ALLY A subject determined by another to have mutual interests based on their actions.

BIOREGION A region determined by a watershed, literally an area of land through which all liquid flows toward a single body of water- usually a river. It can also be recognized by the presence of certain economic/material, cultural and species/ecological characteristics. We all live in a bioregion, but its boundaries rarely coincide with political borders. Bioregional mapping can be used to imagine a physical and cultural area that displaces human centrism, allowing for the consideration of other species and different possibilities for coexistence. A good tool for imagining the ground beneath the sidewalk.

CONSENT Permission for something to happen or agreement to do something.

DECOLONIZATION The long term political, economic, spiritual, process of reclaiming all aspects of life from imperial control and rebuilding indigenous power-bases.

ECONOMIC ENTRENCHMENT The process of limiting peoples imaginations from inventing the wide array of possibilities for living a fulfilling life and doing fulfilling work by the strict and often violent control of land, resources, capital, and knowledge.

ETHICS OF SCALE Geographer Neil Smith proposed three telescoping scales of relations: the urban, the nation-state and the global. He proposes the urban as the site of production – where the materialization of life is most directly realized and regulated. There are other scales within and between those proposed by Smith – extending from the family unit and neighborhood to larger and more complex organizations. Understanding how actions function and resonate across scales creates an ethical system or metric.

More on Smith’s consideration of scale in this essay: Contours of a spatialized politics. Here he lays out units, each with potential internal negotiations: body, home, community, urban space, region, nation and global boundaries.

FINANCIALIZATION Control of the present through a contracted future.

HINTERNET

MIDWEST

MUTUAL SELF RECOGNITION

PETROLEUM SPACE/TIME CONTINUUM The experience and realization of time/space based on the speed and mobility enabled by petroleum/oil. Descriptions of this might include: compressed, nodal, disjointed

PLUME A political region or territory defined pollution, toxic substances, or contamination.

PRIMARY RESEARCH

RECTIFICATION A technological term for the aggressive engineering of a river’s boundaries in order to create a straighter channel that would facilitate shipping speed. This involves removing s- curves and eddies, and frequently eliminating riparian habitats.

RECOVERY The re-entrenchment in unsustainable, imperialist economic relationships to each other and the land.

REGION Through engaging with the question of scales, we have come to think more clearly about regions, not as static territories but as always shifting volumes tied to other spaces. Current planners in the neoliberal/global economy have thought about regions as a way to optimize the flow of goods, financial services and business opportunities. In the 1970s environmentalists used the ideas of a bio-region to think about the way we impact habitats, watersheds, and animal migration. We have been interested in thinking about regions in both ways—how can we be aware of the way we use space and land so that the impact takes into account migrations of animals and people, downstream watersheds and other human ecologies?