Reinhabitation, the bioregional project of living-in-place, has matured incrementally and surely over the past 40 years, as it has tested and refined close-to-the-ground practices and customs in cities and suburbia or out into the countryside and beyond.

There are many ways to apply this bioregional idea, but its foundations have remained rather constant and sturdy. Many would begin with this statement by Aldo Leopold, from his Sand County Almanac: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” The practical consequences of this enduring wisdom are to enlarge our sense of community to include water (and watersheds), plants, animals and soil and to assume a worth to them beyond an instrumental value for humans.

Leopold’s land ethic serves as a starting point for Thomas Berry’s articulation of the “earth community,” within which the human is embedded and is the source of celebration, creative inspiration and sustenance. Embeddedness is a recurring theme for reinhabitation, but how can this be accomplished at different scales of watershed life? Ray Dasmann and Peter Berg write, “Living-in-place means following the necessities and pleasures of life as they are uniquely presented by a particular site, and evolving ways to ensure long-term occupancy of that site ..... Simply stated, it involvesapplying for membership in a biotic community and ceasing to be its exploiter.”

Tacking from the intentional to the more concrete, Berg offers the following cornerstones for reinhabitory practices: restore and maintain natural systems; develop sustainable means for satisfying basic human needs; and create and support a broad range of activities that make it possible to fit better into the life-place.

This collection of art and ideas strives to anchor itself in this vibrant context, while encouraging an appreciation of how wildness is central to land-based customs and community building (and is a counterbalance to the increasing virtualization of everyday life).

Inside this envelope, you will find a helpful Hudson Estuary map showing watersheds, forest communities and totem animals. Art Murphy’s powerful fossil photographs establish the presence of a deep prehuman past, often forgotten. George Tukel looks at how neighborhoods can become more self-reliant and convivial once they are located within bioregions. Carol Zaloom’s linocut prints and Mikhail Horowitz’s prose remind us of the eternal collision between the wild world and the built or cultivated world. Evan Pritchard, of the Micmac people, researches how Hudson Valley Native Americans, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, met basic needs in parallel to the European money economy.

Thoughts or comments? Write to Reinhabit the Hudson Estuary, 38 Marakill Lane, New Paltz, NY 12561