Article Archive

Note: The following issue of COMMENT was presented as a lecture to the Critical Theory Seminar of the University of California at Los Angeles on May 29, 1980. My remarks are intended to emphasize the extreme importance today of viewing Anarchism in terms of the changing social contexts of our era – – not as [...]

The twentieth century is the heir of human history – the legatee of man’s age-old effort to free himself from drudgery and material insecurity. For the first time in the long succession of centuries, this century has elevated mankind to an entirely new level of technological achievement and to an entirely new vision of the [...]

CHAPTER FIVE: ENVIRONMENT AND CANCER The Importance of Environment

One of the most challenging problems in public health involves the influence of man’s environment on the incidence of cancer. Differences of opinion concerning the extent of this influence are likely to have important practical consequences. If a specialist believes that cancer is caused primarily by [...]

CHAPTER FOUR: The Problem of Chemicals in Food
The Consumer and Commercial Foods

With the rise of an urbanized society, the production of food becomes a complex industrial operation. In contrast with earlier times, when very few changes were made in the appearance or the constituents of food, much of the food consumed in [...]

CHAPTER SIX: RADIATION AND HUMAN HEALTH The Effects of Radiation

It is hardly necessary to emphasize that since the explosion of a nuclear weapon at Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945 ionizing radiation has become the most serious threat to man’s survival. If nuclear weapons are further developed or increased in number, it is quite [...]

CHAPTER SEVEN: HUMAN ECOLOGY Survival and Health

Despite mounting problems and difficulties, most official statements on environmental change tend to be reassuring and optimistic. We are told repeatedly, for example, that the amount of strontium-90 in a quart of milk or the quantity of DDT in a fruit is “trivial”; that in order to ingest [...]

CHAPTER THREE: URBAN LIFE AND HEALTH The Changing Urban Scene

Man’s environment attains a high degree of simplification in the modern metropolis. At first this may seem surprising: We normally associate metropolitan life with a diversity of individual types and with variety and subtlety in human relations. But diversity among men and complexity in human [...]

Our Synthetic Environment CHAPTER TWO: AGRICULTURE AND HEALTH Tuesday, November 18 2003 @ 01:28 AM PST

Contributed by: murray

By: Murray Bookchin
Problems of soil and agriculture seldom arouse the interest of urban dwellers. Town and country have become so sharply polarized that the city man and the farmer live in widely separated, [...]

Our Synthetic Environment Chapter 1 Tuesday, November 18 2003 @ 01:22 AM PST

Contributed by: murray

By: Murray Bookchin
CHAPTER ONE: THE PROBLEM Our Changed Environment

Life in the United States has changed so radically over the past one hundred years that the most wearisome historians tend to become rhapsodic when they describe [...]

CHAPTER EIGHT: HEALTH AND SOCIETY Individual and Social Aspects of Health

A new approach is likely to gain easier acceptance if it involves individual rather than social action. The majority of people tend to look for immediate, practical solutions that they can adopt without having to face major social and environmental problems. They search for [...]