Marshfield, Vermont

In the coming year the Institute for Social Ecology will celebrate 40 years as a unique educational haven for critical thought and political action directed towards creating a free and ecological society. We invite friends, colleagues, alumni, and fellow travelers to gather this August to [...]]]> August 23-25, 2013

Marshfield, Vermont

In the coming year the Institute for Social Ecology will celebrate 40 years as a unique educational haven for critical thought and political action directed towards creating a free and ecological society. We invite friends, colleagues, alumni, and fellow travelers to gather this August to critically reflect on the continued relevance of Social Ecology today, while also renewing old friendships and making new ones in the beautiful Vermont countryside.

The present moment poses multiple interlocking crises – economic, political, and ecological – ripe for the ideas and politics of Social Ecology. Yet where does this tradition stand today? Although relatively little new political or intellectual work has emerged that is explicitly informed by Social Ecology, this is in part due to its success; the very ideas that were once so unique and heretical have become common sense in many parts of the left and the broader ecology movement. This new political landscape, and a rapidly changing historical context, provides an important opportunity to reflect on the relevance and critical force of key ideas and concepts within Social Ecology.

To this end, we invite papers that examine this legacy against the backdrop of the current historical moment. Topics of interest might include: examining the relationship between neoliberal antistatism and the political decentralism of libertarian municipalism, the role and relevance of Social Ecology for Occupy Wall Street and its many offshoots, how the concepts of hierarchy and freedom might be applied to transgender politics, critiques of the philosophy of Dialectical Naturalism, the relation of Bookchin/Social Ecology to other traditions such as Marxism, ecosocialism, or poststructuralism. These are only suggestions; there should be many more so feel free to propose them.

Registration info.: The colloquium is intended to be a space for focused discussion on the development of social ecology in theory and praxis, while relaxing together and renewing the ISE community. We invite all who are familiar with the core ideas of social ecology to attend and submit abstracts for papers. As space is unfortunately limited, we ask that all participants submit a brief note to register that explains your relationship and familiarity with social ecology and what you’d like to get out of attending the colloquium.

Please note that proposing a paper is not a requirement for attendance; there are many ways to contribute; typically we discuss 5-8 papers, along with other, more general discussions, over the three days. Paper abstracts (350-500 words), registration information, and general questions can be sent to Blair Taylor (blairfett at yahoo.com). Abstracts are due by June 20th, with final drafts of accepted papers due by August 1st to allow adequate time for them to be distributed and read.

We look forward to a fun, lively, and rejuvenating weekend – please join us!

Janet writes:

… the expanding capitalist [...]]]> From The New Compass, a review by Janet Biehl of Pioneers of Ecological Humanism, by University of London anthropologist Brian Morris. The book offers a comparative review of three pioneers of current ecological thought, Lewis Mumford, René Dubos, and Murray Bookchin.

Janet writes:

… the expanding capitalist order has proved itself to be unsustainable – it is the very path leading to the ecological crisis. But the alternative, the fetishization of wilderness, is untenable as well, since pursuing it would require a massive reduction in human population (neo-Malthusianism), the subordination of human aims to perceived natural ones, and a regression to a low-tech hunter-gatherer existence. The choice between these two paths, Morris argues, represents a false dilemma. There is a third way: ecological humanism, an affirmation that human beings are capable of transforming their societies so as to enhance the flourishing of both humanity and nature.

Mumford, Dubos, and Bookchin all rejected the idea of a radical dichotomy between humans and the rest of nature. All three enthusiastically embrace the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, who demonstrated the organic link between people and other life-forms by showing that the nature of nature is evolution. Long before, in ancient times, Aristotle had emphasized the continuity between inanimate matter, plants, and animal life. But Darwin’s theory connected them all by explaining the principles by which new life-forms of life evolve and affirming that human beings are a product of that very process. People, like all other life-forms, organisms, mammals, and primates, are children of natural evolution and hence an intrinsic part of nature’s continuum of life-forms.

That said, homo sapiens is unique by virtue of its dual nature: we are social mammals as well as natural ones. Evolutionary history gave us symbolic faculties, including language, and a capacity for social cooperation and consciousness and choice. We necessarily inhabit that cultural environment as well as our biological one. Hence multiple factors – biology, society, psychology, and culture – condition us. And even though our extra-biological inheritance renders us distinct from other organisms, paradoxically it is itself a natural fact. Moreover, part of our our dual nature is creative agency. We are structured to interact with nonhuman nature, even to modify and transform it, through our labor and our imagination.

Full story is at http://new-compass.net/articles/pioneers-ecological-humanism.

Following the German reunification process in the 1990s, a new movement appeared in Germany. This movement rejected all [...]]]> Against the Nation: Anti-National Politics in Germany
By ISE alum Robert Ogman
Now available from New Compass Press and AK Press

Following the German reunification process in the 1990s, a new movement appeared in Germany. This movement rejected all forms of nationalism, including the desirability and legitimacy of national communities, borders, and the existence of the nation-state itself. Against the Nation covers the background of this movement—the rise of Neo-Nazism, racist violence, restriction in immigration policies, and growing state power—as well as its urge to organize society around other principles than nationality.

By examining the campaigns and documents of the various anti-national tendencies in Germany during this period, Robert Ogman takes a fresh look at the question of nationalism and its relationship to Left politics.

More information at http://new-compass.net/articles/protests-against-nation.
An interview with the author is at http://new-compass.net/articles/interview-author-against-nation.

This is a first installment of an ongoing discussion about Social Ecology and the food system – both why the one we have is so wrong, and how our understanding of the root causes of its failures can inform food system activists and practitioners.  [...]]]> From ISE faculty member and organic pioneer, Grace Gershuny:

This is a first installment of an ongoing discussion about Social Ecology and the food system – both why the one we have is so wrong, and how our understanding of the root causes of its failures can inform food system activists and practitioners.  There is an approximate boatload of food system bloggers of all stripes out there – this one will uniquely speak from the perspective of Social Ecology, which is sorely needed.  I hope you will jump in and offer your own insights to the questions raised, and also point out problems that are being overlooked.

I have been saving up a bunch of ideas after spending the entire winter teaching two on-line courses for Green Mountain College, Poultney, VT in their new MA program in Sustainable Food Systems (Theory & Practice of Sustainable Agriculture, and Contemporary Food Systems).  This experience has given me lots of insight into what is and is not helpful in thinking about food system change.  Here we go…

Push for GMO labeling – Round two in Vermont

A couple of weeks ago I attended a local meeting to rally the faithful to pressure the Vermont legislature to pass the current version of the GMO labeling bill – H 112 – which was hung up in the House Judiciary Committee after being approved by the Agriculture Committee.  This is the same bill that was introduced too late in the session last year, and also the same bill that was defeated as California’s Proposition 37 in November.

The history and issues surrounding GMOs are well known to our community, and in many ways I consider GMOs to be something like the nuclear power of the food system (not to compare their impact to the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima).  Labeling seems to be inevitable eventually, and while we know it is not the ultimate answer to the GMO question, it will help diminish their market dominance.  Here a letter I wrote to the leadership of our statewide labeling push, spearheaded by Rural Vermont and VPIRG.  It is followed by some additional commentary on the importance of this issue:

RE: VT GMO Labeling Bill: Big mistake to prohibit GMO content for any product labeled ‘natural.’

I fully support the passage of this bill, and have been a staunch opponent of GMOs in agriculture from the beginning (mid-late 1980′s), through my agriculture courses at the ISE (Institute for Social Ecology) and as editor of Organic Farmer magazine (which was a Rural VT publication). Vermont really is a bell weather state, and so winning this battle is extremely important.  However, as I have said at various meetings, I believe that attaching a provision outlawing the ‘natural’ label on products that contain GMOs is a serious mistake – one that could make the fight to eliminate GMOs from our food and our soil and our air difficult if not impossible to win.

There are several reasons why I think this:

•  The ‘natural’ label is meaningless and should ideally be prohibited in general.  But this is not the fight we are engaged in, and represents an unnecessary distraction.  A consumer who sees a GMO label on a ‘natural’ product can decide for themselves what they think about it – there is so much confusion about the meaning of ‘natural’ that it could not possibly confuse consumers any more than they already are.

•  The natural products industry includes many players who are sympathetic to the anti-GMO movement, to varying degrees.  Attacking all of them in this manner will turn potential allies into enemies, and some believe this division (including attacking organic companies whose owners opposed it) is what really sank Prop 37 in California.  The Natural Products Association has already come out in favor of GMO labeling, and presumably are willing to allow ‘natural’ labeled products to also be labeled as GMOs, but would certainly oppose this provision.  This could be important on the national level, even if there has thus far been no push-back here. Lets not once again snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by forming a circular firing squad and attacking those who would otherwise be our allies.

I had a brief email exchange with my friend and colleague Brian Tokar, who expressed some disagreement with this position, saying: “Seems to me that ‘natural’ labels are increasingly used as a non-regulated substitute for organic (Silk products, e.g.) and the more we can limit that the better.”   To which I replied: “…this is surely not the way to regulate the problem of confusion about the ‘natural’ label.  It sure won’t address the problem of ‘natural’ but non-GMO project certified, which consumers are almost guaranteed to believe is just the same as organic. Actually, it may be helpful in making clear to consumers that ‘natural’ is not at all the same as organic if they see a GMO label on it.  And, it will certainly work against passage and implementation of this bill, lack of pushback notwithstanding.”

•  The Washington State labeling bill (now a voter referendum slated for November) does not contain this provision, apparently for the reasons given above.  I am not sure about the EU, other than prohibiting use of an organic label if the product contains more than 0.9% GMOs.

•  Not least among my concerns is a deeply held principle that opposition to GMOs should not be based on the belief that they are ‘unnatural.’  This provision only reinforces that misconception amongst both activists and the uninformed.  It also bolsters the primary argument advanced by big biotech that its opponents are unscientific fearmongers and Luddites.

Why is this so important?

Beyond Vermont’s unique position as a leader in food system change, it is also important to learn the lessons of what happened with the NOP (National Organic Program).

One key motivation for me in accepting a staff position at the NOP in 1994 was the belief that establishing organic as a viable alternative form of agriculture could stop – or at least seriously obstruct – the looming takeover of the food system by GMOs, courtesy of Monsanto.

The activist community believed that it had won a victory against GMOs by the success of its campaign against the first NOP proposed rule in 1998.  However, Monsanto found it easy to use the activists’ demand for purity to gain the upper hand, by encouraging them to insist on the highest, strictest standards for organic. Monsanto understood that this would ensure the marginalization of organic to a tiny fraction of the food system, leaving everything else as fair game for their GMO plan.  Even better, as they noted in their public comment to the first proposed rule, the organic label gave consumers who wanted to avoid GMOs a choice – so there was therefore no need to label products that contained or were derived from GMOs (which was then being advocated by Jeremy Rifkin).

At the time I suspected some of the leadership of the anti-USDA organic rule of being agents of Monsanto.  Today less than 1% of US agriculture is organic, and the rest is dominated by GMOs.  This means that Monsanto’s strategy worked like a charm – and yet the activist community continues to agitate for increased purity and ‘raising the bar’ on organic standards.  For a more detailed discussion of why this is wrong headed, see http://www.social-ecology.org/2009/03/are-the-best-organic-standards-the-toughest-organic-standards-why-the-activists-got-it-wrong/.

Additional confirmation of my belief that the ‘unnatural’ argument is a huge mistake came in a recent Alternet expose of Michael Potter, CEO of organic company Eden Foods, as an ugly right-winger (http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/organic-eden-foods-secretive-right-wing-agenda).  Less than a year ago, another organic-bashing article appeared in the NY Times with the headline,  “Has Organic Been Oversized?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/business/organic-food-purists-worry-about-big-companies-influence.html).  Michael Potter was the primary source of the (dis)information cited in that article, which focused mainly on the corporate influence on organics that is supposedly compromising its ’purity’ by pushing for allowing all kinds of synthetic additives.  The piece was instigated by Mark Kastel, Director of the Cornucopia Institute, one of those outfits that has appointed itself as the organic watchdog – ostensibly from the left.

Rolling back the tide of GMOs in all food is even more important than protecting the ‘purity’ of organic food – not at all the same as integrity.

Boston Tragedy Reveals Inevitability of Vulnerability
By Ben Grosscup

Public acts of inexplicable and horrific violence such as what we saw in Boston on Monday reveal basic vulnerabilities that are painful but necessary to face.

My whole family converged in Boston [...]]]> From ISE board member and outstanding singer/songwriter Ben Grosscup:

Boston Tragedy Reveals Inevitability of Vulnerability
By Ben Grosscup

Public acts of inexplicable and horrific violence such as what we saw in Boston on Monday reveal basic vulnerabilities that are painful but necessary to face.

My whole family converged in Boston to cheer on my father and my two brothers who entered the Marathon. We are all well. My brothers and I heard the 2 explosions from a few blocks away, not knowing what they were until many minutes later.

My sorrow is for the suffering of the people who died, their loved ones, and the hundreds who suffered painful and debilitating injuries. My greatest fear from the day was seeing the fear on other people’s faces. Fear is a natural human emotion without any inherent political content. For the many ones of us who responded emotionally to what we heard and saw with fear, the proper response is one of compassion and sympathy.

Still, the immediate aftermath of this tragedy is the most important time to remember that the results are disastrous when a population participates in a response to perceived political threats based on fear. We have seen this starkly since September 11, 2001: when people are fearful, they are more easily persuaded to support policies that curtail rights and exacerbate war.

I believe that a necessary step in a people freeing itself from the manipulations of those in power who would enlist public support for such policies is to acknowledge that human vulnerability to violence is inevitable and universal. Our leaders are not giving us that message, however.

On Tuesday, the President of the United States said of the bombings, “We will get to the bottom of this and we will find out who did this and find out why they did this. Any responsible individuals, any responsible groups will feel the full weight of justice”. The president’s certainty was contradicted, however, by the obvious possibility that the criminals might not be found and brought to justice.

The idea that we can be so sure that the authorities will apprehend the criminals suggests “we” as an American culture believe we are invulnerable. Even if Americans do not believe that every minute of every day can be absolutely safe and secure, Americans remain deeply invested in the idea that any offenses against “us” will ultimately face justice. I think this belief is based upon a sense shared by many Americans that the political dominance of the United States should somehow protect us from external harm.

The people across the globe who live under the daily threats of U.S. drone strikes, bombs, and military occupations, however, cannot be so certain that justice will be served for them. They live on the other side of a world marked by fundamental imbalances of power — a world in which the deaths of brown people, especially Muslims and Arabs, are not treated with an equal sense of outrage and remorse as the deaths of members of racially and nationally dominant groups.

Ours is a world where many Pakistanis, Afghanis, and Yemenis have come to know all too well that the U.S. military can use drones to kill anyone – including children – and nobody will face any consequences for having killed them. This is a world where Muslim men with no incriminating evidence found against them can languish indefinitely at Guantanamo with no right of habeus corpus.

This so-called “War on Terrorism” has vastly expanded institutions of surveillance, detention, and war-making, but it has not increased the safety in the everyday lives of Americans.

The horrific Boston bombings provide an opportunity to remember our common vulnerability to violence. In remembering this, all we have to lose is the illusion of security – the notion that by giving sufficient cooperation with policing authorities we can ultimately become safe. What we have to gain is a sense of solidarity and common cause with billions of people across the globe whose everyday lives are made insecure by military and police violence, domestic violence, economic and racial injustice, environmental degradation, and politically-motivated murder.

Being able to see our own vulnerability in the context of a world of people who have already lost any illusions of invulnerability that they may have once had deepens our grounding in mourning the horror we witnessed.

But there’s a step beyond self-awareness of vulnerability, and it is much harder. In facing the violence that mars our world, we must expect from one another that people act from a place of courage. By courage, I mean that we must realize that human life is marked by inherent vulnerabilities that we cannot avoid, but that despite this, we are obligated to do what is right even when doing so subjects ourselves to even greater vulnerability. The people who ran toward the bomb blasts to help the wounded exemplify this courage. Also courageous are the many others who face violence every day and demand of themselves and of others that the response be one that furthers the cause of peace and non-violence.

Ben Grosscup represents precinct 9 in Amherst, MA Town Meeting.

From Climate Action to Housing Justice

An Intensive Seminar for All Levels

Each year, the Institute for Social Ecology hosts intensive seminars for students, activists, and community leaders to come together to explore sets of dynamic and urgent [...]]]> New Directions in Social Ecology:

From Climate Action to Housing Justice

An Intensive Seminar for All Levels

Each year, the Institute for Social Ecology hosts intensive seminars for students, activists, and community leaders to come together to explore sets of dynamic and urgent social and ecological issues. This year, the Institute for Social Ecology is thrilled to offer, for the first time, a seminar right in the heart of San Francisco.

We will be partnering with the California Institute for Integral Studies based in the SOMA district and on major transit lines. Classes will include the politics and philosophy of Social Ecology, international social movements for direct democracy, alternatives to capitalism, climate justice with a focus and emphasis on urban housing and land struggles. We have designed this intensive to be a bit longer than previous programs so as to secure time for local field trips that will allow us to get to know the community and history in which we are studying.

What is Social Ecology?

Social Ecology is an interdisciplinary perspective that  weaves together aspects of ecology, philosophy,  anthropology, and political theory. As a body of ideas, social ecology favors a moral economy over a market  economy, while striving to foster human and biological   diversity in a directly democratic world.

The Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) was founded in 1974 as an educational institution dedicated to the exploration of social ecology and its relationship to fields  including philosophy, history, economics, the natural sciences, post-colonialism, and feminism. Historically, the ISE has been a pioneer in community-based approaches to alternative technologies, directly democratic organizing, and ecological urban design. ISE faculty, students, and alumna have played key roles in movements to challenge nuclear power, environmental racism, agricultural biotechnology, climate crisis, and global injustice.

What is an ISE Intensive?

The ISE organizes educational ‘intensive seminars’ that deepen students’ understanding of  human/nature relationships, directly democratic movements, climate change, and the historical unfolding of Left politics. At ISE intensives, students establish links between their current political work on the ground to the ‘grounded theory’ of social ecology.  In that spirit, the ISE has organized intensive seminars to among core Occupy NYC organizers while also fostering strategic ongoing movement-building in the New York area.

check out the event on Facebook!

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“I was able to attend two of these [Intensives] in NYC and would love to go again!” – Jose Whelan

“I am enormously happy that the Institute for Social Ecology is coming to SF!!! Radical, coherent and powerful body of ideas taught by talented and dedicated teachers that can transform your perspective of politics, evolution, nature, revolution, environmentalism, climate change, capitalism, power and hierarchy.” -Liana Sweeney, past Intensive student

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Dates: June 12th – 22nd, 2013

Location: California Institute for Integral Studies, 1453 Mission Street, San Francisco CA

Scholarships: Available, please inquire.

Tuition: $250 – $400 sliding scale or $50 per class. To secure your spot in the seminar, a deposit (30% of your fee) is required. To make your deposit, click on the donate button (up and to the right of this text) and describe your donation as “SF Intensive.”

Readings: Click HERE!

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Intensive Seminar Instructors

Dan Chodorkoff: What is Social Ecology/the Utopian Tradition

Dan Chodorkoff is a cultural anthropologist and co-founder of the Institute for Social Ecology. He recently published his first novel,Loisaida, a reflection on the rich history of people’s struggles in New York’s Lower East Side.

Chaia Heller: Direct Democracy and Dual Power / The Alter Left (History of the Left)

Chaia Heller is a cultural anthropologist and a professor of gender studies at Mt. Holyoke College. She is the author of Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature, and just released her second book, Food Farms and Solidarity: French Farmers Challenge Industrial Agriculture and Genetically Modified Crops.

Peter Staudenmaier: What is Capitalism?/A Moral Economy:  Around the world, people dissatisfied with global capitalism face challenging questions about what kind of society could replace the present one: How can we build amoral economy in the wreckage of a market economy? This course will explore how capitalism works and how a fundamentally different economic system can be both possible and practical.

Peter Staudenmaier is a historian, and a professor of modern German history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. He co-wrote the book Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience with Janet Beihl.

Brooke Lehman: Building Transformative movements: How can we build democratic organizations and movements powerful enough to shift systemic power and grounded enough to evolve the very nature how we relate to each other and to our own deepest sense of purpose? In this class students will develop their own personal mission and vision statements; practice communication skills for effective leadership; and learn how to design healthy organizational
structures and coalitions.

Brooke is a NY based educator, activist and organizational development consultant. She leads workshop meditation, facilitation, direct democracy and organizational development.

Brian Tokar: Social Justice and Climate Action: Unprecedented weather extremes over the past several years have helped revive media coverage as well as activist campaigns to address the global climate crisis. Mainstream discussions about climate solutions, however, are still usually limited to incremental policy measures and improvements in technology. We will discuss how the insights of social ecology can aid in the development of a more holistic and radical climate justice movement that can ultimately help transform society. Our class sessions will include a panel discussion featuring climate justice activists from the Bay Area.

Brian Tokar is currently the director of the Institute for Social Ecology and a lecturer of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont. His most recent book is Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change.

Hilary Moore with James Tracy: Solidarity and Alliance Building

Hilary Moore is a founding member of Mobilization for Climate Justice- West in the Bay Area. She co-wrote the booklet Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections to Navigate the Climate Crisis with Joshua Kahn Russell.

James Tracy is an organizer with the San Francisco Community Land Trust and author of Hillbilly Nationalist, Urban Race Rebels , and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times with Amy Sonnie.

Andrej Grubacic: International Movements for Democracy: What is democracy? This class will focus on several historical instances of direct democracy. From the Cossak “krug,” to the pirate ship, and from the runnaway “palenque” of Maroons, to the Chiapas village assembly.

Andrej Grubacic is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His most recent book is Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! Essays After Yugoslavia (PM Press 2011).

For more information, email seminar@social-ecology.org

The year 2012 didn’t bring us the [...]]]> A review of  Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, by Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen and James Davis (Oakland: PM Press, 2012, 178 pp.).  Also available at  Toward Freedom and  ZNet:

The year 2012 didn’t bring us the end of the world, nor the end of capitalism and Coca-Cola that Evo Morales promised last summer. It still remains to be seen whether or not it will have ushered in the resurgence of indigenous resistance that was proclaimed by the more than 40,000 Zapatistas who marched in Chiapas last December 21^st. But whatever new political developments the coming years may or may not bring upon us, it’s clear that we haven’t seen the end of the apocalyptic outlook that 2012 came to represent.

Popular culture, of course, has been reveling in apocalypse and catastrophe for a long time. From serious literature to pulp fiction, from punk and alt-rock music to teen novels, from the art house to the multiplex – not to mention the ultra-violent world of video games – American culture has been saturated with images of apocalypse since long before 2012. With the catastrophic weather predictions of scientists’ climate models coming to fruition with devastating accuracy, decades earlier than anticipated, we’re not likely to see the end of apocalyptic thinking for some time.

What does this mean for social movements, and for those of us who seek a more just human order in the midst of climate breakdown and persistent financial uncertainty? Can the specter of apocalypse serve to invigorate popular movements, or is it merely an outlet for escapism and despair? What of the significant ranks of radical environmentalists who now believe that a restoration of biodiversity can only follow the collapse of civilization? Are such views part of the solution or part of the problem?

A new book, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth, by four activist-scholars associated with the Berkeley-based Retort Collective is an essential contribution to this profoundly important discussion. Each of the authors in turn offers their distinct perspective, scholarship and insights to the analysis of “catastrophism” among environmentalists, in movements of the left and the right, and in popular culture itself. Overall, the contributors make a compelling case for the view that apocalyptic thinking is a dead-end for the left, a chronic enabler for the right, and an outlook that radical movements embrace at their peril.

A foreword by Doug Henwood introduces the volume on an inviting though frequently sarcastic note, asserting from the outset that catastrophic thinking is fundamentally paralyzing for popular movements. He quotes Engels’ biting critique of Malthus’ still-popular forecasts of doom as “the crudest, most barbarous theory that ever existed, a system of despair,” arguing instead that “recovering a utopian sensibility is about the most practical thing we could do right now.” This is a theme I’ve explored in my recent book on climate justice, and one that has been significantly elaborated by a new generation of utopian scholars; it is unfortunate that none of the main contributors to this book chose to elaborate any further on this point.

However, we are offered a panoramic and often illuminating review of the uses and abuses of catastrophe in various spheres of thought. Sasha Lilley’s introduction brings up two of the volume’s persistent themes: that “[t]he politics of fear… play to the strengths of the right, not the left,” and that catastrophic thinking consistently fails to realize its promises of a “shortcut” to a better world. Popular commentators like Chris Hedges and Naomi Wolf, who tend to see fascism lurking around every corner, tend to lose sight of the ways in which the “politics of fear” lead to “panic and powerlessness,” ultimately serving the agendas of the extreme right.

Eddie Yuen, editor of two essential volumes that analyzed the emergence of anticapitalist movements in conjunction with the Seattle WTO protests, focuses his chapter on the prevalence of apocalyptic thinking in the environmental movement. While there is no question that we are in a “genuinely catastrophic moment” in human history, the litanies of calamity often emphasized by environmentalists have led to a “catastrophe fatigue” that ultimately pacifies rather than energizes most people. Yuen invokes the familiar figures of Thomas Malthus and Al Gore to bookend his analysis of how catastrophic predictions often fail to usher in positive social outcomes. (Gore, it is rarely acknowledged, was among the first to predict that an inadequate response to climate change would likely lead to increased political repression.) Further, false predictions of catastrophe, from the “population bomb” to the “Y2K” frenzy – fueled in part by Helen Caldicott and many environmentalists – often serve to discredit environmental predictions in the eyes of much of the public.

Apocalyptic scenarios, in Yuen’s words, serve as “a kind of ‘substitutionism,’ in which a miraculous event … transforms consciousness, wipes the slate clean and abruptly changes the world [without] the need for difficult organizing and conflictive politics.” For Yuen, today’s popular forecasters of ecological collapse are more likely to fuel right wing fanaticism, e.g. calls to seal the borders to immigrants, than to facilitate a progressive awakening. Real solutions “must be prefigurative and practical as well as visionary and participatory,” appealing to “community and solidarity” rather than “austerity and discipline,” but unfortunately the book offers few suggestions for how to actualize this. Radical disaster relief efforts, from Common Ground in New Orleans to Occupy Sandy, offer one inspiring model of how to help further utopian expectations in apocalyptic times, and the analysis here could have been strengthened by a discussion of such examples, among others.

The book’s two in-depth historical chapters are more expansive in their scope, and are generally the most satisfying. Author and Against the Grain radio host Sasha Lilley offers a rather thorough critical analysis of catastrophic trends on the left, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Her approach draws on a distinction once raised by Lukács between a “deterministic” view that ever-deepening crises of capitalism are historically inevitable, and a “voluntarist” outlook, emphasizing the revolutionary potential of popular responses to worsening economic conditions. Of course these two approaches are often linked like hand and glove. While Marx emphasized the primacy of class struggle, his collaborators and successors were more inclined to invoke the inevitability of crisis and capitalism’s “certainty of doom.” In the early 20^th century, Rosa Luxemburg believed capitalism would “collapse against absolute limits,” and the Stalinist left often saw world revolution as imminent, but thinkers such as Gramsci and the council communist Anton Pannekoek offered a more measured view, anticipating the ways in which crisis often serves to strengthen the capitalist system. Lilley is rather dismissive of both Wallerstein’s World System Theory and Baran and Sweezy’s often prescient analyses of the system’s current tendencies toward stagnation, but generally locates these views within a clear and engaging historical perspective.

The origins of the “voluntarist” approach emerge somewhat earlier, with roots in mid-nineteenth century Russian nihilism, among other outlooks. In the US, the strongest arguments for a “worse the better” view are often rooted in the dramatic labor upsurge of the 1930, but Lilley argues convincingly that the Depression Era labor movement was the exception that proves the rule. More typically, Lilley argues, labor militancy has risen during periods of economic expansion and rising expectations, a trend that also significantly shaped the movements of the 1960s. When leftists have “hailed fascism and dictatorship” as harbingers of an impending revolt, they have usually been severely disappointed, from the Italian and German communists of the 1920s and ’30s to the Weathermen and the Red Army Faction of the late sixties and 1970s.

From Estonia in the 1920s to Ché’s Bolivia in the sixties, beliefs that revolution would inevitably emerge from “objective conditions” and severe state repression have led revolutionaries toward disaster more often than triumph.  But this hasn’t prevented ambitious revolutionaries from reveling in elevated expectations. Lilley reports that both Mao in China and an obscure Argentine Trotskyist named Posadas declared that socialism would inevitably emerge from a nuclear war. While the right more commonly “thrives on fear,” she correctly emphasizes that “[r]adical mass movements typically grow because they offer hope for positive change.”

Equally expansive in its historical scope is the Irish writer and filmmaker James Davis’ chapter on the catastrophism of the right. Apocalyptic visions, Davis argues, are “central to the propaganda and ideology of the modern right,” and he offers a wealth of evidence to bring that point home. As with the dual outlooks shaping left catastrophism, the right’s version also assumes two interrelated forms. “Disease catastrophism” is rooted in scenarios of impending societal collapse, from Spengler’s “twilight of the West” to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” while “cure catastrophism” is expressed most fully in a variety of revenge scenarios from the fantasy of a redemptive race war to the Christian millenarian idea of the rapture. Davis argues that both are rooted firmly in the “narrative model of religious apocalypse.” (Unfortunately, these two poles of right catastrophism are not defined unambiguously until close to the end of the chapter.)

Davis recounts the origins of modern Christian evangelism from the early 19^th century to the rise of Billy Graham in the 1950s and the movement’s increasing politicization in reaction to the expansive social progress of the New Deal and the 1960s. While this story has been told elsewhere in much more detail,  Davis’ account underscores the ideological roots of various trends on the right. For example, right wing catastrophism has long been steeped in conspiracy theory, with 1970s rightists attacking the Frankfurt School for originating “cultural Marxism” (a view apparently borrowed from the publications of former leftist Lyndon LaRouche), and of course today’s scapegoating of post-sixties intellectuals such as Frances Fox Piven. For the right, Western civilization is always on the decline, whether the primary cause is “permissive egalitarianism,” the “evil empire,” (both terms are rooted in the writings of Leo Strauss), or today’s Islamic extremism. Europe’s Muslim populations have been targeted by numerous xenophobic right wing movements in recent years, and Davis dissects the origins of ideas that were expressed most disturbingly in the manifesto of the mass murderer Anders Breivik, issued just prior to his lethal attack on a social democratic youth camp in Norway in 2010.

While the right often adopts a veneer of anti-statism, it invariably extolls the state’s military and police powers. Even while condemning the state as a “vehicle of liberal progress,” rightists tend to celebrate the “harsh and previously off-limits policies” that result from casting immigration and crime as catastrophic problems. The politics of fear spread by right catastrophists serves to “disorient the left” and often put it on the defensive. “Fear,” Davis argues,” is the bedfellow of right wing catastrophism and it is expertly manipulated by the state.” Examples abound, from the origins of the Cold War, to the (Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al.) Project for a New American Century’s predictions of a “new Pearl Harbor,” and even some of the rhetoric that accompanied the 2008 bailout of major US banks. Davis’ view that “[c]atastrophism for the right is the fight against equality and for war, hierarchy and state violence,” is supported by a wealth of evidence, both historical and contemporary, in theory as well as in practice.

Following these two wide-ranging historical examinations, York University political scientist David McNally offers some fascinating glimpses of the ways that visions of apocalypse are depicted in popular culture. How can we best comprehend the pervasive images of zombies and vampires in pop culture today, and what different forms has this taken in other parts of the world? The most fully developed discussion here is of the varied images and meanings associated with the Frankenstein story, from its early nineteenth century origins until today. According to McNally, Mary Shelley’s London was literally immersed in a “corpse economy,” where markets in human body parts were central to the rise in medical knowledge and education, even as the brutal rhythms of early industrial labor proliferated images of the “living dead.” When Hollywood adopted the tale, however, Frankenstein’s monster was deprived of the articulate self-consciousness that was so central to Shelley’s narrative, foreshadowing the increasingly zombified image of workers under late capitalism.

McNally explains the rise of the zombie myths that accompanied the globalization of West African slavery and its fullest elaboration in the cane fields of Haiti. Zombies started out as slaves, but soon became a metaphor for the “dispossession of the self” through wage labor. In Hollywood during the 1960s and seventies, zombies became flesh-eaters, and thus an even more extreme metaphor for manic consumerism. Interestingly, zombies and witches have become significant cultural images in modern-day Africa, where the ravages of the global economy have devastated communities, and spread unprecedented ravages of disease and displacement. Apparently, images of zombie revolt have also taken hold in contemporary Africa, but McNally offers no further details on this, instead transitioning to a lengthy description of a film by Wes Craven, whose allegorical images of inner city zombies come across as a little too obvious. McNally concludes by urging that we read present-day catastrophes dialectically, to examine their underlying truth while eschewing simple invocations of apocalypse. This chapter could have been more satisfying, I’d suggest, if he’d more fully followed that advice.

In some ways that can also be said about the book as a whole. As a work of historical analysis, its scope is impressive and often enlightening. The authors persist in pressing readers to avoid simplistic conclusions and the superficial appeal of apocalyptic images, a compelling and important message for today’s movements. But except for several broad invocations of the imperative of mass organizing, they don’t offer many contrasting images of a better way forward. This is a significant oversight if we acknowledge that current trends toward increasing environmental and financial chaos are both likely to continue. If we accept the warnings of climate scientists, the devastating droughts, floods and wildfires of recent years are only the first stirrings of an increasingly unstable climate regime, which will have genuinely catastrophic effects on communities throughout the world.

This may be news to many in the US, but in much of the global South people have been living with this altered reality for several years now. Even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply curtailed this decade – a scenario all but precluded by recent non-developments in the UN-sponsored international climate negotiations – the persistence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means that everyone will be living with the consequences of increasing climate chaos for our entire lifetimes. It’s clear that a more dialectically nuanced understanding of catastrophe and the underlying potential for positive transformation is needed if we are to avoid a collapse into total despair. The transformative potential of apocalyptic scenarios has often been central to utopian thinking, from the radical millenarian movements of the Middle Ages to the 20^th century revival of the utopian tradition in the writings of H.G. Wells and others. While the authors of Catastrophism offer an essential antidote to a superficial politics of apocalypse and redemption, it will be up to others, especially the emerging generation of activists and theorists, to articulate an outlook that can inspire the profound social transformations that today’s environmental and financial crisis render more necessary than ever.

Brian Tokar is a lecturer in Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, director of the Institute for Social Ecology (social-ecology.org), author, most recently, of Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Change (New Compass Press, 2010), and co-editor (with Fred Magdoff) of Agriculture and Food in Crisis: Conflict, Resistance, and Renewal (Monthly Review Press, 2010).

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