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Feature Article |
Vol.
2, 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.
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.
Left Greens and Youth Greens
During that grassroots program-building process, an increasing tension
emerged between Greens committed to grassroots democracy and municipalist
politics, and those aiming toward a Green Party that could field candidates
for national office. Social ecologists in New England circulated a call
for a Left Green Network in 1988, and like-minded activists in the San Francisco
Bay Area developed a Radical Green caucus. The Left Greens held their first
national caucus meetings during the Greens’ national conference in
Eugene, Oregon in June of 1989, with a very large proportion of conference
attendees participating.
While some in the Greens viewed the Left Greens in grimly conspiratorial
terms, it turned out that Left Green positions were widely popular with
grassroots Greens all across the country, and significantly influenced the
shaping of the Green Program. The following year’s Greens gathering
was held in an elite resort town in the Rocky Mountains, and there were
far too few Left Greens in attendance to even hold caucus meetings. Still,
most of the platform positions argued for by the Left Greens became incorporated
in the final program document. This, apparently, was the occasion when several
influential moderate Greens decided that they would have to eventually secede
from the existing Green organization to create a more traditional national
party. Ironically, many Left Greens and other grassroots activists also
began losing interest in the Greens at this point. Green moderates went
on to form a separate national organization, based exclusively on state-certified
Green Parties, while the Left Green Network continued holding educational
conferences and publishing materials largely independent of any other Green
entity.
During the same period, a group of recent ISE students formed a youth
caucus in the Greens, which eventually became an independent organization
known as the Youth Greens. The Youth Greens debated positions on a wide
array of issues, refined their positions on both external and internal matters,
and attracted a significant base of young radicals largely from outside
the Greens. However it was at the Eugene Greens gathering that Youth Greens
and Left Greens united around the idea of a major direct action to coincide
with the twentieth anniversary of the original Earth Day during April of
1990. While mainstream Earth Day celebrations were taking on an increasingly
compromised character—essentially casting the search for environmental
solutions as an expression of individual lifestyles and consumer choices—the
Youth Greens, Left Greens, and a wide array of grassroots supporters, chose
to focus on the symbolic home of capitalist ecocide: Wall Street.
April 22, 1990—Earth Day Sunday—was a day of polite, feel-good
commemorations with strikingly little social or political content; many
big city events were almost wholly sponsored by major corporations. But
early Monday morning, several hundred Left Greens, Youth Greens, ecofeminists,
environmental justice activists, Earth First!ers and urban squatters converged
on the nerve center of U.S. capitalism seeking to obstruct the opening of
trading on that day. Activists based around the ISE in Vermont had prepared
a comprehensive action handbook, featuring a wide range of social ecological
writings, and helped create a broad, empowering coalition effort. The next
day, columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote in the New York Daily News:
Certainly, those who sought to co-opt Earth Day into
a media and marketing extravaganza, to make the public feel good while
obscuring the corporate root of the Earth’s pollution almost succeeded.
It took angry Americans from places like Maine and Vermont to come to
Wall Street on a workday and point the blame where it belongs.
Meanwhile, in Burlington, Vermont, social ecologists formed the Burlington
Greens to develop positions on urban issues and run candidates for local
office. The Greens opposed the commercial development of the city’s
Lake Champlain waterfront, and argued that the neighborhood assemblies established
by the Progressive city administration for planning and administrative purposes
should become the basis for a more empowered model of democratic neighborhood
governance. The Burlington Greens gained national headlines in 1989 when
the Greens contested several City Council seats and a Green candidate challenged
the city’s Progressive mayor in a citywide election.
Confronting Biotechnology
The ISE also became actively involved in issues around biotechnology during
the late 1980s, as farmers and environmentalists in Vermont and elsewhere
were becoming concerned that the impending release of a genetically engineered
growth hormone for dairy cows would have a devastating impact on Vermont’s
small farm economy. A Vermont Biotechnology Working Group, including activists
from the ISE, Rural Vermont, the Progressive Party and the Burlington Greens,
helped raise public awareness about recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH),
and published the first widely accessible activist handbook on biotechnology.
The Vermont effort played a significant role in delaying the approval for
the commercial use of Monsanto’s rBGH by several years. Social ecologists
were also involved in protesting a planned new biotechnology building at
the University of Vermont in Burlington, and supporting activists in New
York City who were opposing a planned biotechnology complex on the site
of the Audubon Ballroom, the famous Harlem cultural center where Malcolm
X was assassinated following a speech in 1965.
By the mid-1990s, it was clear that the impending release of a wide variety
of genetically engineered food products was going to have profound implications
for public health, the environment, and society at large. Sonja Schmitz
had recently come to study at the ISE after leaving a position at DuPont’s
biotechnology laboratories, faculty member Chaia Heller became involved
in the early ecofeminist opposition to biotechnology, and Brian Tokar was
advising M.A. student Zoë Erwin on a biotechnology-centered Masters
study, while considering appropriate next steps following the Vermont rBGH
campaign. The four began doing presentations together at the ISE, as well
as at venues in New York, Montreal and other cities. They participated in
the First Grassroots Gathering on Biodevastation in St. Louis in 1998, launched
a regional activist network, NorthEast Resistance Against Genetic Engineering
(NERAGE) and began developing plans for a comprehensive published collection
on biotechnology issues, which eventually appeared as Redesigning
Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (Zed Books,
2001).
In the spring of 2000, the ISE
Biotechnology Project was the initiator and the main organizational
sponsor of Biodevastation 2000, which became the largest public
gathering in opposition to biotechnology in North America to date. Some
4,000 people converged in Boston’s Copley Square, and marched on
the annual convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO);
this protest followed a three-day public teach-in that highlighted a wide
array of issues related to both the genetic engineering of food, and the
implications of biotechnology for health care, medical research, globalization,
and the survival of indigenous cultures around the world. Since 2000,
the Biotechnology Project has provided significant support for Biodevastation and Biojustice events
in San Diego and Toronto, and is helping develop plans for major events
in St. Louis and Washington, D.C. during 2003.
In March of 2002, residents in 28 Vermont towns voted for labeling genetically
engineered (GE) foods and a moratorium on GE crops at their annual Town
Meetings. Eight towns took the further step of discouraging or declaring
a moratorium on the planting of GE crops in their town. This was the first
round of the Town-to-Town campaign, in which the ISE’s Biotechnology
Project has played a central educational and organizational role, in collaboration
with the farm advocacy group Rural Vermont and the Vermont Genetic Engineering
Action Network. In a followup effort in March of 2003, an additional 37
towns voted against GE food and crops. Vermont now has the distinction of
having 70 municipalities that have voted against GE food and crops out of
more than 85 in the entire U.S. Our coalition partners are now focusing
on passing anti-GE legislation in Vermont, while we are working to sustain
the grassroots focus of a growing GE-Free Vermont campaign.
The work of the ISE Biotechnology Project today reflects a distinct political
outlook on grassroots organizing, an approach that is firmly grounded in
the principles of decentralism, community control, and face-to-face democracy.
This work has encouraged biotechnology activists to consider the widest
social and political implications of these issues, and helped those confronting
the institutions of global capitalism to understand how globalization directly
impacts our food and our health. The Biotechnology Project seeks to address
the widest possible implications of genetic engineering and other biotechnologies
and solidify links between biotech activists and those working primarily
on global justice issues. Similarly, ongoing workshops and courses on biotechnology
issues at the ISE reflect social ecology’s holistic and dialectical
understandings of society, nature, politics and technology. (For details,
see, “Biotechnology: Radicalizing the Debate,” in Harbinger,
Vol. 2, No. 1).
Movement for Global Justice
Finally, the ISE has played a central educational role in the current
movement for global justice and to counter the institutions of capitalist
globalism. Social ecologists have raised discussions around the potential
for direct democracy as an alternative to increasingly centralized economic
and political institutions, and helped further the evolution of what began
as largely a protest movement to one that is unusually conscious of the
need for a long-range reconstructive vision. During the summer of 1999,
ISE students intervened in an official hearing in Burlington, Vermont that
addressed US agricultural policy in anticipation of the Seattle WTO meetings.
Three ISE students were centrally involved in the organizing for the WTO
shutdown in Seattle, and several others formed an affinity group to participate
in and document the actions. After Seattle, the ISE pamphlet Bringing
Democracy Home highlighted the writings of social ecologists on
potential future directions for the movement, and various faculty members
have highlighted these themes in their speaking tours. Many antiglobalization
activists from across the country have come to the ISE in Vermont during
the past few summers to further their own political analysis and participate
in discussions of where the movement might be heading. We look forward to
ongoing exchanges of ideas, theories and inspirations as this dynamic new
movement continues to evolve over the coming years.
Notes
- Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary
Thought” in Post Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 1986), p. 80
Published by the Institute for
Social Ecology
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