Layers upon layers upon ...

In the interest of full disclosure, I confess to being back on a bioregional binge. A few days ago I began rereading Kirkpatrick Sale's Dwellers in the Land. Before that there were encounters with some intriguing resources via Plantmaps. Even when enlarged, it's challenging to determine specifically where our property lies, because it's near the edge(s) of:

• USDA hardiness zones 4a and 4b


• St. Croix Outwash Plain and McGrath Till Plain and Drumlins (Ecoregions)


• Close to the border between Deciduous and Coniferous Forest biomes


• Near the divide between the Laurentian Mixed Forest and the Eastern Broadleaf Forest (Ecological Provinces)
• Near the divide between Western Superior Uplands and Minnesota and NE Iowa Morainal (Ecological Sections)


• Near the divide between the Anoka Sand Plain and the Mille Lacs Uplands (Ecological Subsections)

Geology of Minnesota, Stillwater Region

Photo by J. Harrington

Many of these borders / boundaries will shift over the next decades or century as climate weirding affects precipitation and climate patterns. What is unlikely to change is that the property will remain within the:

• Sunrise River Watershed of the


• Lower St. Croix River Watershed of the


• Upper Mississippi Watershed

All of which is before we begin to consider soils, political and related boundaries, foodsheds and other cultural geography. This is part of why Dwellers in the Land is being read again. The more I learn about the concept of bioregions and its application, the more I feel like good old Winnie, a bear of very little brains. But I'm also becoming more and more convinced that we need a broader understanding and use of bioregions if we want to have a fulfilling life for our remaining years and the same for our descendants.

Map

Linda Hogan

This is the world
so vast and lonely
without end, with mountains
named for men
who brought hunger
from other lands,
and fear
of the thick, dark forest of trees
that held each other up,
knowing fire dreamed of swallowing them
and spoke an older tongue,
and the tongue of the nation of wolves
was the wind around them. 
Even ice was not silent.
It cried its broken self
back to warmth.
But they called it
ice, wolf, forest of sticks,
as if words would make it something 
they could hold in gloved hands,
open, plot a way
and follow.

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.
This is what I know from science:
that a grain of dust dwells at the center
of every flake of snow,
that ice can have its way with land,
that wolves live inside a circle
of their own beginning. 
This is what I know from blood: 
the first language is not our own.

There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.

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