Community Scale: Local is Whole; Regions are Whole - 1999

Note: An early expression of the thought in an email.

There is only one planet here - our local planet. It is whole - as are all levels of local. The local planet is divided into regions into regions to manage/conquer. There are seven continents - but the U.S. State Department divides the world into six regions. Penguin relations for Antarctica don't require an embassy or regional designation. Continents have become, over time, divided into nations. These political boundaries are cultural, political, arbitrary - each representing a local whole. Within the nations are any variety of states, provinces, counties, cities, town, villages - those with governors - governance - elected or not, represent yet another level of local - even down to the neighborhood, block or building. From higher levels, regions are used or manage/control the smaller geographic locals. What emerges is a local scale which ranges on one end from planet, to continent, to nation, to state, to province, to county, to either incorporated/unincorporated community, then to neighborhood or village (both unincorporated), to the parcel of land where a dwelling unit/or apartment building sit. The local scale does not end here - it goes to the family, the individual, the organs of the body, to the single cell - all local wholes.

Moving the other direction, this is the regional scale. Within the human body, physicians speak about a local or regional infection. The individual cell - a whole - is of course local - as too are the components of the cell. The smallest locals are the individual entities of atoms - which partner to become greater and greater local entities. So - land parcels become neighborhoods/villages - incorporated municipalities within chartered counties/within provinces/states/nations to encompass the six continents, much of the shore lines, and leaving the remainder to international law of the seas - to complete the puzzle of the local planet. Leave out any part and it is not the whole planet - the local planet.

Governmental boundaries are conditional, if not arbitrary. The true boundaries for humans are physical - to cross a land/water boundary you may swim, shedding clothes - or need a boat/or scuba gear, plus thermal protection to permit the human body to survive. Climbing above the tree line to cross a mountain, or going aloft in a balloon, airplane or space craft, again - the physical body needs climate control in order to live. Going into the molten earth is one where the gear may never be found, so there are even absolute boundaries for human presence.

What we are concerned with is human community - which considered as regional/local is entirely scaleable - local top and bottom. With the expansion of communications technology - the geographic and language barriers to global community are lowered - so individuals can directly experience their local world. Since the first satellites photographs in the 1970s, humans have been able to see a picture of our local planet.

The perspective of "Think globally, act locally," is more properly, "Think local planet, act regionally." A region is always a subset of a whole. c 1999 -