Peter Berg, the social-revolutionary thinker, writer, ecologist, environmental activist and founder of Planet Drum Foundation, died on July 28, 2011, after a sudden case of pneumonia complicated by his bout with lung cancer.
Peter was an unforgettable personality for anyone who made his acquaintance over the past several decades.
This website collects many of his writings, essays, dispatches, broadsides, and pioneering documents describing a new vision for ecological living in an era of ongoing political and industrial crisis.
- View the complete archive of Peter’s works that are on this website
- Browse a selected bibliography of some of his essential writings
- Read a collection of interviews, appreciations and memories of Peter from around the world
- See videos of Peter doing a bioregional workshop, being interviewed, and a memorial film about him on the youtube channel.
- Peruse the Planet Drum announcement of Peter’s passing with links to other newspaper announcements.
Selected Bibliography of Peter Berg’s writings
Essays
- Amble Toward Continent Congress is a manifesto to overcome the politics of extinction, the Earth-colonist globalism which exhausts whole continents, their people, and moves now to devastate deep floors of our planetary oceans. This piece was distributed with one of the early Planet Drum Bundles, and was written to counter the patriotic fervor of the US Bicentennial in 1976. [Note: Amble is also available as part of one of the original Planet Drum bundles. Please visit our Publications page for more information.]
- The Bioregional Approach for Making Sustainable Cities This article discusses sustainable cities’ foundation in ecology and includes a guide for starting the transition to achieve bioregional sustainability in any city. There is a section with examples from Bahia de Caraquez, Ecuador.
- Bioregionalism (Defined and Updated 2002) an update of his early essay Bioregions. Why bioregions are important,clear and concise definitions of them, as well as manifestations of bioregionalism—groups, history, relationships to other concepts, and attacks by global monoculture.
- Learning to Partner with a Life-Place is the outline of a first year bioregional curriculum. It was first published as Dispatch #1 from Ecuador, 2004.
- Metamorphosis for Cities is an article by Peter from 1995 that outlined the blueprint for transforming urban areas to bring them into “balanced reciprocity with natural systems.” Subsequent work by Planet Drum Foundation in cooperation with the Eco City movement in Ecuador stems from the vision this article described.
- New Weather and You appeared in The Messenger, a free newspaper in San Francisco serving independent culture and community. It was published by Independent Arts & Media (www.artsandmedia.net) as part of the Seventh Annual Expo for the Artist & Musician, September, 2006.
- Trip Without a Ticket was originally published by the Diggers, Winter 1966-67. It was reprinted in August 1968 as part of The Digger Papers by Paul Krassner as Issue No. 81 of The Realist. Krassner said that his first encounter with the word ‘ecology’ was in this essay and he had to look its definition up in a dictionary.
Presentations
- Peter Berg at Watershed: Writers, Nature and Community is a presentation he gave in Washington D.C., April 16,1996, appearing at a session with Gary Snyder and Stephanie Mills
- The Post-Environmentalist Directions of Bioregionalism, a lecture by Peter Berg given at the University of Montana, Missoula, April 10, 2001.
- Bioregion and Human Location was a talk that Peter gave at the University of North Carolina in 1982 (published originally in All Area #2, Spring 1983). It lays out the argument that “there has to be a new politics based on reincorporating the social and natural sciences together in a way that is appropriate for developing a planetarian civilization.”
Dispatches
In his numerous peregrinations, Peter sent us dispatches from distant bioregions, our eyes and ears, a sort-of latter-day combination of Darwin (as chronicler of minute botanical/zoological detail) and Bakunin (as pollinator of the Reinhabitory Movement)
Ecuador
- The index of Ecuador Dispatches is on the Eco Ecuador Dispatches page.
Mexico
- Bioregionalism Meets Local Autonomy in Mexico reports on the November 1996 Turtle Island Bioregional Gathering (TIBG) in Tepoztlán, Mexico.
Asia — Japan, China, Mongolia
- August 2001: Reports from the Planet Drum Bioregional Asia Tour by Peter Berg.
Japan
- Autumn 2004: Japan Dispatches, 2004
- Summer 2005: Japan Dispatches, 2005
Northeast (USA)
- October 2005: Dispatch from Planet Drum Foundation’s Northeast (USA) Tour in the form of a poem, Hudson Loan.
Peace Boat (off Baja Califas)
- October 8, 2006: Finding a Bioregion in the Sea is a Dispatch written while teaching on the Peace Boat.
Poems
- December 21, 2010: Celestial Soulstice
Tributes
- Peter Berg’s tribute to Raymond F. Dasmann, who died in Santa Cruz, California on November, 2003
- Murray Bookchin was one of the most influential thinkers in the formation of the anarcho-bioregional movement. Peter Berg’s homage to this most inscrutable luminary, August 2006.
- Meeting Thomas Berry, Biospherean was written in 2008 to go into a “book of appreciations” celebrating Berry’s 93rd birthday.
- On January 24, 2001 a memorial for Gregory Corso was held at the New College in San Francisco. Peter Berg sent Standing on a Street Corner Doing Nothing is Power as a Dispatch from Ecuador for that occasion, and it was read there by Judy Goldhaft .
- Nanao Sakaki 2008 was an internationally renowned as a contemporary Taoist sage/poet. Peter put together a tribute to him when he died at the end of 2008.
Notes on Art
- Overview of John Berger
- Review of Francois Truffault’s Shoot The Piano Player
- Painter Hiroshi Yoshida’s Bioregional Perception of Place