For decades, Peter Berg has traveled the globe teaching people how to get to know their local ecosystem and how to base decisions on this knowledge. On May 17, Peter Berg spoke at the North Tahoe Conference Center, for a special event co-sponsored by Moonshine Ink and the North Lake Chamber of Commerce. With about 40 in attendance, the guru defined bioregionalism and how it could apply to Tahoe/Truckee.
‘We don’t need to be rabble-roused into knowing something is wrong,’ Berg said. ‘We need to have a basis for making good decisions.’ Below are comments from some attendees.
‘Someone with Peter’s stature and heart should have drawn a bigger audience…Nonetheless it was good to hear the concept of bioregionalism defined again from its most prominent originator.’
~ Frank DeCourten
‘I was completely engaged in the talk and it has awakened a desire to try and find a way to incorporate the principals of bioregionalism in my classroom. I am now planning on taking a workshop in August with the U.C. Cooperative Extension at Sagehen in hopes of discovering ways to teach this concept to first grade students.’
~ Julia
‘It is interesting how many of Peter’s then-radical ideas are beginning to seem old-hat under the new banner of sustainability.
‘I wondered if people went home with a new perspective, a new consciousness, a new way of thinking about themselves in place. I was also left wondering whether bioregionalist ideas are likely to take hold in an affluent, tourist-based place like Tahoe. The whole idea of tourism is to leave one’s bioregion for a vacation to somewhere else where one is free from the responsibilities of home.’
~ Cheryll Glotfelty, Associate English Professor, University of Nevada
