Agraria_Journal_WINTER_2022

18 AGRARIA JOURNAL 2022 physical force or social pressure, and to develop common outlooks and aims by mutual inquiry, mutual interest, and mutual regard.” Although not explicit about its environmental impacts, Morgan essentially crafted an early vision for sustainable living on a more human scale. He understood the importance of regional planning, especially when it came to economics and conservation. He pioneered the concept of “conservancy districts” as entities designed to steward a region’s water resources. As for economics, he saw the need for diversity in size and scope of industry. “American business is not of a choice between big business and little business, but of normal distribution,” he wrote, “just as there is normal distribution between large and small in a primeval hardwood forest.” Small communities, even if economically self-reliant to a degree, should not be isolated. Addressing the question of scale, he wrote, “A great community seeks excellence rather than size. It aims at full, well-proportioned life for its members, and vital relations with the wide world.” Intellectually, Morgan was a bridge connecting the late 19th century utopians to the decentralists and agrarians of the 1930s and ’40s and ultimately to the counterculture environmentalists of the ’60s and ’70s. One significant collaborator of Morgan’s was Lewis Mumford, who spoke at Community Service’s 1950 conference. Presaging the bioregional movement, Mumford wrote that regional planning should look at “how the population and civic facilities can be distributed so as to promote and stimulate a vivid, creative life through a whole region — a region being any geographic area that possesses a certain unity of climate, soil, vegetation, and culture.” In his time, Morgan was central to a small but vocal reform movement emphasizing the importance of small communities. His work inspired, or was adjacent to, a variety of other similar movements, which Community Service, Inc. would later be a part of or promote, including: agrarianism; back-to-the-land; self-sufficiency/self-reliance; appropriate technology; community land trusts; cooperatives; local currencies; intentional communities; simple living/voluntary simplicity; localization; and now, bioregional regeneration. In embracing bioregional regeneration, Agraria continues the legacy of Morgan while offering a potent ideological framework to guide the substance and scale of our work. As we work to regenerate our own bioregion, the Greater Miami Valley, we do so with an eye toward the healing and restoration of our land and our communities. Megan Bachman is the Assistant Director of Agraria. COURTESY OF B-W GREENWAY Arthur Morgan conceived the idea of conservation corridors around and through Dayton in the early 20th century. Area land trust B-W Greenway is working to fulfill this equitable bioregional vision.