



Murray Bookchin



What Is Social Ecology? 


Murray Bookchin has long been a major figure in anarchist and utopian political  theory, theory of technology, urbanism, and the philosophy of nature. He is the cofounder and director emeritus of the Institllte for Social Ecology. His many books include Toward an Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, Remaking Society, and The Philosophy of Social Ecology.


What literally defines social ecology as "social" is its recognition of the 
often overlooked fact that nearly all our present ecological problems arise from 
deep-seated social problems. Conversely, present ecological problems cannot be 
clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems 
within society. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, 
and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious 
ecological dislocations we face today--apart, to be sure, from those that are 
produced by natural catastrophes.
If this approach seems a bit too "sociological" for those environmentalists who 
identify ecological problems with the preservation of wildlife, wilderness, or 
more broadly, with "Gaia" and planetary "Oneness," it might be sobering to 
consider certain recent facts. The massive oil spill by an Exxon tanker at 
Prince William Sound, the extensive deforestation of redwood trees by the Maxxam 
Corporation, and the proposed James Bay hydroelectric project that would flood 
vast areas of northern Quebec's forests, to cite only a few problems, should 
remind us that the real battleground on which the ecological future of the 
planet will be decided is clearly a social one. 
Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems--or even to play 
down or give token recognition to this crucial relationship-- would be to 
grossly misconstrue the sources of the growing environmental crisis. The way 
human beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing the 
ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will surely fail to see 
that the hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly 
permeate society give rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world. 
Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the 
brutally competitive imperative of "grow or die," is a thoroughly impersonal, 
self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame technology as such or 
population growth as such for environmental problems. We will ignore their root 
causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion, and the identification 
of "progress" with corporate self-interest. In short, we will tend to focus on 
the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and 
our efforts will be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more 
cosmetic than curative.
While some have questioned whether social ecology has dealt adequately with 
issues of spirituality, it was, in fact, among the earliest of contemporary 
ecologies to call for a sweeping change in existing spiritual values. Such a 
change would mean a far-reaching transformation of our prevailing mentality of 
domination into one of complementarity, in which we would see our role in the 
natural world as creative, supportive, and deeply appreciative of the needs of 
nonhuman life. In social ecology, a truly natural spirituality centers on the 
ability of an awakened humanity to function as moral agents in diminishing 
needless suffering, engaging in ecological restoration, and fostering an 
aesthetic appreciation of natural evolution in all its fecundity and diversity.
Thus social ecology has never eschewed the need for a radically new spirituality 
or mentality in its call for a collective effort to change society. Indeed, as 
early as 1965, the first public statement to advance the ideas of social ecology 
concluded with the injunction: "The cast of mind that today organizes 
differences among human and other life-forms along hierarchical lines of 
'supremacy' or 'inferiority' will give way to an outlook that deals with 
diversity in an ecological manner--that is, according to an ethics of 
complementarity."1 In such an ethics, human beings would complement nonhuman 
beings with their own capacities to produce a richer, creative, and 
developmental whole-not as a "dominant" species but as a supportive one. 
Although this idea, expressed at times as an appeal for the "respiritization of 
the natural world," recurs throughout the literature of social ecology, it 
should not be mistaken for a theology that raises a deity above the natural 
world or that seeks to discover one within it. The spirituality advanced by 
social ecology is definitively naturalistic (as one would expect, given its 
relation to ecology itself, which stems from the biological sciences), rather 
than supernaturalistic or pantheistic.
To prioritize any form of spirituality over the social factors that actually 
erode all forms of spirituality, raises serious questions about one's ability to 
come to grips with reality. At a time when a blind social mechanism, the market, 
is turning soil into sand, covering fertile land with concrete, poisoning air 
and water, and producing sweeping climatic and atmospheric changes, we cannot 
ignore the impact that a hierarchical and class society has on the natural 
world. We must earnestly deal with the fact that economic growth, gender 
oppressions, and ethnic domination-not to speak of corporate, state, and 
bureaucratic interests-are much more capable of shaping the future of the 
natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self-regeneration. These 
forms of domination must be confronted by collective action and major social 
movements that challenge the social sources of the ecological crisis, not simply 
by personalistic forms of consumption and investment that often go under the 
rubric of "green capitalism." We live in a highly cooptative society that is 
only too eager to find new areas of commercial aggrandizement and to add 
ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer relations. 
NATURE AND SOCETY
Let us begin, then, with basics-namely, by asking what we mean by nature and 
society. Among the many definitions of nature that have been formulated over 
time, one is rather elusive and often difficult to grasp because it requires a 
certain way of thinking-one that stands at odds with what we popularly call 
"linear thinking." This form of "nonlinear" or organic thinking is developmental 
rather than analytical, or, in more technical terms, dialectical rather than 
instrumental. Nature, conceived in terms of developmental thinking, is more than 
the beautiful vistas we see from a mountaintop or in the images that are fixed 
on the backs of picture postcards. Such vistas and images of nonhuman nature are 
basically static and immobile. Our attention, to be sure, may be arrested by the 
soaring flight of a hawk, or the bolting leap of a deer, or the low-slung 
shadowy loping of a coyote. But what we are really witnessing in such cases are 
the mere kinetics of physical motion, caught in the frame of an essentially 
static image of the scene before our eyes. It deceives us into believing in the 
"eternality" of a single moment in nature.
If we look with some care into nonhuman nature as more than a scenic view, we 
begin to sense that it is basically an evolving phenomenon, a richly fecund, 
even dramatic development that is forever changing. I mean to define nonhuman 
nature precisely as an evolving process, as the totality, in fact of its 
evolution. This encompasses the development from the inorganic into the organic, 
from the less differentiated and relatively limited world of unicellular 
organisms into that of multicellular ones equipped with simple, later complex, 
and presently fairly intelligent neural apparatuses that allow them to make 
innovative choices. Finally, the acquisition of warm-bloodedness gives to 
organisms the astonishing flexibility to exist in the most demanding climatic 
environments.
This vast drama of nonhuman nature is in every respect stunningly wondrous. It 
is marked by increasing subjectivity and flexibility and by increasing 
differentiation that makes an organism more adaptable to new environmental 
challenges and opportunities and renders a living being more equipped to alter 
its environment to meet its own needs. One may speculate that the potentiality 
of matter itself-the ceaseless interactivity of atoms in forming new chemical 
combinations to produce ever more complex molecules, amino acids, proteins, and, 
under suitable conditions, elementary life-forms-is inherent in inorganic 
nature. Or one may decide, quite matter-of-factly, that the "struggle for 
existence" or the "survival of the fittest" (to use popular Darwinian terms) 
explains why increasingly subjective and more flexible beings are capable of 
dealing with environmental changes more effectively than are less subjective and 
flexible beings. But the fact remains that the kind of evolutionary drama I have 
described did occur, and is carved in stone in the fossil record. That nature is 
this record, this history, this developmental or evolutionary process, is a very 
sobering fact.
Conceiving nonhuman nature as its own evolution rather than as a mere vista has 
profound implications-ethical as well as biological-for ecologically minded 
people. Human beings embody, at least potentially, attributes of nonhuman 
development that place them squarely within organic evolution. They are not 
"natural aliens," to use Neil Evernden's phrase, strange "exotics," phylogenetic 
"deformities" that, owing to their tool-making capacities, "cannot evolve with 
an ecosystem anywhere."2 Nor are they "intelligent fleas," to use the language 
of Gaian theorists who believe that the earth ("Gaia") is one living organism. 
These untenable disjunctions between humanity and the evolutionary process are 
as superficial as they are potentially misanthropic. Humans are highly 
intelligent, indeed, very self-conscious primates, which is to say that they 
have emerged"not diverged"from a long evolution of vertebrate life-forms into 
mammalian, and finally, primate life-forms. They are a product of a significant 
evolutionary trend toward intellectuality, self-awareness, will, intentionality, 
and expressiveness, be it in oral or body language.
Human beings belong to a natural continuum, no less than their primate ancestors 
and mammals in general. To depict them as "aliens" that have no place or 
pedigree in natural evolution, or to see them essentially as an infestation that 
parasitizes a highly anthropomorphic version of the planet (Gaia) the way fleas 
parasitize dogs and cats, is bad thinking, not only bad ecology. Lacking any 
sense of process, this kind of thinking-regrettably so commonplace among 
ethicists-radically bifurcates the nonhuman from the human. Indeed, to the 
degree that nonhuman nature is romanticized as "wilderness," and seen presumably 
as more authentically "natural" than the works of humans, the natural world is 
frozen into a circumscribed domain in which human innovation, foresight, and 
creativity have no place and offer no possibilities. 
The truth is that human beings not only belong in nature, they are products of a 
long, natural evolutionary process. Their seemingly "unnatural" activities-like 
the development of technology and science, the formation of mutable social 
institutions, of highly symbolic forms of communication, of aesthetic 
sensibilities, the creation of towns and cities-all would be impossible without 
the large array of physical attributes that have been eons in the making, be 
they large brains or the bipedal motion that frees their hands for tool making 
and carrying food. In many respects, human traits are enlargements of nonhuman 
traits that have been evolving over the ages. Increasing care for the young, 
cooperation, the substitution of mentally guided behavior for largely 
instinctive behavior--all are present more keenly in human behavior. The 
difference between the development of these traits among nonhuman beings is that 
among humans they reach a degree of elaboration and integration that yields 
cultures or, viewed institutionally in terms of families, bands, tribes, 
hierarchies, economic classes, and the state, highly mutable societies for which 
there is no precedent in the nonhuman world-unless the genetically programmed 
behavior of insects is to be regarded as "social." In fact, the emergence and 
development of human society is a shedding of instinctive behavioral traits, a 
contlnuing process of clearing a new terrain for potentially rational behavior.
Human beings always remain rooted in their biological evolutionary history, 
which we may call "first Nature," but they produce a characteristically human 
social nature of their own which we may call "second nature." And far from being 
"unnatural," human second nature is eminently a creation of organic evolution's 
first nature. To write the second nature created by human beings out of nature 
as a whole, or indeed, to minimize it, is to ignore the creativity of natural 
evolution itself and to view it onesidedly. If "true" evolution embodies itself 
simply in creatures like grizzly bears, wolves, and whales-generally, animals 
that people find aesthetically pleasing or relatively intelligent-then human 
beings are literally de-natured. In such views, whether seen as "aliens" or as 
"fleas," humans are essentially placed outside the self-organizing thrust of 
natural evolution toward increasing subjectivity and flexibility. The more 
enthusiastic proponents of this de-naturing of humanity may see human beings as 
existing apart from nonhuman evolution, thereby dealing with people as a 
"freaking," as Paul Shepard puts it, of the evolutionary process. Others simply 
avoid the problem of humanity's unique place in natural evolution by 
promiscuously putting human beings on a par with beetles in terms of their 
"intrinsic worth." In this "either/or" propositional thinking, the social is 
either separated from the organic, or flippantly reduced to the organic, 
resulting in an inexplicable dualism at one extreme or a naive reductionism at 
the other. The dualistic approach, with its quasi-theological premise that the 
world was "made" for human use is saddled with the name of "anthropocentricity," 
while the reductionist approach, with its almost meaningless notion of a 
"biocentric democracy," is saddled with the name of "biocentricity." 
The bifurcation of the human from the nonhuman reveals a failure to think 
organically, and to approach evolutionary phenomena with an evolutionary way of 
thought. Needless to say, if we are content to regard nature as no more than a 
scenic vista, mere metaphoric and poetic description of it might suffice to 
replace systematic thinking about it. But if we regard nature as the history of 
nature, as an evolutionary process that is going on to one degree or another 
under our very eyes, we dishonor this process by thinking of it in anything but 
a processual way. That is to say, we require a way of thinking that recognizes 
that "what-is" as it seems to lie before our eyes is always developing into 
"what-it-is-not," that it is engaged in a continual self-organizing process in 
which past and present, seen as a richly differentiated but shared continuum, 
give rise to a new potentiality for a future, ever-richer degree of wholeness. 
Accordingly, the human and the nonhuman can be seen as aspects of an 
evolutionary continuum, and the emergence of the human can be located in the 
evolution of the nonhuman, without advancing naive claims that one is either 
"superior to" or "made for" the other.
By the same token, in a processual, organic, and dialectical way of thinking, we 
would have little difficulty in locating and explaining the emergence of the 
social out of the biological, of second nature out of first nature. It seems 
more fashionable these days to deal with ecologically significant social issues 
like a bookkeeper. One simply juxtaposes two columns-labeled "old paradigm" and 
"new paradigm"-as though one were dealing with debits and credits. Obviously 
distasteful terms like "centralization" are placed under "old paradigm," while 
more appealing ones like "decentralization" are regarded as "new paradigm." The 
result is an inventory of bumper-sticker slogans whose "bottom line" is patently 
a form of "absolute good versus absolute evil." All of this maybe deliciously 
synoptic and easy for the eyes, but it is singularly lacking as food for the 
brain. To truly know and be able to give interpretative meaning to the social 
issues so arranged, we should want to know how each idea derived from others and 
is part of an overall development. What, in fact, do we mean by the notion of 
"decentralization," and how does it derive from or give rise in the history of 
human society to "centralization"? Again: processual thinking is needed to deal 
with processual realities so that we can gain some sense of direction-practical 
as well as theoretical-in dealing with our ecological problems.
Social ecology seems to stand alone, at present, in calling for the use of 
organic, developmental, and derivative ways of thinking out problems that are 
basically organic and developmental in character. The very definition of the 
natural world as a development indicates the need for an organic way of 
thinking, as does the derivation of human from nonhuman nature-a derivation that 
has the most far-reaching consequences for an ecological ethics that can offer 
serious guidelines for the solution of our ecological problems.
Social ecology calls upon us to see that nature and society are interlinked by 
evolution into one nature that consists of two differentiations: first or biotic 
nature, and second or human nature. Human nature and biotic nature share an 
evolutionary potential for greater subjectivity and flexibility. Second nature 
is the way in which human beings as flexible, highly intelligent primates 
inhabit the natural world. That is to say, people create an environment that is 
most suitable for their mode of existence. In this respect, second nature is no 
different from the environment that every animal, depending upon its abilities, 
creates as well as adapts to, the biophysical circumstances-or ecocommunity-in 
which it must live. On this very simple level, human beings are, in principle, 
doing nothing that differs from the survival activities of nonhuman beings-be it 
building beaver dams or gopher holes.
But the environmental changes that human beings produce are significantly 
different from those produced by nonhuman beings. Humans act upon their 
environments with considerable technical foresight, however lacking that 
foresight may be in ecological respects. Their cultures are rich in knowledge, 
experience, cooperation, and conceptual intellectuality; however, they may be 
sharply divided against themselves at certain points of their development, 
through conflicts between groups, classes, nation states, and even city-states. 
Nonhuman beings generally live in ecological niches, their behavior guided 
primarily by instinctive drives and conditioned reflexes. Human societies are 
"bonded" together by institutions that change radically over centuries. Nonhuman 
communities are notable for their fixity in general terms or by clearly preset, 
often genetically imprinted, rhythms. Human communities are guided in part by 
ideological factors and are subject to changes conditioned by those factors.
Hence human beings, emerging from an organic evolutionary process, initiate, by 
the sheer force of their blology and survival needs, a social evolutionary 
development that profoundly involves their organic evolutionary process. Owing 
to their naturally endowed intelligence, powers of communication, capacity for 
institutional organization, and relative freedom from instinctive behavior, they 
refashion their environment-as do nonhuman beings-to the full extent of their 
biological equipment. This equipment now makes it possible for them to engage in 
social development. It is not so much that human beings, in principle, behave 
differently from animals or are inherently more problematical in a strictly 
ecological sense, but that the social development by which they grade out of 
their biological development often becomes more problematicai for themselves and 
non human life. How these problems emerge, the ideologies they produce, the 
extent to which they contribute to biotic evolution or abort it, and the damage 
they infiict on the planet as a whole lie at the very heart of the modern 
ecological crisis. Second nature, far from marking the fulfillment of human 
potentialities, is riddled by contradictions, antagonisms, and conflicting 
interests that have distorted humanity's unique capacities for development. It 
contains both the danger of tearing down the biosphere and, given a further 
development of humanity toward an ecological society, the capacity to provide an 
entirely new ecological dispensation. 
SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND DOMINATION
How, then, did the social-eventually structured around status groups, class 
formations, and cultural phenomena"emerge from the biological? We have reason to 
speculate that as biological facts such as lineage, gender distribution, and age 
differences were slowly institutionalized, their uniquely social dimension was 
initially quite egalitarian. Later it acquired an oppressive hierarchical and 
then an exploitative class form. The lineage or blood tie in early prehistory 
obviously formed the organic basis of the family. Indeed, it joined together 
groups of families into bands, clans, and tribes, through either intermarriage 
or fictive forms of descent, thereby forming the earliest social horizon of our 
ancestors. More than in other mammals, the simple biological facts of human 
reproduction and protracted maternal care of the infant tended to knit siblings 
together and produced a strong sense of solidarity and group inwardness. Men, 
women, and their children were brought into a condition of a fairly stable 
family life, based on mutual obligation and an expressed sense of affinity that 
was often sanctified by marital vows of one kind or another.
Outside the family and all its elaborations into bands, clans, tribes and the 
like, other human beings were regarded as "strangers," who could alternatively 
be welcomed hospitably or enslaved or put to death. What mores existed were 
based on an unreflected body of customs that seemed to have been inherited from 
time immemorial. What we call morality began as the commandments of a deity, in 
that they required some kind of supernatural or mystical reinforcement to be 
accepted by the community. Only later, beginning with the ancient Greeks, did 
ethical behavior emerge, based on rational discourse and reflection. The shift 
from blind custom to a commanding morality, and finally, to a rational ethics 
occurred with the rise of cities and urban cosmopolitanism. Humanity, gradually 
disengaging itself from the biological facts of blood ties, began to admit the 
"stranger" and increasingly recognize itself as a shared community of human 
beings rather than an ethnic folk-a community of citizens rather than of 
kinsmen.
In the primordial and socially formative world that we must still explore, other 
of humanity's biological traits were to be reworked from the strictly natural to 
the social. One of these was the fact of age and its distinctions. In the 
emerging social groups that developed among early humans, the absence of a 
written language helped to confer on the elderly a high degree of status, for it 
was they who possessed the traditional wisdom of the community, the kinship 
lines that prescribed marital ties in obedience to extensive incest taboos, and 
techniques for survival that had to be acquired by both the young and the mature 
members of the group. In addition, the biological fact of gender distinctions 
were to be slowly reworked along social lines into what were initially 
complementary sororal and fraternal groups. Women formed their own 
food-gathering and care taking groups with their own customs, belief systems, 
and values, while men formed their own hunting and warrior groups with their own 
behavioral characteristics, mores, and ideologies.
From everything we know about the socialization of the biological facts of 
kinship, age, and gender groups-their elaboration into early institutions-there 
is no reason to doubt that people existed in a complementary relationship with 
one another. Each, in effect, was needed by the other to form a relatively 
stable whole. No one "dominated" the others or tried to privilege itself in the 
normal course of things. Yet with the passing of time, even as the biological 
facts that underpin every human group were further reworked into social 
institutions, so the social institutions were slowly reworked at various periods 
and in various degrees, into hierarchical structures based on command and 
obedience. I speak here of a historical trend, in no way predetermined by any 
mystical force or deity, a trend that often did not go beyond a very limited 
development among many preliterate or aboriginal cultures, and even in certain 
fairly elaborate civilizations. Nor can we foretell how human history might have 
developed had certain feminine values associated with care and nurture not been 
overshadowed by masculine values associated with combative and aggressive 
behavior.
Hierarchy in its earliest forms was probably not marked by the harsh qualities 
it has acquired over history. Elders, at the very beginnings of gerontocracy, 
were not only respected for their wisdom but often beloved of the young, and 
their affection was often reciprocated in kind. We can probably account for the 
increasing stridency and harshness of later gerontocracies by supposing that the 
elderly, burdened by their failing powers and dependent upon the community's 
goodwill, were more vulnerable to abandonment in periods of material want than 
any other part of the population. In any case, that gerontocracies were the 
earliest forms of hierarchy is corroborated by their existence in communities as 
far removed from each other as the Australian Aborigines, tribal societies in 
East Africa, and Indian communities in the Americas. "Even in simple 
food-gathering cultures, individuals above fifty, let us say, apparently 
arrogated to themselves certain powers and privileges which benefitted 
themselves specifically," observes anthropologist Paul Radin, "and were not 
necessarily, if at all, dictated by considerations either of the rights of 
others or the welfare of the community."3 Many tribal councils throughout the 
world were really councils of elders, an institution that never completely 
disappeared (as the word "alderman" suggests), even though they were overlaid by 
warrior societies, chiefdoms, and kingships. 
Patricentricity, in which male values, institutions, and forms of behavior 
prevail over female ones, seems to have followed gerontocracy. Initially, this 
shift may have been fairly harmless, inasmuch as preliterate and early 
aboriginal societies were largely domestic communities in which the authentic 
center of material life was the home, not the "men's house" so widely present in 
tribal societies. Male rule, if such it can be strictly called, takes on its 
most severe and coercive form in patriarchy, an institution in which the eldest 
male of an extended family or clan has a life-and-death command over all members 
of the group. Women are by no means the exclusive or even the principal target 
of the patriarch's domination. The sons, like the daughters, may be ordered how 
to behave and whom to marry and may be killed at the whim of the "old man." So 
far as patricentricity is concerned, however, the authority and prerogative of 
the male are the product of a slow, often subtly negotiated development in which 
the male fraternity tends to edge out the female sorority by virtue of the 
former's growing "civil" responsibilities. Increasing population, marauding 
bands of outsiders whose migrations may be induced by drought or other 
unfavorable conditions, and vendettas of one kind or another, to cite common 
causes of hostility or war, create a new "civil" sphere side by side with 
woman's domestic sphere, and the former gradually encroaches upon the latter. 
With the appearance of cattle-drawn plow agriculture, the male begins to invade 
the horticultural sphere of woman, who had used the simple digging stick, and 
her earlier economic predominance in the community's life is thereby diluted. 
Warrior societies and chiefs carry the momentum of male dominance to the level 
of a new material and cultural constellation. Male dominance becomes extremely 
active and ultimately yields a world that is managed by male elites who dominate 
not only women but also other men.
"Why" hierarchy emerges is transparent enough: the infirmities of age, 
increasing population, natural disasters, certain technological changes that 
privilege male activities of hunting and caring for animals over the 
horticultural functions of females, the growth of civil society, the spread of 
warfare. All serve to enhance the male's responsibilities at the expense of the 
female's. Marxist theorists tend to single out technological advances and the 
presumed material surpluses they produce to explain the emergence of elite 
strata-indeed, of exploiting ruling classes. However, this does not tell us why 
many societies whose environments were abundantly rich in food never produced 
such strata. That surpluses are necessary to support elites and classes is 
obvious, as Aristotle pointed out more than two millennia ago. But too many 
communities that had such resources at their disposal remained quite egalitarian 
and never "advanced" to hierarchical or class societies.
It is worth emphasizing that hierarchical domination, however coercive it may 
be, is not to be confused with class exploitation. Often the role of high-status 
individuals is very well-meaning, as in the case of commands given by caring 
parents to their children, of concerned husbands and wives to each other, or of 
elderly people to younger ones. In tribal societies, even where a considerable 
measure of authority accrues to a chief-and most chiefs are advisers rather than 
rulers-he usually must earn the esteem of the community by interacting with the 
people, and he can easily be ignored or removed from his position by them. Many 
chiefs earn their prestige, so essential to their authority, by disposing of 
gifts, and even by a considerable disaccumulation of their personal goods. The 
respect accorded to many chiefs is earned, not by hoarding surpluses as a means 
to power but by disposing of them as evidence of generosity.
Classes tend to operate along different lines. Power is usually gained by the 
acquisition of wealth, not by its disposal; rulership is guaranteed by outright 
physical coercion, not simply by persuasion; and the state is the ultimate 
guarantor of authority. That hierarchy is more entrenched than class can perhaps 
be verified by the fact that women have been dominated for millennia, despite 
sweeping changes in class societies. By the same token, the abolition of class 
rule and economic exploitation offers no guarantee whatever that elaborate 
hierarchies and systems of domination will disappear.
In nonhierarchical and even some hierarchical societies, certain customs guide 
human behavior along basically decent lines. Of primary importance in early 
customs was the "law of the irreducible minimum" (to use Radin's expression), 
the shared notion that all members of a community are entitled to the means of 
life, irrespective of the amount of work they perform. To deny anyone food, 
shelter, and the basic means of life because of infirmities or even frivolous 
behavior would have been seen as a heinous denial of the very right to live. Nor 
were the resources and things needed to sustain the community ever completely 
privately owned: overriding individualistic control was the broader principle of 
usufruct-the notion that the means of life that were not being used by one group 
could be used, as need be, by another. Thus unused land, orchards, and even 
tools and weapons, if left idle, were at the disposition of anyone in the 
community who needed them. Lastly, custom fostered the practice of mutual aid, 
the rather sensible cooperative behavior of sharing things and labor, so that an 
individual or family in fairly good circumstances could expect to be helped by 
others if their fortunes should change for the worse. Taken as a whole, these 
customs became so sedimented into society that they persisted long after 
hierarchy became oppressive and class society became predominant.
THE IDEA OF DOMINATING NATURE
"Nature," in the broad sense of a biotic environment from which humans take the 
simple things they need for survival, often has no meaning to preliterate 
peoples. Immersed in nature as the very universe of their lives it has no 
special meaning, even when they celebrate animistic rituals and view the world 
around them as a nexus of life, often imputing their own social institutions to 
the behavior of various species, as in the case of "beaver lodges" and humanlike 
spirits. Words that express our conventional notions of nature are not easy to 
find, if they exist at all, in the languages of aboriginal peoples.
With the rise of hierarchy and human domination, however, the seeds are planted 
for a belief that nature not only exists as a world apart, but that it is 
hierarchically organized and can be dominated. The study of magic reveals this 
shift clearly. Early forms of magic did not view nature as a world apart. Its 
worldview tended to be such that a practitioner essentially pleaded with the 
"chief spirit" of the game to coax an animal in the direction of an arrow or a 
spear. Later, magic becomes almost entirely instrumental; the game is coerced by 
magical techniques to become the hunter's prey. While the earliest forms of 
magic may be regarded as the practices of a generally nonhierarchical and 
egalitarian community, the later forms of animistic beliefs betray a more or 
less hierarchical view of the natural world and of latent human powers of 
domination.
We must emphasize, here, that the idea of dominating nature has its primary 
source in the domination of human by human and the structuring of the natural 
world into a hierarchical Chain of Being (a static conception, incidentally, 
that has no relationship to the evolution of life into increasingly advanced 
forms of subjectivity and flexibility). The biblical injunction that gave to 
Adam and Noah command of the living world was above all an expression of a 
social dispensation. Its idea of dominating nature can be overcome only through 
the creation of a society without those class and hierarchical structures that 
make for rule and obedience in private as well as public life. That this new 
dispensation involves changes in attitudes and values should go without saying. 
But these attitudes and values remain vaporous if they are not given substance 
through objective institutions, the ways in which humans concretely interact 
with each other, and in the realities of everyday life from childrearing to work 
and play. Until human beings cease to live in societies that are structured 
around hierarchies as well as economic classes, we shall never be free of 
domination, however much we try to dispel it with rituals, incantations, 
ecotheologies, and the adoption of seemingly "natural" ways of life.
The idea of dominating nature has a history that is almost as old as that of 
hierarchy itself. Already in the Gilgamesh Epic of Mesopotamia, a drama that 
dates back some 7,000 years, the hero defies the deities and cuts down their 
sacred trees in his quest for immortality. The Odyssey is a vast travelogue of 
the Greek warrior, albeit a more canny than a heroic one, who essentially 
dispatches the nature deities that the Hellenic world inherited from its less 
well-known precursors. That elitist societies devastated much of the 
Mediterranean basin as well as the hillsides of China provides ample evidence 
that hierarchical and class societies had begun a sweeping remaking and 
despoliation of the planet long before the emergence of modern science, "linear" 
rationality, and "industrial society," to cite causal factors that are invoked 
so freely in the modern ecology movement. Second nature, to be sure, did not 
create a Garden of Eden in steadily absorbing and inflicting harm on first 
nature. More often than not, it despoiled much that was beautiful, creative, and 
dynamic in the biotic world, just as it ravaged human life itself in murderous 
wars, genocide, and acts of heartless oppression. Social ecology refuses to 
ignore the fact that the harm elitist society inflicted on the natural world was 
more than matched by the harm it inflicted on humanity; nor does it overlook the 
fact that the destiny of human life goes hand-in-hand with the destiny of the 
nonhuman world.
But the customs of the irreducible minimum, usufruct, and mutual aid cannot be 
ignored, however troubling the ills produced by second nature may seem. These 
customs persisted well into history and surfaced almost explosively in massive 
popular uprisings, from early revolts in ancient Surner to the present time. 
Many of those demanded the recovery of caring and communitarian values when 
these were under the onslaught of elitist and class oppression. Indeed, despite 
the armies that roamed the landscape of warring areas, the taxgatherers who 
plundered ordinary village peoples, and the daily abuses that were inflicted by 
overseers on workers, community life still persisted and retained many of the 
cherished values of a more egalitarian past. Neither ancient despots nor feudal 
lords could fully obliterate them in peasant villages and in the towns with 
independent craft guilds. In ancient Greece, religions based on austerity and, 
more significantly, a rational philosophy that rejected the encumbering of 
thought and political life by extravagant wants, tended to scale down needs and 
delimit human appetites for material goods. They served to slow the pace of 
technological innovation to a point where new means of production could be 
sensitively integrated into a balanced society. Medieval markets were modest, 
usually local afairs, in which guilds exercised strict control over prices, 
competition, and the quality of the goods produced by their members. 
"GROW OR DIE!" 
But just as hierarchies and class structures tend to acquire a momentum of their 
own and permeate much of society, so too the market began to acquire a life of 
its own and extended its reach beyond limited regions into the depths of vast 
continents. Exchange ceased to be primarily a means to provide for modest needs, 
subverting the limits imposed upon it by guilds or by moral and religious 
restrictions. Not only did it place a high premium on techniques for increasing 
production; it also became the procreator of needs, many of which are simply 
useless, and gave an explosive impetus to consumption and technology. First in 
northern Italy and the European lowlands, later-and most effectively-in England 
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the production of goods 
exclusively for sale and profit (the capitalistic commodity) rapidly swept aside 
all cultural and social barriers to market growth.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the new industrial 
capitalist class with its factory system and commitment to limitless expansion 
began to colonize the entire world, and finally, most aspects of personal life. 
Unlike the feudal nobility, which had its cherished lands and castles, the 
bourgeoisie had no home but the marketplace and its bank vaults. As a class, 
they turned more and more of the world into an ever-expanding domain of 
factories. Entrepreneurs of the ancient and medieval worlds had normally 
gathered their profits together to invest in land and live like country 
gentry-given the prejudices of their times against "ill-gotten" gains from 
trade. On the other hand, the industrial capitalists of the modern world spawned 
a bitterly competitive marketplace that placed a high premium on industrial 
expansion and the commercial power it conferred, and functioned as though growth 
were an end in itself.
It is crucially important, in social ecology, to recognize that industrial 
growth does not result from a change in a cultural outlook alone"and least of 
all, from the impact of scientific rationality on society. lt stems above all 
from harshly objective factors churned up by the expansion of the market itself, 
factors thot are largely impervious to moral considerotions and efforts at 
ethical persuasion. Indeed, despite the close association between capitalist 
development and technological innovation, the most driving imperative of the 
capitalist market, given the dehumanizing competition that defines it, is the 
need to grow, and to avoid dying at the hands of savage rivals. Important as 
greed or the power conferred by weaIth may be, sheer survival requires that an 
entrepreneur must expand his or her productive apparatus to remain ahead of 
other entrepreneurs and try, in fact, to devour them. The key to this law of 
life-to survival-is expansion, and greater profit, to be invested in still 
further expansion. Indeed, the notion of progress, once identified by our 
ancestors as a faith in the evolution of greater human cooperation and care, is 
now identified with economic growth. 
The effort by many well-intentioned ecology theorists and their admirers to 
reduce the ecological crisis to a cultural rather than a social problem can 
easily become obfuscatory. However ecologically concerned an entrepreneur may 
be, the harsh fact is that his or her very survival in the marketplace precludes 
a meaningful ecological orientation. To engage in ecologically sound practices 
places a morally concerned entrepreneur at a striking, and indeed, fatal 
disadvantage in a competitive relationship with a rival-notably one who lacks 
any ecological concerns and thus produces at lower costs and reaps higher 
profits for further capital expansion.
Indeed, to the extent that environmental movements and ideologies merely 
moralize about the "wickedness" of our anti-ecological society, and emphasize 
change in personal life and attitudes, they obscure the need for social action. 
Corporations are skilled at manipulating this desire to be present as an 
ecological image. Mercedes-Benz, for example, declaims in a two-page ad, 
decorated with a bison painting from a Paleolithic cave wall, that "we must work 
to make more environmentally sustainable progress by including the theme of the 
environment in the planning of new products."5 Such deceptive messages are 
commonplace in Germany, one of western Europe's worst polluters. Advertising is 
equally self-serving in the United States, where leading polluters piously 
declare that for them, "Every day is Earth Day."
The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual change is 
meaningless or unnecessary, but that modern capitalism is structurally amoral 
and hence impervious to any moral appeals. The modern marketplace has 
imperatives of its own, irrespective of who sits in the driver's seat or grabs 
on to its handlebars. The direction it follows depends not upon ethical factors 
but rather on the mindless "laws" of supply and demand, grow or die, eat or be 
eaten. Maxims like "business is business" explicitly tell us that ethical, 
religious, psychological, and emotional factors have absolutely no place in the 
impersonal world of production, profit, and growth. It is grossly misleading to 
think that we can divest this brutally materialistic, indeed, mechanistic, world 
of its objective character, that we can vaporize its hard facts rather than 
trans forming it.
A society based on "grow or die" as its all-pervasive imperative must 
necessarily have a devastating ecological impact. Given the growth imperative 
generated by market competition, it would mean little or nothing if the 
present-day population were reduced to a fraction of what it is today. Insofar 
as entrepreneurs must always expand if they are to survive, the media that have 
fostered mindless consumption would be mobilized to increase the purchase of 
goods, irrespective of the need for them. Hence it would become "indispensable" 
in the public mind to own two or three of every appliance, motor vehicle, 
electronic gadget, or the like, where one would more than suffice. In addition, 
the military would continue to demand new, more lethal instruments of death, of 
which new models would be required annually.
Nor would "softer" technologies produced by a grow-or-die market fail to be used 
for destructive capitalistic ends. Two centuries ago, the forests of England 
were hacked into fuel for iron forges with axes that had not changed appreciably 
since the Bronze Age, and ordinary sails guided ships laden with commodities to 
all parts of the world well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, much of the 
United States was "cleared" of its forests, wildlife, soil, and aboriginal 
inhabitants with tools and weapons that would have been easily recognized, 
however much they were modified, by Renaissance people who had yet to encounter 
the Industrial Revolution. What modern technics did was to accelerate a process 
that was well under way at the close of the Middle Ages. It did not devastate 
the planet on its own; it abetted a phenomenon, the ever-expanding market system 
that had its roots in one of history's most fundamental social transformations: 
the elaboration of hierarchy and class into a system of distribution based on 
exchange rather than complementarity and mutual aid. 
AN ECOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Social ecology is an appeal not only for moral regeneration but also, and above 
all, for social reconstruction along ecological lines. It emphasizes that an 
ethical appeal to the powers that be (that embody blind market forces and 
competitive relationships), taken by itself, is likely to be futile. Indeed, 
taken by itself, it often obscures the real power relationships that prevail 
today by making the attainment of an ecological society seem merely a matter of 
"attitude," of "spiritual change," or of quasi-religious redemption.
Although always mindful of the need for spiritual change, social ecology seeks 
to redress the ecological abuses that society has inflicted on the natural world 
by going to the structural as well as the subjective sources of notions like the 
"domination of nature." That is, it challenges the entire system of domination 
itself and seeks to eliminate the hierarchical and class edifice that has 
imposed itself on humanity and defined the relationship between nonhuman and 
human nature. It advances an ethics of complementarity in which human beings 
must play a supportive role in perpetuating the integrity of the biosphere, as 
potentially, at least, the most conscious products of natural evolution. Indeed 
humans are seen to have a moral responsibility to function creatively in the 
unfolding of that evolution. Social ecology thus stresses the need for embodying 
its ethics of complementarity in palpable social institutions that will give 
active meaning to its goal of wholeness, and of human involvement as conscious 
and moral agents in the interplay of species. It seeks the enrichment of the 
(MISSING 370-371)
legitimation that it so often indicates today. It meant the cultivation of an 
affiliation with the interests of the community, one in which the communal 
interest was placed above personal interest, or, more properly, in which the 
personal interest was congruent with and realized through the common. 
Property, in this ethical constellation, would be shared and, in the best of 
circumstances, belong to the community as a whole, not to producers ("workers") 
or owners ("capitalists"). In an ecological society composed of a "Commune of 
communes," property would belong, ultimately, neither to private producers nor 
to a nation-state. The Soviet Union gave rise to an overbearing bureaucracy; the 
anarcho-syndicalist vision to competing "worker-controlled" factories that 
ultimately had to be knitted together by a labor bureaucracy. From the 
standpoint of social ecology, property "interests" would become generalized, not 
reconstituted in different conflicting or umnanageable forms. They would be 
municipalized, rather than nationalized or privatized. Workers, farmers, 
professionals, and the like would thus deal with municipalized property as 
citizens, not as members of a vocational or social group. Leaving aside any 
discussion of such visions as the rotation of work, the citizen who engages in 
both industrial and agricultural activity, and the professional who also does 
manual labor, the communal ideas advanced by social ecology would give rise to 
individuals for whom the collective interest is inseparable from the personal, 
the public interest from the private, the political interest from the social.
The step-by-step reorganization of municipalities, their confederation into 
ever-larger networks that form a dual power in opposition to the nation-state, 
the remaking of the constituents of republican representatives into citizens who 
participate in a direct democracy-all may take a considerable period of time to 
achieve. But in the end, they alone can potentially eliminate the domination of 
human by human and thereby deal with those ecological problems whose growing 
magnitude threatens the existence of a biosphere than can support advanced forms 
of life. To ignore the need for these sweeping but eminently practical changes 
would be to let our ecological problems fester and spread to a point where there 
would no longer be any opportunity to resolve them. Any attempt to ignore their 
impact on the biosphere or deal with them singly would be recipe for disaster, a 
guarantee that the anti-ecological society that prevails in most of the world 
today would blindly hurtle the biosphere as we know it to certain destruction. 
 
NOTES
1 Murray Bookchin, "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought," initially published in 
the ecoanarchist journal New Directions in Libertarian Thought (Sept., 1964), 
and collected, together with all my major essays of the sixties in Post-Scarcity 
Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1972; republished, Montreal: Black Rose 
Books, 1977). The expression "ethics of complementarity" is from The Ecology of 
Freedom (San Francisco: Cheshire Books, l982; revised edition, Montreal: Black 
Rose Books, 1991).
2 Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1986), 
p. 109. 
3 Paul Radin, The World of Primitive Man (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 211. 
4 Quoted in Alan Wolfe, "Up from Humanism," in The Arnerican Prospect (Winter, 
1991), p. 125.
5 See Der Spiegel (Sept. 16, 1991), pp. 144-45.
6 All of these views were spelled out in the essay "Ecology and Revolutionary 
Thought" by this writer in 1965, and were assimilated over time by subsequent 
ecology movements. Many of the technological views advanced a year later in 
"Toward a Liberatory Technology" were also assimilated and renamed "appropriate 
technology," a rather socially neutral expression in comparison with my original 
term "ecotechnology." Both of these essays can be found in Post-Scarcity 
Anarchism.
7 See the essay "The Forms of Freedom," in Post-Scarcity Anarchism, "The Legacy 
of Freedom," in The Ecology of Freedom, and "Patterns of Civic Freedom" in The 
Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club 
Books, 1987).
