Make money doing the work you believe in
I think this is the quote I am responding to: "The hyper-local never quite gets a clear size. Bioregions get ecological boundaries. The cosmo-local gets the network. But the base unit stays undefined,"...."
Two points:
1. I have always suggested innately nested watersheds as the base unit of a more geographical ecological feedback (see previous book Toward a Bioregional State (2005)) to work against degradative politics for coordinating more durable boundaries, upon which more deliberative and ethical communities develop. This is how commons institutions are made: by how durable communities are developed for deliberation on a resource by clear resource boundaries. However, with watersheds, there is an innate modular nesting that allows more local communities to find their particluar niche boundaries, within wider watersheds.
2. I am working on a book about scaling this to global issues as well. The first three nested levels of watersheds are based on freshwater ecoregions (which are the largest levels of watersheds in the world). The next one is terrestrial ecoregions (not based on watersheds, though based on mostly larger terrestrial ecological networks of species) AND hybrid terrestrial-marine ecoregions (because no one lives on the ocean, yet it is innately a resource downstream and connected, for better or for worse, to a contiguous littoral area of a neighboring terrestrial ecoregion, so the marine ecoregions have a commons community that would include the terrestrial ecoregion upstream from them, for them to improve and to be improved). The final level is the global commons, yet it is not a separate level though just a collaborative eco-confederation of all terrestrial and hybrid terrestrial-marine ecoregions in deliberation, to work against any unvetted/unelected global technocracy of billionaire dynasties and their foundations and formal institutions trying to take over the whole arrangement by squatting upon the global level--which is our problem now. Billionaire squatters are illegitimately occupying the global level of these networks, and have to have a more "United Ecoregions" to displace them. This will be in a book called "the Glomos" that I am writing now. Michel has kindly put some links up about it at the P2P wiki, here. If Michel knows another link I am leaving out, please include it?
This one is accurate for the five levels conceived from local communities to global biogeochemical cycles:
This link is not accurate though:
because it carries on the populationist global technocratic management ideas of Widmer in the original white paper about the Glomos from the 1980s. That is what is being rejected in this eco-Glomos of five geographic levels nested to aggregate and to align pressures of regional communities of deliberation with each other toward more representation and sustainability upward as against larger (and local) unrepresentative and degradative forces, instead of allowing pressures downward on populations or regions from some godlike global technocratic-managerial level.
The model of confederative commons is historically justified as well, because there are "eco-confederations" in the past as well though most modern political science is so specialized in its academics it fails to frame what was occurring beyond just 'human institutions' when many past confederations were more than just human confederations, they were aligned commons institutions coming together over ecological issues themselves in about 40% of cases.
Whitaker - Commons Governance in a General Theory of Confederation Durability and State Failures at Durability; Introducing the Confederation Longevity Database (CLD), Data on 55 Confederations - upcoming Glomos book excerpt (Appendix 6)
Thank you, Michel, for making the above links. As I told you, I promise to correct all the misconstrued points about me in the P2P wiki, sooner or later --after the Glomos book is finished!
Best,
Mark