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Institute for
Social Ecology

popular education for a free society

Feature Article  |   Vol. 2, No. 1

Interview with Murray Bookchin

By David Vanek

DV: What do you find unacceptable about deep ecology's diagnosis of the roots of the environmental crisis?

MB: First of all, it addresses people's attitudes, not social issues. Most deep ecologists seem to think that by changing human attitudes alone, we can produce an ecological, beautiful, harmonious world, in which all forms of life, and human beings among them, can live in harmony. Now, I regard that as the height of naïveté. To begin with, our social environment is extremely important in shaping the acceptability of new ideas. Many centuries ago - whether rightly or wrongly - Roger Bacon, a monk, anticipated many ideas that modern science and engineering turned into realities. But he lived in the 13th century, and the world around him was so socially conditioned by the Church and hierarchy that his fairly naturalistic ideas were not accepted. Who knows how many of these Roger Bacons existed before him, people who died in obscurity?

Today we are faced with a basically anti-ecological social environment. The social environment today favors atomization and money-making. People look after themselves, after their families, after their jobs, after their income, and that pretty much constitutes their concerns. It's not like in the 1930s, when everyone I knew seemed concerned above all with changing the world. There were always group meetings, street-corner meetings, there was activity, vitality, and a high degree of public concern. We had a radical, lively political culture. We were embattled especially against the dangers of fascism.

Now being embattled about anything is regarded as disruptive: When people speak out in anger, they are told, "You're rocking the boat. We have to hug each other." It's a hugging culture. It's a culture that fosters passivity. And deep ecology plays up to these moods. Deep ecology emphasizes our kinship with birds and spiders, our place in a supposed mystical circle of life, not differences in wealth and lifeways. At something called a "Council of all Beings," people sit in a circle, and one person says: "I represent rabbits." Another person says: "I represent trees." Deep ecologists love these rituals. Actually, people represent nothing but themselves. Such deceptions are all over the place in America. And we all have to live in harmony with each other! Tell it to people of color and oppressed women.

DV: But Joanna Macy, the author of that ritual, does not seem to be a passive person. Many other deep ecologists are very active as well.

MB: I don't know about her recent activities, and certainly some deep ecologists participate in protests around environmental issues. But most deep ecologists emphasize, as Macy does, spiritual change over political and social change, and the cultivation of a reverential consciousness or sensibility about the natural world rather than organization and movement building. They talk about inwardness and Buddhism and archetypes rather than the real social forces that produce the ecological crisis. They call upon human beings to follow their instincts and feeling, not remake the world according to reason. This is a turn toward private sensibility rather than public action and often produces little more than lifestyle changes. That easily leads to accommodation. Other aspects of deep ecology — its biocentrism — are simply reactionary.

DV: I heard that Prince Charles calls himself a deep ecologist. When did you realize for the first time the reactionary character of deep ecology?

MB: In the very beginning, when I heard about biocentrism. In the mid-1980s, I met the deep ecologist Bill Devall at a conference in Wisconsin, where we had a discussion, and he talked about it. I tried to be friendly enough, but I had to criticize this idea. In the summer of 1986 at the first national gathering of the American Greens at Amherst, Massachusetts, I launched a public criticism of deep ecology. I was the keynote speaker, and I distributed an article called "Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology." I didn't realize at the time that I was dealing with people who didn't want to debate ideas, and because I was very sharp, I antagonized a lot of them. They paid less attention to what I had said than to my tone. That was the big issue — my tone! I was criticizing David Foreman for his statement that we should let Ethiopian children starve and "let nature take its course," but his reactionary views bothered them less than they way I criticized him.

I don't know what's going on among deep ecologists today. I don't read their press anymore. I'm too old to waste my limited time reading their materials. I've already written what I had to say about them.

DV: I've met many people within the environmental movement who have a rather equivocal view of modern society or modernity in a broader sense, covering technology, specific sets of ideas, lifestyle, and so on. They acknowledge that modernity has brought many positives - or at least they do not want to simply go back to the pre-modern society - but they do not want to talk about these positives publicly. Their rationale is we are overmodernized right now, so putting the pendulum into balance requires talking only about the opposite extreme: since we face the negative effects of technology, let's minimize talking about its positives. What do you think of this shyness? Is it a good strategy?

The fact is that we will have to use modern technology in a different social order. There's no sense in misleading people about that. Nowadays technology obviously can be used to produce the greatest amount of destruction, but it can also be used to produce the great amounts of good. Even if we succeed in preserving more forests, open land, and wildlife, we will still need technology desperately to keep these forests, open land, and wildlife intact. It will take high levels of technology to engage in ecological restoration and maintenance.

The real problem is not technology itself — although there are some technologies, admittedly, like nuclear energy, that I'd like to see disappear. The basic question we face is, by what standards and toward what ends do we use technology? Today its is used primarily to make money, not to improve people's lives. In this country now there's a big scandal about defective automobile tires. The Firestone tires on many large "sport utility vehicles" have fallen apart when the vehicle is going at high speeds. Everyone in the country knows that this problem stems from one thing: the companies are producing cheap or unsuitable goods to make larger profits. The people don't believe fairy tales about benevolent auto manufacturers.

Sooner or later, however, society will produce vehicles and tires that never wear out but can be handed down from generation to generation. If this technology is used for rational ends, it will be a boon. Therefore I can't single out technology alone as the source of the problem. I can single out the reasons for which technology is being used and toward what ends.

We live in a very confusing time. Sometimes people look for easy answers to complex questions. If a machine or item functions poorly, it is easy to blame technology rather than the competitive corporations that try to make money, or to blame people's attitudes rather than the mass media that shapes people's thinking, or to say we should go back to old ideologies — Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, orthodox Marxism, orthodox anarchism, even orthodox capitalism — for solutions.

People need new ideas based on reason, not superstition; on freedom, not personal autonomy; on creativity, not adaptation; on coherence, not chaos; and on a vision of a free society, based on popular assemblies and confederalism, not on rulers and a state. If we do not organize a real movement — a structured movement — that tries to guide people toward a rational society based on reason and freedom, we face eventual disaster. We cannot withdraw into our "autonomous" egos or retreat to a primitive, indeed unknown past. We must change this insane world, or else society will dissolve into an irrational barbarism — as it is already beginning to do these days.

David Vanek (born in 1974) does postgraduate studies in philosophy at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, where he is also the editor of Sedma Generace (Seventh Generation) magazine, a publication of Friends of the Earth Czech Republic. He interviewed Bookchin in Burlington, Vermont, in the summer of 2000. The interview was originally published in Sedma Generace.

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