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 ...
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