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

Anti-Nuclear Alliances

Social ecology achieved a much fuller expression in the popular movement against nuclear power that arose during the late 1970s and early 1980s. This movement embraced direct action and decentralized organizational models, expressed a sophisticated understanding of the complex relationship between technological and social changes, and was captivated by the utopian dimension of the emerging “appropriate technology” movement, within which the recently founded Institute for Social Ecology played a dynamic, critical and catalytic role. During the late 1970s, well over a hundred students each summer came to the ISE, then located at Cate Farm in Plainfield, to acquire hands-on experience in organic gardening and alternative technology, while studying social ecology, ecofeminism, reconstructive anthropology and other theoretical approaches with virtually all of the pioneering thinkers in the ecology movement of that period.

The ISE, as a central participant in the emerging Central Vermont activist community, sent affinity groups to Seabrook for the landmark 1977 occupation of the nuclear construction site in that coastal New Hampshire town. Over 2,000 demonstrators converged on Seabrook that spring, for what became the most significant act of mass civil disobedience since the end of the 1960s. Over 1,400 people were arrested by the New Hampshire State Police for refusing to leave the construction site; most declined bail and were incarcerated for two weeks in National Guard armories scattered throughout the Granite State. This was where the concept of the affinity group first became the underlying basis of a growing popular organization.

The affinity group concept, of course, originated with the Spanish anarchists of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI). In an appendix to his influential pamphlet, “Listen, Marxist!” Murray Bookchin compared the Spanish grupos de afinidad to the countercultural collectives that had appeared by then in numerous U.S. cities. The concept was adapted by organizers of a huge antiwar action in Washington, D.C. in 1971, where people were encouraged to form small collectives to offer mutual support and security in the face of an overwhelming police presence. In the antinuclear Clamshell Alliance, affinity groups were initially formed at nonviolence training sessions for similar purposes, but the experience of incarceration in New Hampshire’s armories raised the expectation that these collectives were not only useful as support groups during an action, but could form the basis for a much more widely participatory, directly democratic form of movement organization than had ever been realized before. In the preparations for a planned follow-up action at Seabrook in June of 1978, the wider meaning of affinity groups was actively promoted, Bookchin’s “Note on Affinity Groups” was distributed widely, and activists in Vermont, Boston and elsewhere in New England worked hard to make the Clamshell Alliance live up to the most profoundly democratic potential of the organizational model it had pioneered. Antinuclear alliances organized along similar lines sprouted up all across the country; many, like the Clamshell, took their names from local species of animals and plants that were endangered by the spread of nuclear power, and adopted affinity groups and spokescouncils as their basic decision-making structures.

The euphoria of affinity group-based democracy was to be short-lived in the Clamshell, however. Protracted debates over the appropriateness of various tactics within a context of organized nonviolence led to a growing polarization. When most of the original founders of the Clamshell Alliance acceded to a deal with the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office that led to the cancellation of the 1978 Seabrook occupation —a large legal rally was held at Seabrook instead—activists at the ISE and elsewhere helped expose the antidemocratic nature of that decision and pressed for a renewal of affinity group democracy. The Boston area chapter was completely reorganized around affinity groups and neighborhood-based organizing collectives, and a new organization, the Coalition for Direct Action at Seabrook, picked up where the now-faltering Clamshell left off. ISE-based activists in Vermont played a central role in setting an appropriately open and participatory tone for that new organization, which staged significantly more militant-styled actions at Seabrook in 1979 and 1980.

Ecofeminist activism also arose during the years immediately following the first Seabrook occupation, and the ISE played a catalytic role here as well. Ynestra King taught the first-ever courses on ecofeminism at the ISE in the late 1970s, and the ISE sponsored the historic Women and Life on Earth conference in western Massachusetts in 1980. This led directly to the planning of the first Women’s Pentagon Action later that year, which planted the seed for feminist peace camps throughout Europe, and in the U.S. as well.

ISE students and staff during the 1970s and 1980s also took numerous initiatives to support Native American struggles. They worked closely with the traditionalist Mohawks of Akwesasne—ISE students camped out overnight in the lobby of the New York state capitol in 1980 to protest a state of siege against the Akwesasne Mohawks. Social ecologists traveled to the lakes of northern Wisconsin in support of traditional Chippewa spear-fishing, looked after Navajo families’ sheep in the contested Big Mountain region of Arizona, and caravaned to Montreal for a rally at the headquarters of the Hydro-Quebec utility in solidarity with the James Bay Cree of northern Quebec.

Green Politics

By the early 1980s, another important political development attracted the attention of social ecologists in Vermont and elsewhere: the origins of a Green political movement in West Germany and other European countries. Long before Greens began to be elected to state and national Parliaments in Europe, social ecologists became excited about this “anti-party party” that initially functioned more as an alliance of grassroots “citizen initiatives” than a conventional parliamentary party. In the early 1980s, European Greens were running for office as delegates from various social movements, decisions were made primarily at the local level, and candidates for both public office and positions of responsibility within the Greens were obliged to rotate their positions every two years. Greens in Germany and other countries were articulating a sweeping ecological critique in all areas of public policy, from urban design, energy use and transportation, to nuclear disarmament and the need to support emerging dissident movements in Eastern Europe. Translations of Murray Bookchin’s writings played an influential role in the development of this new Green political agenda.

A staff member of the Institute for Social Ecology attended the first public discussion of strategies for developing a Green movement in the U.S. This occurred at the first North American Bioregional Congress, in the Ozark foothills of Missouri in 1984. Within a few short weeks after that meeting was written up in the pages of The Nation, nearly 2,000 letters appeared at the post office box in Marshfield, Vermont that had been set up for Green correspondence. A Green “Committees of Correspondence” organization was formally established at a gathering in St. Paul, Minnesota later that year; the ISE helped organize that event, and several prominent social ecologists were invited, including ISE director Dan Chodorkoff, community media guru Paul McIsaac and Chino Garcia of the CHARAS community center on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

At the St. Paul meeting, several nationally known writers and activists were pushing for a national organization, through which self-named representatives of various Green constituencies would form a national organization, relate to other NGOs on the national level, and perhaps create a national Green Party within the year. The model that prevailed, however, was that of a more decentralized, grassroots-based movement, rooted in Green locals empowering regional delegates to make confederal decisions following locally-debated mandates. Social ecologists in New England had already begun creating a confederation of Green locals on that model, and the idea once again spread across the country. By the first public national conference of the Greens, in Amherst, Massachusetts in July of 1987, there were already over a hundred grassroots Green locals spread across the U.S., along with numerous other affiliated groups. Ideas from social ecology, and activists based at the Institute, played an important role in the development of the first national Green Program between 1988 and 1990.

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