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The Crisis in the Ecology Movement
by Murray Bookchin
American
ecology movements -- and particularly the American Greens
-- are faced with a serious crisis of conscience and
direction.
Will
ecologically oriented groups and the Greens become a
movement that sees the roots of our ecological
dislocations in social dislocations -- notably, in the
domination of human by human which has produced the very notion
of dominating nature?
Or will
ecology groups and the Greens turn the entire ecology
movement into a starry-eyed religion decorated by
gods, goddesses, woodsprites, and organized around
sedating rituals that reduce militant activist groups to
self-indulgent encounter groups?
These sharply
conflicting alternatives are very real. And to openly
state them is not "divisive" or
"confrontational." Accusations like
"divisiveness" and "confrontation"
are being used with outrageous cynicism to blur
significant differences in outlook and prevent a careful
exploration of serious problems. The phony cry of
"Unity!" has often been used to silence one
'viewpoint in the interests of another. We can certainly
have unity -- and discussion, if you please -- despite
major differences. "New Age" rhetoric to the
contrary notwithstanding, this what democracy is all
about.
In fact, real
growth occurs exactly when people have different views
and confront each other in order to creatively arrive at
more advanced levels of truth -- not adopt a low common
denominator of ideas that is "acceptable" to
everyone but actually satisfies no one in the long run.
Truth is achieved through dialogue and, yes, harsh
disputes -- not by a deadening homogeneity and a bleak
silence that ultimately turns bland "ideas"
into rigid dogmas.
The Basic Differences
Let's face it:
There is a major dispute in the ecology and Green
movements, today. It is a dispute between social ecology
and "deep ecology" -- the first, a body of
ideas that asks that we deal with human beings primarily
as social beings who differ profoundly as to their status
as poor and rich, women and men, black and white, gays
and "straights," oppressed and oppressor; the
second, that sees human beings as a mere
"species" -- as mammals and, to some people
like the "Earth First!" leaders, as
"vicious" creatures -- who are subject almost
entirely to the "forces of nature" and are
essentially interchangeable with lemmings, grizzly bears
(a favorite species!), or, for that matter, with insects,
bacteria, and viruses.
These are not
airy, vaguely philosophical, and remote problems to be
disputed by modern-day scholastics. They underpin very practical
differences. The social view of humanity, namely that of
social ecology, focuses primarily on the historic
emergence of hierarchy and the need to eliminate
hierarchical relationships. It emphasizes the just
demands of the oppressed in a society that wantonly
exploits human beings,, and it calls for their freedom.
It explores the possibility or a new technology and a new
sensibility, including more organic forms of reason, that
will harmonize our relationship with nature instead of
opposing society to the natural world. It demands
sweeping institutional changes that will abolish a
competitive "grow-or-die" market society --
frankly, called capitalism, not such politically
safe and socially neutral words like an
"industrial," "technological," or
"post - industrial" society -- and replace it
with an ecologically oriented society based on free,
confederated, humanly scaled communities in which people
will have direct, face-to-face control over their
personal and social lives.
By contrast,
"deep ecology" essentially overlooks the
profound social differences that divide human from human
and "zoologizes" poor and rich, women and men,
black and white, gays and "straights,"
oppressed and oppressor into a biological lump called
"humanity" which is, presumably,
"spiritually impoverished,"
"anthropocentric" or "human-
oriented" in "its" belief that the world
was "made" (by whom? -- a mean God?)
exclusively for human enjoyment, and humanistic"
ends (whatever that word means these days). As voiced by
Bill Devall and George Sessions in their bible, Deep
Ecology, this shift from a basically social to a
basically spiritual outlook essentially side-steps the
social (apart from a "minority tradition" that
recycles the far-reaching works of Peter Kropotkin, the
Russian anarchist, into a few bumper-sticker slogans) and
then takes a complete nose-dive into Buddhism, Taoism,
"the Christian tradition," the "question
of technology," "green politics" -- and,
very significantly, Malthusianism.
The crucial
economic forces that divide so much of humanity into
exploited and exploiter are replaced by conflicting
"worldviews." Utterly opposed individuals like
the authoritarian Communist, Woody Guthrie, are
amalgamated with libertarian anarchists like Paul
Goodman. The "development of a market economy"
and the "impact of the rise of capitalism" are
given short shrift. They are mentioned once, only in
passing (p. 45), as issues that attract "some
historians and social scientists to explain the origins
and development of the dominant worldview."
"Our purpose here is not to extensively review the
origin and development of the dominant worldview,"
write Deep Ecology's authors, Devall and Sessions,
in what can be regarded as one of the major
understatements of the book, "but to explore in
general its (the worldview's) influence on current
societies and on our approach to ultimate reality
(metaphysics), to knowledge (epistemology), to being
(ontology), to the cosmos (cosmology) and to social
organization." (p. 45)
As it turns
out, the expectant reader gets a heavy tribute to Thomas
Malthus (pp. 45-46) for an analysis of current social
problems (i.e., the "population problem"), the
impact of a "technological society" as a source
of personal alienation (p. 48), "basic intuitions
and experiencing ourselves and Nature" as the
"foundations of deep ecology" (p. 65), and a
"realization of the 'self-in-Self,' where 'Self'
stands for organic wholeness" as doses of
metaphysics and epistemology combined. The notion that
"All things in the biosphere have an equal right to
live and blossom and to reach their own individual forms
within the larger Self-realization" (p.67) is a
sparkling issue that generated a serious discussion in
the New Scientist on the right of "endangered
viruses" like the smallpox virus to exist and
flourish. All of this is presented in a metaphoric form
that evokes a sense of nausea in any thinking reader. The
few social issues with which Deep Ecology began fade into
paens to wilderness, critiques of natural resource
conservation, and the brilliant rediscovery that organic
agriculture is good and city life is bad. Besides a host
of platitudes, what we need in addition to communing with
nature and dissolving our burdensome "selves"
into a cosmic organic wholeness, Devall and Sessions
emphasize, is to turn our "opponent into a
believer" (p. 200). In short, we need the personal
touch: a festival of warmth, rituals, and a good dose of
religion that tries to pass for politics.
That a market
economy based on dog-eat-dog as a law of survival and
"progress" has penetrated every aspect of
society has no centrality whatever in this self-indulgent
literary collage of platitudes and pieties. At a time
when the "self" is being rapidly dissolved by
the mass media, we are urged to further this process by
dissolving all the boundaries that define us -- this, in
the name of a cosmic "Self" that seems more
Supernatural than natural.
The Logic of "Deep Ecology"
We suffer,
these days, from a bad habit. We eat "fast
food," nibble at "fast ideas," scan
"fast headlines," and buy our panaceas in the
form of easily swallowed pills. The need to think out the
logic of certain premises is almost totally alien to the
"American Way" of the late 20th century. Devall
and Sessions' Deep Ecology and the
"movement" they have helped to launch under the
presiding icon of Arne Naess, provides what is exactly
needed to lull us into a acceptance of "fast
ecology."
As it turn
out, however, we cannot say "A" without passing
into "B," or "B" into "C"
until we reach "Z." And there is a
"deep" or "deeper ecology" movement
of which Devall is a member, formed around a periodical
called Earth First! to which Devall is a
contributing editor and Sessions a valued contributor. If
there is anything fascinating about "Earth
First!" as a movement and especially as a
periodical, it is the fact that the periodical does go
from "A" to "Z" and draws all the
logical conclusions from "deep ecology,"
conclusions that Devall and Sessions often bury with
metaphors, sutras, poetic evocations, and pretensions.
"Earth
First!" means exactly what it says and what
"deep ecology" implies -- the "earth"
comes before people, indeed, people (to the periodical's
editor, David Foreman) are superfluous, perhaps even
harmful, and certainly dispensable. "Natural
law" tends to supplant social factors. Thus: is
there a famine in Ethiopia? If so, argues Foreman to an
admiring Devall in a notorious interview, nature should
be permitted to "take its course" and the
Ethiopian should be left to starve. Are Latins (and, one
may add, Indians) crossing the Rio Grande? Then they
should be stopped or removed, contends Foreman, because
they are burdening "our" resources. Devall, who
apparently recorded these golden views, doesn't express a
word of protest or even dissent. Nor is there a known
denunciation, so far as I know, from Sessions.
Given the
preoccupation of Devall and Sessions with the need for a
eco-culture -- or religion? -- what kind of culture
should we protect, asks Ed Abbey, the theoretical Pope of
"Earth First!"? It turns out that our society
has been shaped by a "northern European
culture," declares Abbey -- or should we say
"Aryan"? Hence there are presumably sound
"cultural" reasons -- an expression that some
might interpret as "racial" -- to keep Latins
from polluting "our" culture and institutions
with their hierarchical attributes. What is the
"litmus test" of our adherence to "Earth
First!" asks Foreman? It is the question of
"population growth," you see -- not capitalism
and the competitive market place. No one in that entire
crowd, to my knowledge, takes the care to note that if
the world's population were reduced to 500 million (as
Naess suggests for a demographic desideratum) or even 5
million, an economic system based on competition and
accumulation in which a failure to "grow" is a
sentence of economic death in the market place would necessarily
devour the biosphere, irrespective of what people need,
the numbers they reach, or the intentions that motivate
them. American capitalism wiped out some 40 million
bison, devastated vast forests, and dessicated millions
of acres of soil before its population exceeded 100
million.
If an
inherently "grow-or-die" market economy cannot
produce cars, it will produce tanks. If it cannot produce
clothing, it will produce missiles. If it cannot produce
tv sets, it will produce radar guidance systems.
"Deep ecology," with its bows to Malthus, is
totally oblivious to these almost classic almost economic
principles. Its focus is almost completely zoological and
its image of people, indeed, of society is very deeply
rooted in "natural forces" rather than social
tendencies. Characteristically, it speaks of a
"technological society" or an "industrial
society" instead of capitalism, a piece of verbal
juggling that shrewedly conceals the social relationships
that play a decisive role in the technologies and
industries society develops and the use to which they are
put.
Technology in
itself does not produce the dislocations between an
antiecological society and nature, although there are
surely technologies that, in themselves, are dangerous to
an ecosystem. What technology does is essentially magnify
A basically social problem. To speak of a
"technological society" or an "industrial
society," as Devall, Sessions, and "Earth
First!" persistently do is to throw cosmic stardust
over the economic laws that guide capital expansion which
Marx so brilliantly developed in his economic writings
and replace economic factors by zoological metaphors.
Herein lies the utterly regressive character of
"deep ecology," "Earth First!" and
its religious acolytes like Charlene Spretnak,
Kirkpatrick Sale, and the diaperheads who float between
Hollywood and Disneyland, indeed, who threaten to remove
every grain of radicality in a movement that is
potentially, at least, one of the most radical to emerge
since the sixties. If the biggest "hole" in the
Green movement is the need for a "sustainable
religion," as Spretnak would have us believe, then
we have created a donut rather than a movement.
Re-enchanting Humanity
Beyond any
shadow of doubt, we direly need an ecological sensibility
-- one that is marked by a sense of wonder for natural
evolution and the splendor of the biosphere in its many
varied forms. But nature is not a scenic window that
overlooks the Pacific coastal mountains or the New
England marshlands. Nature is above all a process -- a
wondrous process that can admired on its own terms, not
by invoking deities that are simply crude anthropomorphic
projections of ourselves -- male or female -- in a
mystified, often irrational, and sometimes a highly
hierarchical form -- a procedure that has served
hierarchical interests for many millenia by lulling the
oppressed into a paralyzing quietism and sense of
resignation.
A remarkable
product of natural evolution are the human beings who
people the planet -- beings that are no less products of
nature than grizzly bears and whales. And like bears and
whales, the human species --- for it is no less a species
when seen from a biological standpoint than it is social
from the standpoint of social ecology -- has acquired a
remarkable capacity called conceptual thought. In this
respect, natural evolution has endowed this species with
powers that are unmatched by other- species: powers to
form highly institutionalized communities called
societies that, unlike the genetically programmed
"social insects," are capable of an
evolutionary development of their own, however rooted
they may be in nature.
The crucial
question we face today -- not only for ourselves as human
beings but for the entire biosphere -- is how social
evolution will proceed and in what direction it will go.
To deal with this question primarily as a matter of
spiritual renewal, desirable as that may be. is not only
evasive but socially disarming. Social evolution took a
wrong turn ages ago when it shifted from egalitarian
institutions and relations to hierarchical ones. It took
an even worse turn a few centuries ago when it shifted
from a relatively cooperative society to a highly
competitive one. If we are to bring society and nature
into accord with each other, we must develop a movement
that fulfills the evolutionary potential of humanity and
society, that is to say, turn the human world into a
self-conscious agent of the natural world and enhance the
evolutionary process -- natural and social. All the
eco-babble of Devall, Sessions, Naess, and their acolytes
aside, if we do not intervene to act creatively on nature
(indeed, to rescue it from itself at times), we will
betray everything of a positive character that natural
evolution itself endowed us with -- our potentially
unprecedented richness of mind, sympathy, and conscious
capacity to care for nonhuman species. Given an
ecological society, our technology can be placed as much
in the service of natural evolution as it can be placed
in the service of a rational social evolution.
To call for a
"return to the Pleistocene," as "Earth
First!" has done, to degrade humanity as so many
misanthropic "antihumanists" and
"biocentrists" have done is not only atavistic
but crudely reactionary. A degraded humanity will only
yield a degraded nature as our capitalistic society and
our hierarchical history have amply demonstrated. We are
direly in need not only of "re-enchanting the
world" and "nature" but also or
re-enchanting humanity -- of giving itself a sense of
wonder over its own capacity as natural beings and a caring
product of natural evolution. A Supernature, peopled by
"earth-based" deities, must be replaced by a
healthy naturalism in which, as a movement, we will
re-establish our severed ties with nature by naturalistic
means and heal our terribly wounded society by social
means. For Greens, in particular, this means that we must
formulate a new, independent, revolutionary politics,
using this word in its broadest possible sense, not
recycle old, shopworn, sedating deities -- be they
Eastern or Western, pagan or Christian,
"earth-bound" or "heaven-bound". We
must learn to look reality directly in the face, not
obscure it with irrational thinking and a fog of dense,
obscurantist myths.
The Left
Network of the Vermont Greens has already taken the
all-important step of trying to formulate a truly radical
program -- "Toward a New Politics" -- that
sketches out the basic concepts of a Left Green
ecological movement. It openly describes itself as an
"ecological humanism" (to use this term in its
best sense, not the perverted meaning given to the word
"humanism" by "deep ecology'.." And
it advances the basic principles of social ecology as
they apply to American political life. Either ecology
movements and the Greens will free themselves of subtly
hierarchical "centricities" -- "bio"
or "anthropo" -- and develop a clearly defined
and coherent body of social principles based on
ecological concepts or they will become a marginalized
collection of privileged encounter groups -- one that may
learn to "think like a mountain," as Devall
recommends but one that will be justly ignored as another
fad, a target of derision at worst or healthy ridicule at
best.¤
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