Editor's Note: In this issue, after reading Bioregioanlism, you may want to apply (yourself) for a change of address! Having moved into a new place (perspectively), we present you a guide to Make It All at your home, from tomatoes to toothbrush. Enjoy your new dwelling. --Ragu & Nisha

By foregrounding natural factors as a way to envision place, bioregionalism proposes that human identity may be constituted by our residence in a larger community of natural beings—our local bioregion—rather than, or at least supplementary to, national, state, ethnic, or other more common bases of identity. Bioregionalists ask questions such as the following: What does it mean to be a resident, not of Vancouver, British Columbia, but of Cascadia? Not just of Nebraska, but also of the tallgrass prairie ? Not just of California, but of the Shasta bioregion ? Not simply of Milan, but of the Po River Watershed ? Not of Nevada, but of the Great Basin Desert? The answers to such questions are rich with ecological, political, cultural, and even literary significance, the consequences of which we are only beginning to understand.

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We didn’t start all of this with a particular agenda. The way we live now is the result of a series of actions rising out of seemingly random decisions that, in retrospect, followed a logical path. And that path was dictated by the things we were learning. To turn Zen for a moment, you could say we didn’t shape the bread loaf, the bread loaf shaped us. As did the chickens and the bees, the vegetable bed and the worm bin, the laundry line and the homemade soap. Once we discovered the pleasure of making things by hand and the enchantment of living close to the natural world (even though we lived in the heart of Los Angeles), there was no going back to our old ways.

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Be The Change Idea

Famialirize yourself with 'bioregionalism' and write a new bio-address for yourself; then make your own address labels at home to complement your postal-address to let people know where you actually live and how the sky looks like from your window.