[Note: The following are a series of personal testimonials sent to the ISE marking the passing of Murray Bookchin.]

From Green Cities pioneer Mark Roseland, Director, Centre for Sustainable Community Development Simon Fraser University Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada :
Murray Bookchin had a profound influence on my life’s work, in the area I now call sustainable community development. He also had an enormous influence on me personally at a tender time in my own development. In 1977 I was in university, and my left-leaning professor had ordered Post-Scarcity Anarchism but we …

Murray Bookchin, visionary social theorist, dies at 85

A tribute by Brian Tokar.

Murray Bookchin, the visionary social theorist and activist, died during the early morning of Sunday, July 30th in his home in Burlington, Vermont. During a prolific career of writing, teaching and political activism that spanned half a century, Bookchin forged a new anti-authoritarian outlook rooted in ecology, dialectical philosophy and left libertarianism.

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was a left-libertarian social theorist who, in the early 1960s, introduced the concept of ecology into radical politics.

In the aftermath of the cold war, in a world that glorifies markets and commodities, it sometimes seems difficult to remember that generations of people once fought to create a very different kind of world. To many, the aspirations of this grand tradition of socialism often seem archaic today, or utopian in the pejorative sense, the stuff of idle dreams; others, more dismissive, consider socialism to be an inherently coercive system, one that whose consignment to the past is well deserved.