BIOREGIONAL MICROCULTURES & THE AGE OF AQUARIUS

CHEAP THRILLS: SPECULATIONS ON ENTERTAINMENT, MEDIA, ART AND LEISURE IN THE DEINDUSTRIAL AGE

“Find your place on the planet. Dig in, and take responsibility from there.” ― Gary Snyder

When Jack Kerouac went out on the road in the 1940s, America hadn’t yet become quite so homogenized as it is today. There were certainly national brands and national ideals, things that held the republic in common bond, yet New Orleans, Denver and Des Moines were all worlds away. The telephone was around but long distance calls were expensive. Space had not been shrunk down so much by instantaneous communication. Even in 1978 when William Least Heat-Moon hit the blue highways to take in small town America, the plethora of sameness was not so prominent and pervasive. The small businesses on Main street strips hadn’t been totally usurped by Target and Walmart, Family Dollar and Dollar General. Starbucks wasn’t around to fuel the journey. Fast food chains were just ramping up. In their place a multitude of diners and local spots offering local flavors added to the uniqueness of each place. Towns, counties, states all had their own character and characters.

When TV came along it added another layer of sameness to this diverse country. A new monoculture got beamed into living rooms all across the land. In the beginning three choices commanded the airwaves: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Even so, there were still local programs on the channels—but most of them had gotten canceled by the end of the seventies. Things were a bit more diverse on the radio, but even that changed when the stations got bought up by a handful of companies devoted to the boring format concept that flatlined the excitement of live airtime. The newspapers, when we had newspapers, were multiple, but while each was often angled at some slight political slant, they otherwise covered the same topics. In a similar way big-name movie and music stars jelled the very different and diverse regions of America together in the twentieth century, and so did major writers. A hit movie, song, or book would be on everyone’s lips, a talking point not just for days, but for weeks, months, and seasons. All of these things became part of the glue of American monoculture.
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I contend that as costs of transportation increase, the cost of mass production increases, and our electrical grids and communications infrastructure get tangled into knots and dissipate, the local celebrity will begin to again trump the national. Sure, there will still be writers, singers and radio stars who hit it big across the land, but these stars won’t be quite as super as they are today. As people move away from a mass-produced “national” culture, the return of regional and bioregional cultures will once again structure people’s conversations on the rebuilt Main Streets of our retrovated futures. Some of the culture people will be conversing about will be so local and individualistic we might as well think of them as microcultures. Furthermore, this is a trend that lines up with the influences of the Aquarian age, and America, as I plan to show, is a distinctly Aquarian group of nations.

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​AMERICAN NATIONS

America isn’t one nation, but many, and the product of a multitude of folkways. A string of authors make this claim and have presented their take on the matter in a number of interesting books. Three of those stand out, and we’ll take a quick look at their claims.

In Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America, published in 1981, he argued that the conventional boundaries of the states in the USA don’t matter as much to the economics and culture of a region as his nine nations do. He divides the country thus: New England, The Foundry (think Midwest rust belt), Dixie (think the southeastern states), The Breadbasket (think Great Plains and Prairie states), The Islands (includes the Caribbean as well as Florida—which is soon to become a string of islands where it isn’t completely underwater due to sea level rise), Mexamerica (the Southwest), Ecotopia (the Pacific Northwest, and familiar to anyone who has read the book of the same name by Ernest Callenbach), The Empty Quarter (which includes most of Alaska, the Klondike and parts of the Rocky Mountains in the west U.S., centered on Denver), and finally Quebec (who have long been desirous of being their own nation). These groupings make an intuitive sense to me, and there is a good deal of overlap with the regions suggested by our third author, below.

The next major author to mine this territory was David Hackett Fischer, and here we get into the meat of migration, a major factor influencing regional cultures. His tome Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America came out in 1989 and describes the influence of English immigrants and colonizers. His book shows how the different regional identities of England got transplanted onto the soil of America, becoming parts of distinctive regional cultures and ways of thinking.

Fischer argues that the migration of those on the border of Scotland in the North of England (the Northern English) and of the Scots-Irish influenced the eventual pioneer and ranching culture of the Western states. I can see this exemplified in the figure of the cowboy. Cattle raiding was a popular Scottish pastime back in the day; transplanted here on western soil, this feisty culture mixed with Hispanic vaqueros to give rise to perhaps the most distinctive American archetype, the cowboy1. Fischer also lays out how the Scotch-Irish left their mark on the South, particularly Appalachia, giving us our beloved hillbillies.

The Puritans who came to Massachusetts influenced education as well as corporate culture, Fischer argues. The idea of a town hall where people came together to hash things out and reach consensus was a gift of the Puritans. Meanwhile migrants from the south of England influenced the growth of plantations and slavery in our own south. Finally, in the Delaware valley, the influence of the Friends or Quakers was felt following their migration from the North Midlands. Many other people came from many other lands later, and gave their distinct imprints to the areas they settled. The usefulness of Fischer’s book is how he models that process in his examples.

The historian Colin Woodard took the seed of Albion’s Seed and grew another tree. His contention is also quite similar to Garreau’s, but instead of nine regions, Woodard gives eleven. His book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, lists them as such: El Norte, New France, Tidewater, Yankeedom, New Netherlands, Deep South, the Midlands, Greater Appalachia, the Far West, Left Coast, and First Nation. Again, there is quite a bit of overlap with the way Garreau maps out his regions, but with a bit more nuance.

Woodard’s book gives a well-rounded approach to many of the different immigrants who came to these shores, not just those from England, and who overlaid their traditional cultures onto the existing landscape and helped forge the American mindset in the process. The flow of people into this country hasn’t stopped, not by any means. New diasporas congregate on new land to give it their own imprint. It doesn’t seem like the flood tide of humanity will stop any time soon either. Climate refugees will join the political and economic refugees already coming into the country in droves. It’s not like all three issues aren’t tied in a knot together anyway. As desertification afflicts the western U.S., and rising sea levels affect all ocean-lined states, inner migrations from the nine or eleven regional nations will find themselves in new areas, mixing and merging to create new variations on these regional cultures.

To speak from my own experience, I already find myself having plenty of new neighbors from the Left Coast, i.e, California. The fact of the matter is that the cost of living is lower in Ohio, while the standard of living in a city like Cincinnati is very good in terms of culture and available services. A lot of internal immigrants have bought up houses around several blocks right where I live. As my neighborhood gets further gentrified by those fleeing California, and perhaps later by those fleeing NYC, I can only expect its microculture will change.
Meanwhile out in the northern suburbs of the city is a thriving eastern-Indian diaspora. This population is large enough to support two Hindu temples that I know of, and it will be interesting to see, over time, if their religion spreads locally to others outside of their descendants, or if new syncretic faiths develop. In the meantime, however, it remains a microculture, though not an insignificant one, plopped within the macroculture of the area. It’s not quite the same as the Little Italy neighborhoods of Cleveland and Chicago, or the Chinatown of San Francisco, but it’s close, and it could continue to grow.

In Woodard’s scheme Cincinnati is on the fringe of Greater Appalachia and the Midlands. This is evidenced by the number of people who emigrated inwardly to Cincinnati, and the southwest of Ohio in general, seeking economic opportunities during the post-war industrial boom of the 1950s. Most of them were from Kentucky and other places in the south and brought with them their bluegrass music, which is what makes southwest Ohio a thriving center of the musical style, as written about in the book Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy.2 It’s industrial-strength because it mixed with the hard-working German Catholics who came to the same area in the 1800s and gave Zinzinnati its stoic cast, a perfect match for the emergent Midland culture. Not far from here, in Springfield, Ohio, somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 Haitians have arrived over the past few years.3 Aside from whatever a person may think of the situation from a political perspective, from a cultural perspective it will be interesting to see how integration might occur, and if Haitian beliefs which have been described as “70% Catholic, 30% Protestant, and 100% Vodou” might merge or conflict with born Ohioans.4 Perhaps a Haitian microculture will remain in the area, mixing with the descendants of German farmers, or getting involved somehow with people from the Indian diaspora.

I encourage readers to look at their own area, and trace how the different flows of people have created one or more cultural overlays on the character of the land you call home. The cultural overlay runs in tandem with the ecological underpinnings. Immigrants bring with them traditions from another land onto a new land. Sometimes they mesh harmoniously and sometimes they do not, yet both always influence each other. The humans impact the land through their relationship to plants and animals they bring with them, and their related traditions. The land in turn influences humans by forcing us to live within certain limits and with the things already in place. Regional and cultural edges are blurry at best, and zooming back out can allow the concept of bioregionalism to become part of the equation.

BIOREGIONALISM AND CULTURAL ECOTONES

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At this point in our collective society’s history, many people seem to feel separated from the very environment that gives them life. Business as usual, whether corporate capitalism or crony communism, hasn’t done a good job of meshing industry with the land, as their main motive has always been extraction rather than investment. Bioregionalism is a philosophy that attempts to address this issue by looking at ways we can better fit ourselves to the particular landscapes and ecologies we find ourselves embedded within. This is already at work on some levels. The industries that came to certain areas were often drawn by their resources. By changing our relationship to those resources, we can start to enter into a discourse instead of a one-sided relationship. Even when we are distracted by the simulacra and spectacle of disembodied online life, people still do have to pay attention to the elements, to the weather, and to the particular resources that caused a people to settle a certain place.

We humans can learn to fit ourselves to place, and by fitting ourselves to it, not feel so outside it, above it, beyond it—but rather connected and interconnected, in relationship to and with the land. It requires us to learn to live within the limits of the land, but also to give back to the land. We can’t just be takers and consumers as industrialism has taught us to be, but givers and regenerators. To do that requires a connection to the landscape in our consciousness. By looking at the place we live in terms of what watersheds we are a part of, what kinds of minerals and substrates are in the soil, what are the general characteristics of the terrain, we gain a greater appreciation of the interconnection between the land and our lives lived on the land. The knowledge people bring with them can mix with the knowledge already embedded in a more stationary population. These factors all become part of a philosophy of bioregionalism. I imagine a country where county lines are based around watersheds and other natural features rather than lines made on a map by a surveyor in the eighteenth century.

If a place is to thrive, the spiritual, cultural, economic, and political life of the human community must be harmonized with the environmental geography, climate, and plant and animal life. Yet all of these are now in flux. It is not just humans involved in mass migration and relocation, but also our flora and fauna moving from one domain to another, invasive species daring to thrive where they may. I have no doubt that decades from now Ohio farmers will be planting orange groves and lemon trees, and we may have gators swimming in the rivers. In the meantime we can start to think of the fringe zones and border areas between different ecological systems as models for emergent cultural ecotones.

The word ecotone was coined by Frederic E. Clements, who added the root tone, from the Greek tonos, or tension, to the eco- (“home”) root from ecology to denote the dynamic tension at places where two or more ecological systems overlap and meet. I think the idea of cultural ecotones would also be useful to develop, the place where two or more cultural systems meet and overlap. These borders, edges and thresholds are all places of liminality where the magic of synergism and borrowing, bartering and swapping of cultural tools and ideas, is liable to happen as populations and landscapes adapt and allow themselves to mutate to accommodate novel conditions.
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When regional identity encompasses not just the different cultures of humans in a place, but all of its denizens, and the natural features of the landscape, human culture in turn can have the chance to grow into a beautiful shape, leaving to the past our brutalist legacy. We might have some combing through the ruins to do before those shapes fully emerge, and repurposing of what has already been built, but they exist within the land, just like a fully grown tree exists within an acorn. One way to start would be the oft-repeated goal of eating locally and seasonally. Cultures grow around shared food traditions, and following the seasons and what comes from closest by can start the work of attuning us to the rhythms of the land.

THE RISE OF AQUARIAN MICROCULTURES

When the mainstream culture fails to deliver the goods, as it often does, people will turn to the counterculture and alternative subcultures to find meaning. People did this in droves throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The trend was driven in a large part by the appearance of youth culture. People in their teenage years are especially prone to identifying with one or more subcultures. Some people grow out of it, but for others it becomes a lasting influence if not a lifestyle. Before the nineteenth century the very idea of a “teenager” as a specific time period in a person’s life did not exist as such. There were only children and adults, but that started to change in the early 1800s. In Jon Savage’s book Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, he shows how the phrase juvenile delinquent was first used in America sometime around 1810, and he uses that term to pinpoint our current ideas about what it means to be a teenager.

To continue this line of thought, we are going to have to pivot and make a brief detour into astrology. The planet Uranus was discovered in 1781. Uranus is a planet of freedom, of revolution, of visionaries and of original thinking. It is also the planet that rules youth culture, and is the planetary ruler of the sign of Aquarius. According to astrologer John Michael Greer, whenever a new planet gets discovered, it coincides with the development of a new aspect of humanity that had been dormant prior to the discovery of that planet. As a force, the discovery of Uranus ushered in the revolutionary period that began shortly before its discovery with the triumphant spirit of 1776, followed by the French Revolution and other revolutions.

In Greer’s book The Twilight of Pluto, he writes about how it takes about thirty years for the influence of a planet to be fully felt on humanity after it gets discovered, but the beginnings of that influence are first felt thirty years before it is found. If we look to the time stamp that Savage put on the beginning of youth culture, through the first use of the term juvenile delinquent, it was just around the thirty-year mark after Uranus wobbled into the view of William Herschel’s homemade telescope. By the end of the century, the energy of Uranus was in full swing and teenage gangs had taken to the streets with their own ways of dressing, mannerisms, slang, and the like. In 1898 a psychologist named G. Stanley Hall made up the word adolescence. It marked the beginning of a new era with a distinct emphasis on youth. Tribes of teenagers found each other and a plethora of subcultures ripened on the vine of youth.

The sign of Aquarius, in turn, rules eccentricity, rebellion, airy mentality, invention, imagination, and humanitarianism. On January 19, 1881, the sun entered the sign of Aquarius, marking the beginning of a roughly 2,000-year epoch in which Aquarian themes will dominate life on earth. Since the United States was founded during the revolutionary blast surrounding the appearance of Uranus, and since that planet rules the sign of Aquarius, the USA can be seen as a distinctly Aquarian republic.

People seek out subcultures and countercultures as an alternative to the mainstream. The ideas at large within what we might as well call bohemianism don’t have to be sane to be exciting, don’t have to be smart to lure people in. All they have to do is offer a way out, an alternative. Bohemianism also emerged in the early nineteenth century, around the same time the influence of Uranus started to be felt. Among other things, Uranus also rules gay and lesbian culture, and bohemian lifestyles provided a safe haven for queer culture to grow into its own distinctive form outside the straight world.

Uranus is also a planet of revolution and rebellion, and the kids rebelled against the oftentimes stifling structures of family life, compulsory education, rules, regulations, and red tape. So, a lot of people dropped out of the big macro-mono combine and made their way into various dark bars, cafes, dives, salons, gay bars, and sweetly sordid soirees in search of something distinctively different. As the twentieth century got up to speed in the 1950s one subculture after another started to emerge, each with their own unique flavor, but often overlapping in subcultural ecotones. From the beats and the bikers, to the mods and the hippies, to punks, b-boys and b-girls, metalheads, goths, and other freaks, there was something for everyone who wanted to be a part of a tribe distinct from the people who wore suits and went to the office. (Zoot suits don’t count.)

Yet something seems to have gone amiss in the past decade. A once thriving bohemian diaspora seems to have withered. Jazz writer and cultural critic Ted Gioia wrote an article in 2024 listing fourteen warning signs that we are living in a society without a counterculture.1 These include the fact that a majority of the alt-weekly newspapers have disappeared from our cities, that telling jokes has become dangerous (especially if it is your livelihood), and most tellingly to me, that the writers in mainstream publications who try to explain culture to us all have elite educations. We can take it as a given that the highly schooled but uneducated managerial class are completely lacking in the wide variety of tastes that once defined subcultural aesthetes. When the counterculture thrived, young kids were telling things how it was, and working class voices were part of the conversation in arts, letters and especially music.

At the same time what was the counterculture has in many ways been recuperated, to use Situationist language, back into the monoculture. Meanwhile microcultures are bubbling beneath the radar of the official narrative. People are turning away from traditional media. Trust in official news sources is at an all time low.2 People have stopped watching award shows and paying attention to who the entertainment industry thinks is deserving of praise. New forces are emerging, and once again they don’t align with the man, man. There is a back-to-the-land element to some of them, and a self-sufficiency element, as evidenced by the robust subcultures around prepping and homesteading.

These days people no longer have Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. Instead, as Cory Doctorow noted, creatives are now more liable to be famous to fifteen people. That is the essence of a microculture. Individualism, rugged or otherwise, is at the center of these microcultures, because individualism is an Aquarian thing, ya dig. Strange and wondrous cults of personality are liable to erupt around musical bards, inspired scribes, and junk yard sculpturists. Hyperspecific periodicals, radio shows, restaurants and theaters, with their own cadre of followers, each doing their own thing, may rise up from the rubble, each with their own specific flavors imbued by place. The bioregions will color in the background in large swaths, while the individuals create pointillistic kaleidoscopes of blistered seasonal flavor in the brief flowering of the foreground, here for a time, and gone tomorrow.

These microcultures can, to the extent that they are embedded in a bioregion, become polycultures, ready to give rich yields of imaginative material to the children of tomorrow. Companion planting and intercropping between individual microcultures can strengthen them all and give them an edge against parasitic creativity zappers, i.e., the thought forms of corporate-bred spectacle. Not every polyculture is suited to the same environment. The bioregional flavors that predominate in one area will push up through the soil to give their specific cast of terroir to emergent happenings.

As the Aquarian age accelerates, macroscopic forces such as climate change, economic collapse, and the fall of American hegemony, will drive change all across the different bioregions of this country. Meanwhile people will focus in on the microscopic. Local culture will become elevated. Interest groups and fandoms loyal to and excited by some peculiar artist, writer, musician, or cause, will become the norm. Niche is an operative word for the microculturalist. Specific elements particular to a bioregion, and specific elements particular to the peculiar vision of a strange individuals may be one of the hallmarks of Aquarian Age America. And it will get even weirder than the weirdest and most far-out visions of the bohemiana we’ve had up until now.

To me, high weirdness is something to get excited about, something to be celebrated, and something to look forward to and participate in as the chaos unfurls. Clinging to unique and eccentric ideas and mysterious whimsy might just provide the rudders for our own personal lifeboats amid the maelstrom of the furious and unwinding monolith of legacy media and corporate shills posing as artists.

1 https://www.arcaneborders.com/post/border-reiving-an-iron-age-relic
2Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison, eds. Champaign, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2021.
3https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/19/us/springfield-ohio-haitians-immigration-cec/index.html
4https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/07/vodou-haiti-endangered-faith-soul-of-haitian-people
1 https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living
2 https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-remains-trend-low.aspx

RE/SOURCES:

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York, NY.: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Garreau, Joel. The Nine Nations of North America. Boston, MA .: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

Gioia, Ted. “In 2024, the Tension Between Macroculture and Microculture Will Turn into War.” < https://www.honest-broker.com/p/in-2024-the-tension-between-macroculture>

“14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture” < https://www.honest-broker.com/p/14-warning-signs-that-you-are-living>

Greer, John Michael. The Twilight of Pluto: Astrology and the Rise and Fall of Planetary Influences. Rochester, VT.: Inner Traditions, 2022.

Heat-Moon, William Least. Blue Highways: A Journey into America. Boston, MA .: Little, Brown, 1982. This book was first thrust on me by a friend in high school. It captivated my mind, because I had just before run across my father’s diaries, and had read them without him knowing. They detailed his own travels across the United States from Maine to the Alaskan highway in his ’34 Ford Coupe in the year of 1976. Heat-Moon’s book takes place in 1978, just a year before I was born, so it touches on a time in America that had already started to fade as I was coming into this world, and the place my father knew as a young man.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York, NY.: The Viking Press, 1957. This classic text of the Beat generation is available in multiple editions. While it may be flawed as a novel (I like his Dharma Bums much better), it excels as a snapshot of the different regions of North America, including Mexico, in the aftermath of World War II and remains a vital countercultural document.

Savage, Jon. Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture. New York, NY.: Viking, 2007. This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the development of the phenomenon of the teenager. It roughly covers the years 1875-1945, and focuses in on small groups and gangs now only dimly remembered as well as the influence of authors such as James M. Barrie, L. Frank Baum, Anne Frank, and Oscar Wilde.

Woodard, Colin. American Nations: The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York, NY.: Viking, 2011.

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