Nine Nations of North America
The
Nine Nations of North America, according to
Joel Garreau in his
1981 book of the same name (ISBN 0-380-57885-9), are:
- Quebec, the primarily french-speaking province of Canada, whose provincial government already calls itself the Quebec National Assembly, and which has run referenda on secession in 1980, and 1995, losing narrowly;
- an expanded New England, also called New Britain or Atlantica, and sometimes jokingly Atlantis, including not only Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut, but also the Canadian Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland;
- The Breadbasket, consisting of Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma and northern Texas as well as some of 'near-North' Ontario, and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba in Canada;
- The Foundry, the then-declining industrial areas of the northeastern United States stretching from New York City to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and including Chicago as well as industrial southern Ontario centering on Toronto, Ontario;
- Dixie, the traditional Confederate States of America, which are today the southern and southeastern U.S. states, centered on Atlanta, and including most of eastern Texas to Austin, TX and most of Florida to the city of Fort Meyers, south of which is:
- The Islands, the Caribbean islands, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale portion of southern Florida, and parts of Venezuela;
- Mex America, the southern and central valley portions of California as well as Arizona, New Mexico and all of Mexico, centered on either Los Angeles or Mexico City depending on who you ask, which are primarily Spanish language speaking, south of:
- Ecotopia - the Pacific Northwest coast west of the Continental Divide stretching from Alaska in the north to coastal areas of British Columbia down through Washington state, and Oregon and into California to just south of San Francisco; and
- The Empty Quarter - most of Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and Denver, Colorado as well as the eastern portions of Oregon, California, Washington, all of Alberta and Northern Canada, and British Columbia west of the Continental divide.
Garreau argued that everything from
politics to
urban planning must be redesigned to match the evolving regional or bio-regional sensibilities that now matter more to people than national and international borders. In the Ecotopia, for instance, residents prize
natural capital for its
biodiversity and self-renewing capabilities, often specialize in environmentally friendly high-technology industries like
solar energy, and consider those who don't share these values to be 'foreigners'. Meanwhile, communities in the Empty Quarter see their ecologies primarily as
natural resources such as
oil,
timber and mineral ore. Garreau suggests that these fundamental differences in worldviews were pulling each of the nine nations apart. This evocative thesis has been controversial since the book was first published, but this seemed only to make the book more popular, especially in college courses.
The theory of bioregional democracy and urban secession owe much to his analysis, as does the theory of free trade. Today, in 2003, even critics concede that intervening developments in national and international politics, including the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement, have made Garreau's views more respectable - even mainstream. A few would argue that Seattle for instance has replaced San Francisco as the Ecotopia center, but, few would say that these regions no longer exist.
A major impact of Garreau's work has been at the municipal level, as certain cities have realized they are drastically more important under Garreau's scenario than they are accorded in present politics. For instance, Austin, Texas is at the corner of three of the Nine Nations of North America, Chicago, Illinois brokers Breadbasket food into The Foundry region to feed industrial workers, and San Francisco (or Seattle) leads a Pacific Rim region with an economy the size of Japan.
A parallel impact has been to cast doubt on the role of American state and Canadian provincial governments, especially vis a vis these keystone cities. Texas and Ontario share the distinction that Garreau's analysis divides their territory among three nations each. As the 20th century ended with these two jurisdictions ranked as the two worst polluters in North America, some suggested strongly that their state and provincial authority needed to be eradicated, as it was being abused to simply cover up polluters' activities. An alternative view is that the cultural differences between these three regions make the state/provincial government a forum for factional differences between societies, where ecology necessarily takes a back-seat, and pollution increases then as a side-effect.
Those that unite such fractious states seem to be believed to have special power to unite the federal governments as well: G. W. Bush was the sitting Governor of Texas, and that former Ontario Premier Michael Harris was and is a commonly-named candidate to "unite the right." Others believe that regional differences are themselves responsible for such figures rising to power at all, e.g. Green Party of the United States strength in Ecotopia and New England and especially Florida which many blame for helping to elect Bush.
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