published by:

Institute for
Social Ecology

popular education for a free society

Feature Article  |   Vol. 2, No. 1

Interview with Murray Bookchin

By David Vanek

DV: Aren't you afraid of falling into "anthropocentrism"? Even if you don't say the Earth was made for human beings, you maintain that humans are the most valuable beings on Earth. I can imagine many people calling this anthropocentrism.

MB: The word anthropocentrism doesn't frighten me. It implies that the natural world was "made for" human beings by some sort of deity. This, in my opinion, is absurd. One of my critics, Robyn Eckersley, challenged me in the journal Environmental Ethics to explain, "Why should human thinking be regarded more valuable than the navigational skills of birds?" But that's just a silly question. In "navigating," birds are affected by the magnetic field of the Earth, they're affected by the changes of temperature; they're adapting to their surroundings. But human beings, crucially, can innovate, as I pointed out, and they live on another level of phenomena, culture. They can make airplanes, and they know how to navigate. Now they can go beyond birds and farther than birds and higher than birds.

Human beings differ profoundly from all living things, because potentially at least, they can be natural evolution rendered self-conscious. They can be a "natural force," so to speak, that can enter into that evolution, reflect upon it, and act on it empathically, morally, and rationally, to make life a better experience for animals as well as themselves.

DV: Can we come back to your thesis that there is no solution to the environmental crisis without solving social problems?

MB: By all means. The society we live in was made by the bourgeoisie and its use of modern industry. We can't ignore the fact that we are living in a capitalist world. Contrary to what Marxism believed, capitalism is not falling apart — it is disturbingly stable. Cyclical depressions used to take place every ten years or so. But now there hasn't been a depression in decades. Lenin predicted that capitalism was entering a period of war and socialist revolutions. It might have done so between 1914 and 1945 or 1950, but it's not doing so today — at least, not on a scale comparable to the twentieth-century world wars.

What capitalism is doing is creating a synthetic environment, one in which "wilderness" is more of a metaphor than a reality. That's particularly true in the United States, which has a long history of dealing with "wilderness." Here "wilderness" is a formative cultural concept. Today American deep ecologists sing the praises of wilderness, by which they seem to mean places like Glacier National Park and Olympic National Park. But Indians were living in and transforming those places long before any Europeans came, thousands of years ago. In fact, human beings began to change the planet as far back as the time of Homo erectus and perhaps even earlier. They started burning forests systematically soon after they learned to make and use fire.

Now, especially, it's ridiculous to believe in the myth of wilderness. There are no wilderness areas anymore. Yes, wild animals are now drifting into the cities - deer are coming into Burlington, wolves are going into Nome, Alaska. Wild animals look for food in urban garbage cans. There are polar bears in Churchill, on the Hudson Bay, about 700 of them. They all congregate there, breaking open garbage cans and trying to open the doors of houses. But wilderness areas are gone — they're reserves. The whole planet has been changed, and now the polar icecaps and mountain glaciers are melting. A synthetic world is being created that flatly contradicts deep ecology hopes about returning to primeval nature.

Will science and technology be able to keep up with this destruction, prevent the worst damage, and make this synthetic world sustainable? That issue hangs in the balance. I don't know anymore. Things that seemed inconceivable 40 years ago have now come into existence. Scientists have mapped the human genome, they have discovered the secrets of life - genes, genetics, and bioengineering. They have discovered the secrets of matter - nuclear energy, nucleonics. Maybe your generation or your children will witness innovations that will prevent the synthetic world from becoming uninhabitable.

The whole ecological question is up for grabs today, and people should focus on the main thing: to try to create a free, rational — and ecologically oriented — society. We have to raise consciousness so that reason and an ecological outlook will prevail. This is a profoundly social — and I should add political — problem. And we have to create a movement that is educational and political, that has a real philosophy, a real concept of history, a real economics, a real politics, and a real ecological sensibility. This movement has to talk to people, assuming - and this is a big problem - that their minds are not destroyed by capitalism. People have to learn from history and understand what they can apply from the past to the present and future. We have to have a creative point of view. We can't just be against something, we have to offer alternatives, rational and ecological ones, and offer ways to change this society. Basically, if we are to resolve the ecological crisis today, we have to build a new political culture.

Unfortunately, commodification is not only turning everything into an object of exchange, it is changing the way people think. The famous question in America today is "What's the bottom line?" That's the language of accounting, of business. It frightens me that people think in those terms.

DV: People like to "invest" in their children…

MB: Yes, especially by educating them to go out and make money.

DV: You've written that the movements of the 1960s were opposed to commodification — and that while the 1960s were radical, the 1970s were reactionary.

MB: Relatively so, compared with today. In terms of their potentiality for making social change, the 1960s were more interesting than the 1970s. In the 1960s ecology seemed to be developing toward a revolutionary outlook, toward social ecology. The counterculture, it seemed, was challenging hierarchy and elitism. Feminism was expressing an opposition to hierarchy. Utopian wishes favored humanly scaled and ecological communities.

But in the 1970s things changed. The counterculture drifted into the New Age. Much of feminism turned into a lobbying movement for getting women into corporations and high military positions. That change is hardly progressive. The 1960s, in effect, were swallowed up by capitalism. What is revolutionary today about wearing a beard and wearing long hair? Nothing. Many 1960s radicals have since become professors and teach postmodernism. And social ecology, founded in the 1960s and truly radical, was to a great extent replaced by deep ecology, whose naive biocentrism I find regressive at best.

DV: In my country, deep ecology is often labeled a very radical movement. I know that "radical" is not necessarily the opposite of "reactionary" - you can be reactionary in a radical way. I just mean that deep ecology is not usually taken as a movement for conserving the political status quo.

MB: It's not the first time popular opinion is wrong. Capitalism has a remarkable ability to take ideas that seem to be against it and use them to deflect attention from the real problems of capitalism itself. For example, believers in deep ecology don't focus on capitalism as the source of ecological ills, or hierarchy, for that matter. They blame technology and certain religions. They call for greater spiritual development, getting in tune with the cosmos, becoming part of the web of life. They are not building a social movement — they're offering a religion. This spiritual rubbish, decorated with ecological language, ultimately supports the status quo. Capitalism is ready to embrace any religion, as long as it doesn't have to surrender its profits.

A good example that supports my concerns is that deep ecology has distorted radical ecology into an apologia for statism. In a recent interview, Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology who has called himself a sort of Gandhian anarchist, recently came out in support of a strong centralized state. He wants a strong centralized state because, he believes, if you leave the solution to ecological problems up to small localities, they will do great ecological damage. Yes, in a capitalist society, to be sure; but strong centralized states will do that in any society. In the same interview he attacked me for "localism" — as if I had never written about interdependence and confederation. But Naess is popular because he gives people an ecology — a spiritual ecology — that is very personal. And that is easy to understand, especially when vast numbers of people go to psychoanalysts and movies where all they hear about is love affairs and personal problems.

Social Ecology n 1: a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and anti-ecological trends. 2: a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society.

Published by the Institute for Social Ecology