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 didn’t get to it in the course. I was standing in the very long returns lineup at the bookstore when I read “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” and “Toward a Liberatory Technology.” By the time I got to the cash register my life had changed, and I kept the book.

Soon afterwards I organized a conference on social ecology at Wesleyan and invited Murray sight unseen as keynote speaker. The conference was organized around a full Saturday of workshops, concluding with Murray’s speech and then a concert. By mid- afternoon Murray had engaged in verbal sectarian battles in every workshop he walked into. As a 20 year old who didn’t really know better, I pulled him aside and yelled at him that I had invited him to talk about unity in diversity, not to be divisive and sectarian. Perhaps it was my youthful innocence, but he immediately mellowed, and was remarkably well-behaved for the rest of the day and the evening. He later told me that no one but Bea had ever criticized him quite like that.

Murray invited me as his guest to the Social Ecology Institute that summer, where I was introduced to the likes of John Todd from the New Alchemists and David Morris from the Institute for Local Self- Reliance and many others whose work I have long since admired. I returned for part of the following summer as well, and helped edit parts of what was to become The Ecology of Freedom.

Murray was disappointed when I left New England to take a position in Portland, Oregon as an editor of RAIN Magazine, an appropriate technology journal. I talked Murray into writing an updated “Open Letter to the Ecology Movement” for the April 1980 Earth Day issue of RAIN. It became one of the most popular pieces RAIN ever published, and was reprinted widely elsewhere.

I haven’t seen Murray or been in touch with him for the last 25 years. It’s too late now to tell him how much I appreciated having had him in my life, but his influence is still with me, and continues with those whom I now mentor. We will miss him, but we can take some solace in knowing that his spirit is alive and well.

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From historian Gabriel Kolko in the Netherlands:

IN A WORLD FULL OF EVIL PEOPLE AND EVIL ACTIONS, WE CAN, ALAS, POINT TO VERY FEW WHO DEVOTE THEIR LIVES TO THE FIGHT FOR A BETTER WORLD, FOR SANITY AND JUSTICE, AND OPPOSE THE DOMINANT CURRENTS OF WAR AND IRRATIONALITY. MURRAY BOOKCHIN WAS OF THAT ALL- TOO-RARE BREED.

HE CARRIED ON HIS STRUGGLE WITH PASSION BUT ALSO WITH INTELLIGENCE, WHICH REQUIRED THOUGHT AND CHANGE. WHAT WAS CONSTANT IN MURRAY BOOKCHIN’S LIFE WAS THE DEVOTION TO PEOPLE, WHICH HAVE BEEN BETRAYED BY NOMINALLY GOOD AS WELL AS EVIL CAUSES. HE SOUGHT TO ATTAIN A SYNTHESIS OF IDEAS BUT ALSO TO REFLECT ON THOSE THAT EXISTED WITH CRITICAL INTELLIGENCE.

HIS WAS A GREAT HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT. THE CHALLENGE IS TO FOLLOW IN HIS FOOTSTEPS, WITH THE SAME COMMITMENT AND DEDICATION TO REASON AND INTELLIGENCE. THIS WAS MURRAY BOOKCHIN’S LEGACY.

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From historian Howard Zinn in Boston:

Murray Bookchin was that rare person — a creative and independent thinker, rejecting dogma, devoting his life as an intellectual, a writer, an activist, to the cause of freedom and justice.

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Comments Of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)  On The Passing Of Murray Bookchin Date Issued: Aug. 1, 2006:

“Murray was an intriguing and endearing blend of New York intellectualism and New England libertarianism.

“He was always to be found on the cutting edge — in the dynamism of his ideas, the power of his reason and the infectiousness of his enthusiasm. And I would add to that: in the sparkle of his friendship.

“He had a fundamental optimism about the ability of people to adapt and change to make the world better. That was his driving purpose. To him small was beautiful, except for the boldness of his vision. He helped us see our role in the natural world. His ideas helped forge the environmental movement, including our attention today to man’s role in climate change. He also was confident enough about his ideas to constantly refine them and to put theory into action.

“To Murray’s great credit, and our great benefit, he did more than his part to make the world better.”

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From David Block, EA, TaxMaster Financial Services Corporation in New York:

[In Murray’s weekly study group in Burlington], you may recall, we learned Greek, studied Collingwood’s “The Idea of Nature,” and learned Murray’s take on Plato and Aristotle. For 15 years, until I returned to New York, I studied Social Ecology in Murray’s living room. He would read to us from his works in progress, expounding upon them. And I did his tax returns. I could not get that kind of education anywhere else. Unlike many theorists, who stake out a position and defend it vigorously for the rest of their lives, his ideas never reified. As you know, Murray’s thoughts constantly evolved and expanded until he died.

… I recognized his genius the moment I first read “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” in the fall of 1978, in Mark Roseland’s “Social Ecology” class at Wesleyan. As a friend of mine put it, when you find genius, you stick to it like glue to learn as much as you can and hope as much of it can stick as possible. He was a genius who, paradoxically, was both far ahead of his time and yet far outlived his own time as well. I will miss him.

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From Nelson Alvarez in Puerto Rico:

Please transmit to the social ecology community my sense of loss at the death of Bookchin, whose thinking and vision will surely nourish generations to come.

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From Arthur Mitzman in Amsterdam, (emeritus professor of history, University of Amsterdam):

As a friend and political companion of Murray in the Contemporary Issues group between 1951 and 1956, I wanted to express my regrets and condolence to his family and friends in Vermont. Murray’s subsequent importance in defining social ecology for two generations of concerned citizens of the world cannot be overestimated, but his articulate, reasoned passion was essential to my own political education a half century ago.

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From Aron Kay (aRoN pIeMaN kAy) in New York:

I am sending this as a condolence communiqué regarding the passing of Murray Bookchin….I recall learning about Murray Bookchin back in the 70′s…..during the days of yippies and anarchist conferences at hunter college…. anyway, Murray still lives in our hearts

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From Kai Malloy in Colorado, ISE Graduate – Summer 1999:

I just received the latest ISE newsletter and the news about Murray’s death on July 30th. My condolences go out to everyone, especially those closest to him. He will be missed by all I am sure, but hopefully his fighting spirit will continue to inspire us as we struggle for a better world in the era of Bush and right-wing conservatism.

My best to all.

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From Marta Gregorcic,  Matej and activists in Slovenia in Slovenia:

We received [news of your] painful loss. All Slovenian anti-authoritarian movements which were inspired by social ecology are mourning for [this] incredible struggler! Murray Bookchin will live with our struggle beyond neoliberalism!

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From Trish Malone in Hawaii:

I am very sad to hear of the passing of Murray Bookchin. His writting showed me how to think outside of the current norms and stand for one’s beliefs.

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From the Any Time Now collective in British Columbia (Kevin Carson, Larry Gambone, Peter Good, Keith “kppgarv,” Richard Martin, Pat Murtagh, Werner Scott):

We, [the following members] of the anytimenowdiscussion group, affiliated with the magazine ‘Any Time Now: A Newsletter of Social Anarchism’ wish to convey our sincere feelings of sympathy to the friends, comrades and family of Murray Bookchin on the occasion of his passing. Murray Bookchin contributed so much of great value to the world anarchist movement, and he will be remembered with great respect and affection.

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From the Social Ecology Group in Turkey:

Commemorating Bookchin

We, as Social Ecology Group in Turkey (Toplumsal Ekoloji Grubu) have learned vastly from Bookchin. Most of us felt lost in the Left politics until we discovered his book “Ecology of Freedom” (translated into Turkish in 1994). It has been an exciting and fulfilling experience to discover his holistic thoughts to create a non-hierarchical society. Also it was a reenergizing force those of us who had to confront violently polarized political atmosphere in Turkey.

We established discussion groups in Istanbul and Ankara. Influenced by his book “Remaking Society”, we organized community actions about certain local problems.

In the year 2000, two of us participated in summer school at the Institute for Social Ecology. On that occasion, we had the fortune and honor of meeting Bookchin, in Burlington. Along with Bookchin’s article about communalism, an inspiring account of their meeting with Bookchin appeared in the first issue of our “Toplumsal Ekoloji” magazine.

Bookchin’s ideas, insights and his motivating activist experiences will lead us to establish an ecological libertarian society in Turkey and the world. We will always remember him through our endeavour to achieve this goal.
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From Peter Berg in San Francisco:

Some Encounters with Murray Bookchin

Before offering any recollections about Murray it is necessary to make the disclaimer that if he was here he would quite possibly refute them.
And that he might even dispute that statement!

That said I can relax and share some remembrances that might otherwise go unrecorded from the contentious albeit intellectually respectful course of my interaction with Murray since meeting him in the early Sixties on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I was living at the time. It was a gathering of radical activists of various stripes to discuss participating in the first New York City public demonstration against the Vietnam War, a march from Washington Square in Greenwich Village to UN headquarters. Alan Hoffman, editor of the outspokenly anarchist magazine Good Soup, introduced us. Also there as I recall was Ben Morea with some of his fellow Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers and artist Aldo Tambolini who performed the Dance of the Screw in front of art museums around the city to protest the commodification of paintings.

Dissenters in that period coming out of the repressive Fifties tended to be overly self- conscious and almost monomaniacally declarative about their positions. Murray was a distinct exception. He was confident and almost avuncular about his background and the tradition of anarchist philosophy. The Spanish Civil War of almost thirty years before seemed to have just happened when he spoke about it. He assured us that we were in good historical company, and was optimistic about support from anti- establishment groups in Europe. Unusual for a leftist at that time was his belief that issues of the environment offered a new basis for unity. But his agreeableness ended with the Marxist organizers of the demonstration and their centralized decision- making. I didn’t recognize him in the march that eventually materialized but came away from the meeting inspired to begin reading about the origins and practice of contemporary anarchism.

By the late Sixties I had helped form the San Francisco Diggers, perhaps the best model of creative anarchist social alternatives as could then be found. it was clear that the Vietnam War was waning so we staged an “End of the War” event in a Haight-Ashbury theater announced by a poster showing Lyndon Johnson with his arms around Ho Chi Minh. It was a celebration of Diggerly things that could possibly take place in a liberatory peacetime society: free food and rock music, nude dancing, climbing cargo nets on the walls, processions with palm fronds, film loops of seeds germinating and volcanoes erupting, and satirical presentations by faux political candidates.

A number of New York based groups showed up including some remnants of the Up Against the Wall Mortherfuckers who set up a card table with free pistol and rifle ammunition, and the entire cast of the Living Theater`s “Paradise Now” show who simply sat in the balcony wearing G-strings and stared wide-eyed at the proceedings. Murray suddenly appeared in an Army surplus jacket, boots, and carrying a gas mask! I asked him what he thought was going to happen and he nervously stated the conviction that police were about to descend on us. Not likely in San Francisco I assured him and pointed out participants who were embracing or dancing ecstatically. The contrast between his furtive wariness and the expansive Digger attitude was glaring and I tried to persuade him to join in. He left immediately and afterwards I realized that some East Coast militants seriously expected a civil war to break out when the war ended.

When I was invited to help edit the “Bioregions” issue of Coevolution Quarterly in the late Seventies one of the first materials I sought out was Murray’s “Ecology of Freedom”. Knowing that he accepted some of the general premises of bioregionalism as espoused by Planet Drum Foundation, I requested permission to edit the long first chapter of the book to expose readers to advanced anarchist-based ecology ideas. I fully expected an argument and long set of conditions but surprisingly he responded, “There isn’t anyone who I would trust with this more than you. Do whatever you like.” I took special pains to carefully preserve his train of thought wondering whether there was ever another instance when Murray allowed his text to be altered. The resulting article was invaluable to help set the autonomous and self-governing tone of bioregional discourse.

Bookchin’s subsequent campaign during the Eighties and Nineties against Earth First!, deep ecology, and spiritually oriented ecology proponents was a puzzling retreat from the openness in “Ecology of Freedom”. It was especially unfortunate because of the general slowing down of public support that was occurring at that time, and Murray seemed to be a singularly divisive force for dissent within the environmental movement. When Gary Snyder asked me why Bookchin chose to attack with inflammatory language including “misanthrope” and “eco- fascist” I explained that his argumentative style stemmed from early exposure to Communist ideology, and that it had the flavor of “Stalinist thugs”. Snyder repeated that phrase later in a newspaper interview. When I last saw Murray in the cafeteria of Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont a few years ago he plaintively wondered why such a hurtful term had been used to describe him. There were the two Murrays in the same moment. He was an honestly compassionate champion of a more human and liberated society, yet seemed to be unconscious of the overbearing and dismissive statements that tinged his philosophical positions.

In the Enlightenment Era social and political thinkers pondered what kind of society might exist without monarchial government, and anarchism was considered as legitimate as other viable alternatives. It persisted as an ideal ever since although squeezed into an increasingly narrow area of acceptance by state socialism and bourgeois democracy which fight to diminish and ridicule it. But in our time when globalism and planet-wide environmental destruction threaten the whole human species, the broad vision of a sustainable society with a foundation in mutualism that underlies Murray Bookchin’s thinking is once again a guidepost for a positive direction.

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From Ben Grosscup in Amherst, MA:

The ideas that Murray Bookchin developed under the name of social ecology are fundamentally important to me in framing the terms upon which I have become able to hope for a rational society. Growing up in a left and environmental political scene where reformism, lifestyle politics, various forms of authoritarianism, and romantic concepts of nature would often prevail, social ecology has been for me a hopeful corrective with which I have changed my outlook on life and politics. Social Ecology has offered a revolutionary vision beyond social hierarchy in all its forms and an incisive critique of society that gets to the root of hierarchy as such.

Through books and lectures, I knew Murray as revolutionary and as a brilliant intellectual. Social ecology has given me a political and theoretical framework to approach the everyday political problems that I encounter in everyday life and work, and it has given me the tools to be able to think beyond the immediate reality. Social ecology gives me hope in these troubled times, because I truly believe that it is possible to build the kinds of political movements that are needed to bring about a substantially more rational and directly democratic society that Bookchin fought for.

I first studied social ecology at the ISE when I came there in 2001. I have been returning to the ISE every summer since then. My main reason for coming back each year was the opportunity to develop my thinking among other social ecologists. Throughout those years I took every available opportunity to come to Murray’s apartment with groups of students to hear him speak. While at the ISE, I also viewed videos of Murray’s talks from before I ever came to ISE.

Although I only knew Murray through books and lectures, I have known many people who knew him more closely. The mentorship that Murray shared with so many people in his life has touched me, although largely indirectly. Likewise, Murray’s commitment to scholarship in the service of radical social change and the commitment of my mentors who learned directly from him has inspired me to touch the lives of others. Murray’s legacy as a visionary, an educator, and a revolutionary lives on through the activity of political organizing, study groups, and intellectual life that I and so many others have made part of our lives.

For me, the political education I gained from these treasured moments with Murray and with the people whom he mentored is not a quaint memory of ungrounded, bleary-eyed, revolutionary exuberance, nor shall it ever become so. Rather, these lessons continue to challenge me every day of my life to strive towards political and ethical thinking and action to harmonize the the multitudinous fissures within humanity and the split of humanity and nature. Indeed, Murray’s life stands as a tremendous challenge to all of us who dream of a rational and ecological society to find effective and principled ways of fighting for it, that is, to engage in the revolutionary project. Murray also challenged us not to consider political victory as the only validation of our efforts. More importantly a life of political struggle and intellectual reflection is purposeful because it is a good way to live.

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From ISE alum, Israel Zuckerman:

Please accept my condolences on this sad occasion. I’m sure that you are hearing from past students from all over the world who wish to pay their respect to Murray. While I cannot afford to be at the memorial tomorrow in person, be sure that I am with you in spirit. I have explored the blogosphere in the weks since I heard, and am comforted somewhat by the outpouring of (mostly) affectionate memories that others have shared. Let my include mine.

On my last visit to the Institute, in 1991, I had my opportunity for a sit-down chat with Murray. Others were quizzing him about his theoretical developments, the state of the environmental movement, the possibilities of a more libertarian future. When my turn came up, I found myself struck by grief, having lost my father the previous summer. He and Murray were of a kind and a generation, my father a few years older. New York Jews, radicals in their youth, activists in the labor movement, WWII veterans, both brilliant, and both role models for me. We talked about the smaller, homey things of a generation that was dwindling, and the changes and great events they had seen and participated in. I told Murray my father’s stories of protests in Tompkins Square Park, where factory workers filled their pockets with ball bearings stolen from the factories, to spill upon the streets and sidewalks to unbalance the horses of the “Cossacks,” as the called the mounted police who would bust up the demonstrations. He was sympathetic, appreciative, perhaps welcoming the chance to reminisce rather than hammer out theory and ideology.

Others will no doubt talk about Murray’s brilliance, his deep understandings of so many subjects and fields, his fire and his passionate commitment to the cause of human freedom. I treasured those qualities about him as well, but also want him remembered for his acts of human kindness, such as sparing a chunk of a beautiful Vermont summer afternoon to comfort a grieving student the best way he could have, by listening, sharing, and commiserating. We have all lost not just a teacher, but a friend.

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From Stavros Karageorgakis in Greece:

My condolences. I hope that Murray’s ideas will continue to inspire revolutionaries to build a rational society

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From Sarah Ross and Thomas Forster in Olga, Washington:

We are saddened by the news of Murray’s passing and wish to honor him with a gathering of alumni and friends to share how he inspired us.

Our idea is to host a weekend (two day) event on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands to share how he provoked our critical analysis and engaging debate…

With the help of ISE we would like to invite alumni and friends.

We taught organic and sustainable agriculture classes at ISE in the early 1990s. Since then we have lived and farmed on Orcas Island. We also teach in the local school and farm community, and work on farm and food policy at the national and international levels.

From the 1960s to the present, the utopian dimension of Bookchin’s social ecology inspired several generations of social and ecological activists, from the pioneering urban ecology movements of the sixties, to the 1970s’ back-to-the-land, antinuclear, and sustainable technology movements, the beginnings of Green politics and organic agriculture in the early 1980s, and the anti-authoritarian global justice movement that came of age in 1999 in the streets of Seattle. His influence was often cited by prominent political and social activists throughout the US, Europe, South America, Turkey, Japan, and beyond.

Even as numerous social movements drew on his ideas, however, Bookchin remained a relentless critic of the currents in those movements that he found deeply disturbing, including the New Left’s drift toward Marxism-Leninism in the late 1960s, tendencies toward mysticism and misanthropy in the radical environmental movement, and the growing focus on individualism and personal lifestyles among 1990s anarchists. In the late 1990s, Bookchin broke with anarchism, the political tradition he had been most identified with for over 30 years and articulated a new political vision that he called communalism.

Bookchin was raised in a leftist family in the Bronx during the 1920s and ‘30s. He enjoyed retelling the story of his expulsion from the Young Communist League at age 18 for openly criticizing Stalin, his brief flirtation with Trotskyism as a labor organizer in the foundries of New Jersey, and his introduction to anarchism by veterans of the immigrant labor movement during the 1950s. In 1974, he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology, along with Dan Chodorkoff, then a graduate student at Vermont’s Goddard College. For 30 years, the Institute for Social Ecology has brought thousands of students to Vermont for intensive educational programs focusing on the theory and praxis of social ecology. A self-educated scholar and public intellectual, Bookchin served as a full professor at Ramapo College of New Jersey despite his own lack of conventional academic credentials. He published more than 20 books and many hundreds of articles during his lifetime, many of which were translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish and other languages.

During the 1960s – ‘80s, Bookchin emphasized his fundamental theoretical break with Marxism, arguing that Marx’s central focus on economics and class obscured the more profound role of social hierarchy in the shaping of human history. His anthropological studies affirmed the role of domination by age, gender and other manifestations of social power as the antecedents of modern-day economic exploitation. In The Ecology of Freedom (1982), he examined the parallel legacies of domination and freedom in human societies, from prehistoric times to the present, and he later published a four-volume work, The Third Revolution, exploring anti-authoritarian currents throughout the Western revolutionary tradition.

At the same time, he criticized the lack of philosophical rigor that has often plagued the anarchist tradition, and drew theoretical sustenance from dialectical philosophy—particularly the works of Aristotle and Hegel; the Frankfurt School—of which he became increasingly critical in later years—and even the works of Marx and Lenin. During the past year, even while terminally ill in Burlington, Bookchin was working toward a re-evaluation of what he perceived as the historic failure of the 20th century left. He argued that Marxist crisis theory failed to recognize the inherent flexibility and malleability of capitalism, and that Marx never saw capitalism in its true contemporary sense. Until his death, Bookchin asserted that only the ecological problems created by modern capitalism were of sufficient magnitude to portend the system’s demise.

Murray Bookchin was diagnosed several months ago with a fatal heart condition. He will be remembered by his devoted family members—including his long-time companion Janet Biehl, his former wife Bea Bookchin, his son, daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter—as well as his friends, colleagues and frequent correspondents throughout the world. ]]> http://www.social-ecology.org/2006/08/murray-bookchin-tribute/feed/ 1 http://www.social-ecology.org/2006/07/murray-bookchin-obituary-by-janet-biehl/ http://www.social-ecology.org/2006/07/murray-bookchin-obituary-by-janet-biehl/#comments Mon, 31 Jul 2006 12:00:14 +0000 Janet Biehl http://74.52.141.130/~ise/?p=290 Obituary by Janet Biehl, for the Burlington Free Press

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) was a left-libertarian social theorist who, in the early 1960s, introduced the concept of ecology into radical politics. A self-described utopian, he sought a decentralized, genuinely democratic society and placed ecology in a humanistic and social framework. He wrote more than two dozen books on ecology, history, politics, philosophy, and urban planning. At all times he upheld reason against the alternatives and sought to bring a lived revolutionary past forward into the future.

He was born on Jan. 14, 1921 in New York City, the only son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Nathan and Rose (Kaluskaya) Bookchin. At nine he joined the Communist youth organization but became disillusioned with the authoritarian character of the international Communist movement and broke with it in 1937. Unable to afford a college education, he worked as a foundryman in New Jersey and as a union organizer for the CIO. He served in the U.S. Army, then returned to civilian life as an autoworker. He participated in the great General Motors strike of 1946, but the strike leaders’ compromises with management caused him to abandon his faith in the industrial proletariat.

His first book, Our Synthetic Environment (written under the pseudonym Lewis Herber), published in 1962, addressed a broad range of ecological issues. Preceding Rachel Carson’s famous SilentSpring by nearly half a year, it called for a decentralized society using alternative energy sources. In this and later writings he developed what he called social ecology, which holds that ecological problems can be remedied only by the creation of a free and democratic society. At a time when “ecology” was an unfamiliar concept to most people, he lectured indefatigably on the subject to countercultural groups throughout the United States. He advanced the concept of postscarcity, holding that advances in technology would make possible a reduction of the workday, thereby providing people with the free time necessary to engage in civic self-management and direct democracy. His 1960s essays were very influential both in the counterculture and in the New Left and were anthologized in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971).

During the 1970s Bookchin’s writings and lectures influenced the formation of Green movements in the United States and abroad. Three years after moving to Burlington in 1971, he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vt., becoming its director; the school later acquired an international reputation for its curriculum on social theory, ecophilosophy, and alternative technologies. That same year he began teaching at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he became a full professor in 1977. He retired from Ramapo in 1981 with emeritus status.

In 1982 Bookchin published The Ecology of Freedom, which became a classic in social thought. His 1986 The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1986) presented his program for direct-democratic politics at the municipal, neighborhood, and town levels. In Burlington Bookchin attempted to put these ideas into practice by working with the Northern Vermont Greens, the Vermont Council for Democracy, and the Burlington Greens, retiring from politics in 1990. His ideas are summarized succinctly in Remaking Society (1989) and The Murray Bookchin Reader (1997).

Bookchin is survived and his passing mourned by his loving family members, all of whom live in Burlington: his longtime companion, Janet Biehl; his daughter, Debbie Bookchin, her husband, James Schumacher, and their daughter, Katya Bookchin Schumacher; his son, Joseph Bookchin; and his ex-wife and longtime friend, Beatrice Bookchin. He will be much missed as well by his many dear friends and by the thousands of people, unknown to him personally, whom he touched during his long and productive life.

Yet for a century preceding the First World War, and for nearly a half century thereafter, various kinds of socialism – statist and libertarian; economistic and moral; industrial and communalistic – constituted a powerful mass movement for the transformation of a competitive society into a cooperative one – and for the creation of a generous and humane system in which emancipated human beings could fulfill their creative and rational potentialities. People are ends in their own right, the socialist tradition asserted, not means for one another’s use; and they are substantive beings, with considered opinions and deep feelings, not mass-produced things with artificially induced notions and wants. People can and should throw away the economic shackles that bind them, socialists argued, cast off the fictions and unrealities that mystify them, and plan and construct, deliberately and consciously, a truly enlightened and emancipated society based on freedom and cooperation, reason and solidarity. Material aims would be secondary to ethical concerns, people would have rich, spontaneous social relationships with one another, and they would actively and responsibly participate in making all decisions about their lives, rather than subject themselves to external authoritarian control.

After 1917 a general enthusiasm for the stunning accomplishment of the Bolshevik Revolution pervaded almost all sectors of the international left, so much so that the humanistic ideals of socialism came to be attached to the Communist movement. In the 1930s young American intellectuals growing up under Depression conditions, especially in the vibrant radical political culture of New York City, cut their teeth on the version of socialism that the Communist movement taught them. Their minds brimming with revolutionary strategies and Marxian dialectics, their hopes and passions spurred by life-endangering battles against a capitalist system that seemed on the brink of collapse, they marshaled all their abilities to achieve the century-old socialist ideal.

Tragically, international Communism defiled that ideal. It committed monstrous abuses in the name of socialism, and when these abuses became too much to bear – the show trials of 1936-38, the betrayal of the Spanish Revolution, and the Hitler-Stalin pact – hopes that the Communist movement could usher in a socialist world were shipwrecked. Many radicals, reeling from these blows, withdrew into private life; others accommodated themselves to the capitalist system in varying degrees, even to the point of supporting the United States in the cold war. Still others, who did remain on the left politically, turned their attention to more limited arenas: aesthetics, or “new class” theory, or Frankfurt School sociology. Meanwhile, outside the academy, what remained of the Marxian left persisted in small groups, defying the prevailing “consensus” in favor of capitalism and accommodation.

Among the young intellectuals who had emerged from the 1930s Communist movement, relatively few responded to its failure by attempting to keep the centuries-old revolutionary tradition alive, by advancing a libertarian alternative to Marxism, one better suited to pursue a humane socialist society in the postwar era. It is a distinction of Murray Bookchin that in these years of disillusion, disenchantment, and retreat, he attempted to create just such an alternative.

Born in January 1921 in New York City to Russian Jewish immigrants, Bookchin was raised under the very shadow of the Russian Revolution, partaking of the excitement that it aroused among his immigrant and working-class neighbors. At the same time, from his earliest years, he imbibed libertarian ideas from his maternal grandmother, who had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a quasi-anarchistic populist movement, in czarist Russia. In the early 1930s, as the United States plunged deeper into the Depression, he entered the Communist movement’s youth organizations, speaking at streetcorner meetings, participating in rent strikes, and helping to organize the unemployed, even as an adolescent, eventually running the educational program for his branch of the Young Communist League. After breaking with Stalinism – initially, in 1935, because of its class- collaborationist policies (the so-called Popular Front), then conclusively in 1937 during the Spanish civil war – he turned to Trotskyism and later to libertarian socialism, joining a group surrounding the exiled German Trotskyist Josef Weber in the mid- 1940s; his earlist works were published in this group’s periodical, Contemporary Issues. In the meantime Bookchin was deeply involved in trade union organizing in northern New Jersey, where he worked for years as a foundryman and an autoworker. (Due to his family’s poverty, he went to work in heavy industry directly after high school.) In whatever factory he worked, he engaged in union activities as a member of the burgeoning and intensely militant Congress of Industrial Organizations, particularly the United Automobile Workers.

During the 1930s Marxian precepts had seemed to explain conclusively the Great Depression and the turbulent labor insurgency that arose during the decade, seeming to challenge the very foundations of the capitalist system. But Marxist prognoses about the 1940s were glaringly unfulfilled. These predictions had it that the Second World War, like the First, would end in proletarian revolutions among the belligerent countries. But the proletariat, far from making a revolution in any Western country under the banner of internationalism, fought out the war under the banner of nationalism. Even the German working class abandoned the class consciousness of its earlier socialist history and fought on behalf of Hitler to the very end. Far from collapsing, capitalism emerged from the war unscathed and strengthened, with more stability than ever before.

The Soviet Union, for its part, was clearly far from a socialist society, let alone a communist one. Far from playing a revolutionary role during the war, it was actively involved in suppressing revolutionary movements in its own national interests. Finally, American industrial workers, far from challenging the capitalist system, were becoming assimilated into it. When a major General Motors strike in 1946 ended with his co-workers placidly accepting company pension plans and unemployment benefits, Bookchin’s disillusionment with the workers’ movement as a uniquely revolutionary force was complete, and his years as a union activist came to an end. The revolutionary tradition, he concluded, would have to dispense with the notion of proletarian hegemony as the compelling force for basic social change. With the consolidation of capitalism on a massive international scale, the idea that conflict between wage labor and capital would bring capitalism to an end had to be called into serious question.

To his credit, Bookchin, faced with these dispiriting conditions, nonetheless refused to relinquish his commitment to revolution. Rather, the revolutionary tradition, he felt, had to explore new possibilities for creating a free cooperative society and reclaim nonauthoritarian socialism in a new form. Anarchism, whose history had long intertwined with that of Marxian socialism, argued that people could manage their own affairs without benefit of a state, and that the object of revolution should be not the seizure of state power but its dissolution. In 1950s America, in the aftermath of the McCarthy period, the left generally – especially the anarchist movement – was small, fragmented, and seemingly on the wane. Yet anarchism’s libertarian ideals – “a stateless, decentralized society, based on the communal ownership of the means of production”(1) – seemed to be the basis, in Bookchin’s mind, for a viable revolutionary alternative in the postwar era.

Moving decisively toward this left-libertarian tradition in the middle of the decade, Bookchin tried to free anarchism of its more dated nineteenth-century aspects and recast its honorable principles in contemporary terms. “The future of the anarchist movement will depend upon its ability to apply basic libertarian principles to new historical situations,” he wrote in 1964.

“Life itself compels the anarchist to concern himself increasingly with the quality of urban life, with the reorganization of society along humanistic lines, with the subcultures created by new, often indefinable strata – students, unemployables, an immense bohemia of intellectuals, and above all a youth which began to gain social awareness with the peace movement and civil rights struggles of the early 1960s.”(2)

Even as he embraced the anarchist tradition, however, Bookchin never entirely abandoned Marx’s basic ideas. In effect, he drew on the best of both Marxism and anarchism to synthesize a coherent hybrid political philosophy of freedom and cooperation, one that drew on both intellectual rigor and cultural sensibility, analysis and reconstruction. He would call this synthesis social ecology.

Even as Bookchin was moving toward an anarchist outlook, the American economy of the early 1950s was undergoing enormous expansion, with unprecedented economic advances that catapulted even industrial workers into the booming middle class. It was not only military spending that propelled this growth; with government support, science and industry had combined to spawn a wide array of new technologies, suitable for civilian as well as military use. These new technologies, so it was said, seemed poised to cure all social ills of the time, if not and engineer an entirely new civilization.

Automobiles, fast becoming a standard consumer item, were promising mobility, suburbs, and jobs – giving plausibility, in the eyes of many Americans, to the slogan “What’s good for GM is good for America.” Nuclear power, it was avowed, would meet U.S. energy needs more or less for free; indeed, Lewis Strauss, the former Wall Street investment banker who first chaired the Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that electricity from nuclear power plants would become “too cheap to meter.” Miracle grains would feed humanity, and new pharmaceuticals would control formerly intractable diseases. Petrochemicals and petrochemical products – including plastics, food additives, detergents, solvents, and abrasives – would make life comfortable and provide labor-saving convenience for everyone. As for pesticides, as environmental historian Robert Gottlieb observes, they were “being touted as a kind of miracle product, supported by advertising campaigns (‘Better Things for Better Living Through Chemistry’), by government policies designed to increase agricultural productivity, and a media celebration of the wonders of the new technology.” Most of the American public welcomed these new technologies, seeming to agree with the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Thomas Nolan, that the new technological resources were “inexhaustible.”(3)

It was just at this moment of collective anticipation that Bookchin audaciously suggested that an ecological crisis lay on the horizon. “Within recent years,” he wrote in a long 1952 essay, “the rise of little known and even unknown infectious diseases, the increase of degenerative illnesses and finally the high incidence of cancer suggests some connection between the growing use of chemicals in food and human diseases.”(4) The chemicals being used in food additives, he insisted in “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” could well be carcinogenic. The new economic and technological boom, despite all its rosy promises, could also have harmful environmental consequences.

Little environmentalist writing existed in the United States in these years, apart from neo-Malthusian tracts that issued dire warnings about overpopulation, like Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s The Road to Survival (both published in 1948). Although a conservation movement existed, it worked primarily for the preservation wilderness areas in national parks and showed little interest in social or political analysis. The existing literature on chemical pollution, for its part, was silent on the driving role that modern capitalism was playing in the development and application of chemicals.

So it was that before most Americans even realized that an environmental crisis was in the offing, Bookchin was telling them it was. Even more striking, he was already probing its sources. “The principal motives for chemicals,” he warned, and the “demands imposed upon [farm] land” are “shaped neither by the needs of the public nor by the limits of nature, but by the exigencies of profit and competition.”(5) The use of carcinogenic chemicals was rooted in a profit-oriented society; “profit-minded businessmen” have produced “ecological disturbances . . . throughout the American countryside. For decades, lumber companies and railroads were permitted a free-hand in destroying valuable forest lands and wildlife.”(6) Bookchin had not only rooted environmental dislocations in modern capitalism; he had found a new limit to capitalist expansion, one that held the potential to supersede the misery of the working class as a source of fundamental social change: environmental destruction.

Amid the McCarthyite intolerance of all social radicalism in 1952, it required considerable courage to write and publish a radical social analysis of environmental problems. Yet not only did Bookchin write such an analysis; he advanced, albeit in rudimentary terms, an anarchist solution to the problems he explored, calling for the decentralization of society to countervail the looming ecological crisis, in passages that presage the marriage of anarchism and ecology that he would expound more fully twelve years later:

“In decentralization exists a real possibility for developing the best traditions of social life and for solving agricultural and nutritional difficulties that have thus far been delivered to chemistry. Most of the food problems of the world would be solved to-day by well-balanced and rounded communities, intelligently urbanized, well-equipped with industry and with easy access to the land. . . . The problem has become a social problem – an issue concerning the misuse of industry as a whole.”(7)

For almost half a century, this assertion of the social causes of ecological problems, and the insistence on their solution by a revolutionary decentralization of society have remained consistent in Bookchin’s writings. He elaborated these ideas further in Our Synthetic Environment, a pioneering 1962 work that was published five months before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; unlike Carson’s book, Our Synthetic Environment did not limit its focus to pesticides. A comprehensive overview of ecological degradation, it addressed not only the connections between food additives and cancer but the impact of X-radiation, radionucleides from fallout, and the stresses of urban life, giving a social elaboration of what in those days was called “human ecology.”(8)

The freer political atmosphere of the 1960s allowed Bookchin to express more clearly his revolutionary perspective. His 1964 essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” the first manifesto of radical ecology, overtly called for revolutionary change as a solution to the ecological crisis. It advanced a conjunction of anarchism and ecology to create an ecological society that would be humane and free, libertarian and decentralized, mutualistic and cooperative.

In its range and depth, Bookchin’s dialectical synthesis of anarchism and ecology, which he called social ecology, had no equal in the postwar international Left. The first major effort to fuse ecological awareness with the need for fundamental social change, and to link a philosophy of nature with a philosophy of social revolution, it remains the most important such effort to this day.

Social ecology, drawing on multiple domains of knowledge, traces the roots of the ecological crisis to dislocations in society. As Bookchin put it in “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”: “The imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused by the imbalances he has produced in the social world.”(9) This inextricable relation between society and ecology remains a pillar of social ecology.

But social ecology has not only a critical dimension but a reconstructive one as well. Since the causes of the ecological crisis are social in nature, we can avert the present danger of ecological disaster only by fundamentally transforming the present society into a rational and ecological one. In this same 1964 article, in “Toward a Liberatory Technology” (written the following year), and in many subsequent works, Bookchin described his version of the truly libertarian socialist society. It would be a decentralized and mutualistic one, free of hierarchy and domination. Town and country would no longer be opposed to each other but would instead be integrated. Social life would be scaled to human dimensions. Politics would be directly democratic at the community level, so that citizens can manage their own social and political affairs on a face-to-face basis, forming confederations to address larger-scale problems. Economic life would be cooperative and communal, and technology would eliminate onerous and tedious labor.

Bookchin would elaborate and refine many aspects of this society – and the means to achieve it – over subsequent decades. But its earliest outlines were sketched as early as 1962 and developed in 1964 and 1965. Here Bookchin also proposed that an ecological society could make use of solar and wind power as sources of energy, replacing fossil fuels. At that time renewable energy sources – solar and wind power – were subjects of some research and experimentation, but they had essentially been abandoned as practical alternatives to fossil and nuclear fuels; nor did the existing environmental literature pay much attention to them. Not only did Bookchin show their relevance to the solution of ecological problems, he stood alone in demonstrating their integral importance to the creation of an ecological society.

“To maintain a large city requires immense quantities of coal and petroleum. By contrast, solar, wind, and tidal energy can reach us mainly in small packets; except for spectacular tidal dams, the new devices seldom provide more than a few thousand kilowatt-hours of electricity. . . . To use solar, wind, and tidal power effectively, the megalopolis must be decentralized. A new type of community, carefully tailored to the characteristics and resources of a region, must replace the sprawling urban belts that are emerging today.”(10)

These renewable sources of energy, in effect, had far-reaching anarchistic as well as ecological implications.

The list of Bookchin’s innovations in ecological politics does not stop here. To take another example: Warnings of a greenhouse effect were hardly common in the early 1960s, yet Bookchin issued just such a warning in 1964.

“It can be argued on very sound theoretical grounds that this growing blanket of carbon dioxide, by intercepting heat radiated from the earth, will lead to rising atmospheric temperatures, a more violent circulation of air, more destructive storm patterns, and eventually a melting of the polar ice caps (possibly in two or three centuries), rising sea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas.”(11)

Bookchin underestimated only the time frame – and it is testimony to the enormity of the ecological problem that the damage that he anticipated would take centuries to develop has actually developed in only a matter of decades.

Bookchin spent much of the 1960s criss-crossing the United States and Canada, indefatigably educating the counterculture and New Left about ecology and its revolutionary significance. The first Earth Day in 1970, followed by the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972, signaled the arrival of ecology as a popular issue. But in the following years a less radical, more technocratic approach to ecological issues came to the fore, one that, in Bookchin’s view, represented mere environmental tinkering: instead of proposing to transform society as a whole, it looked for technological solutions to specific environmental problems.

Calling this approach reformistic rather than revolutionary, Bookchin labeled it “environmentalism,” in contradistinction to his more radical “ecology.” Although some histories of the ecological and environmental movements now assert that Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess was the first to distinguish between environmentalism and ecology (in a paper on deep ecology, presented as a lecture in 197212), Bookchin made this distinction in November 1971, in “Spontaneity and Organization,” anchoring it, as always, in a social and political matrix:

“I speak, here, of ecology, not environmentalism. Environmentalism deals with the serviceability of the human habitat, a passive habitat that people use, in short, an assemblage of things called ‘natural resources’ and ‘urban resources.’ Taken by themselves, environmental issues require the use of no greater wisdom than the instrumentalist modes of thought and methods that are used by city planners, engineers, physicians, lawyers – and socialists.

“Ecology, by contrast, . . . is an outlook that interprets all interdependencies (social and psychological as well as natural) nonhierarchically. Ecology denies that nature can be interpreted from a hierarchical viewpoint. Moreover, it affirms that diversity and spontaneous development are ends in themselves, to be respected in their own right. Formulated in terms of ecology’s ‘ecosystem approach,’ this means that each form of life has a unique place in the balance of nature and its removal from the ecosystem could imperil the stability of the whole.”(13)

Bookchin’s core political program remained far too radical to gain general social acceptance in those decades. But many of his remarkably prescient insights have by now become commonplaces, not only in ecological thought but in mainstream popular culture, while their originating source has been forgotten or obscured. By advancing these ideas when he did, Bookchin exercised a strong and steady influence on the international development of radical ecological thought.

As significant as Bookchin’s prescient insights are, they are only part of what is actually a large theoretical corpus. Over the course of five decades, the ideas of social ecology have grown steadily in richness. Encompassing anthropology and history, politics and social criticism, philosophy and natural science, Bookchin’s works evoke the grand tradition of nineteenth-century generalists, who could write knowledgeably on a multiplicity of subjects – a tradition that is, lamentably, fast disappearing in the present age of scholarly specialization and postmodernist fragmentation.

Drawing on anthropology and history, Bookchin explored the libertarian and democratic traditions that could contribute to the creation of an ecological and rational society. A “legacy of freedom,” he believes, has run like an undercurrent within Western civilization and in other parts of the world, with certain social virtues and practices that are relevant to the socialist ideal. In its nascent form this legacy appears in the “organic society” of prehistoric Europe, with a constellation of relatively egalitarian social relations. These societies were destroyed by the rise of hierarchy and domination and ultimately by the emergence of states and the capitalist system.

Hierarchy and domination, it should be noted, are key concepts in Bookchin’s political work, for although in his view the ecological crisis has stemmed proximately from a capitalist economy, its ultimate roots lie in social hierarchies. The ideology of dominating the natural world, he has long maintained, is an anthropomorphic projection of human social domination onto the natural world. It could only have stemmed historically from the domination of human by human, and not the other way around. During the late 1960s and 1970s Bookchin’s anthropological, historical, and political explorations of the “legacy of freedom” and the “legacy of domination,” as he called it, percolated through radical social movements – not only the ecology movement but the feminist, communitarian, and anarchist movements as well. The concept of hierarchy in particular, assimilated by the counterculture into conventional wisdom, has become essential to radical thought due largely to Bookchin’s insistence on its nature and importance in many lectures in the late 1960s.

Bookchin’s ideas have retained an underlying continuity over the decades, and it is precisely by upholding his original principles that he has maintained his stalwart opposition to the existing capitalist and hierarchical system. As could be expected of any writer engaged in concrete political activity, his ideas have also changed over time; yet they have done so not to effect a compromise with the existing social order but to sustain a revolutionary position in response to regressive developments both in the larger society and within social movements for change. Often he has initiated intramural debates by objecting to tendencies that he considered out of place in a revolutionary movement, due to their opportunism, their accommodation to the system, or their quietism; his frequently polemical style stems from an earnest attempt to preserve the revolutionary impulse in movements that hold potential for radical social transformation. To his credit, he raised such objections even when the tendencies to which he objected were the more popular ones and when acquiescence would have enhanced his own popularity. Still, even as the key concepts of social ecology remain fundamentally unchanged since the 1960s, the many debates in which he has been engaged have primarily defined and sharpened them. If anything, his ideas have become more sophisticated over time as a result of these debates.

It is typical of Bookchin that his ideas should become honed as a result of practical movement experience. Despite his large body of theoretical writing, he is no mere armchair theorist. Throughout his life he has consistently maintained an active political practice: his union and protest activities in the Depression decade, his libertarian activities of the 1950s and 1960s, his mobilization of opposition to a nuclear power plant proposed for Queens in 1964, his civil rights activities, his participation in endless demonstrations and actions in the 1960s against the Vietnam war and in support of ecology and anarchism, his 1970s involvement in the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, his efforts to preserve and expand democracy in his adopted state of Vermont, and finally his influence, in the 1980s, on the development of Green movements in the United States and abroad, trying – often unsuccessfully – to keep them on a radical course. Only in his eighth decade have physical infirmities – especially a nearly crippling arthritis – obliged him to withdraw from organized political activity.

Yet withdrawal from active political work has not meant that Bookchin has put down his pen. On the contrary, in an era of reaction, he continues to denounce tendencies that compromise the radicalism of the ecological and anarchist movements, be it a mystical “deep ecology” or an individualistic “lifestyle anarchism,” both of which he sees as personalistic and irrationalistic departures from the social, rational, and democratic eco-anarchism and socialism he has championed for decades. With the emergence of ecological-political tendencies that embraced irrationalism, he emphasize that an ecological society would neither renounce nor denigrate reason, science, and technology. So crucial is this point that he today prefers the phrase “rational society” to other labels for a free society, since a rational society would necessarily be one that is ecological. His commitment to longstanding socialist ideals, informed by Marx as well as by social anarchist thinkers, remains firm: for Murray Bookchin, the socialist utopia is still, as he once said, “the only reality that makes any sense.”

To all his writing, Bookchin brings a passionate hatred of the capitalist social order, expressed in the cadences of six decades of radical oratory. He brings to it the grim hatred of the grueling toil that he experienced in factories, and the acerbic intensity of one who has looked down the barrel of a gun during 1930s labor protests. At the same time he brings to it the originality and creativity of a thinker who is largely self-taught, and the love of coherence of one who studied dialectics with Marxists as a youth. He brings to it, in this age of diminished expectations, the outrage of one who consistently chooses morality over realpolitik, and he serves as the lacerating conscience of those who once held revolutionary sentiments but have since abandoned them.

A thorough understanding of his project would require a reading of his most important books. Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) contains the two pivotal mid-1960s essays mentioned in this introduction, which encapsulate so many ideas that he later developed more fully and that, in their uncompromising intensity, remain fresh to this day. The Ecology of Freedom (1982) is an anthropological and historical account not only of the rise of hierarchy and domination but of the “legacy of freedom,” including the cultural, psychological, and epistemological components of both. Although The Ecology of Freedom has been heralded in some quarters as Bookchin’s magnum opus, it has been followed by several books of at least equal importance. The Philosophy of Social Ecology, especially its revised edition (1995), is a collection of five philosophical essays on dialectical naturalism, the nature philosophy that underpins his political and social thought; he himself regards it as his most important work to date. Remaking Society (1989) is a summary overview of his ideas, with emphasis on their anarchist roots. From Urbanization to Cities (which has previously appeared under the titles Urbanization without Cities and The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship) is a wide-ranging exposition of libertarian municipalism, Bookchin’s political program, giving much attention to popular democratic institutional forms in European and American history. Re-enchanting Humanity (1995) is his defense of the Enlightenment against a variety of antihumanistic and irrationalistic trends in popular culture today. Finally, his three-volume The Third Revolution (of which the first volume is already in print at this writing) traces the history of popular movements within Euro-American revolutions, beginning with the peasant revolts of the fourteenth century and closing with the Spanish Revolution of 1936- 37.

The present reader brings together selections from Bookchin’s major writings, organized thematically. Even as I have tried to show the development of his ideas over time, I have emphasized those works that have stood the test of time and that are most in accordance with his views today, at the expense of works that, generated in the heat of polemic, sometimes verged on one-sidedness. All of the selections are excerpted from larger works, and all have been pruned in some way, be it to achieve conciseness, to eliminate repetition among the selections in this book, or to produce a thematic balance among them. I have very lightly copyedited a few of the selections, but only where the need for it was distracting. Regrettably, but necessarily for reasons of space, I have had to cut all textual footnotes, retaining only those that cite a specific source. Except for these notes, I have indicated all cuts in the text with ellipsis points. I have provided the sources for all the selections in the listing that appears at the end of this book.

Janet Biehl

Notes

1. Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” 1964; as reprinted in Anarchy 69, vol. 6 (1966), p. 18. The section “Observations on Classical Anarchism” appeared in the original essay, as it was published in Comment in 1964 and in Anarchy in 1966, but it was cut from the reprinting in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971; Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977).
2. Ibid., pp. 18, 21.
3. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C., and Covelo, Calif.: Island Press, 1993), p. 83; Nolan is quoted on p. 37.
4. Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” Contemporary Issues, vol. 3, no. 12 (June- August 1952), p. 235.
5. Ibid., pp. 206, 211.
6. Ibid., p. 209.
7. Ibid., p. 240.
8. Lewis Herber (pseud. for Murray Bookchin), Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). For a comparison with Silent Spring, see Yaakov Garb, “Change and Continuity in Environmental World-View,” in Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology, edited by David Macauley (New York: Guilford, 1996), pp. 246-47.
9. “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 62.
10. Ibid., p. 74-75.
11. “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” as it appeared in Anarchy, p. 5. Some of the words from this passage were cut when the essay was republished in Post-Scarcity Anarchism; see p. 60 of that book.
12. Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry, vol. 16 (1973), pp. 95-100.
13. Murray Bookchin, “Spontaneity and Organization,” lecture delivered at the Telos conference, Buffalo, N.Y., 1971; published in Anarchos, no. 4 (1973) and in Liberation (Mar. 1972); republished in Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), where this quotation is on pp. 270-71