When was the last time a fire burned in your area?
This is one of the quiz questions that reveals its Cascadian/West Coast USA origins. As Carolyn Merchant has noted in Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (1992) the quiz is ‘culture-bound’. I write that because the whole concept of a fire burning ‘in your area’ seems to reflect the spread of wildfire over large parts of a landscape, something that happens regularly enough to note in California, but is much less familiar in northern Europe.
A question to which my first response is ‘soil what?’ An alternate version of the bioregional quiz frames this question as ‘Describe the type of soil around your house.’ which is a bit more approachable. Another version asks ‘Describe the basic geology of the place you are living. What type of natural ground is there?”, which is also useful – but starts to move in on the territory of a later question (#16).
I’m not sure how good I would be at this calculation generally. I can’t remember seeing the moon lately but then I can’t remember looking at the night sky recently either. Today, Wednesday 11th April 2018, I’m pretty sure the last full moon was Easter Saturday – which was 31st March – which I think means that we are a few days off new moon – so perhaps it’s not surprising I haven’t seen the moon lately. The moon has a 28-day cycle, so the next full moon should be in about 17 days time – 28th April.
A key resource in bioregional thinking is the ‘Where You At? A Bioregional Quiz’, developed by Leonard Charles, Jim Dodge, Lynn Milliman, and Victoria Stockley, which was published in Coevolution Quarterly 32 (Winter 1981). Lightly edited – it posed the reader with these questions: