Abstract
This thesis discusses the usefulness of the concept of bioregionalism as a social and cultural environmental practice, and as a response to the environmental crisis of our time. The thesis addresses an important issue in environmental discourse by considering whether bioregionalism s place-based approach with its ethic of reinhabitation could challenge mainstream environmentalism. The thesis raises a critique of today s professionalized and technocratic environmental movement. This thesis will argue that bioregional thinking evokes agrarianism and is indeed useful, because it can offer a practical utopian answer to the current environmental catastrophe. It is pragmatic, regionally specific, and reinforces the concept of place as central to the environmental discourse and debate. Ecological utopias have a role to play in environmental thinking because of their transformational power and pragmatic aspects. This thesis will show how the imagined bioregion of Cascadia is being constituted in different cultural representations of place, such as narratives about imagined places in music, film, and literature, and how this in turn is placemaking. This thesis argues that cultural representations of place, such as narratives about imagined recovery of places, can bring about both desperately needed inspiration for us humans to find local solutions to a global environmental crisis. The thesis is a contribution to American Studies because the discourse of bioregionalism contrasts the dominant narrative of American culture as placeless, in flux, and commodified.