Where do you live? I live in the Hudson River Delta, on the largest of the islands washed by the river's effluence: Long Island, precisely on its far-western bulge, coursed and carved here and there by sounds and channels-- and run-off, much of it put underground by the city. Notice that I have not mentioned political geographies, by which I mean nation and other arbitrary divisions such as provinces or states or counties. Cities also are arbitrary at least in terms of their official limits, because metropolises spread stain-like across their territory, brooking no attempts to contain them, conquering even geographical divides, such as mountains or rivers (as is seen in images of the world at night, depicting the diamond-like sprinkle of lights clustered in highly urbanized regions, such as the Hudson River Delta and surrounding shores). 
When most of us imagine the world, we imagine it politically. I suspect most of us are still more familiar with the political map of the world, its multi-colored patchwork of countries, and can bring this representation of the world to the mind's eye more easily than the physical map with its large swaths of green and expanses of brown, its relatively un-parceled look. We know nation is a fiction. Yet we cling to it very firmly, and the imagination latches onto it, drunk on the romance, the sentiment, the emotion of being a patriot, a lover, a belonger, a devotee of a certain arbitrarily determined parcel of land.As of late nation has been making a comeback. We were fascinated with the idea that the world's borders were being erased, but as connections between nations multiply-- as immigrants, ideas and guns and money flow back and forth and squiggle through borders, illicitly or not-- the reaction is a palpable re-entrenchment of nationalisms. It has occurred previously, this nationalistic reaction to openness and an era of intense exchange. The 19th Century's last years were heady with the idea of cosmopolitan simmering, chock-full of trade and huddled masses of moving peoples and steam engines sprouting here and there, and this lasted until: World War I, when Europe's nations dug themselves into trenches for mutual massacres in order to gain a few paces in a field. OK, perhaps it amounted to more than a few paces, I mean the land at stake, but really, whether a border was here or there, or whether Alsace and Lorraine or this or that entity ended up on this side or that side, that wasn't the point, really. The point of course was to affirm nation.
When nation is threatened its fangs come out, and they do so in the form of jingoism, ultra-patriots, watchmen of all sorts, walls, trenches, fences. When nation is threatened it becomes nasty. Globalization does not mean the end of nation, but the morphing of it into something more vicious: a normalized jingoism.
It has become fashionable to speak of the rising nationalism of the Chinese, the Brazilians (flush from their recent oil finds and rising agribusiness potency) or the Russians (less so lately the Indians, but when the South Asian nuclear race activates again, the Indians will join this axis ). Yet clearly it is the United States that has been flailing its national dragon tail around with the most aggressive intent. "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer," goes the proverb. No, we are not at war with China, Russia or India, but perhaps the unspoken aim of all this warring against terror is to send them a message, in the way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were messages to the Soviet Union. I remember very well a pre September 11, 2001 essay I read on the nature of U.S. power, and which made a good case that it's not so much an exercise in quelling rogue nations, but a constant gamesmanship in which Europe, East Asia and Russia are continually intimidated so that they will play cards at a rhythm dictated by the big dog at the baccarat table.
After Sept. 11, 2001, it's all about stopping terrorists, and nukes in suitcases, etc., but terrorists may just be convenient foils for the desperate need of nation to confirm its reason for existence, seizing on an opportunity to produce jugfuls of patriotic antibodies. The terrorist, seen from this perspective, isn't just a threat and a murderer of civilians, which he most definitely is, but also a reason for the state's existence. I do not believe Sept. 11, 2001 conspiracy theories. I do not believe that world leaders in their heart of hearts welcome terrorists in order to prop up their crumbling nations, I simply observe that nationalism is on the rise, not coincidentally at a time of a global Dirty War against terror, in an age when here in the United States we've begun to build a high-tech border wall across thousands of miles to cleave ourselves from a peaceful, friendly neighbor to the south.
The counterweight to this nasty nationalism cannot be globalization, because globalization is too insubstantial. This is where the free marketeers and anti-globalization protesters have both gone wrong. You cannot be for or against globalization because in effect it does not exist. It is vapor, something in the air. It is like saying you are for the speeding up or the slowing down of history or time; it can't be done. Certain things can be accomplished, reforms and wholesale rejiggerings of systems can be achieved, whether your aim is to deregulate or to control certain aspects of economic and social change, but to either stop or fully unleash the forces of globalization is absurd, because like nationalism and other abstractions that humans become enamored of and are willing to fight and die over, it does not in fact exist.
That is why region might save us. I mean a regionalism based on the tangible realities of landscape and natural resources, and an ethic, probably, of stewardship, with regards to both human inhabitants and non-human entities. Also, the creation of a responsible built environment. There is a fellow who writes out of Louisiana named Max Cafard who in the 1990s published something called the Surre(gion)alist Manifesto. In it, he identifies himself as an inhabitant of the Mesechabe Delta, meaning the area around New Orleans, and offers a eerily prescient analysis (given Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath) of how the city's cavalier way of dealing with nature and landscape made the city vulnerable and, he hints, its continuity precarious. Interestingly, the most defining characteristic of region, as Cafard points out, may be its very undefinability, not because it does not exist and is only an abstraction, but because it is impossible to tell exactly where it ends or begins. Where does the Hudson River Delta end and begin? Where do the Everglades begin and end, or the U.S. South, or the Caribbean? Who can draw a boundary around the Sonoran Desert?Cities are real, more real at least than provinces or nations, which are completely arbitrary, but what is not real is the politically-determined geographical entity that represents a city. Its metropolitan area is always only a fragment of the total urban weave, which has incommensurable tentacular offshoots and spokes and scattered spores. A city is like water: it loves to fill a vacuum.
Regionalists are able to see beyond the fool's gold of nation, province, county and metro area, and understand that all the complexity on which their life depends is ultimately tied in to concrete cycles of energy exchange that begin and end with nature, and ultimately, the sun itself. Everything depends on our relative location on this orb floating in space, and the contours of the land around us. Each place, whether highly anthropomorphized or not, has its spirit, which is another way of referring to its zillions of characteristics that add up to make it into something unique, tangible, real. Region is rooted in landscape and climate, not anthems or slogans, and region can't be penned in by any border, imagined or real.
In many places around the world regionalism is beginning to enter into a symbiotic positive feedback loop with ecological thought. Regionalism is a natural ally to environmentalism because it encourages thought and lifestyle based on natural systems such as a watershed, a mountain range or the idiosyncrasies of desert or rainforest. This points to what may be the saving grace of the fact that some of the most critical environmental problems are in poor countries with weak central governments, which can exercise only limited power in ecologically critical regions. If regional identities, like the caboclo culture of Amazonia, can be properly collaborated with, and local wisdom be well-tapped, then regionalists, and not capital city nationalists, could become the main protagonists in regional moves toward sustainability sprung from the grassroots.
In Latin America, and in many other parts of the world that have been shaped by weak nations, we are accustomed to think in terms of region: Llanos, Pampas, Cerrado, Amazonia, Altiplano, Costa, Sertão, Patagonia, Yungas, Chaco, etc. It is probably because of this that in Latin America we have produced so many regionalist authors of international relevance: Ricardo Palma, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, Jõao Guimaraes Rosa, Romulo Gallegos, Juan José Saer. Other Latin American authors have taken the very concept of region and have made it a subject of their books, molding fictional areas that are not stand-ins for a real region as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County was, but a sort of ur-region, in which the very mind-frame of rooting oneself in a region is investigated (Alejandro Rossi). In Exile's Return, his collective biography of U.S. writers of the 1920s, Malcolm Cowley says the emergence of the self-consciously separate "Lost Generation" of artists and writers was in part due to the jettisoning of regional identities that had tethered creators to land or region in the past (the New England Transcendentalists, etc.)
I think that soon, in art and literature, region will return. Eco-ethics, regionalism, and a healthy obliviousness to nationalism might coalesce into a new, morally rigorous, clear-eyed, non-sentimental and scientifically exacting regionalist style that might serve as the antidote to so much art and literature that is excessively national, fixated on the myths of nation, whether it is to critique them or elevate them. Our new Gods, someone has said, will be more intimate. It's true, they may be nearer to us than we think, they may reside in our own watershed, in the clefts between our hills, in the local forest that has shadowed generations.Top photo: Martin Dürrschnabel
