published by:

Institute for
Social Ecology

popular education for a free society

What is Social Ecology?  |   Vol. 3, No. 1

Reflections
An Overview of the Roots of Social Ecology

By Murray Bookchin

he extent to which radical versions of environmentalism underwent sweeping metamorphoses and evolved into revolutionary ideologies when the New Left came of age is difficult to convey to the present generation, which has been almost completely divorced from the ebullient days of the New Left, not to speak of all the major problems in classical socialism, especially in its Marxist form. These changes burden us to this very day.

In fact, the way in which the New Left initially reacted to my writings on social ecology, even to such manifesto-type articles as my “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought”(1964), was very similar to the way my comrades of the Old Left would have reacted in the 1930s. Perhaps the most sophisticated leftist “movement” of the sixties—and certainly the most arrogant, namely, the French Situationists and their American hangers-on—witlessly denounced me as “Smokey the Bear”(a childlike symbol of the US Forest Service!), so irrelevant was the issue of humanity’s place in the natural world to the Left of the sixties. Accordingly, I was asked repeatedly where the “class struggle” was located in my writings—as though the “class struggle” was not implicit in everything I wrote!—after which I was lectured on how Marx and Engels were “really” firm adherents of the very views for which I had been denounced a few years earlier. My dogmatic opponents of the Left began to shift their ground by trying to fit environmental issues into such frameworks such as the importance of conservation in Marx and Engels’s writings. In short, the Left had been oblivious to ecological issues, which were merely regarded as a “petty bourgeois” endeavor to redirect public attention away from a hazy need to abolish capitalism pure and simple!

This criticism, to be sure, was not without a certain measure of truth. Anything resembling a socially oriented ecology, such William Vogt’s Our Plundered Planet in the fifties and especially Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, was more concerned with the impacts of human population growth and the loss of wildlife in an increasingly industrialized world than with the material welfare of humanity and the impact of hierarchy on attempts to create a rational society. In some respects, ecologists were inspired by the reactionary motifs raised by Ernst Haeckel, who created the word “ecology” in the 1880s, notably the harm produced by “humanity” on the planet rather than the effects of the capitalist system in producing ostensibly “biological problems.” Although Carson attacked the chemical industry for promoting the use of toxic pesticides, perceptive readers could see that she was more concerned with their impact on birds than on people. Nor did she and other ecological critics examine the socially and negatively systemic sources that produced a growing disequilibrium between nonhuman nature and society. She and her fellow ecological critics often seemed to think in terms of an abstract “humanity” (whatever that socially ambiguous word means) as distinguished from classes. To Carson and her admirers, it was not a specific social order—namely, capitalism and entrepreneurial rivalry—that was responsible for the ecological destruction that was undermining the biosphere but “immoral” human behavior.

By contrast, social ecology completely inverted the meaning and implications of society’s interaction with the natural world. When I first began to use the rarely employed term “social ecology” during 1964 in my essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” I emphasized that the idea of dominating nature has its origins in the very real domination of human by human—that is, in hierarchy. These status groups, I insisted could continue to exist even if economic classes were abolished.

Secondly, hierarchy had to be abolished by institutional changes that were no less profound and far reaching than those needed to abolish classes. This placed “ecology” on an entirely new level of inquiry and praxis, bringing it far above a solicitous, often romantic and mystical engagement with an undefined “nature” and a love-affair with “wildlife.” Social ecology was concerned with the most intimate relations between human beings and the organic world around them. Social ecology, in effect, gave ecology a sharp revolutionary and political edge. In other words, we were obliged to seek changes not only in the objective realm of economic relations but also in the subjective realm of cultural, ethical, aesthetic, personal, and psychological areas of inquiry.

Most fundamentally, these relations exist at the very base of all social life: notably, the ways in which we interact with the natural world, especially through labor, even in the simplest forms of society, such as tribal and village stages of social formation. And certainly, if we had major negative ecological disequilibria between humanity and the natural world which could threaten the very existence of our species, we had to understand how these disequilibria emerged; what we even meant by the word “nature;” how did society emerge out of the natural world; how did it necessarily alienate itself from elemental natural relations; how and why did basic social institutions such as government, law, the state, even classes emerge dialectically from each other before human society came into its own; and in ways that went beyond mere instinct and custom, not to speak of patricentricity, patriarchy, and a host of similar “cultural” relations whose emergence are not easily explained by economic factors alone.

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