Chapter 1: Erasing the Ghost Map

From the upcoming Book: Wake Up to the Bioregional World

Series: A Companion to Decolonize Imagination for Planetary Regeneration

Link to download Decolonize Imagination for Planetary Regeneration: https://media2-production.mightynetworks.com/asset/31143d56-7e1f-453d-9005-1c61a538bb99/Decolonize_Imagination_-_Elyes_M_-_2025.pdf#_gl=1*1a10rd1*_ga*MTUwNzQ1OTMxNy4xNzIxMDQzOTMx*_ga_T49FMYQ9FZ*MTc0NTY1OTIwNy4yMTIzLjEuMTc0NTY1OTgxMS4wLjAuMA..*_ga_NEGJ2SXNP7*MTc0NTY1OTIwNy4zNzk3LjEuMTc0NTY1OTgxMS42LjAuMA

The Core Thesis:

If Decolonize Imagination is the act of unlearning the toxic stories of separation, then Wake Up to the Bioregional World is the practice of remembering our place within the living Earth. It argues that alongside a decolonized mind, a bioregional mind is our most vital pathway to healing; a practical, grounded consciousness that turns abstract ideals of "regeneration" into daily, life-sustaining action.

This book is a field guide for that shift: from global consumer to local citizen, from extractive thinking to reciprocal being.

Chapter 1: Erasing the Ghost Map

Close your eyes and picture the world. The image that arises is a ghost. It is a phantom of borders, names, and colors—a mental map imposed by a history of power and separation. We internalize this map as children, learning that a river can be a property line, a mountain range a divider, and that we belong to these abstract, political shapes more than to the living, breathing systems that sustain our every breath.

This is the colonial world map: the ultimate artifact of disconnection. It was not drawn by watersheds or animal migrations, but by the pens of cartographers serving empires. It carved the living body of the Earth into properties and nations, reducing vast, pulsing ecologies to single, simplified labels like “Africa” or “Asia.” This map did more than chart territory; it created a psychology. It made the world seem manageable, ownable, and ultimately, expendable. It enabled extraction because it first engineered a profound sense of alienation from the source of life itself.

But beneath this phantom layer lies the true territory. A world not of lines, but of flows. Not of names, but of relationships. This is the bioregional world, and waking up to it is the most critical step on the path to regenerating our planet and ourselves.

A bioregion is a life-place, a home territory defined by the nature that shapes it. Its boundaries are drawn by the pull of water toward the sea—the ridges of a watershed that decide whether rain flows to the Pacific or the Atlantic. They are drawn by the ancient paths of migrating salmon and elephants, by the specific conversations between soil, climate, and plant life that create a unique assemblage of mosses, grasses, and forests. This is the ecological bedrock. But a bioregion is more than ecology; it is the cradle of culture.

Culture, in its deepest, most resilient form, is not manufactured; it is grown. It is the slow, patient accumulation of human adaptation to a specific place. It is the way people live, what they eat, how they build, and how they organize, all emerging from a long and intimate dialogue with their surroundings. The colonial map doesn’t just erase ecological nuance; it violently severs this essential connection, replacing place-based wisdom with a homogenized, extractive global culture.

To understand this, contrast the vast expanse labeled “Africa.” This one word tries to contain the immense, sun-filled silence of the Sahara and the deep, humming chorus of the Congo Basin. These are not just different ecosystems; they gave birth to entirely different ways of being human. In the desert, life moves to a rhythm of scarcity, giving rise to nomadic traditions, profound knowledge of hidden water, architectural wisdom for creating coolness, and a spirituality woven from the stars and the sand. In the rainforest, life is a celebration of abundance, nurturing communities with a deep understanding of the forest’s pharmacy, building techniques that breathe with the humidity, and cosmologies where the sacred is embedded in the canopy. The continental name “Africa” softly erases these beautiful, life-sustaining distinctions.

This gentle weaving of life and place is the rule, not the exception. It is the foundational pattern of human existence. In the lands touched by the Mediterranean climate—a distinct bioregion spanning southern Europe, northern Africa, and the Levant—a shared way of life emerged. The dry summers and mild winters nurtured olive groves and vineyards, which in turn fostered a shared culinary heart, building styles using local stone and clay, and communal traditions around harvests and shared water resources that connect peoples across what are now called separate continents.

Similarly, the bioregion defined by the mighty salmon runs of the northern Pacific Rim shaped entire cultures from Japan to Alaska to the Pacific Northwest. The sacred, predictable return of the salmon each year dictated the calendar, inspired art and ceremony, taught sophisticated principles of sustainable harvesting, and created a shared identity for people connected by a river and a fish, not a arbitrary border.

From the Arctic, where language and life are intimately tied to the qualities of snow and the moods of the sea, to the Great Plains, where cultures learned to move with the monumental migrations of bison, our deepest wisdom comes from paying close attention to where we are. This wisdom tells us what foods will truly nourish us, which materials will best shelter us, and how to live together in a way that honors, rather than depletes, our home.

Therefore, the shift from a colonial to a bioregional mind is our most critical pathway to healing. It is not merely an intellectual exercise but a sensory and spiritual homecoming. It begins with asking new questions: Not “What country am in?” but “What watershed am I in?” Not “What can I take from here?” but “What is my responsibility to this here?”

This awakening starts with attention. The ghost map is loud, its borders reinforced by news cycles and economies. The land is patient. It speaks in the feel of the air on your skin—is it dry desert air or humid coastal mist? It speaks in the dawn chorus of birds outside your window—the voices of your more-than-human community. It speaks in the path of the rain falling on your roof—where does that water go? Which creek does it join? Which river does it feed? You are living in a watershed, a nested series of basins that is the true anatomy of your home.

To know your place is to begin to love your place. And to love your place is to accept the sacred responsibility to defend it and nourish it. This is regeneration in action: not a vague global concept, but the daily, grounded practice of belonging. It is the work of rewilding not just landscapes, but our very minds, re-weaving our culture back into the ecology that sustains it. The ghost map is a spell of separation. The bioregional mind is the act of waking up from it, remembering that we are, and always have been, citizens of a living, breathing Earth.