haha, i was thinkin bout that too, i like it, im australian and mexican, two of the countries you said, lol, but whats woolwich, i only know woolworths, me confundo
As someone from Chile 🇨🇱, people from other countries always get a little confused on why my country is really long and skinny, and it’s truly because we are a long hallway between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, so when the Spanish Army founded the “Capitanía General de Chile” colony located in what’s modern day the capital Santiago, there wasn’t other option for expanding other than north or south 😅. So in some cases natural borders are just inevitable. Great video btw! I love finding new interesting channels 🙌🏼
It was so interesting to hear about Cascadia. While the people from East Tennessee identify themselves as Tennessean, me and a lot of other people from the area more identify as Appalachian (specifically Southern Appalachian). And I feel much more in common with Eastern Georgia, Western N. Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, Western Virginia and West Virginia than I do with the Tennessee Plateau or Mississippi River basin on our Western Border (a 7 and a half hour drive from where my Dad was born). And when I think about the culture of my region I think of the isolation of the mountains, a respect for nature, the history of coal mine exploitation. The conflict of the Creek and Cherokee, the relationship of the settlers with the Cherokee, the displacement of the Cherokee in the SE and the Eastern Band. Rugged individualism, a propensity to stay put. Inventiveness, folk music. I've even gotten in arguments with people who tried to describe me as Southern instead of Mountain. I wish there were more avenues for connection between the people of these regions. Reddit/Appalachia is pretty cool. People will bring up something from their area (like, when I was a kid, we would stand in the graveyard before dawn and sing to the rising sun) and see which other areas of Appalachia have the same tradition. Interesting video.
yeah people, especially americans, are very 'border' brained. our understanding of culture related to political vs physical boundaries is limited. and part of this is by design from colonization
Why do people accept borders in the first place? A fence works both ways, and these are just fences for humans. On the day we are born, we are immediately subjugated by force to an entity we have never met, and likely never will. And would deny this happens many many years before the age of consent. Yes, it is that word that starts with the letter "R." Except it lasts a lifetime and is done to everyone. This is the exact opposite of Freedom.
@@Claudia-Ayuso so you're applying to live in another country while simultaneously trying to dismantle it. You're an embarrassment. Consider self-reflection. PS: The UK is a geographically mapped out country already, it's literally an island.
On the contrary! A nation should ideally include more than one bioregion. Because different bioregions means different resources. That prevents nations from being dependent on resource importation.
The whole video seems to be about creating economies that don't depend on moving resources around, but instead on using local resources as much as possible. An industrial economy like we're used to probably isn't possible in that kind of world, since so much industrial production depends on bringing distant resources together.
Exactly, it would lead to "countries" where there is only desert bioregion, which is completely insane that you think anyone would live there. And if noone lives within those borders, it can't be a country
Yes the whole premise of the video is insane. Political borders are meaningful. Just asked Ukraine. Just ask the country Georgia. Ask the Palestinians. Assuming that we can divide up land based on on the features of nature is asking for wars. The way we divided up the land in the 19th century and 20th century to create the borders that we have today was another form of insanity but now that we have them it is a terrible idea to even think of changing them. We just have to live with what we have. Where does this revisionist perfectionist concept of redefining boundaries come from? Given that it would create so much bloodshed, it seemed like an elitist idea to perfect the world.
@@joythought I agree, although at the time the borders were drawn, there weren't much political differences between the lands north and south of the 49th parallel. Now that the populations have been divided for 200+ years, there are.
I live in Czechia (middle Europe) and one thing that I love about it is that you can see it on every borderless map. It is just almost completely surounded with mountains and I think that's how borders should look like.
@@kolomaznik333 well, it used to be. the area between Drava and Danube rivers (northern serbia and northern croatia) is mostly Hungarian populated too, so those two could be a better southern border. but for the northern borders, a natural Danube border wouldn't make sense, as it now separates a city that was also mostly Hungarian populated, so natural borders don't always work, i guess.
Natural borders exist. A countries borders only exist in the imagination of those who seek to oppress the masses, and those who don't understand that all of their Freedom was stolen away from them on the day they were born.
@@jubmelahtes thats only in Africa. unironically only nationalists want to change current world borders oin the Americas, the only exemption being the US-Canadian border that some people make videos like this, or border towns threatening to join the other country if the state/province doesn't give them money to make roads and bridges lol
@@jubmelahtes It would be interesting to take a look at other places though, even Europe, just to trace what borders are natural and which are not, because these also tell a story
@@jubmelahtes Romania, Ireland/NI, Ukrainian Ruthenia, the near east, just a couple of examples of unnatural Eurasian borders but yea by and large African, South and North American borders are more unnatural. A lot of the provincial borders in Canada are based on watersheds and thus are pretty natural, even if our border with the US isn't
Yeah I was expecting her to cover Africa's borders as well, since its borders are incredibly unnatural and were drawn up by the Europeans during decolonisation and not the natives.
As someone who definitely lives in the southern end of the Cascades hundreds of miles south of her ideal border, I do not give my consent. Indeed I was forced into becoming an American on the day I was born, as were all "Americans." It's not just indigenous peoples who suffer this subjugation, but as a white person I have to say we are less oppressed being of the majority/most powerful. _Power corrupts, and ultimate power corrupts ultimately._
This is a topic I've been considering for a long time. A few other things to think about: 1. The Brazilian government has the right to cut down their rain forest. But this would impact the entire world. Conversely, the almost all of North & South America was once covered in a rain forest, of which the Brazilian rain forest is all that is left. If the other countries decided to invest in massive re-forestation, that could also benefit the entire world. The impact of bio-systems is well beyond themselves and borders shouldn't matter. We need economic models to compensate countries with higher forest cover, to encourage investment in systems that can benefit other nations. 2. A natural border (mountains, seas, rivers, etc) are natural defence systems. Forming nations around these means you don't have to invest as much in your nations defence and can focus on other, more productive, activity. 3. Most of our future conflict will be for water. This has already happened in several regions. Distribution of, maintenance and replinishing water resources will have to be the basis of any nation building.
maybe i missed the part of the video where she says “let’s make nations off bioregions” but i’m so confused why everyone thinks she’s arguing that. she’s just talking about the idea of bio regions and how it’d be cool and nice, not telling people to make them or whether or not it’s feasible. it was super interesting! it’s a concept that i’d never heard of before but makes so much sense!
Exactly. When she speaking with indigenous tribes, that’s when she acknowledges the set backs of the idea, and when it doesn’t meet the needs of people living on the ground.
Yeah, the videos I find to contain the most informational/educational value are the ones, that draw you in with their premise, and whether or not they deliver on it, use it as na excuse to tell an interesting story and show you a new perspective of looking at the subject at hand and world around us in general, just like this one.
While I disagree with the entire concept of forcefully dividing people with borders, be they natural or imaginary (as in a countries borders), I agree that people need to not assume her intentions, and instead listen to what she said. But then, what is the point? That's my question. This division only serves the interests of the Wealthy Elite who demand we are complicit from the day we're born. No age of consent even considered.
South Americas borders somewhat follows these principles. Brazil's borders are almost completely defined by bioregions. Brazil includes pretty much the whole of the Atlantic rainforest, Cerrado, pantanal, and Caatinga biomes. And includes large parts of the Amazon, the borders being drawn in the Guyana Plateau and the Andes. it also goes into the states as well, with borders being drawn in plateaus, mountains and rivers
I thought the same thing. Another great example is the Amazon rainforest and how people are just free to cross from one country of the other as citizens of the forest.
The anglo-americans went mostly for imaginary borders to organize their territories while latin-americans had bioregions in mind way before their northern neighbors to do the same job. I don't get where this woman came up with the idea that bioregions are an innovative idea when Latin America and Europe are right next to the US and Canada.
Wow! Excellent presentation of bioregionalism! Well done Claudia! Well done Brandon as well. by the way I am the designer of the Cascadian bioregional flag that popped up a couple of times.
Dude you literally put a tree on a blue, white, and green tricolor. That flag could literally just as well apply to Siberia, or Michigan, or Finland. Try and throw in some Cascadian culture and history. Maybe reference your split between the US and Canada, or include a symbol from one of your indigenous tribes, and didn't you guys fight a war over a pig in the San Juan isles, maybe put a pig on your flag.
@@kepspark3362 I just took the existing countries (I also split the US and UK into their respective states/countries since they have their own borders) and remapped them according to rivers and mountains. It was a just a little thing I tried doing for myself so I haven't shared it anywhere. Finding a free, large topological world map proved to be a little hard from what I can remember, but I did find a grayscale version, so I used it.
Why impose these imaginary borders in the first place? They only benefit the Wealthy Elite by making the rest of us mere cattle to do their bidding. Borders are nothing more than fences for humans. Rivers, mountains etc, are merely obstacles, not borders.
@@DaWorldGuardian001I’ve done similar things based largely on drainage basins and biomes. It was encouraging to see this video and also know I’m not alone in that hobby.
"people who don't live in a place drawing borders on a map at some table far away causes chaos" *proceeds to draw borders on a map at some table far away* I think it's great to have concern for the environment and for people who live in it, but even with those in mind, prescribing new borders from the outside without the input of residents is not a good idea. it's clear this is more of a thought exercise, but one has to be careful about this kind of thing; it comes with a lot of nasty colonialist/imperialist baggage. glorifying the "natural" can also be iffy. natural disasters are also natural! nature does not have a will that aligns directly with human needs! we ought to build human constructs (like borders) for human purposes. we should take nature into account! we all owe a duty of stewardship to the land. but nature won't be stopped by borders; it doesn't care where we put them. WE care. current borders are not great, but we can't say imposing new ones would be amazing without a LOT of consideration. If we're radically rearranging borders, we should rethink our base assumptions about what borders are for and to what extent we need them at all. also, one of the interviewees here sort of implied that nomadic peoples didn't/don't fight each other over territory. i don't know much about prehistory, but in the last few thousand years at least, this is straight-up false... then again, we are talking about prehistory. I am not a historian and may be wrong, but my instinct is that no paradise with human populations well below the carrying capacity of the land ever existed for very many generations after humans reached a place. low population density probably reflected available huntable/forageable resources. agriculture just would have increased that carrying capacity. would be interested to hear a different perspective!
pre-historic nomads 100% fought each other, we have the evidence for it. infact the biggest genocide in history (relative to population sizes) was the 'indo-european' nomad's migration into northern europe in pre-historic times. they also invaded southern europe but the demographic replacement wasn't as severe.
Maybe you missed it - but the idea of Cascadia and bioregional mapping emerged from this area, especially in the 1970's and 1980's, and then through a series of Cascadia Bioregional Congresses. Bioregional mapping, from Chilcotin, Nis'gaa, Wetsuweten in the 1980's. She was just helping outline the natural boundaries as a visual aid.
@@BrandonLetsinger I feel like the video, for being about 'redrawing borders,' didn't seriously enough consider the political implications of such a radical act (for example, who would be imposing these borders & what it would mean for residents). But I did miss that part while thinking about other things. That's good to know. Thanks :)
@@target0330yeah as someone in the region these are all real concerns of many proponents of the movement. For many the cascadia movement isn't about redrawing the borders along natural lines but more about trying to promote regional interconnectedness and self sufficiency in spite of the existing borders.
As a French Canadian and Native American who lived in South America, I really enjoyed your video. I am so happy that someone else talks about this topic!!Thank you😘
Just a little point: The indigenous people still live around there and many still speak Coast Salish languages-Halkomelem, Lushootseed, and several others. I've read that there are even bilingual road signs in some places.
What a cool idea from a priviledged post war perspective. And once a bioregion has completely aligned it's internal perspective, the most productive bioregions can push their will on the less productive ones ignoring the perspective of the less productive regions. Bio-regions often get split because two groups both want access to the same benefits.
but does she really talk about the complete independence of the bioregion? Well, the same Cascadia could be completely part of the USA. With access to the US infrastructure and all that. I don't see any problems. Especially since Canada is not a real country)
Very interesting for sure, but I can’t help feel this is very idealistic. I mean you’re talking about creating new countries and carving out old ones. In the event we are all united under one flag that represents earth. This seems more realistic kind of, but even in the cascade bio region, there are 15 different cultures all just in the Frazier valley. In most instances (drawn on borders in a room) don’t make much sense, but you’re arguing for the creation of entirely new countries to solve ecological problems that also require some sort of organization and funding. How would you define these regions allegiances? What other countries are you creating? Are there identities that these people would be opposed to identifying as? Not trying to put you down or be rude or anything, but this feels like a geologists solution to an ecologists problem by spitting on the face of anthropologists.
0:26 1.4 million just isn't a lot, whatsoever. Like an atom sized drop in the entire earth's oceans compared to what both countries spend on military and social services.
it's still for a really dumb purpose. not to mention, clearing out the trees actually separates these natural habitats physically and can negatively impact the movement of native species, leading to genetic separation and more vulnerable populations. but ofc, there are definitely worse injustices if we're shifting focus to look at politics in general and away from conservationism in particular.
Maybe people need to step back and see what countries and their borders actually are. Borders are just fences for humans. Countries are just the consolidated profit.power of the Wealthy Elite to subjugate those born on the part of the planet they are their predecessors imposed on humanity by force.
@@onelusciouslad7841 : Why? I'm not saying you don't have a good answer, just saying if you do have one, that means something. Just saying x,y, or z is bad, is not saying anything. That's just expressing distaste for some undisclosed reason. And for all we know, you have a great reason, but from this vantage point, it seems just as likely you don't have any reason at all. I'm certain you can do much better. 🙂
You need to be careful relying too heavily on bioregions to inform politics. On the Australian continent there are seven defined bioregions, but only one (East Australian Temperate Forests & Mountain Shrublands (AU3)) encompasses the vast majority of the entire continent’s wealth and population. Our current political divisions splits this economic dominance amongst four states, with no one able to assert itself upon the others. While there may be other arguments for bioregionalism, Cascadia is a singular phenomenon, both in terms of ecological sustainability and political self-interest. Cascadia is not a model for universal bioregionalism, and should not be touted as the example.
Although I see the borders of countries as human-cattle ranches, I agree with you. If we're going to have countries, we should still seek to free ourselves from the Wealthy Elite who impose this tyranny on humanity for their personal profit/power.
I’m guessing people 20-30 thousand years ago knew where the borders were. It was, if you go past that river, or over that hill, you will get killed or captured by the neighboring group.
It's actually because when you don't have cars and trains to move, crossing a large river or mountains is stenuous. Thus, it kept people somewhat isolated from each other which then developped different cultures and languages Large rivers and mountains are also a natural wall that protects you from invasions to some extent This is also why the nations that were built in large plains were regularly invaded by empires one after the other
Bioregionalism is idiotic if you genuinely know anything about politics. It will lead to areas like the Great Plains and Appalachia being cut off from the economic frameworks that keep them alive and functioning. Infrastructure needs to be taken into account, and any region that cannot sustain itself will fall apart completely. Furthermore, you would be cutting apart communities of united people that don't even want independence.
Umm so less than 30 seconds into the video I'm convinced this channel is the lovechild of Johnny Harris and Cleo Abram from their time at Vox. Brava Claudia 👏👏👏 Immediately subscribed!
Ew, Johnny Harris has been caught straight up lying, fabricating data, using propaganda, accepting bribes from the World Economic Forum to push certain agendas instead of facts.....please do not turn into a Johnny Harris. He is as unethical as they come.
I was coming here to comment just that. Looks like a video by Johnny Harris, content, style of presentation, even editing, cutting to her motion of sitting down on floor, etc. very influenced I’d say, but still her own flair. Great video
I love this sooo much!!!!!! I’m a farmer in western North Dakota and have been working on regenerative agriculture but still looking at grids… this makes so much sense even for small environments as well!!!!!!
First learned about bioregionalism on Instagram a few years back, and was confused why almost no one (outside of select Native American orgs) was talking about it. So glad to see this video pop up in my YT feed.
I think borders may need to be organized into city states. Most of our political fighting is urban vs rural. Different wants and needs. Let the cities have a very large amout of autonomy but it only extends to city borders. Leave large areas of land between cities to govern themselves.
I'd love to see a world without the imaginary borders imposed on humanity by the Wealthy Elite for their personal profit/power. I was born in a "country," and therefore immediately subjugated to whims of the Wealthy Elite who thousands of years have divided humanity with bigoted ideals like nationalism, classism, and racism all for their own personal profit/power. I did not consent to being an American on day one! I am an Earthling.❤🌍🌎🌏🌐
Thank you so much for covering this. As a resident of the Southern Oregon Coast, I’ve always thought a lot about how much more sense it would make to organize boundaries according to watershed. Maybe we’ll have a chance to someday.
Just looking at the brief glimpse we were given at 17:33 of what I'm assuming is potential world borders based on biomes, just the tip of Florida is a part of the country of the Caribbeans. Felt silly and unrealistic. I feel that larger regions make sense to section off to like minded biomes, but there should be a respect of natural borders and an understanding that humanity isn't just their biomes, humanity is their culture. If the Texans of dry deserts feel the same way about things as the Texans of piney wetlands 9 hours away, then it makes sense for them to be under the same governing. Love the video, very fun topic and good job making good content as such a small channel!
I think it goes beyond human culture and beyond the duality of humans independent from nature. It may seem silly and unrealistic if the mindset of the majority of humans doesn't expand beyond the limits of culture, which is man-made and in service for humans only. But at the same time, it is realistic and serious to consider that majority of humans today aren't ready to surrender back to the systems of nature and go redraw borders based on biomes and what nature says. It takes a lot of paradigm shifts and metaphysical understanding of the world for humans to transcend to this higher levels of thinking, which will redefine their mindset and purpose within the earth. Humans in general still have a lot of ego, which influences a lot of the politics and territory we have today. Due to this, humans still need some more time to evolve as a species where our thinking goes beyond paradigms of tribalism, fundamentalism, pragmatism and materialism, paradigm of science and technology, paradigm of cultures, environmentalism, and so on. It's an integration of all of these mindsets while honing a systematic thinking that everything is interconnected and one. Humans today in general, at least most of the developed west, still view this transcended mindset as woo woo and new age-y, without realising that this is the necessary path of human evolution for the future. It's letting go of a lot of what human collectives everywhere define themselves in order to see the bigger picture of reality beyond their culture. I mean, people are now learning a lot about different cultures, and some of them are adopting and embodying cultural ways alien to them whenever it resonates. Although, there are several countries and states/regions today that do follow more closely to this biomistic approach of creating territory regardless of current human developement and present culture. I guess they have theirs going on lucky.
The Arawak language in the Caribbean was also spoken in southern Florida, so these bioregions made sense for people for over a thousand years. Also Texas is extremely politically split, are you kidding me?
0:50 Ye I don't know what happened there. US/Canada border is 8891 Kilometers long. Then she says if you were to summit it instead of walk it you would have 50 meters left and shows that Mt.Everest us 8849 METERS tall. Did she get confused between meters and kilometers? Is that a US not knowing metric system problem ? I mean a lot of work went into that animation so it was not simply missed.
The US not knowing about the metric system? Are you serious? Do you actually not understand the foundational misunderstanding of that incorrect viewpoint? Do you just blindly accept things "the crowd" says without actually asking yourself if its true or not? If you don't understand it and can't take a few minutes and think about it yourself.....I can explain it to you. I don't mean to attack you in any way..... its just that it amazes me how common this incorrect belief is. I think it must come from people blindly believing things if enough people repeat them and not having the curiosity to think about it themselves.
@@chandie5298 It was a joke you silly goose. Dont get your knickers in a twist. The video creator made a mistake between meters and kilometers and went all the way out to make an animation saying that the us canada border is the same as Everest.
@@stormxlr2377 I'm happy to hear that it was a joke. You'd be amazed at the number of otherwise intelligent people who actually believe that people in the US don't know about the metric system and do not commonly use it (of course, we do). Yes... my knicker's were in a bit of a twist, admittedly.......because that very obvious false claim is so commonly made.....especially in forums such as this. It gets aggravating after a while.......just as claims about the British all having bad teeth (they do not) and the French rarely ever bathing (they do frequently). Yes....she gets points for putting in the effort to correct that mistake.......doesn't quite excuse the video whose viewpoint is something one would expect from an elementary school child who has exactly zero understanding of the history of humanity and human nature (which incidentally applies to every group of mammals that exists now or has ever existed; the difference being that most animals are limited by their environment whereas humans have advanced to the point that we control the environment.....actually, other animals also control their environment to a large extent....those damned beavers).....but yes, I applaud her efforts in fixing the point you brought up.
As a Washingtonian, I truly appreciate someone exploring our region of the country as well as discussing that the native peoples of this land truly understand what the land means to all life.
One struggle with remapping, though. Is we can't just forget history happened. Whenever a border disappears politically, the histories and cultures of the area happened there and will be in conflict.
The idea of removing dams and returning riparian areas to their natural habitat feels great but these dams were built there for legitimate reasons. Aside from flood control these dams were built for electricity. In a world where we are trying to reduce our carbon footprint and move away from internal combustion engines in favor of electric vehicles, how are we going to replace the electricity lost by the destruction of these dams? This area is totally unsuitable for things like wind or solar so the answer is probably going to be natural gas or some other kind of carbon producing fuel. We are now going to need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars creating new power sources and all of that cost is going to be transferred to the consumer. Ultimately I'm not sure that the removal of these dams is a win for anybody's environmental vision. Great video. Good luck.
Some dams re good, but too many will destroy nature and society. For example china plans to dam many rivers in the himalayas, it will cause drought in myanmar, india, and bangladesh. Another example is ethiopia, they will literally start a war with egypt and sudan because of new nile dam.
It's a win for the Yurok people. The affected parties (including PacifiCorp, the for-profit electric utility*) have agreed to the removals. One of the dams has already been removed. This plan is going forward. * The sticking point was that PacifiCorp wanted to pass the removal costs onto US taxpayers.
Often they weren't. If you do research, many of the dams, such as the Elwah, or current Deschutes Dam removals were either built illegally, have long since stopped providing power - or in the case of the Deschutes, was simply built to provide the Washington capitol with a reflection pool under the state capitol. It will now cost hundreds of millions do undo even that one basic example.
Great subject. And it makes me emotional too as when I was a child I used to draw maps of fantasy worlds and even move borders according to river basins. I still love geography. Thanks for your informative video. ☺️
As someone who works with bioregions and kindof defines them I can tell you there are no correct bioregions based on ecology because there are endless ways to split things up. Look up maps of bird conservation regions and avifaunal biomes. Both ignore borders in the Americas. Also, we have to cut down trees to keep forests healthy unless we are going to let fires burn.
Yes to all of this (there's an episode about trees and fires coming)! And to your first point, this was why I included the explanation of how we're mapping the bioregions I'm talking about in this video
There are a few issues with this video. First is the idea that we would have to completely rearrange our national borders to be more cooperative with our neighbors when it comes to the environment. A region does not need to be in the same country for the people to take care of it. The second issue is of the dams. You bring this up as an example but to my knowledge these dams are not apart of any border so you are making the case for no dams purely on environmental grounds and has no connection to borders. Finally, the better example of this would have either been the US-Mexican border where building a physical barrier has impacted the ability of wildlife to cross or Africa where having borders with straight lines has impacted communities being split up far more than the US-Canadian border or US states.
It is relevant because the dams are used for diverting water outside of the river's watershed but within the state that has legal rights to the river's water.
I love the real motive of the video. Borders don’t matter. Borders weren’t stolen and the I saw what happened to the ungrateful and bigoted Klamath tribe leadership. They have cause unnecessary suffering for not only their own people but others and they aren’t testing down Shasta dam in your video. That is never going to happen. Salmon can easily go up the cosumnes, American and feather rivers. But you probably have no clue what I am talking about and therefore shouldn’t be talking about matters you don’t understand in California or Oregon
@@thefelonattorneyyeah she makes abound of really stupid points she says damns are bad which is not true they are necessary for electricity in some place and prevent floods makes it seem like it harms fish which even if it does why would I care there fish like what and if your gonna complains about borders all of Africa is there with you she makes. A lot of bad faith arguments
@@joetibbles1688true. And even if it did serve as a firebreak that doesn’t mean it’s anything more than arbitrary. Canada or the USA could make any number of firebreaks anywhere.
I have been getting really disenchanted with geography videos on youtube lately but this one had me just as exited to learn as I used to be at 14 just getting into geography content on youtube. Throughout university I have dealt with these concepts around bioregions, ecological governance, and indigenous soverighnty a lot, so It is really refressing to see them on youtube in a very polished and apporachable lense. Keep up the good work and definently earned a sub.
specifically, this geography video (and channel) seems to have a more activist / progressive mindset. it's a bit like mossy earth and planet wild, with a focus on rational conservationism.
I really enjoyed this video! I’m a born and raised Cascadian having spent my childhood in Idaho and adult life in Oregon and Washington. I have always felt a deep connection to the idea of Cascadia. To me Cascadia and bioregionalism is a better connection to the lands that we call home. Here in Cascadia we span many different climates and cultures but the one thing you will always see here is the connection to our waters. I like the idea of Cascadia in part because it challenges the structures in which the United States and Canada are set upon in a way that opens up the possibility for a more local and indigenous lead methods of governance. At the forefront of any bioregionalism movement should be the voices and wisdom of a lands indigenous communities who have been stewards of these lands since time immemorial.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the relation of bioregions to common climate, common geography, common farming methods, common water resources, and common infrastructure.
"Borders are a scar on the face of the planet" - Yanis Varoufakis Bioregionalism is a step toward a future where we are just humans living in our communities and free to travel this beautiful planet we call home in these blips of time we call a life.
Scars are but wounds long-healed. Borders are there to protect distinct human groups in their uniqueness. Not that a "Globanite" like you would understand.
@@Oera-B globanite? 😂 you don’t need borders to have a group of individuals share their own cultures and beliefs. Borders aren’t anything more than made up lines those in power fight over sending the poor to die. Ukraine and Gaza now are suffering from simply having a border. That what it boils down to.
Bioregionalism is idiotic if you genuinely know anything about politics. It will lead to areas like the Great Plains and the Deep South being cut off from the economic frameworks that keep them alive and functioning. Infrastructure needs to be taken into account, and any region that cannot sustain itself will fall apart completely.
free travel is bad idea. borders exist for a reason. before the EU sex trafficking was largely erradicated in western europe and close to it in europe in general, but the ability to move people across borders made it so much easier for the criminals to avoid getting caught and so it sky rocketed. the same goes for european drug market. not everyone is a responsible steward who can be trusted with the priviledge of roaming.
Problem is nothing binds people within these bio regions but them living in the region ... Linguistic differences ethnic differemces and cultural diffetences would come in the way and cause civil unrest ...
Sorry for the LONG ass comment. Feel free to just skim or ignore, as it's really just a collection of my thoughts on the topic. I hate to break it to you, but there's already lots of civil unrest in the US and the world. All over the world, national borders drawn with barely a nod to native populations are much more apt to cause unrest than borders that consider SOMETHING. In many cases, improving borders by considering bioregional stewardship could only create stronger communities. Of course, bioregions are more than certainly not the only thing to consider when it comes to border revision, hypothetical or otherwise. I think it’s clear that this video tends more towards “food for thought” than “Dr. Ayuso’s Border Cure Prescription”. It’s an exploration of bioregions- full stop. It’d be nigh impossible to fully explain a complete worldwide or even national border revision considering every factor ever, and I think the concept of doing that seriously without having meaningful and extensive discussion with many, many local populations is ludicrous. To go through the process would take years, decades even, and to explain it all to the public would take more than a youtube video, even two or three. That hasn’t stopped some from trying, though! While it’s limited in scope (it considers exclusively land which is already currently considered part of the US) and certainly isn’t perfect, there’s a pair of videos on a channel called “Monsieur Z” on an idea called The Balkanization Proclamation, a title which I believe to be an ode to the culturally-driven breakup of Yugoslavia into the set of Balkan nation-states which we have today. (To Balkan folks, I’m sorry for oversimplifying your history like that, but this comment is already way too long. I encourage folks who don’t already know about the Balkan region and the breakup of Yugoslavia to look into that. It’s not only very interesting, it’s important history!) The first installment Monsieur Z’s two-parter is titled “What If Every State In America Had Natural Borders? | American Politics”, and if you’re into these sorts of things, you should definitely watch it. From the description: “The state borders of the United States are arbitrary, and need to be redrawn. Monsieur Z redraws the borders of the U.S states by accounting for culture, geography, history, economics, religion, politics, and more.” To me, it’s a fun exploration of how these factors could be considered when reimagining borders. But as it stands, current US borders are, unfortunately, a bunch of straight lines. (There was this excellent show called “How The States Got Their Shapes”, which, as the name implies, dives into how these lines were drawn. It's incredibly interesting!) And while the idea of a prescribed border revision from one party (like that put forward in the Monsieur Z videos) goes against what I already said about the necessity of involving locals in border discussion and really letting folks decide what’s best for them, something as well researched as the videos from Z and his accomplices would definitely be an improvement over the current lots-of-straight-lines system (though, again, locals would need to be heavily involved in the discussion before the revision could be prescribed). Right, back to your point- I disagree that nothing connects the people within bioregions. Bioregional borders could allow for a deeper connection to the land's original stewards, the Indigenous peoples who managed these ecosystems for millennia before other folks came along and drew borders all over them. The common goal of protecting a local biosphere is certainly nothing to sneeze at, either. Honestly, I think it’s silly that any individual group should need their own land. With empathy, I think it’s important for previously divided groups to work together to grow stronger, more connected communities. In many cases, this will require some often difficult acknowledgements of the past- colonization, enslavement, and genocide are certainly not topics to gloss over or pretend to forget- but over time, I think communities that work hard can be stronger as diverse teams. Conclusively, bioregions are a starting point, not a sole consideration. They should be taken into account because of their potential to foster a sense of shared responsibility for local ecosystems, which in turn can help build more cohesive and resilient communities. The idea isn’t to ignore cultural, linguistic, or ethnic factors, but to complement them by aligning communities with the natural environment they inhabit.
Dams are not the problem, obstructive dams are, you need dams like Sorumsand Dam in Sorumsand, Norway. Dams that use the Beaver model of creating a path for the river to flow freely and naturally, as well as a section where it can bunch up and be of use to both people and nature that requires calmer water areas.
I don't think "according to nature" is correct - for eg, as a Cascadia resident, there's a massive cultural divide between coastal northwesterners and inland northwesterners. We don't want to include Eastern Washington, let alone parts of Idaho!
It's my first time on this channel and i really liked this topic and the way you trated it. Really good infirmation, explanation, and motivation by doing it (it really seemed you liked it!). Congrats and here's my subscription!
I've long thought that shared jurisdictions would be the next step given the world of nation-states we have now. These would be places where there is a unified government that handles some of the affairs of the region, with various agreements between two (or more) national governments on how to deal with resources, security, citizenships, policy, and more. Cascadia would be a good place for one such region, though it would be a lot of work to make such a place work.
This. A shared overlaying government could take into account ecological and environmental stewardship... but removing most political boundaries is not necessarily a great idea. For example, in "Cascadia," the city of Portland and most of its suburbs have a shared regional government, Metro, that includes three counties and plans interlocking transit routes, waste disposal, etc. Absolutely acknowledge shared ecological concerns with joint regulation...but don't prioritize removing established borders, whether created for poor reasons or not, because in the here and now they (generally) serve purposes and populations have built their life choices around the stability of them.
Hola Claudia, espero que te encuentres bien y feliz. Nada más te quería comentar que justo videos como este es lo que necesita TH-cam, entretenimiento de calidad. Gracias y te deseo mucha suerte y éxito!
Politics is very important in what borders look like. We don't like how the government of this area is running things and they have too much support from people that don't live like us for us to make a change that benefits us. We're going to break off and run our area ourselves. It's how we got West Viginia and a lot of other states. Then there's these states with odd bumbs because the people of the area chose one state government over another. It's why Europe has so many countries with different customs and languages. Borders are about people and their decisions on who they want to be. Sometimes a geological feature is insurmountable and it forces a border but it's still people who decide that there is a border.
I agree with a lot of what was said but some of it seems like a stretch or at least isn’t backed up well. For example, I don’t understand how damming the Klamath river has anything to do with straight line borders. Seems more like an issue of disrespecting locals and valuing industrial “progress” over ecological sustainability. Overall it was a very enjoyable video thanks!
The production quality of this video was really well done, it was a well researched video, but I must say that the title was somewhat misleading to me. I was expecting a "rebuild" of the world borders based on Nature, you know, giving a brief history on why such country had borders that were so unnatural (Africa and Middle East have a ton of that due to colonialism) and how with nature that could be solved (I'd imagined that it would've been a mix of Real Life Lore and Atlas Pro). But instead, it was just the US-Canada border, specifically Cascadia with some history regarding the natives of that region and their hardships. I mean, what was exactly the goal of the video is my question, it wasn't what the title suggested, since we only did Cascadia, and the other two main points (actually creating countries according to bioregions and the disruption that dams caused to nature and natives) weren't (in my opinion) really explored as in depth as it should've been. Like, how would actually rearranging the world borders according to bioregions look like? How do we take into account a fully globalized economy with milions of people dependent on it? Dams are a disruption to local nature? But at the same time, they're probably the most cleanest and green solution to production of high amounts of energy, right? My country (Brazil) has one the cleanest energies in the world, because like 80% of it come from hydroelectric dams, instead of coming from fossil fuels and etc. So I don't know, I enjoyed the video, but at the same time felt that it could've been 3 different videos, each one covering their own topics and ideas in a greater depth.
the cleanest and greenest solution is geothermal, followed by nuclear. geothermal is too expensive in most places (we can drill deep enough to have geothermal everywhere its just far to expensive with current tech) leaveing nuclear as the best solution.
@@matthiuskoenig3378 How would nuclear work in a world such as this? Most of these bioregions wouldn't even have uranium deposits in the first place, so they'd have to resort to either trade, war, or just any other more readily available energy.
Ok so, bioregion borders, are maybe not that good honestly Perhaps in the Americas yes, but in Europe? No of course not So there as I see bioregions often follow some cultural maps too, but not in Europe To abandon historical and cultural, and some political boundaries fully just to use bioregions would be a disaster in Europe However most borders already do follow natural lines as in Europe borders often followed rivers or mountains more, not always but much more than in the colonies, although the Spanish did make good borders for their colonies if you ask me, they are not just random flat lines but follow natural boundaries often The French made good borders in the Americas but not in Africa And the Portugese also made good borders for their colonies Now those borders sadly did not always follow native cultures, but sometimes they partially did too and the Spanish and Portugese mixed with the natives, unlike in the USA and Canada where the natives were almost completely ignored
European Borders already are largely bioregional. Certainly more so than Africa, North America or South America or the Middle East. It's usually when boundaries are imposed by European countries on others - as straight lines on maps - that it becomes disconnected, colonial and abstract.
@@BrandonLetsingerI mean yeah I get the point Although I have to say that, it t was not fully the Europeans that made the borders flat The border of Canada and the USA was partially done by the British and partially by the Americans who have stopped being a colony a while before And most of the flat internal borders were post-colonial However yeah it still is bad Although still surprisingly south America has good looking borders
First of all I have to compliment Your contagious enthusiasm for the topic which shows throughout the video - You are fascinated by the topic and pull other people into it as well. Using bioregions as a better tool for creating national borders however seems not very practicable, since first and foremost the cultural aspects should define which people should share their region. In Europe we have a quite good balance between natural borders and the cultural ones that developed within them. Strange straight lines drawn on a map far away are mostly colonial relicts. I played myself with the idea of using natural borders to divideareas but used for managing nature itself, especially wildlife. Since animals do not respond to political borders but certainly to natural ones like rivers or mountains, but also technical ones like highways or railways, rather than the borders used for governing humans, populations of animals should be divided by other lines and for example hunting quota set for the natural units created by them. Therefore I was very happy to find Your video about this topic, and now I am fascinated to hear how many other facettes are to the topic of bioregions.
Hola Claudia! He repetido unas cuantas veces el inicio del vídeo para asegurarme de que no lo estaba entendiendo mal. Dices que la frontera de US-Canadá es ligeramente superior en longitud que la altura del monte Everest. El Everest mide 8km y pico, que si lo ponemos en llano, es la distancia que puedes recorrer yendo a dar un paseo. Obviamente la frontera entre US y Canadá es infinítamente más larga que eso. ¿Es posible que hayas mezclado metros con kilómetros?
Hola! Gracias por avisarme, efectivamente me he equivocado con la comparación. Ya lo he corregido para que no salga esa parte. Tendré más cuidado la próxima vez.
Ye I don't know what happened there. US/Canada border is 8891 Kilometers long. Then she says if you were to summit it instead of walk it you would have 50 meters left and shows that Mt.Everest us 8849 METERS tall. Did she get confused between meters and kilometers? Is that a US not knowing metric system problem ? I mean a lot of work went into that animation so it was not simply missed.
It seems like it was just a brain fart on her part. You could damn near walk from the continental US to Mt. Everest if you were going the same length as the US-Canada border
@@stormxlr2377 yeah, not to mention that I'll grant that confusing an "m" for a "km" is a minor and totally understandable mistake, especially if you're not used to metric -- but only for somebody who is bringing no prior knowledge to the discussion's context. Otherwise, it should mentally be a non-starter to compare a significant portion of the Earth's circumference (over 5,000 miles!) to the height of a mountain that is scaled by so many people every year that there is a single file line of climbers snaking its way up during every summer. One is near the limits of what a human can conceivably achieve with a sustained effort for a few days to weeks; the other is FAR outside of them. I subscribed because it's a new channel and I enjoy her style, so I have faith that there could be some good videos coming...but tbh I dunno if I can respect somebody who not only made that mistake as like a brain fart, but was fully convinced of it for long enough to script, produce and edit an accompanying animation for it -- and never came to realize the glaring error in all the time between finishing that and uploading the video -- on an intellectual level...
@@B2F1 even allowing for a brain fart to explain the initial confusion, it's just one of those things that should immediately sound ridiculous as soon as you say it out loud and start pursuing it. It would be like saying the Burj Khalifa reaches halfway to the moon or something, it's just a patently ludicrous claim on its face. And I don't really buy that it has to do with confusion stemming from the units -- whatever unit system you're using, you're *never* going to find the length of a land border expressed in the same units as the height of a mountain! The reason is that the typical scale of these quantities is literally _orders of magnitude_ apart, and this is something even most older children (much less adults in a professional context) should have an intuitive feel for, regardless of being unfamiliar with the particular details in a given case. In general, unless you have a REALLY abnormally short land border and you're comparing it to a REALLY abnormally tall mountain, there's no way these quantities are even going to be close...Mt. Everest as the tallest mountain on Earth is still
@@dancoroian1 This is how you know she didn't do the editing or the animation herself. She's probably paying one of those content farm companies which oversee lots of channels run by hot people with no skills or education who are trying to market themselves and get in on the pop-intellectual TH-cam niche. That's why the production style is so expensive and evocative of certain famous TH-camrs (some of whom have already been mentioned in the comments) even though it's a brand new channel. As a longtime lover of TH-cam, it's pretty gross if you ask me. Slick production doesn't turn an idiotic topic like "bioregionalism" into a video worth watching. You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd.
I´ve been following and listening to your podcasts since i was like 14 (im 20 now) and I stumbled across this video by chance, and how happy I am that I did!! new hyperfixation for the year omg
The US/Canada border is the least problematic straight line border in the world, its sparsely populated, and both countries have no disputes over it. Wanting to change it because "it looks ugly!" it not a valid reason.
@@j134679 no it doesn’t, there’s people who have formed national identities to either be Canadian or American; to carve that up because you feel it would be “neater” is ridiculous, I’m one of the people living in the Cascadia region and I think this is a ridiculous idea only touted by those who don’t understand how either country works.
16:00 . This is a more contentious topic than you might think. Removing those hydroelectric dams will reduce significantly, the amount of renewable energy consumed in those states. In addition, it is widely understood that there is a large possibility that these efforts will not be enough to save salmon populations in the first place. Beyond this, I question the sentiment in projects like this. Urban societies are often vilified in favor of what we would call the idea of "untouched wilderness". What benefit to society does a thriving native salmon population pose, beyond an increased connection to nature. While I appreciate nature and spend a lot of times outdoors in the cascadia region which you define, I also recognize that the idea of Nature is an inherently human concept in the first place. These bioregions will continue to operate regardless of lines drawn on a political map.
It's mainly the fact that the dams are reaching the end of their life cycles. The engineers working on them are essentially nurses in an assisted living home, tending to them through their sunset years. The dams need to be taken down as it is, and governments don't find it to be worth the cost to rebuild. The amount of electricity isn't negligible even on a watershed as small as the Klamath, but considering the algae blooms and the destruction to Salmon populations we really won't be missing much. Growing up in Idaho, the Snake River dams have been a contentious issue for longer than I've been alive. And for good reason. Lewiston is a seaport in the mountains because of it. Entire economies and sections of the power grid depend on the Snake. There's much more to lose besides a few dams. But as those dams reach the end of their life cycle, I still find myself siding with environmentalists but that's beside the point. The point is, it's not a shipping highway. The electricity generated is a relative blip, especially when compared to the not only the US as whole, but even the entire PNW with its vast supply of hydroelectric. The economies centered around lake recreation will sadly be a casualty, but soon may give way to rafting tours and perhaps some of the best salmon fishing in the world. Sportsmen will pay insane amounts of money to participate. The Klamath dam situation appears to me more like the natural end of a life cycle than it does a complete breakdown of highly essential infrastructure that will plunge an entire chunk of the US back into the stone age haha.
@@wagonhound_official I go to college in Boise, so I am no stranger to the region. It is my opinion that the presence of the dams does more good for society than their absence would. Idaho is one of the few states in a position where they realistically could go all "green energy". Beyond that, it would cost over a billion to remove dams along the snake. Investments could instead be made to cement the dams as a path towards the future, rather than something holding us back. Your point is valid, there is something to be said for preserving nature. There are two sides to every coin though.
@@owenwillard5409 already existing absolutely, but take a backpack trip or better yet a rafting trip through the Frank Church Wilderness and tell me that we would have been better off developing all that. The salmon river is a national treasure. The Snake River isn't so cut and dry due to the level of infrastructure in place, but what I'm saying is the Klamath isn't supporting a mass number of livelihoods. Entire cities don't exist as they do today solely because of the Klamath river being dammed. Klamath Falls maybe, but they're not breaching the Klamath lake dam. Just the four downriver, in a largely undeveloped backwater. I'm very excited to see what comes of this in future studies.
I live in British Columbia and it was interesting hearing someone on the other side of the world talk about my backyard, its peculiar quirks like point Roberts, and the recent environmental disasters I was in the thick of: flooding in Sumas and forest fires in the South Okanagan. The floods in Sumas are a great example of how an infrastructure failure on one side of a political border impacted us on the other. Most people in British Columbia do not wish to secede from Canada, and most Oregonians and Washingtonians probably don't want to either unless maybe they live in Seattle or Portland. Quite frankly as a Canadian it'll be a cold day in hell before I leave Canada to live with Americans. Maybe that's all part of it, one's identity is more than their local region. Also, tbh the last people I'd want managing my provinces/cascadia's economy are proponents of an autonomous Cascadia. Like the one fellow who advocated moving away from an "extractive economy." I'm sorry but mining, logging, and fishing are the backbone of this province and are the whole reason it exists at all. Yes, we should manage it to make it as sustainable and renewable as possible, and yes it's good to diversify our economy as well.. but if we were to secede and unite into one big Cascadia, we'd only be viable as a nation if we relied on hydro-electric dams for electricity, and logging, fishing, farming, and mining for our economy. Especially logging and mining.
This makes so much sense in lots of levels. Would love to see examples of its impact, my guess is that places with borders with no biorregional (and thus, cultural) logic are much more likely to be a conflictive border, like Russia and Europa, Middle East, etc., whereas if you have a natural border with a self sustained bioregion there’s simply not much incentive to fight (like, what for?). Also, places that lack a border might also be conflictive (like inner China), unless sufficient institutional strength (US). Great video! Saludos de Chile 🇨🇱
17:31 Wow this is actually terrible. You make fun of people drawing borders from lines of latitude and longitude, but this is just the same thing only with an ecological map. Completely ignoring the people that live there, their ethnicities, nationalities, and religions.
I would imagine many of the same problems would still exist? The only reason straight borders are bad is because they are difficult to control/monitor whereas natural borders like mountains or rivers are clearly defined. If the nation is centralized enough it shouldn’t be a problem.
rivers actually make rather bad borders because they move and create difficult to monitor islands. a flat line border overland can be marked (even if by mile stones) and can be easily patroled. rivers only make good borders for war defense, not regular border control.
You sound pretty confident and the editing is pretty well done! You have very little videos posted, but I'll guess you already have lot of experience as a content creator, that's pretty nice. Would be cool if you could talk about permaculture someday on your next videos, that's like, the life style of my dreams, but all is so cramped here on the cities. También voy a felicitarte en español porque me da ilusión jajsd, sigue asi!!
Are ypu serious right now 😂 ? Counter-intuitive ? Against human nature ? Just pick up a history book and maybe you'll understand why borders are needed. We ARE NOT all the same. Would you want a bad neighbour getting into your house ? Someone who wants to kill you ot destroy you ? Give us a break.
When you’re an agent of the Spanish Crown who’s reeeeeally committed to getting Gibraltar back.
😂😂😂😂
Until you realize that's a 50/50 split between Spain and Morocco.
You changed Gibraltar and Menorca by Catalonia with the british.
Then, fuck you.
If you want Gibraltar back, leave Catalonia free, bastards
Ceuta and Melilla…
They never was moroccan@@horatiohuskisson5471
Your accent manages to sound like it's from South Africa, Australia, Mexico, Woolwich all at the same time and it tickles my brain, cheers!
lol
haha, i was thinkin bout that too, i like it, im australian and mexican, two of the countries you said, lol, but whats woolwich, i only know woolworths, me confundo
@@UnseenFootage Woolwich is a suburb/town whatever you want to call it in London
I feel like she could portray Lara Croft! Not just bc shes pretty but the history/archaeology vibes.
I hear a Spanish accent, taught British English.
Didn’t realise this was a video from a small channel: This is very informative and well done!
Thank you!!
What channel is it on
Topham. Respect.
Right? It's great!
Didn't realise until you pointed it out, dayum..
As someone from Chile 🇨🇱, people from other countries always get a little confused on why my country is really long and skinny, and it’s truly because we are a long hallway between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, so when the Spanish Army founded the “Capitanía General de Chile” colony located in what’s modern day the capital Santiago, there wasn’t other option for expanding other than north or south 😅.
So in some cases natural borders are just inevitable. Great video btw! I love finding new interesting channels 🙌🏼
Somewhat similar for Norway, though it extended further east and south in the past, before Sweden ate up parts of it.
It was so interesting to hear about Cascadia. While the people from East Tennessee identify themselves as Tennessean, me and a lot of other people from the area more identify as Appalachian (specifically Southern Appalachian). And I feel much more in common with Eastern Georgia, Western N. Carolina, Eastern Kentucky, Western Virginia and West Virginia than I do with the Tennessee Plateau or Mississippi River basin on our Western Border (a 7 and a half hour drive from where my Dad was born). And when I think about the culture of my region I think of the isolation of the mountains, a respect for nature, the history of coal mine exploitation. The conflict of the Creek and Cherokee, the relationship of the settlers with the Cherokee, the displacement of the Cherokee in the SE and the Eastern Band. Rugged individualism, a propensity to stay put. Inventiveness, folk music. I've even gotten in arguments with people who tried to describe me as Southern instead of Mountain. I wish there were more avenues for connection between the people of these regions. Reddit/Appalachia is pretty cool. People will bring up something from their area (like, when I was a kid, we would stand in the graveyard before dawn and sing to the rising sun) and see which other areas of Appalachia have the same tradition. Interesting video.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience
yeah people, especially americans, are very 'border' brained. our understanding of culture related to political vs physical boundaries is limited. and part of this is by design from colonization
Why do people accept borders in the first place? A fence works both ways, and these are just fences for humans.
On the day we are born, we are immediately subjugated by force to an entity we have never met, and likely never will. And would deny this happens many many years before the age of consent. Yes, it is that word that starts with the letter "R." Except it lasts a lifetime and is done to everyone. This is the exact opposite of Freedom.
@@Matty002 : Border-brained, accepting of being enslaved.
Same thing.
Btw, I was born in the U.S. but I am not an American, I am an Earthling. ❤🌍🌎🌏🌐
@@Claudia-Ayuso so you're applying to live in another country while simultaneously trying to dismantle it. You're an embarrassment. Consider self-reflection. PS: The UK is a geographically mapped out country already, it's literally an island.
On the contrary!
A nation should ideally include more than one bioregion.
Because different bioregions means different resources.
That prevents nations from being dependent on resource importation.
sure unless it was an EU like total open boarders within the continent situation
The whole video seems to be about creating economies that don't depend on moving resources around, but instead on using local resources as much as possible. An industrial economy like we're used to probably isn't possible in that kind of world, since so much industrial production depends on bringing distant resources together.
Exactly, it would lead to "countries" where there is only desert bioregion, which is completely insane that you think anyone would live there. And if noone lives within those borders, it can't be a country
Yes the whole premise of the video is insane. Political borders are meaningful. Just asked Ukraine. Just ask the country Georgia. Ask the Palestinians. Assuming that we can divide up land based on on the features of nature is asking for wars. The way we divided up the land in the 19th century and 20th century to create the borders that we have today was another form of insanity but now that we have them it is a terrible idea to even think of changing them. We just have to live with what we have.
Where does this revisionist perfectionist concept of redefining boundaries come from? Given that it would create so much bloodshed, it seemed like an elitist idea to perfect the world.
@@joythought I agree, although at the time the borders were drawn, there weren't much political differences between the lands north and south of the 49th parallel. Now that the populations have been divided for 200+ years, there are.
I live in Czechia (middle Europe) and one thing that I love about it is that you can see it on every borderless map. It is just almost completely surounded with mountains and I think that's how borders should look like.
so then let hungary have his 1000 year borders back lol
@nemtweakelek so true
Somebody forgot about southern CZ border. So southern border sould be what? Donau (Danube)?
@@kolomaznik333 well, it used to be. the area between Drava and Danube rivers (northern serbia and northern croatia) is mostly Hungarian populated too, so those two could be a better southern border. but for the northern borders, a natural Danube border wouldn't make sense, as it now separates a city that was also mostly Hungarian populated, so natural borders don't always work, i guess.
Natural borders exist. A countries borders only exist in the imagination of those who seek to oppress the masses, and those who don't understand that all of their Freedom was stolen away from them on the day they were born.
Title: “Rearranging the World's Borders According to Nature”
Video: “US and Canadian borders, especially Cascadia”
I mean, in Eurasia most borders are "natural" it's mostly the old colonies that have horribly bad borders
@@jubmelahtes thats only in Africa. unironically only nationalists want to change current world borders oin the Americas, the only exemption being the US-Canadian border that some people make videos like this, or border towns threatening to join the other country if the state/province doesn't give them money to make roads and bridges lol
@@jubmelahtes It would be interesting to take a look at other places though, even Europe, just to trace what borders are natural and which are not, because these also tell a story
@@jubmelahtes Romania, Ireland/NI, Ukrainian Ruthenia, the near east, just a couple of examples of unnatural Eurasian borders but yea by and large African, South and North American borders are more unnatural. A lot of the provincial borders in Canada are based on watersheds and thus are pretty natural, even if our border with the US isn't
Yeah I was expecting her to cover Africa's borders as well, since its borders are incredibly unnatural and were drawn up by the Europeans during decolonisation and not the natives.
the more i watch this video the more it sounds like its promoting a cascadian independance movement
Same bro
hail the Empire of Cascadia
for cascadia!
As someone who definitely lives in the southern end of the Cascades hundreds of miles south of her ideal border, I do not give my consent. Indeed I was forced into becoming an American on the day I was born, as were all "Americans." It's not just indigenous peoples who suffer this subjugation, but as a white person I have to say we are less oppressed being of the majority/most powerful. _Power corrupts, and ultimate power corrupts ultimately._
@@aylbdrmadison1051 You don't suffer oppression, colonizer.
This is a topic I've been considering for a long time. A few other things to think about:
1. The Brazilian government has the right to cut down their rain forest. But this would impact the entire world. Conversely, the almost all of North & South America was once covered in a rain forest, of which the Brazilian rain forest is all that is left. If the other countries decided to invest in massive re-forestation, that could also benefit the entire world.
The impact of bio-systems is well beyond themselves and borders shouldn't matter. We need economic models to compensate countries with higher forest cover, to encourage investment in systems that can benefit other nations.
2. A natural border (mountains, seas, rivers, etc) are natural defence systems. Forming nations around these means you don't have to invest as much in your nations defence and can focus on other, more productive, activity.
3. Most of our future conflict will be for water. This has already happened in several regions. Distribution of, maintenance and replinishing water resources will have to be the basis of any nation building.
maybe i missed the part of the video where she says “let’s make nations off bioregions” but i’m so confused why everyone thinks she’s arguing that. she’s just talking about the idea of bio regions and how it’d be cool and nice, not telling people to make them or whether or not it’s feasible. it was super interesting! it’s a concept that i’d never heard of before but makes so much sense!
Exactly. When she speaking with indigenous tribes, that’s when she acknowledges the set backs of the idea, and when it doesn’t meet the needs of people living on the ground.
Bocchi the Rock pfp detected. Opinion respected.
Yeah, the videos I find to contain the most informational/educational value are the ones, that draw you in with their premise, and whether or not they deliver on it, use it as na excuse to tell an interesting story and show you a new perspective of looking at the subject at hand and world around us in general, just like this one.
While I disagree with the entire concept of forcefully dividing people with borders, be they natural or imaginary (as in a countries borders), I agree that people need to not assume her intentions, and instead listen to what she said.
But then, what is the point? That's my question. This division only serves the interests of the Wealthy Elite who demand we are complicit from the day we're born. No age of consent even considered.
She uses racist arguments and uses the S#cide rates of people to make a point.
South Americas borders somewhat follows these principles. Brazil's borders are almost completely defined by bioregions. Brazil includes pretty much the whole of the Atlantic rainforest, Cerrado, pantanal, and Caatinga biomes. And includes large parts of the Amazon, the borders being drawn in the Guyana Plateau and the Andes. it also goes into the states as well, with borders being drawn in plateaus, mountains and rivers
Argentina and Chile being separated by the Andes feels like one of the best examples
@@_black_bird EXACTLY
@@_black_bird I truly thought she was gonna mention it
I thought the same thing.
Another great example is the Amazon rainforest and how people are just free to cross from one country of the other as citizens of the forest.
The anglo-americans went mostly for imaginary borders to organize their territories while latin-americans had bioregions in mind way before their northern neighbors to do the same job. I don't get where this woman came up with the idea that bioregions are an innovative idea when Latin America and Europe are right next to the US and Canada.
Wow! Excellent presentation of bioregionalism! Well done Claudia! Well done Brandon as well.
by the way I am the designer of the Cascadian bioregional flag that popped up a couple of times.
So cool!
how do you feel that lesotho nabbed your sick design 😂
Dude you literally put a tree on a blue, white, and green tricolor. That flag could literally just as well apply to Siberia, or Michigan, or Finland. Try and throw in some Cascadian culture and history. Maybe reference your split between the US and Canada, or include a symbol from one of your indigenous tribes, and didn't you guys fight a war over a pig in the San Juan isles, maybe put a pig on your flag.
I have your flag hanging up in my bedroom :D
Its crazy that "you should consider your natural surroundings when building" is something that we actually need to be reminded of
Uh... live in the real world. No one cares so it doesn't matter if they "should."
I've tried mapping new borders for the world using rivers and mountains as guidelines, so this also puts joy in my heart.
What factors did you consider? Have you shared it somewhere on internet?
@@kepspark3362 I just took the existing countries (I also split the US and UK into their respective states/countries since they have their own borders) and remapped them according to rivers and mountains. It was a just a little thing I tried doing for myself so I haven't shared it anywhere.
Finding a free, large topological world map proved to be a little hard from what I can remember, but I did find a grayscale version, so I used it.
Why impose these imaginary borders in the first place? They only benefit the Wealthy Elite by making the rest of us mere cattle to do their bidding.
Borders are nothing more than fences for humans. Rivers, mountains etc, are merely obstacles, not borders.
@@DaWorldGuardian001I’ve done similar things based largely on drainage basins and biomes. It was encouraging to see this video and also know I’m not alone in that hobby.
"people who don't live in a place drawing borders on a map at some table far away causes chaos"
*proceeds to draw borders on a map at some table far away*
I think it's great to have concern for the environment and for people who live in it, but even with those in mind, prescribing new borders from the outside without the input of residents is not a good idea. it's clear this is more of a thought exercise, but one has to be careful about this kind of thing; it comes with a lot of nasty colonialist/imperialist baggage.
glorifying the "natural" can also be iffy. natural disasters are also natural! nature does not have a will that aligns directly with human needs! we ought to build human constructs (like borders) for human purposes. we should take nature into account! we all owe a duty of stewardship to the land. but nature won't be stopped by borders; it doesn't care where we put them. WE care. current borders are not great, but we can't say imposing new ones would be amazing without a LOT of consideration. If we're radically rearranging borders, we should rethink our base assumptions about what borders are for and to what extent we need them at all.
also, one of the interviewees here sort of implied that nomadic peoples didn't/don't fight each other over territory. i don't know much about prehistory, but in the last few thousand years at least, this is straight-up false... then again, we are talking about prehistory. I am not a historian and may be wrong, but my instinct is that no paradise with human populations well below the carrying capacity of the land ever existed for very many generations after humans reached a place. low population density probably reflected available huntable/forageable resources. agriculture just would have increased that carrying capacity. would be interested to hear a different perspective!
pre-historic nomads 100% fought each other, we have the evidence for it.
infact the biggest genocide in history (relative to population sizes) was the 'indo-european' nomad's migration into northern europe in pre-historic times. they also invaded southern europe but the demographic replacement wasn't as severe.
Maybe you missed it - but the idea of Cascadia and bioregional mapping emerged from this area, especially in the 1970's and 1980's, and then through a series of Cascadia Bioregional Congresses. Bioregional mapping, from Chilcotin, Nis'gaa, Wetsuweten in the 1980's. She was just helping outline the natural boundaries as a visual aid.
@@matthiuskoenig3378 very interesting! thanks for sharing!
@@BrandonLetsinger I feel like the video, for being about 'redrawing borders,' didn't seriously enough consider the political implications of such a radical act (for example, who would be imposing these borders & what it would mean for residents). But I did miss that part while thinking about other things. That's good to know. Thanks :)
@@target0330yeah as someone in the region these are all real concerns of many proponents of the movement. For many the cascadia movement isn't about redrawing the borders along natural lines but more about trying to promote regional interconnectedness and self sufficiency in spite of the existing borders.
As a French Canadian and Native American who lived in South America, I really enjoyed your video. I am so happy that someone else talks about this topic!!Thank you😘
Just a little point: The indigenous people still live around there and many still speak Coast Salish languages-Halkomelem, Lushootseed, and several others. I've read that there are even bilingual road signs in some places.
What a cool idea from a priviledged post war perspective. And once a bioregion has completely aligned it's internal perspective, the most productive bioregions can push their will on the less productive ones ignoring the perspective of the less productive regions. Bio-regions often get split because two groups both want access to the same benefits.
We have to excuse her lack imagination. Fortunately she doesn't rule the world because it would burn after bathing in blood.
but does she really talk about the complete independence of the bioregion? Well, the same Cascadia could be completely part of the USA. With access to the US infrastructure and all that. I don't see any problems. Especially since Canada is not a real country)
Very interesting for sure, but I can’t help feel this is very idealistic. I mean you’re talking about creating new countries and carving out old ones. In the event we are all united under one flag that represents earth. This seems more realistic kind of, but even in the cascade bio region, there are 15 different cultures all just in the Frazier valley. In most instances (drawn on borders in a room) don’t make much sense, but you’re arguing for the creation of entirely new countries to solve ecological problems that also require some sort of organization and funding. How would you define these regions allegiances? What other countries are you creating? Are there identities that these people would be opposed to identifying as? Not trying to put you down or be rude or anything, but this feels like a geologists solution to an ecologists problem by spitting on the face of anthropologists.
0:26 1.4 million just isn't a lot, whatsoever. Like an atom sized drop in the entire earth's oceans compared to what both countries spend on military and social services.
it's still for a really dumb purpose. not to mention, clearing out the trees actually separates these natural habitats physically and can negatively impact the movement of native species, leading to genetic separation and more vulnerable populations.
but ofc, there are definitely worse injustices if we're shifting focus to look at politics in general and away from conservationism in particular.
It may not be a lot on world scale, its a lot to waste on such a dumb thing.
Ok? It's still a stupid thing to spend an annual million dollars on.
Maybe people need to step back and see what countries and their borders actually are.
Borders are just fences for humans. Countries are just the consolidated profit.power of the Wealthy Elite to subjugate those born on the part of the planet they are their predecessors imposed on humanity by force.
@@onelusciouslad7841 : Why? I'm not saying you don't have a good answer, just saying if you do have one, that means something. Just saying x,y, or z is bad, is not saying anything. That's just expressing distaste for some undisclosed reason. And for all we know, you have a great reason, but from this vantage point, it seems just as likely you don't have any reason at all. I'm certain you can do much better. 🙂
You need to be careful relying too heavily on bioregions to inform politics.
On the Australian continent there are seven defined bioregions, but only one (East Australian Temperate Forests & Mountain Shrublands (AU3)) encompasses the vast majority of the entire continent’s wealth and population. Our current political divisions splits this economic dominance amongst four states, with no one able to assert itself upon the others.
While there may be other arguments for bioregionalism, Cascadia is a singular phenomenon, both in terms of ecological sustainability and political self-interest. Cascadia is not a model for universal bioregionalism, and should not be touted as the example.
Although I see the borders of countries as human-cattle ranches, I agree with you.
If we're going to have countries, we should still seek to free ourselves from the Wealthy Elite who impose this tyranny on humanity for their personal profit/power.
I’m guessing people 20-30 thousand years ago knew where the borders were. It was, if you go past that river, or over that hill, you will get killed or captured by the neighboring group.
It's actually because when you don't have cars and trains to move, crossing a large river or mountains is stenuous.
Thus, it kept people somewhat isolated from each other which then developped different cultures and languages
Large rivers and mountains are also a natural wall that protects you from invasions to some extent
This is also why the nations that were built in large plains were regularly invaded by empires one after the other
Such a mental shift from the rigid borders we draw on maps. Love this
and everything than stems from them, so fascinating
Hate this it’s stupid
Bioregionalism is idiotic if you genuinely know anything about politics. It will lead to areas like the Great Plains and Appalachia being cut off from the economic frameworks that keep them alive and functioning. Infrastructure needs to be taken into account, and any region that cannot sustain itself will fall apart completely. Furthermore, you would be cutting apart communities of united people that don't even want independence.
As a Balkan I have one thing to say YOU WANT TO CREATE EVEN MORE CHAOS IN HERE!!!! ISNT THERE ENOUGHT CHAOS IN THE BALKANS???
Umm so less than 30 seconds into the video I'm convinced this channel is the lovechild of Johnny Harris and Cleo Abram from their time at Vox. Brava Claudia 👏👏👏 Immediately subscribed!
Give me one sec to recover from this comment… That is the greatest compliment in the world to me🥹 thank you and welcome!
didn't realize it, but yeah, she does have both a Johnny Harris and a Cleo Abram vibe.
Ew, Johnny Harris has been caught straight up lying, fabricating data, using propaganda, accepting bribes from the World Economic Forum to push certain agendas instead of facts.....please do not turn into a Johnny Harris. He is as unethical as they come.
I was coming here to comment just that. Looks like a video by Johnny Harris, content, style of presentation, even editing, cutting to her motion of sitting down on floor, etc.
very influenced I’d say, but still her own flair. Great video
I love this sooo much!!!!!! I’m a farmer in western North Dakota and have been working on regenerative agriculture but still looking at grids… this makes so much sense even for small environments as well!!!!!!
First learned about bioregionalism on Instagram a few years back, and was confused why almost no one (outside of select Native American orgs) was talking about it. So glad to see this video pop up in my YT feed.
This video is so well done! Wish you the best and hope you'll have a great YT career! :)
thank you so much!
I think borders may need to be organized into city states. Most of our political fighting is urban vs rural. Different wants and needs. Let the cities have a very large amout of autonomy but it only extends to city borders. Leave large areas of land between cities to govern themselves.
I'd love to see a video where you rearrange the entire map according to nature with the information you have so far!
I'd love to see a world without the imaginary borders imposed on humanity by the Wealthy Elite for their personal profit/power. I was born in a "country," and therefore immediately subjugated to whims of the Wealthy Elite who thousands of years have divided humanity with bigoted ideals like nationalism, classism, and racism all for their own personal profit/power. I did not consent to being an American on day one! I am an Earthling.❤🌍🌎🌏🌐
This is marvelous stuff and a topic that I've personally sort of worked on for many years.
Thank you so much for covering this. As a resident of the Southern Oregon Coast, I’ve always thought a lot about how much more sense it would make to organize boundaries according to watershed. Maybe we’ll have a chance to someday.
Just looking at the brief glimpse we were given at 17:33 of what I'm assuming is potential world borders based on biomes, just the tip of Florida is a part of the country of the Caribbeans. Felt silly and unrealistic. I feel that larger regions make sense to section off to like minded biomes, but there should be a respect of natural borders and an understanding that humanity isn't just their biomes, humanity is their culture. If the Texans of dry deserts feel the same way about things as the Texans of piney wetlands 9 hours away, then it makes sense for them to be under the same governing. Love the video, very fun topic and good job making good content as such a small channel!
I think it goes beyond human culture and beyond the duality of humans independent from nature. It may seem silly and unrealistic if the mindset of the majority of humans doesn't expand beyond the limits of culture, which is man-made and in service for humans only. But at the same time, it is realistic and serious to consider that majority of humans today aren't ready to surrender back to the systems of nature and go redraw borders based on biomes and what nature says.
It takes a lot of paradigm shifts and metaphysical understanding of the world for humans to transcend to this higher levels of thinking, which will redefine their mindset and purpose within the earth. Humans in general still have a lot of ego, which influences a lot of the politics and territory we have today. Due to this, humans still need some more time to evolve as a species where our thinking goes beyond paradigms of tribalism, fundamentalism, pragmatism and materialism, paradigm of science and technology, paradigm of cultures, environmentalism, and so on. It's an integration of all of these mindsets while honing a systematic thinking that everything is interconnected and one.
Humans today in general, at least most of the developed west, still view this transcended mindset as woo woo and new age-y, without realising that this is the necessary path of human evolution for the future. It's letting go of a lot of what human collectives everywhere define themselves in order to see the bigger picture of reality beyond their culture. I mean, people are now learning a lot about different cultures, and some of them are adopting and embodying cultural ways alien to them whenever it resonates.
Although, there are several countries and states/regions today that do follow more closely to this biomistic approach of creating territory regardless of current human developement and present culture. I guess they have theirs going on lucky.
doesn't have to be countries, could be states/provinces
The Arawak language in the Caribbean was also spoken in southern Florida, so these bioregions made sense for people for over a thousand years. Also Texas is extremely politically split, are you kidding me?
Your excitement is so contagious!! Now I'm subscribed and waiting for the next episode on this series. Amazing work and research
0:50 Ye I don't know what happened there. US/Canada border is 8891 Kilometers long. Then she says if you were to summit it instead of walk it you would have 50 meters left and shows that Mt.Everest us 8849 METERS tall. Did she get confused between meters and kilometers? Is that a US not knowing metric system problem ? I mean a lot of work went into that animation so it was not simply missed.
Thank you for flagging this!! We'll be more careful next time and address it now
The US not knowing about the metric system?
Are you serious? Do you actually not understand the foundational misunderstanding of that incorrect viewpoint? Do you just blindly accept things "the crowd" says without actually asking yourself if its true or not?
If you don't understand it and can't take a few minutes and think about it yourself.....I can explain it to you.
I don't mean to attack you in any way..... its just that it amazes me how common this incorrect belief is. I think it must come from people blindly believing things if enough people repeat them and not having the curiosity to think about it themselves.
@@chandie5298 It was a joke you silly goose. Dont get your knickers in a twist. The video creator made a mistake between meters and kilometers and went all the way out to make an animation saying that the us canada border is the same as Everest.
@@stormxlr2377 I'm happy to hear that it was a joke. You'd be amazed at the number of otherwise intelligent people who actually believe that people in the US don't know about the metric system and do not commonly use it (of course, we do).
Yes... my knicker's were in a bit of a twist, admittedly.......because that very obvious false claim is so commonly made.....especially in forums such as this.
It gets aggravating after a while.......just as claims about the British all having bad teeth (they do not) and the French rarely ever bathing (they do frequently).
Yes....she gets points for putting in the effort to correct that mistake.......doesn't quite excuse the video whose viewpoint is something one would expect from an elementary school child who has exactly zero understanding of the history of humanity and human nature (which incidentally applies to every group of mammals that exists now or has ever existed; the difference being that most animals are limited by their environment whereas humans have advanced to the point that we control the environment.....actually, other animals also control their environment to a large extent....those damned beavers).....but yes, I applaud her efforts in fixing the point you brought up.
"World's borders"
* spends most of the video focusing on Cascadia *
💀
I was focusing on Cascadia two
She was using it as a case study to make a wider point
Oregon Country, as it was defined in 1818, is almost the same as Cascadia. They are bringing back something that was defined 200 years ago.
The quality of this work is superb, congrats to all involved ^^
As a Washingtonian, I truly appreciate someone exploring our region of the country as well as discussing that the native peoples of this land truly understand what the land means to all life.
i´m just discover your channel now with this video. And how I love it. Thank you. Whish you the best and be happy
One struggle with remapping, though. Is we can't just forget history happened. Whenever a border disappears politically, the histories and cultures of the area happened there and will be in conflict.
As someone from cascadia whos always been a strong proponent of this movement it's great seeing people from other parts of the world talking about it.
The idea of removing dams and returning riparian areas to their natural habitat feels great but these dams were built there for legitimate reasons. Aside from flood control these dams were built for electricity. In a world where we are trying to reduce our carbon footprint and move away from internal combustion engines in favor of electric vehicles, how are we going to replace the electricity lost by the destruction of these dams? This area is totally unsuitable for things like wind or solar so the answer is probably going to be natural gas or some other kind of carbon producing fuel. We are now going to need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars creating new power sources and all of that cost is going to be transferred to the consumer. Ultimately I'm not sure that the removal of these dams is a win for anybody's environmental vision.
Great video. Good luck.
Some dams re good, but too many will destroy nature and society. For example china plans to dam many rivers in the himalayas, it will cause drought in myanmar, india, and bangladesh. Another example is ethiopia, they will literally start a war with egypt and sudan because of new nile dam.
It's a win for the Yurok people. The affected parties (including PacifiCorp, the for-profit electric utility*) have agreed to the removals. One of the dams has already been removed. This plan is going forward.
* The sticking point was that PacifiCorp wanted to pass the removal costs onto US taxpayers.
Nuclear powerplant
Often they weren't. If you do research, many of the dams, such as the Elwah, or current Deschutes Dam removals were either built illegally, have long since stopped providing power - or in the case of the Deschutes, was simply built to provide the Washington capitol with a reflection pool under the state capitol. It will now cost hundreds of millions do undo even that one basic example.
Great subject. And it makes me emotional too as when I was a child I used to draw maps of fantasy worlds and even move borders according to river basins. I still love geography. Thanks for your informative video. ☺️
As someone who works with bioregions and kindof defines them I can tell you there are no correct bioregions based on ecology because there are endless ways to split things up. Look up maps of bird conservation regions and avifaunal biomes. Both ignore borders in the Americas. Also, we have to cut down trees to keep forests healthy unless we are going to let fires burn.
Yes to all of this (there's an episode about trees and fires coming)! And to your first point, this was why I included the explanation of how we're mapping the bioregions I'm talking about in this video
Fantastic production quality and good storytelling - Well done!
There are a few issues with this video. First is the idea that we would have to completely rearrange our national borders to be more cooperative with our neighbors when it comes to the environment. A region does not need to be in the same country for the people to take care of it. The second issue is of the dams. You bring this up as an example but to my knowledge these dams are not apart of any border so you are making the case for no dams purely on environmental grounds and has no connection to borders. Finally, the better example of this would have either been the US-Mexican border where building a physical barrier has impacted the ability of wildlife to cross or Africa where having borders with straight lines has impacted communities being split up far more than the US-Canadian border or US states.
It is relevant because the dams are used for diverting water outside of the river's watershed but within the state that has legal rights to the river's water.
I love the real motive of the video. Borders don’t matter. Borders weren’t stolen and the I saw what happened to the ungrateful and bigoted Klamath tribe leadership. They have cause unnecessary suffering for not only their own people but others and they aren’t testing down Shasta dam in your video. That is never going to happen. Salmon can easily go up the cosumnes, American and feather rivers. But you probably have no clue what I am talking about and therefore shouldn’t be talking about matters you don’t understand in California or Oregon
@@thefelonattorneyyeah she makes abound of really stupid points she says damns are bad which is not true they are necessary for electricity in some place and prevent floods makes it seem like it harms fish which even if it does why would I care there fish like what and if your gonna complains about borders all of Africa is there with you she makes. A lot of bad faith arguments
Only 30K subs? The editing and research are outstanding! You got my sub!
0:09 That's not true this also operates as a firebreak which is very important for maintaining forests.
A 6m gap is not going to do anything to a blazing bushfire.
@@joetibbles1688true. And even if it did serve as a firebreak that doesn’t mean it’s anything more than arbitrary. Canada or the USA could make any number of firebreaks anywhere.
I love geography videos so much !! Very informative and entertaining 🌎😆
This is great TH-cam content. I'm subscribing.
te sigo desde tu canal anterior y toparme con estos vídeos de tanta calidad es simplemente increíble. Muy interesante todoo
I have been getting really disenchanted with geography videos on youtube lately but this one had me just as exited to learn as I used to be at 14 just getting into geography content on youtube. Throughout university I have dealt with these concepts around bioregions, ecological governance, and indigenous soverighnty a lot, so It is really refressing to see them on youtube in a very polished and apporachable lense. Keep up the good work and definently earned a sub.
This made my day! So happy to have you here 💗
specifically, this geography video (and channel) seems to have a more activist / progressive mindset. it's a bit like mossy earth and planet wild, with a focus on rational conservationism.
I really enjoyed this video! I’m a born and raised Cascadian having spent my childhood in Idaho and adult life in Oregon and Washington. I have always felt a deep connection to the idea of Cascadia. To me Cascadia and bioregionalism is a better connection to the lands that we call home. Here in Cascadia we span many different climates and cultures but the one thing you will always see here is the connection to our waters. I like the idea of Cascadia in part because it challenges the structures in which the United States and Canada are set upon in a way that opens up the possibility for a more local and indigenous lead methods of governance. At the forefront of any bioregionalism movement should be the voices and wisdom of a lands indigenous communities who have been stewards of these lands since time immemorial.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the relation of bioregions to common climate, common geography, common farming methods, common water resources, and common infrastructure.
Loved this video. Well put together and very informative! Also loved the ending about your citizenship and your relation to UK. Best wishes.
"Borders are a scar on the face of the planet" - Yanis Varoufakis
Bioregionalism is a step toward a future where we are just humans living in our communities and free to travel this beautiful planet we call home in these blips of time we call a life.
Scars are but wounds long-healed. Borders are there to protect distinct human groups in their uniqueness. Not that a "Globanite" like you would understand.
@@Oera-B globanite? 😂 you don’t need borders to have a group of individuals share their own cultures and beliefs. Borders aren’t anything more than made up lines those in power fight over sending the poor to die. Ukraine and Gaza now are suffering from simply having a border. That what it boils down to.
Bioregionalism is idiotic if you genuinely know anything about politics. It will lead to areas like the Great Plains and the Deep South being cut off from the economic frameworks that keep them alive and functioning. Infrastructure needs to be taken into account, and any region that cannot sustain itself will fall apart completely.
free travel is bad idea. borders exist for a reason.
before the EU sex trafficking was largely erradicated in western europe and close to it in europe in general, but the ability to move people across borders made it so much easier for the criminals to avoid getting caught and so it sky rocketed. the same goes for european drug market.
not everyone is a responsible steward who can be trusted with the priviledge of roaming.
Best Channel under 100k subs? seriously amazing work
Problem is nothing binds people within these bio regions but them living in the region ... Linguistic differences ethnic differemces and cultural diffetences would come in the way and cause civil unrest ...
Sorry for the LONG ass comment. Feel free to just skim or ignore, as it's really just a collection of my thoughts on the topic.
I hate to break it to you, but there's already lots of civil unrest in the US and the world. All over the world, national borders drawn with barely a nod to native populations are much more apt to cause unrest than borders that consider SOMETHING. In many cases, improving borders by considering bioregional stewardship could only create stronger communities. Of course, bioregions are more than certainly not the only thing to consider when it comes to border revision, hypothetical or otherwise.
I think it’s clear that this video tends more towards “food for thought” than “Dr. Ayuso’s Border Cure Prescription”. It’s an exploration of bioregions- full stop. It’d be nigh impossible to fully explain a complete worldwide or even national border revision considering every factor ever, and I think the concept of doing that seriously without having meaningful and extensive discussion with many, many local populations is ludicrous. To go through the process would take years, decades even, and to explain it all to the public would take more than a youtube video, even two or three.
That hasn’t stopped some from trying, though! While it’s limited in scope (it considers exclusively land which is already currently considered part of the US) and certainly isn’t perfect, there’s a pair of videos on a channel called “Monsieur Z” on an idea called The Balkanization Proclamation, a title which I believe to be an ode to the culturally-driven breakup of Yugoslavia into the set of Balkan nation-states which we have today. (To Balkan folks, I’m sorry for oversimplifying your history like that, but this comment is already way too long. I encourage folks who don’t already know about the Balkan region and the breakup of Yugoslavia to look into that. It’s not only very interesting, it’s important history!) The first installment Monsieur Z’s two-parter is titled “What If Every State In America Had Natural Borders? | American Politics”, and if you’re into these sorts of things, you should definitely watch it. From the description: “The state borders of the United States are arbitrary, and need to be redrawn. Monsieur Z redraws the borders of the U.S states by accounting for culture, geography, history, economics, religion, politics, and more.” To me, it’s a fun exploration of how these factors could be considered when reimagining borders.
But as it stands, current US borders are, unfortunately, a bunch of straight lines. (There was this excellent show called “How The States Got Their Shapes”, which, as the name implies, dives into how these lines were drawn. It's incredibly interesting!) And while the idea of a prescribed border revision from one party (like that put forward in the Monsieur Z videos) goes against what I already said about the necessity of involving locals in border discussion and really letting folks decide what’s best for them, something as well researched as the videos from Z and his accomplices would definitely be an improvement over the current lots-of-straight-lines system (though, again, locals would need to be heavily involved in the discussion before the revision could be prescribed).
Right, back to your point- I disagree that nothing connects the people within bioregions. Bioregional borders could allow for a deeper connection to the land's original stewards, the Indigenous peoples who managed these ecosystems for millennia before other folks came along and drew borders all over them. The common goal of protecting a local biosphere is certainly nothing to sneeze at, either.
Honestly, I think it’s silly that any individual group should need their own land. With empathy, I think it’s important for previously divided groups to work together to grow stronger, more connected communities. In many cases, this will require some often difficult acknowledgements of the past- colonization, enslavement, and genocide are certainly not topics to gloss over or pretend to forget- but over time, I think communities that work hard can be stronger as diverse teams.
Conclusively, bioregions are a starting point, not a sole consideration. They should be taken into account because of their potential to foster a sense of shared responsibility for local ecosystems, which in turn can help build more cohesive and resilient communities. The idea isn’t to ignore cultural, linguistic, or ethnic factors, but to complement them by aligning communities with the natural environment they inhabit.
Culture is shaped by the environment.
@@MyCommentSection This is the kind of thoughtfulness we need more of.
Education really uplifts the exterior and interior beauty of an individual. Well done on this video
Dams are not the problem, obstructive dams are, you need dams like Sorumsand Dam in Sorumsand, Norway. Dams that use the Beaver model of creating a path for the river to flow freely and naturally, as well as a section where it can bunch up and be of use to both people and nature that requires calmer water areas.
Loving this channel! Thank you for bringing your enthusiasm to this global conversation 🧡🙏🏼🕊️
I don't think "according to nature" is correct - for eg, as a Cascadia resident, there's a massive cultural divide between coastal northwesterners and inland northwesterners. We don't want to include Eastern Washington, let alone parts of Idaho!
It's my first time on this channel and i really liked this topic and the way you trated it. Really good infirmation, explanation, and motivation by doing it (it really seemed you liked it!). Congrats and here's my subscription!
I've long thought that shared jurisdictions would be the next step given the world of nation-states we have now.
These would be places where there is a unified government that handles some of the affairs of the region, with various agreements between two (or more) national governments on how to deal with resources, security, citizenships, policy, and more.
Cascadia would be a good place for one such region, though it would be a lot of work to make such a place work.
This. A shared overlaying government could take into account ecological and environmental stewardship... but removing most political boundaries is not necessarily a great idea. For example, in "Cascadia," the city of Portland and most of its suburbs have a shared regional government, Metro, that includes three counties and plans interlocking transit routes, waste disposal, etc.
Absolutely acknowledge shared ecological concerns with joint regulation...but don't prioritize removing established borders, whether created for poor reasons or not, because in the here and now they (generally) serve purposes and populations have built their life choices around the stability of them.
Hola Claudia, espero que te encuentres bien y feliz. Nada más te quería comentar que justo videos como este es lo que necesita TH-cam, entretenimiento de calidad. Gracias y te deseo mucha suerte y éxito!
I'm looking forward to seeing more of your videos! Good editing, good interviews, cool info and MAPS! LOVE IT❤
omg really amazing video! informative, interesting and engaging. I really hope you’ll make more 🙌🏼
Politics is very important in what borders look like. We don't like how the government of this area is running things and they have too much support from people that don't live like us for us to make a change that benefits us. We're going to break off and run our area ourselves. It's how we got West Viginia and a lot of other states. Then there's these states with odd bumbs because the people of the area chose one state government over another. It's why Europe has so many countries with different customs and languages. Borders are about people and their decisions on who they want to be. Sometimes a geological feature is insurmountable and it forces a border but it's still people who decide that there is a border.
this, baseing borders around anything other than the people is forgetting that countries are about people.
" and their decisions on who they want to be", more like, who they're told to be. Usually thought primary exposure, teaching.
omg this was such an amazing video!! the storytelling, editing and information all so so good!! cant wait for more in the future :D
Glad you liked it!! Thank you!!! So happy to have you here
I agree with a lot of what was said but some of it seems like a stretch or at least isn’t backed up well.
For example, I don’t understand how damming the Klamath river has anything to do with straight line borders. Seems more like an issue of disrespecting locals and valuing industrial “progress” over ecological sustainability.
Overall it was a very enjoyable video thanks!
Her point was that thinking in terms of bioregions sets people on a path to think of interdependent ecologies.
Only 3 videos?!?! You’re killing it! Glad to get here early. 1M by 2026 calling it
The production quality of this video was really well done, it was a well researched video, but I must say that the title was somewhat misleading to me.
I was expecting a "rebuild" of the world borders based on Nature, you know, giving a brief history on why such country had borders that were so unnatural (Africa and Middle East have a ton of that due to colonialism) and how with nature that could be solved (I'd imagined that it would've been a mix of Real Life Lore and Atlas Pro). But instead, it was just the US-Canada border, specifically Cascadia with some history regarding the natives of that region and their hardships.
I mean, what was exactly the goal of the video is my question, it wasn't what the title suggested, since we only did Cascadia, and the other two main points (actually creating countries according to bioregions and the disruption that dams caused to nature and natives) weren't (in my opinion) really explored as in depth as it should've been.
Like, how would actually rearranging the world borders according to bioregions look like? How do we take into account a fully globalized economy with milions of people dependent on it?
Dams are a disruption to local nature? But at the same time, they're probably the most cleanest and green solution to production of high amounts of energy, right? My country (Brazil) has one the cleanest energies in the world, because like 80% of it come from hydroelectric dams, instead of coming from fossil fuels and etc.
So I don't know, I enjoyed the video, but at the same time felt that it could've been 3 different videos, each one covering their own topics and ideas in a greater depth.
the cleanest and greenest solution is geothermal, followed by nuclear. geothermal is too expensive in most places (we can drill deep enough to have geothermal everywhere its just far to expensive with current tech) leaveing nuclear as the best solution.
@@matthiuskoenig3378 How would nuclear work in a world such as this? Most of these bioregions wouldn't even have uranium deposits in the first place, so they'd have to resort to either trade, war, or just any other more readily available energy.
I’m from Eastern Oregon and have been saying Cascadia should be its own country for years!!
It will be
Unfortunately, the fact is geography is no longer the most efficient way in determining borders.
I’m super excited to see this channel grow and become bigger.
Ok so, bioregion borders, are maybe not that good honestly
Perhaps in the Americas yes, but in Europe? No of course not
So there as I see bioregions often follow some cultural maps too, but not in Europe
To abandon historical and cultural, and some political boundaries fully just to use bioregions would be a disaster in Europe
However most borders already do follow natural lines as in Europe borders often followed rivers or mountains more, not always but much more than in the colonies, although the Spanish did make good borders for their colonies if you ask me, they are not just random flat lines but follow natural boundaries often
The French made good borders in the Americas but not in Africa
And the Portugese also made good borders for their colonies
Now those borders sadly did not always follow native cultures, but sometimes they partially did too and the Spanish and Portugese mixed with the natives, unlike in the USA and Canada where the natives were almost completely ignored
European Borders already are largely bioregional. Certainly more so than Africa, North America or South America or the Middle East. It's usually when boundaries are imposed by European countries on others - as straight lines on maps - that it becomes disconnected, colonial and abstract.
@@BrandonLetsingerI mean yeah I get the point
Although I have to say that, it t was not fully the Europeans that made the borders flat
The border of Canada and the USA was partially done by the British and partially by the Americans who have stopped being a colony a while before
And most of the flat internal borders were post-colonial
However yeah it still is bad
Although still surprisingly south America has good looking borders
First of all I have to compliment Your contagious enthusiasm for the topic which shows throughout the video - You are fascinated by the topic and pull other people into it as well.
Using bioregions as a better tool for creating national borders however seems not very practicable, since first and foremost the cultural aspects should define which people should share their region. In Europe we have a quite good balance between natural borders and the cultural ones that developed within them. Strange straight lines drawn on a map far away are mostly colonial relicts.
I played myself with the idea of using natural borders to divideareas but used for managing nature itself, especially wildlife. Since animals do not respond to political borders but certainly to natural ones like rivers or mountains, but also technical ones like highways or railways, rather than the borders used for governing humans, populations of animals should be divided by other lines and for example hunting quota set for the natural units created by them.
Therefore I was very happy to find Your video about this topic, and now I am fascinated to hear how many other facettes are to the topic of bioregions.
Hola Claudia! He repetido unas cuantas veces el inicio del vídeo para asegurarme de que no lo estaba entendiendo mal. Dices que la frontera de US-Canadá es ligeramente superior en longitud que la altura del monte Everest. El Everest mide 8km y pico, que si lo ponemos en llano, es la distancia que puedes recorrer yendo a dar un paseo. Obviamente la frontera entre US y Canadá es infinítamente más larga que eso.
¿Es posible que hayas mezclado metros con kilómetros?
Hola! Gracias por avisarme, efectivamente me he equivocado con la comparación. Ya lo he corregido para que no salga esa parte. Tendré más cuidado la próxima vez.
@@Claudia-AyusoGran video, tienes un subscriptor nuevo de México
I love this and very thought provoking ❤️excited for the next episode
0:50 wait what? Did you just imply that Mt. Everest is almost 9000km tall? Surely I must be missing something...
Ye I don't know what happened there. US/Canada border is 8891 Kilometers long. Then she says if you were to summit it instead of walk it you would have 50 meters left and shows that Mt.Everest us 8849 METERS tall. Did she get confused between meters and kilometers? Is that a US not knowing metric system problem ? I mean a lot of work went into that animation so it was not simply missed.
It seems like it was just a brain fart on her part. You could damn near walk from the continental US to Mt. Everest if you were going the same length as the US-Canada border
@@stormxlr2377 yeah, not to mention that I'll grant that confusing an "m" for a "km" is a minor and totally understandable mistake, especially if you're not used to metric -- but only for somebody who is bringing no prior knowledge to the discussion's context. Otherwise, it should mentally be a non-starter to compare a significant portion of the Earth's circumference (over 5,000 miles!) to the height of a mountain that is scaled by so many people every year that there is a single file line of climbers snaking its way up during every summer. One is near the limits of what a human can conceivably achieve with a sustained effort for a few days to weeks; the other is FAR outside of them.
I subscribed because it's a new channel and I enjoy her style, so I have faith that there could be some good videos coming...but tbh I dunno if I can respect somebody who not only made that mistake as like a brain fart, but was fully convinced of it for long enough to script, produce and edit an accompanying animation for it -- and never came to realize the glaring error in all the time between finishing that and uploading the video -- on an intellectual level...
@@B2F1 even allowing for a brain fart to explain the initial confusion, it's just one of those things that should immediately sound ridiculous as soon as you say it out loud and start pursuing it. It would be like saying the Burj Khalifa reaches halfway to the moon or something, it's just a patently ludicrous claim on its face. And I don't really buy that it has to do with confusion stemming from the units -- whatever unit system you're using, you're *never* going to find the length of a land border expressed in the same units as the height of a mountain!
The reason is that the typical scale of these quantities is literally _orders of magnitude_ apart, and this is something even most older children (much less adults in a professional context) should have an intuitive feel for, regardless of being unfamiliar with the particular details in a given case. In general, unless you have a REALLY abnormally short land border and you're comparing it to a REALLY abnormally tall mountain, there's no way these quantities are even going to be close...Mt. Everest as the tallest mountain on Earth is still
@@dancoroian1 This is how you know she didn't do the editing or the animation herself. She's probably paying one of those content farm companies which oversee lots of channels run by hot people with no skills or education who are trying to market themselves and get in on the pop-intellectual TH-cam niche. That's why the production style is so expensive and evocative of certain famous TH-camrs (some of whom have already been mentioned in the comments) even though it's a brand new channel.
As a longtime lover of TH-cam, it's pretty gross if you ask me. Slick production doesn't turn an idiotic topic like "bioregionalism" into a video worth watching. You can polish a turd, but it's still a turd.
I´ve been following and listening to your podcasts since i was like 14 (im 20 now) and I stumbled across this video by chance, and how happy I am that I did!! new hyperfixation for the year omg
The US/Canada border is the least problematic straight line border in the world, its sparsely populated, and both countries have no disputes over it. Wanting to change it because "it looks ugly!" it not a valid reason.
fr this video is so dumb
Cascadia is valid & deserves independence or at least cross-nation statehood status
@@j134679 no it doesn’t, there’s people who have formed national identities to either be Canadian or American; to carve that up because you feel it would be “neater” is ridiculous, I’m one of the people living in the Cascadia region and I think this is a ridiculous idea only touted by those who don’t understand how either country works.
This is an amazing video. Thank you so much, it is so needed. Amazing journalist work.
Let's recreate the big France of the revolution from the Pyrénées to the Alpes to the Rhine! Natural borders! 🇫🇷
This is such a fascinating topic! I'm definitely following. Also so nice to see a woman in the video essay space
16:00 . This is a more contentious topic than you might think. Removing those hydroelectric dams will reduce significantly, the amount of renewable energy consumed in those states. In addition, it is widely understood that there is a large possibility that these efforts will not be enough to save salmon populations in the first place. Beyond this, I question the sentiment in projects like this. Urban societies are often vilified in favor of what we would call the idea of "untouched wilderness". What benefit to society does a thriving native salmon population pose, beyond an increased connection to nature.
While I appreciate nature and spend a lot of times outdoors in the cascadia region which you define, I also recognize that the idea of Nature is an inherently human concept in the first place. These bioregions will continue to operate regardless of lines drawn on a political map.
It's mainly the fact that the dams are reaching the end of their life cycles. The engineers working on them are essentially nurses in an assisted living home, tending to them through their sunset years. The dams need to be taken down as it is, and governments don't find it to be worth the cost to rebuild. The amount of electricity isn't negligible even on a watershed as small as the Klamath, but considering the algae blooms and the destruction to Salmon populations we really won't be missing much.
Growing up in Idaho, the Snake River dams have been a contentious issue for longer than I've been alive. And for good reason. Lewiston is a seaport in the mountains because of it. Entire economies and sections of the power grid depend on the Snake. There's much more to lose besides a few dams. But as those dams reach the end of their life cycle, I still find myself siding with environmentalists but that's beside the point.
The point is, it's not a shipping highway. The electricity generated is a relative blip, especially when compared to the not only the US as whole, but even the entire PNW with its vast supply of hydroelectric.
The economies centered around lake recreation will sadly be a casualty, but soon may give way to rafting tours and perhaps some of the best salmon fishing in the world. Sportsmen will pay insane amounts of money to participate. The Klamath dam situation appears to me more like the natural end of a life cycle than it does a complete breakdown of highly essential infrastructure that will plunge an entire chunk of the US back into the stone age haha.
@@wagonhound_official I go to college in Boise, so I am no stranger to the region. It is my opinion that the presence of the dams does more good for society than their absence would. Idaho is one of the few states in a position where they realistically could go all "green energy". Beyond that, it would cost over a billion to remove dams along the snake. Investments could instead be made to cement the dams as a path towards the future, rather than something holding us back.
Your point is valid, there is something to be said for preserving nature. There are two sides to every coin though.
@@owenwillard5409 already existing absolutely, but take a backpack trip or better yet a rafting trip through the Frank Church Wilderness and tell me that we would have been better off developing all that. The salmon river is a national treasure. The Snake River isn't so cut and dry due to the level of infrastructure in place, but what I'm saying is the Klamath isn't supporting a mass number of livelihoods. Entire cities don't exist as they do today solely because of the Klamath river being dammed. Klamath Falls maybe, but they're not breaching the Klamath lake dam. Just the four downriver, in a largely undeveloped backwater. I'm very excited to see what comes of this in future studies.
Great video! It was well documented, informative, entretaining... I wish I had the same pasion you have
Bioregionalism is cool and all, but where does the nation come into this?
Cascadian independence
This really reminds me of the river valley communities rising up and taking control of their land in Ruthanna Emrys' great A Half-Built Garden
I live in British Columbia and it was interesting hearing someone on the other side of the world talk about my backyard, its peculiar quirks like point Roberts, and the recent environmental disasters I was in the thick of: flooding in Sumas and forest fires in the South Okanagan. The floods in Sumas are a great example of how an infrastructure failure on one side of a political border impacted us on the other.
Most people in British Columbia do not wish to secede from Canada, and most Oregonians and Washingtonians probably don't want to either unless maybe they live in Seattle or Portland. Quite frankly as a Canadian it'll be a cold day in hell before I leave Canada to live with Americans. Maybe that's all part of it, one's identity is more than their local region. Also, tbh the last people I'd want managing my provinces/cascadia's economy are proponents of an autonomous Cascadia. Like the one fellow who advocated moving away from an "extractive economy." I'm sorry but mining, logging, and fishing are the backbone of this province and are the whole reason it exists at all. Yes, we should manage it to make it as sustainable and renewable as possible, and yes it's good to diversify our economy as well.. but if we were to secede and unite into one big Cascadia, we'd only be viable as a nation if we relied on hydro-electric dams for electricity, and logging, fishing, farming, and mining for our economy. Especially logging and mining.
We hate you on the other side too. As Kamala would say, Do Not Come. Do not come
and this is why you should be active & vocal in Cascadia groups to help steer it into a better autonomous region
This makes so much sense in lots of levels. Would love to see examples of its impact, my guess is that places with borders with no biorregional (and thus, cultural) logic are much more likely to be a conflictive border, like Russia and Europa, Middle East, etc., whereas if you have a natural border with a self sustained bioregion there’s simply not much incentive to fight (like, what for?). Also, places that lack a border might also be conflictive (like inner China), unless sufficient institutional strength (US).
Great video!
Saludos de Chile 🇨🇱
17:31 Wow this is actually terrible. You make fun of people drawing borders from lines of latitude and longitude, but this is just the same thing only with an ecological map. Completely ignoring the people that live there, their ethnicities, nationalities, and religions.
What did you expect shes from England. 😂
This is so amazing. Thanks for all of your hard work 😊
I would imagine many of the same problems would still exist? The only reason straight borders are bad is because they are difficult to control/monitor whereas natural borders like mountains or rivers are clearly defined. If the nation is centralized enough it shouldn’t be a problem.
rivers actually make rather bad borders because they move and create difficult to monitor islands. a flat line border overland can be marked (even if by mile stones) and can be easily patroled.
rivers only make good borders for war defense, not regular border control.
@@matthiuskoenig3378 And you do not want the constant territorial disputes over an ill-defined border or loss of territory, either.
This is really good work, what a discovery !
You sound pretty confident and the editing is pretty well done! You have very little videos posted, but I'll guess you already have lot of experience as a content creator, that's pretty nice.
Would be cool if you could talk about permaculture someday on your next videos, that's like, the life style of my dreams, but all is so cramped here on the cities.
También voy a felicitarte en español porque me da ilusión jajsd, sigue asi!!
This was a very interesting and a well edited video!
Glad you enjoyed it!
This is so good! Borders are so counter-intuitive and against human nature. Makes me think of Rousseau’s “hypocrisy of the nation state”
How to sum up a 20 min video in 1 sentence
Are ypu serious right now 😂 ? Counter-intuitive ? Against human nature ? Just pick up a history book and maybe you'll understand why borders are needed. We ARE NOT all the same. Would you want a bad neighbour getting into your house ? Someone who wants to kill you ot destroy you ?
Give us a break.
you dont get it do you.
@@Claudia-AyusoI can’t tell if your an anarchy communist or an sjw or something in between
"Counter-intuitive and against human nature," but has existed for the whole of human history. Make that make sense.