the self evident Truth that all of mankind was created equal. In order to undermine a nation state to replace it with a “nature state,” one might try to “hack” its “cultural narrative” and replace it with a narrative which might cause it to “devolve, retrench and decentralize.” Culture Hack Labs describes its core methodology as follows: “We believe that power rests on the ability to harness and control language; and that humans make sense of their world through stories.”
Bioregionalism is not just a nominally scientific idea based on geography, flora and fauna. It’s a Trojan Horse for hacking American culture and the nation state. It brings together a toxic slurry of core tenets: racist pandering to Indigenous peoples (seeing them as ‘other’ whether it’s positive racism in the form of liberal wokeism, or vulgar racism that views mankind in a pseudoscientific racial hierarchy), decentralization as the mechanism by which only good can come á la Small is Beautiful truisms and, of course, the underpinning monistic theology that humans, animals, mountains, trees and rocks are all part of a oneness. Powers writes in her blog:
We can establish living systems principles and place-based Indigenous wisdom as foundational elements for the new systems we build. We can center our commitment to shifting power imbalances and supporting the decentralization of governance so that it better reflects to collective intelligence of a place — inclusive of human and more-than-human intelligence.
What does Powers mean by “more-than-human intelligence”? The definition on Patrick Curry’s repository website The Ecological Citizen describes the term as:
qualities or attributes found in nature which include but exceed those of human beings: for example, sentience, emotion, intelligence, purpose and agency. Part of its point is to throw into question the claims that such attributes apply to humans alone (see What is human supremacy?).
Bioregionalism is anti-Christian, harkening back to Paganism as a guiding principle, a moral-philosophical framework that predates the Christian framework. Michael York writes:
At perhaps the spiritual forefront of this developing consciousness concerning our dying planet, the re-emergence of Paganism as a consciously renewed religiosity is a natural and seemingly inevitable response. While there is no universal definition of ‘Paganism’, three of its paradigmatic features are:
- a veneration of nature;
- a this-worldly emphasis;
- a corporeo-spiritual understanding of divinity.
Other hallmarks of Paganism include a recognition of enchantment and the value of pleasure, deific pluralism, and a sobering, non-anthropocentric humanistic ethos; however, it is the three central foci that together are paramount, and form a Pagan ecocentric understanding.
Bioregionalism is an Neo-Pagan occult religion that positions itself explicitly in opposition to the Platonic humanist Christian tradition that the United States was founded on. Its goal is not merely a scientific approach to ‘geographically appropriate’ social boundaries; it’s a way to hack the spiritual and philosophical foundations underpinning our nation state.
Funding the Endgame: How Billionaire Philanthropy Fuels Bioregionalist Collapse
If monistic pre-Christian, anti-anthropocentric Paganism is at the core of bioregionalism, then a belief in the imminent collapse of society is the catastrophic event that binds fellow travelers together. In an essay titled Small is Powerful, Sale compares human beings to yeast cells which, during the process of fermentation, “keeps eating until it chokes on its own waste”
This is a process ecologists call drawdown. The next steps are bloom, crash, diedown, and dieout. That is the process of many species. It is the process through which industrial civilization is going today—only we are still in the first two phases of it. Drawdown of the world’s resources at an alarming rate—to the point where the distinguished Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson has declared that “Earth’s capacity to support our species is approaching the limit.”
“The country’s not going to last, but bioregions will,” says Peter Buffett, philanthropist son of finance titan Warren Buffett. The younger Buffett disperses a quarter billion per year via his NoVo Foundation which gets restocked annually with the spoils of his father’s slow liquidation (or perhaps, dare I say, ‘decentralization’) of Berkshire Hathaway shares. Peter is a true believer in bioregionalism.
NoVo’s intention is to support individuals, organizations and communities who are working to regenerate their bioregion – particularly watersheds – in broad community with others and in ways that create new systems of human organization, from the relational to the economic. Said another way, people and communities who are not only helping develop regenerative economies and ways of living for today but are also planting seeds for a post-collapse world.12
Samantha Power’s Biofi lists the NoVo Foundation as a partner on their website. The former World Bank employee is greasing the financial wheel to make sure a bioregionalist secession movement happens. From her blog, she writes:
These Native nations and new nature states can operate in parallel to nation state institutions and can even receive federal grants. And the old, nation state level institutions will become less relevant over time.
Culture Hack Labs was co-founded by Martin Kirk, which is not only funded by The NoVo Foundation, but Kirk is also employed as Programs Director for NoVo. At The Bioregional Regenerative Finance Forum which took place September 27, 2024, Kirk speaks openly about how NoVo is “building a bioregional portfolio.” He describes the goal of the program to support a growing bioregionalism movement, “with the language itself largely oriented to fit into Western scientifically trained minds.” He frames this new bioregional initiative as a sibling to their previous “indigenous portfolio.”
And of course, the NoVo Foundation has been funding E.F. Schumacher Center for New Economics, the organization co-founded by Kirkpatrick Sale, since at least 2017.
Reclaiming the True American Ethos: Liberty, Human Dignity, and the Nation-State
In 2001 Kirkpatrick Sale wrote the forward to a 1957 book by Leopold Kohr. Kohr, a self-described “philosophical anarchist” was E.F. Schumacher’s mentor and considered a founder of bioregionalist thought. In the secessionist blog Vermont Commons, Sale offers a write up of the book:
Leopold Kohr’s most important achievement was a brilliantly argued 250-page book, The Breakdown of Nations, that came out in 1947. It proved that the reasons things either don’t work or are out of control is that they are too big—and this is true of everything, from oversized teeth to global empires. And it showed that, as Aristotle once said, there is a right size to everything, based on the limited capacities of the human body and human brain, and that the restoration of health and serenity everywhere was a return to the human scale—through the breakdown of nations into smaller units where individuals and communities were empowered and invigorated.13
Kohr’s Breakdown of Nations is a strange book full of self-contradicting arguments. There is one in particular that is truly revealing. Kohr walks through a lens of history framed with his motto: The small-cell principle as the principle of all government. Kohr claims the most significant illustration of the small-state principle is the Holy Roman Empire. Why? The reason for its singular success was that it was easy to rule. Yes, Kohr is gleefully promoting the notorious notion: divide and conquer. Kohr quotes his mentor Henry C. Simons suggests that in order to “preserve world order and protect internal peace” that nation states “must be dismantled, their powers sacrificed to some supranational state.”
The great powers, those monsters of nationalism, must be broken up and replaced by small states; for, as perhaps even our diplomats will eventually be able to understand, only small states are wise, modest and, above all, weak enough, to accept an authority higher than their own.14
Kirkpatrick Sale, disciple of Leopold Kohr, is convinced the American empire will collapse because of its bigness. This simplistic view that empires fail primarily due to sheer size, though it is appealing to an immature and undeveloped mind, is patently false. The best American allegorists, such as Thomas Cole in his triumphant series, The Course of Empire, reveal to us the real reason empires fall. As he explains in the description of his famous work, “The architecture, the ornamental embellishments, etc., show that wealth, power, knowledge, and taste have worked together, and accomplished the highest meed of human achievement and empire. As the triumphal fete would indicate, man has conquered man – nations have been subjugated.” Cole explains very clearly that the precursor to Destruction is the subjugation of nations and a misanthropic view of mankind.
Sale, and the bioregional movement at large, sees mankind as an animal, and would have the nation state dismantled, subjugated by ‘localist’ feudal city-states, subjected to a supranational world government, the very thing that Cole warns us against, which puts us, purposefully, on the path toward societal collapse. If someone had Malthusian convictions and saw human beings as a virus on Mother Gaia, would it be far-fetched to say they might want to orchestrate a collapse on purpose to cull the human species?
Another irony of Sale’s rhetoric is that he invokes the American ethos to justify wanting secession. After all, he claims, “we seceded from England.” But if bioregional “nature states” were to secede, there would cease to be an America. Perhaps that is the point. America seceded from England for a very specific reason, which had nothing to do with an aversion to “bigness.” The American nation was founded on specific principals: we hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal, a statement that flies in the face of every notion bioregionalism stands for: racial hierarchy, man as property, man as animal butting up against scarce resource and ecological limit, or man and nature as a monistic “oneness” with no dualistic Creator and Created.
The bioregional movement wears a thin veil of anti-empire morality, but the very essence of the movement is about destruction of the Nation state and the culling of mankind.
- Gilpin, William (1890). The Cosmopolitan Railway: compacting and fusing together all the world’s continents. San Francisco: The History Company.
- Ross, John F. “The Scientist Who Lost America’s First Climate War.” The Atlantic, 10 Sept. 2018, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/09/how-the-west-was-lost/569365/.
- Nate Hagens, Bioregioning 101 | Reality Roundtable #14 (2025) – YouTube Video
- Power, Samantha. “From Nation States to Nature States: The Case for Bioregioning, Birthing New Stories, and Building the World We Want to Live in without Delay.” Medium, 6 Nov. 2024, medium.com/@samanthapower/nature-states-nation-states-2dfe1fa03180.
- Sale, Kirkpatrick. Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought by the Emancipation Proclamation. United States, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012.
- Sale, Kirkpatrick. “First North American Secession Convention – 2006.” Archive.org, 2006, web.archive.org/web/20110709223954/middleburyinstitute.org/secessionconvention2006.html
- Jansson, Dave. “Divided We Stand, United We Fall.” CounterPunch.org, 20 Dec. 2006, www.counterpunch.org/2006/12/20/divided-we-stand-united-we-fall/.
- Harold Channer, Kirkpatrick Sale 01-19-96 Air Date (2008) – YouTube Video
- Culture Hack Labs in collaboration with Ma Earth. Beyond the Carbon Fixation: Pathways to Regenerative Futures | Narrative Analysis. 8 Nov. 2008.
- Toledo, Alexandra. “Mythic Roots of the Metacrisis” Culture Hack Labs, 15 Nov. 2024, www.culturehack.io/issues/issue-07-beyond-the-carbon-fixation-pathways-to-regenerative-futures/mythic-roots-of-the-metacrisis/
- Sale, Kirkpatrick. “Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism.” Schumacher Center for New Economics, Oct. 1983, centerforneweconomics.org/publications/mother-of-all-an-introduction-to-bioregionalism/.
- https://novofoundation.org/faqs/
- Kohr, Leopold. The Breakdown of Nations. Routledge & K. Paul, 1957.
- Ibid
