published by:

Institute for
Social Ecology

popular education for a free society

A History of the ISE  |   Vol. 3, No. 1

Social Ecology and Social Movements
From the 1960s to the Present

By Brian Tokar

Social ecologists have played an important catalytic role in many of the pivotal social and ecological movements of the past four decades. The discussion that follows will focus on events that staff, students and volunteers around the ISE in Plainfield have been most directly involved with. We hope that subsequent issues of Harbinger will include stories from many others whose involvement around a wide array of social, ecological and political issues have been strongly influenced by the ideas of social ecology.

n the 1950s and early 1960s, ecology was largely an academic and technocratic enterprise. Several corporate think tanks emerged during the fifties to address the rapid pace of resource depletion that accompanied the unprecedented postwar economic boom. There was little that was reconstructive or radical in the ecology of that period, but there were already important new stirrings. The effects of nuclear fallout from weapons testing was becoming a volatile public issue, for example, and people living close to some of the earliest nuclear power reactors, such as Indian Point just north of New York City, began questioning the safety of these facilities.

Within a few months in 1962, Murray Bookchin published his book, Our Synthetic Environment, and Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. Carson’s book was serialized in the New Yorker, and eventually shocked millions of people into an awareness of the devastating effects of DDT and other toxic pesticides. Bookchin’s work extended the critique to encompass issues such as the hazards of urban concentration, chemical agriculture as a whole, and the rise of chronic, environmentally related disease. Bookchin’s perspective on these issues emerged partly from his own pioneering work during the 1950s around the hazards of pesticides and food additives, as well as his personal involvement in some of the first anti-nuclear power campaigns, at Indian Point and in opposition to a reactor proposed for Ravenswood, Queens, just across the East River from central Manhattan.

Meanwhile, academic ecologists were slowly beginning to see that their work had broad, previously unappreciated social and political implications. A 1964 article in BioScience labeled ecology “A Subversive Science” embodied a direct challenge to many accepted social and economic practices. The pace of uncontrolled economic growth that characterized the 1950s and early 1960s clearly could not continue, ecologists began to argue, without severely impacting the health of living ecosystems and the diversity of life on earth.

It was Murray Bookchin, again, who took this understanding to its fullest conclusion. In an influential article originally published in the newsletter Anarchos in 1965 (later reprinted in Post Scarcity Anarchism), he wrote:

The explosive implications of an ecological approach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically a critical science—critical on a scale that the most radical systems of political economy have failed to attain—but also because it is an integrative and reconstructive science. This integrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology, carried through to all its implications, leads directly into anarchic areas of social thought. For in the final analysis, it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man [sic] and nature without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with its natural environment.¹

This was the beginning of the radical synthesis that soon became social ecology. To relieve the destructive imbalances imposed by capitalist civilization on the natural world, only a stateless society based on face-to-face democracy, “humanistic” technologies, and a profound decentralization of social and economic power would suffice. Bookchin’s writings about social ecology evolved over the next several decades to encompass an uncompromising political analysis of the institutional roots of the ecological crisis, an historical critique of the myth of the domination of nature, a libertarian municipalist political strategy, and an ethical philosophy that views the potential for human freedom as an emergent property of the dialectic of natural evolution. Ideas first articulated by Bookchin, such as the distinction between technocratic environmentalism and a fundamentally radical ecology, became common wisdom among the growing ranks of ecologically-informed radicals in the late 1960s. Actions such as the occupation of the administration building at Columbia University in 1968 (initially a protest against the university’s expansion plans in West Harlem), and the creation of People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969, began to reflect some of these new understandings.

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