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Title: Stateless Environmentalism
Author: Francisco J. Toro
Date: 2021
Language: en
Topics: Eco-anarchism; environmental ; environmentalism; bioregionalism; social ecology; anarcho-primitivism
Source: https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1950

Francisco J. Toro

Stateless Environmentalism

Abstract

The State and its governmental institutions have been dignified in the

environmentalist mainstream as palliative forces to face and solve the

excesses and failures of capitalism and neoliberalism towards a proper

environmental management. But this environmental state falls into

evident contradictions regards to its formal commitment with

environmentalist purposes. In addition, governmental institutions

contribute to expand a nihilist attitude in the environmentalist actions

of the citizenship. Within the environmentalist strands of anarchism,

the matter of State has focused a relevant attention and position. An

early green criticism may be found in the nineteenth century anarchists,

in which State has no room as a violent and centralized force, and

corrupting the goodness of the material, reproductive and spiritual

connection of humans with Nature. Most recent eco-anarchist approaches,

such as social ecologists, bioregionalists and anarcho-primitivists have

analysed how determinant is State as a responsible agent in the global

environmental crisis and proposed alternatives to this coercive power.

This paper is aiming a) to examine some of the main contributions of the

“green” criticism to State from eco-anarchists; and b) to build a

consistent and wide critique of the State, helping to promote a

non-statist balanced and fair relationship between societies and Nature.

Introduction: The Environmental State, a Suspicious Legitimation?

The State and governmental institutions have reached a determinant role

in the environmental arena. Specific literature and scholars refer to

this as a new stage or process of mutation of the former disrespectful

and harming statist attitudes towards Nature, bonded to the origin of

modern nation-states. This rise of environmental concerns within the

national centralized governance is thus named with a variety of

expressions such as ‘green state’ (Saward 1998; Dryzek et al. 2003;

Eckersley 2004; Wilson 2006; Melo-Escrihuela 2008; Huh et al. 2018),

‘ecostate’ (Duit 2011; Craig 2020), ‘eco-social state’ (Koch and Fritz

2014; Jakobsson et al. 2018) or using a broader and all-encompassing

approach as “environmental state” (Meadowcroft 2014; Duit et al. 2016;

Gough 2016; Mol 2016; Hatzisavvidou 2019; Hausknost 2020; Machin 2020).

To a certain extent, responses to environmental claims within the public

institutions are in proportion to their historical legitimacy,

understanding the State as “the most powerful human mechanism for

collective action than can compel obedience and redistribute resources”

(Duit et al. 2016, 3). Since the emergence of post-war Welfare States

mostly in the developed countries, public institutions have assumed the

prerogative to intercede in the enhancement of standard for the

citizenry, reinforcing the interventionist role of public over

particular, corporate, communal and private interests. Thereby, the

transition to an environmental state would be a step forward in the

consolidation of the Welfare State inasmuch as the challenges that must

be elucidated intimately affect to social and collective dimensions of

quality of life. In fact, this transformation of the statist paradigm is

actually a continuity of the same administrative procedures and

organizational model but disguised as green.

Environmental issues demand regulatory methods, such as a normative

framework, sanctions and taxes in order to guarantee basic dimensions of

welfare which rely on environmental parameters; a sort of measures that

coactive and authoritarian polities might implement with quite efficacy.

Both developed and developing nation-states have increasingly placed in

their administrative bodies a relevant position to the management of

environmental problems, whether it has or not an equivalent influence to

other remits, such as economy, public security and finances.

Furthermore, the environmental agency has been formed in order to

overcome the traditional centralization and thus to face cross-border

issues. That is, the ecological crisis has forced to transform the

conventional welfare State configuration by unfolding a bureaucracy

structure which encompasses a variety of entities in a wide range of

scales. In the context of Europe, the EU plays the role of a mega-state

or trans-national corpus, commanding main lines of action in strategic

fields, distributing funds and incentives for green practices, and

elaborating environmental policies with a cascade effect all over member

countries and regions. But, in addition, many municipalities and

regions, as a result of state decentralization, have been working based

on networks in order to accomplish a proper management of water

resources, natural protected areas, exchange of urban sustainability

experiences or climate change collaborative actions.

A statist spirit has also penetrated the environmental praxis by a

deliberately spreading of values and knowledge. The rise of

environmental concern within citizenship is, in a great extent, an

achievement of educational campaigns promoted by public institutions and

resources, the assumed responsibility in determining an official and

lawful environmentalist discourse. Likewise, quite a few public funds

and budget items have been targeted to stimulate research in scientific

advances, with a particular focus on green technological solutions,

driving thus the production of an amount of knowledge in favour to

strategic areas and aims of public governments. This role of public

institutions in the sprawl of environmentalist values, considering its

moralistic power over society, is therefore “part of a continuing effort

to legitimate state environmental intervention” (Duit et al. 2016, 8).

However, the effectiveness and success of environmental state is equally

questioned (Mol 2016) since it is not working as an isolated political

entity, but another actor –determinant one– in the complex nexus of

globalized market, neoliberal international organisms, cross-national

corporations, institutional commitments, NGOs, environmentalist

movements, and citizenship. Therefore, the capacity of administrating

and applying environmental policies has been constrained and, at the

very best, tends to have a palliative and corrective character with very

little room for manoeuvre. In addition, nation-states have lost power in

their capacity to unilaterally regulate important environmental dues and

duties, given for instance the weakness shown under the influence of

market institutions. Furthermore, they usually contribute to sponsor and

promote private and national projects that inflict severe and

non-reversible damages on environment, such as extractivism, hydropower

dams, land grabbing and urban sprawl (Gerber 2011; Borras Jr. et al.

2012; Grajales 2013; Wolford et al. 2013; Constantino 2016; Martínez-

Alier and Walter 2016). This shows that environmental states do the

management of environmental challenges through a double standard and

commonly have a counterproductive effect. According to the above

scenario, it would be difficult to support the argument that the State

is an authorized power in order to face efficiently environmental

issues.

Even bearing in mind these obstacles, the legitimized and gained

environmental authority of states is far to be rejected. My thesis is

indeed based on a theoretical background rather than empirical. There is

an extended cliché which echoes in society, political and a significant

part of the academic discourse: the belief that liberal state is a

synonym or an equivalent to democracy. And given the urgency of

solutions for environmental issues, it is assumed that “building on the

state government structures that already exist seems to be a more

fruitful path to take than any attempt to move beyond or around states

in the quest for environmental sustainability” (Eckersley 2004, 91). In

sum, the institution of environmental state helped to reinforce the

legitimacy of liberal state (Eckersley 2004, 140).

Moreover, there is enough evidence and quite a few pros and cons either

to idealize or condemn the role of State along the last six decades of

environmental governance. According to Mol the environmental state was

exposed to ups and downs in all this period, gaining a broad

international recognition during the nineties (Mol 2016), but undergone

a recent decline along with a “hybridisation” (Conca 2005) and

“diversification” (Spaargaren and Mol 2008) of environmental

authorities. As it was mentioned above, national governments and other

modalities of public power have been the ’judge and jury’ of the

environmental crisis. So, this process of legitimation transcends such

evidences, and is sustained by a kind of imaginary which is widely

accepted in diverse forums, such as the academic one. According to the

ecological critique of the administrative state, this is not “the type

of entity that is capable of systematically prioritizing the achievement

of sustainability” (Eckersley 2004, 140). The green critical theory

maintains that “states are part of the problem rather than the solution

to ecological degradation” (Eckersley 2004, 90). Yet, it is easy to find

in this left-side environmentalist movements – such as degrowth,

eco-marxism and environmental post-structuralism– a notorious advocacy

of environmental state in spite of their failures, limitations and

inefficacy, recognizing it as the lesser of two evils solution or due to

its commonly correspondence with democratic values (Demaria et al. 2013;

Ariès 2015; Asara et al. 2015; Kallis 2015). Moreover, this legitimation

is not uniquely bonded to the process of mutation into an environmental

state, but to the origin and consolidation of modern-state.

Considering this controversy, an eco-anarchist approach may help to

question the legitimized power of environmental state and to identify it

as a determinant driving force of the ecological crisis. Indeed,

anarchist thought agglutinates two conditions for this examination: 1) a

radical opposition to the State as an idealistic political organization,

based on ontological, scientific and moral precepts; and 2) a long

tradition of critical green thought since the early anarchist

intellectuals to the contemporary libertarians. Within it, diverse

perspectives may be distinguished, from the acknowledged early anarchist

geographers as avant-garde environmentalist thinkers, to the appearance

of diverse strands in responding the emergence of environmentalist

sensibilities emerged in the mid of twentieth century: social ecology,

liberation ecology, anarcho-primitivism, bioregionalism and deep

ecology.

Being cautious, this work does not pretend to canonize the anarchist

vision, as the most authorized voice in order to dismantle the

environmental state, for instance, in the line of how R. Goodin

excessively asserts that “greens are basically

libertarians-cum-anarchists” (Goodin 1992, 152). The “green” labels an

incredible spectrum of ideologies, from staunch supporters to bitter

enemies, of the role of the State in the environmental agenda. Thereby,

greens may encompass both a statist environmentalism, supported by

left-side parties, in proportion to social aims and equity policies, but

also approaches from ultra- neoliberal sectors, which are partisans of

non-interventionist tools on the market, in the framework of green

capitalism, but quite far from or even antagonistic to anarchist

positions. Yet, I consider green anarchism and the libertarian thought

in general offer a radical and utopian position that may help to

decolonize a kind of state environmentalism, based on moral precepts

such as anti-authoritarianism, social and environmental justice, but

also on solid scientific background. Regarding to this green anarchism

or anarchist ecology, it has produced a wide variety of insights,

perspectives and theoretical background which share common points, but

they do not form a monolithic and homogenous discourse. Rather, the

different strands concur on similarities but also display divergences in

basic aspects such as the idea of progress, the role of technological

advances, the spatial organization of societies and ontological view. In

addition, considering the historical gap, the kind of arguments raised

by early anarchists rarely went straight on the topic of environmental

state. As we explained above, the irruption of this archetypical

governance is a contemporary process. Nevertheless, they outlined the

main ontological and theoretical skeleton of anarchist thought and

produced interesting reflections by theorizing on the State in

comparison to Nature and pre-statist societies, which are undoubtedly

impregnated of an environmental sensibility. At bottom, they laid the

foundations of the modern environmentalist critique.

Therefore, this work proposes to show that green anarchist thought has

potential tools for analysing the role played by the State in

environmental governance, problematizing intrinsic and structural

aspects associated with the State as an anti-governance according to

libertarian tradition. But also, anarchist thought might be ideal in

order to decolonize the environmentalist discourse and praxis from

statist attitudes and its extended legitimation. For that, three points

will be analysed in order to question the power, authority and efficacy

of State in environmental issues: a) the State as an unnatural and

external institution to the Nature-society relationships; b) its

configuration as entropic and unsustainable spatial model of governance;

and c) the production of statist discourse of the idea of Nature and of

its management. In addition, some controversies and divergences will be

examined within the eco-anarchist perspectives, concluding that there is

not an undeniable agreement in their basic insights on State and in

their idealization of new alternatives of environmental governance.

The Unnatural S(s)tate

The anarchist imaginary has been traditionally tagged with the

stereotypical idea of chaos and licentiousness (Ince and Barrera 2016),

whereas State has been associated with order and organization. This

stigma has been strengthened comparing anarchism with primitivism,

tribal societies, violent rebels and convulsed times, analogies that

many anarchist partisans have intentionally pretended to evoke. On the

other hand, some hegemonic political theories of Western thought have

related these features to the most ingenuous, mystic, vulnerable,

archaic and lower developed stages of history. Instead, states, in spite

of their vicissitudes, are the symbol of modernity, civilized and mature

societies. Thus, the legitimation of State lies especially on this

commonplace and, according to this interpretation, a sustainable society

— a sign of green prosperity — must be reached through this governmental

filter. Obviously, this cliché has been contested since very early on by

the anarchist thinkers, who, appealing to scientific and moral precepts,

have argued over the abolition of State and the suitability of

non-statist orders. Anarchist ontology sees the State as an unnatural

and alien polity when it is compared to the way in which human societies

have organized themselves throughout their historical evolution. In

fact, an essential pillar of anarchist utopia is the conception of a

social organization in which there is no place for institutions and

organizations that gather power and use it to exploit or oppress

society. This is the most recognized issue of anarchism: their partisans

frontally reject any external institution to society that imposes

political authority, hierarchy and domination (Hall 2001). As Black

asserts, “morality is to the mind what the state is to society: an alien

and alienating limitation on liberty” (Black 2004, 6).

The term ‘unnatural’ contains, at first, a moral connotation for

anarchists: State would be for anarchism the least humanized way of

organizing a society as it deprives legitimized rights and aspirations

of every individual: freedom, justice, equity within diversity, etc. For

the founder of social ecology, Murray Bookchin (1921–2006), the State is

“unnatural and runs counter to the thrust of evolution” (Davidson 2009,

56) and Ted Trainer, anarchist-oriented thinker who champions the

“simpler way” in the conception of more sustainable societies, advocates

that “humans will not reach the social maturity until they learn to

govern themselves” (Trainer 2017, 183). These contemporary ideas about

the ‘unnatural’ State nourish from the early anarchists. Mikhail Bakunin

(1814–1876) categorically asserted that the State “denotes violence,

oppression, exploitation and injustice” (Maximoff 1953, 224), being,

therefore, “a negation of humanity” (Hall 2011, 376). William Godwin

(1756–1836), decades before, stressed the strong antagonism between the

State and society, which affects its different ‘nature’: the government

or state authority reproduces perpetual stagnation while society

manifests itself in a constant flow (Marshall 1992, 206). He idealized

the capacity of societies of being more flexible than immobile states in

order to face external changes.

Applying this argument to the performance of government, the coercive

power of public institutions is driven to control, monitor and even

punish any attempt at abnormal behaviour outside established parameters.

Yet, societies would be more suitable to adapt to environmental changes

than a heavier and more intricate setting of bureaucratic institutions

and normative framework. Based on this binary ontology and capacity of

flexibility, it enables to interpret the genesis of environmental states

like an encounter of forces, as a dialectic conflict between society and

State. Indeed, environmental states are somehow a metamorphosis with

regard to the industrial state, assuming a greater responsibility and

transforming institutions, laws and procedures with a green philosophy.

However, many of the advances and enhancements in terms of environmental

health, protection and rights are actually the reply to societal

demands, obtained with great effort and as a result of decades of

tragedies, costs and sacrifices. Situations in which society responded

through adaptation or self-organized measures before public institutions

could or wanted to confront them. In this regard, and following the

antagonistic view State/society, the latter has forced to change the

State performance through claims and vindications. The correspondence,

according to Peter Marshall, is not balanced, as “even its benign face

of welfare creates dependence and undermines local initiative, mutual

aid and self-help” (Marshall 2001).

Thus, the capacity of societies in order to implement strategies of

voluntary self-sufficiency and collective-based are dramatically cut

when State intervenes, seen through the anarchist lens. Piotr Kropotkin

(1842–1921) asserted that the State, though it is a governmental corpus

and normative framework to enforce order in social interrelationships,

is also a source of individualism, by which “in proportion as the

obligations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were

evidently relieved from their obligations to each other” (Kropotkin

1902). Overall, individualist behaviours, in regards to economic

decisions, entail less thought on the moral limits of our actions and

practices as ecological citizens (Melo-Escrihuela 2008).

Notwithstanding, a voluntary transition to self-sufficiency requires a

deep and broader sense of citizenship, and even of kinship, as the

French geographer Élisée Reclus (1830- 1905) advocated (Reclus 1896),

integrating both human individuals as well as non-human life.

Based on Trainer’s insights (Trainer 2017), the minimization of

self-government and voluntariness by imposed authority and

representative democracies, might be a reason to delegitimize state in a

double scenario: a) the State still concentrates power and is the

authorized administrator of environmental practices; b) the State has

lost power in favour to the financial powers and market agents. In the

first scenario, the absence of self-assumed responsibility and action by

the citizenship in the context of representative democracies, might lead

to a greater centralization of power and the proliferation of

eco-dictatorships, presuming a probable future of acute resource

scarcity and negatively affecting the distribution of goods (Trainer

2017). In the second one, State would dramatically fall in a nihilist

terrain of neoliberalist attitude, fostering wild competitiveness,

individualistic and private interest and degrading environmental

facilities gained in the time of environmental states, i.e., a severe

application of green capitalism. Following an organizational realist

approach, eco-anarchist partisans advocate that “states are

organizations that control (or attempt to control) territories and

people” (Skocpol 1989; Eckersley 2004). There are internal necessities

performed by the State, such as resource extraction, administration and

coercive control from which society is excluded or reduced to mere

passive individuals. This reinforces the thesis that there are statist

interests beside the social ones, which are intentionally hermetic and

hidden to the population (Trainer 2017). Namely the State would have

exclusive and private targets in the environmental performance.

Moreover, the argument of ‘unnatural’ State has also received scientific

support among the early anarchist geographers. Basic foundations on

ideal society were provided by the geographers E. Reclus and P.

Kropotkin, along with Lev Metchnikoff (1838–1888). Indeed, this

scientific anarchism gave historical depth and biological proofs to

non-statist orders (Mac Laughlin 2017). Headed by Kropotkin, they worked

in the conformation of an alternative theory to the most conservative in

opposition to the Darwinian evolutionism, being condensed in his

well-known work “The Mutual Aid” (Kropotkin 1902). Its essential

argument is that in the success of the evolution, whether human or not,

cooperation and mutualism were more determinant than competition;

attitudes that Kropotkin mainly ascribed to the intraspecific

interaction. The cooperation for survival would be the unique solid

basis for having an ethical code towards social progress (Mac Laughlin

2017). Such insight was not a brand-new discovery. Actually, the theory

of mutual aid continued an intellectual tradition of mutualism approach

in Russia, but anarchist oriented (Goodwin 2010) and probably introduced

in scientific terms by the own Metchnikoff (Ferretti and Pelletier

2019), with obvious ideological reminiscences in anarchist thinkers such

as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1808–1865) or Robert Owen (1771–1858)

(Kropotkin 1912). This would show the State as an ineffective and

destructive institution, as it does not cooperate but dominates exerting

its power in unfavourable exchange for society. Such argument adds

solidity to the initial idea that the State is an unnatural form,

whereas society precedes the State and, even according to Kropotkin

himself, society is a reality prior to the emergence of the human being:

“Man did not create society, society existed before Man” (Kropotkin

1902).

The mutual aid thesis reinforces the role of early, primitive and

indigenous societies as models for non-hierarchical and cooperative

societies, to which Kropotkin devoted great attention (Kropotkin 1902;

1969) and Reclus considered to have a deeper and more embedded

connection with Nature than modern societies (Reclus 1866). Stateless

societies, however, encompass different levels of technical advances and

complexities, according to the social ecologist Murray Bookchin,

identifying a libertarian tradition along the history (Bookchin 1982).

These communities lacked an organizational model based on the hierarchy

or vertical domain, but they configured political systems, where

authority or the exercise of power was not given by something external.

Needless to say, those anarchies were not arbitrary or subject to chaos,

but had a perfectly structured system, where in addition, the

interaction with the environment, was intimate, emotional and deeply

respectful. From this ontological view, ethical implications are

derived, arguing or justifying the defence of coevolution and mutual

support as essential principles of every society, whether human or not.

In fact, the political commitment of the anarchist Kropotkin was

preceded by his observations of the natural world (Todes 1989; Goodwin

2010; Mac Laughlin 2017).

An Entropic Spatial Organisation

The ‘unnatural’ also designates a quality that entails thinking the

State as the least suitable form of social organization to fit in the

functioning and integrity of Nature and the human being within it. Not

surprisingly, early anarchists were “ecologically oriented” (Morris

1996), advocating tenets that have had continuity in the agenda and

praxis of contemporary radical environmentalism, such as

decentralization, heterarchical social organization or mutual

interdependence. These practices show a clear dichotomy and antagonism

in regard to the State’s structure and do not lie exclusively in the

exercise of political dialectics. By exploring the roots of the

anarchist movement in 19^(th) century, it is proven that there is a

strong scientific foundation, in which, precisely, the functioning of

Nature and the understanding of its interactions motivate the anarchist

utopia and therefore the ideal of a society without State.

During this time and thanks to the previous works of geographers such as

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the study and understanding of

Nature moves away from the Cartesian mechanical philosophy to an

organicist and harmonic vision of life and environment. This approach

affirmed that unlike the State there is no centralizing force within the

“living” component of ecological systems, “only interaction” (Purchase

1994). Along with this, the organizing principle does not come from

external sources but rather it is a self-regulatory behaviour, as

Kropotkin argued, where “everything is adapted, ordered, and organized

for everything else” (Purchase 1994, 29). It is not (only) a romantic

claim yearning the wildlife or a contemplative attitude towards the

apparent order of Nature. From a teleological point of view, this

equilibrium is not permanent or harmonically achieved without

constrictions or variability. Rather, it is understood in a broader

reality at the expense of homeostasis or local imbalances. In addition,

the external source that nourishes natural ecosystems, i.e., solar

radiation, is dissipated to be used at different organizational levels.

Using this metabolic model as a reference, the State would be, however,

an inefficient machine. It concentrates power to maintain order but at

the expense of increasing the entropy in its environment, that is, to

those administrative units which are submitted or receive its authority.

In addition, P. Kropotkin largely discussed the spatial strategy of

capitalism and its dramatic effects on environment and social life. In

doing so, he was revealing the role of States, that he considered

“always interfered in the economic life in favour of the capitalist

exploiter” (Kropotkin 1912, 84). Thereby, statist targets are oriented

to a severe centralization and creating disparities in the standard of

living among the population, but also extend social and environmental

impacts in the territory. In his work, “Fields, factories and

workshops”, he advocated for the decentralization of production units,

such as small-scale factories, bonded to the cultivation of fields,

which he considered the way to achieve an ecological balance, an

enhancement of life conditions of workers and the creation of a

counterbalance power to the central authority of State (Mac Laughlin

2017). Indeed, for Lewis Mumford, Kropotkin was a pioneer in a regional

conception of sustainable development and organic economic, stressing

the mutual interdependence between cities and villages (Mumford 1961;

Mac Laughlin 2017). He complained how “in industry, as well as in

politics, centralisation has so many admires!” (Kropotkin 1901, 179). In

a certain way, Kropotkin was already warning about State as a colonizing

force of the welfare imaginary and social progress that decades later

would be filter by an environmentalist sensibility.

Given the above, for eco-anarchists, the State is far to be a suitable

structure of power to which delegate the management of Nature and

environmental problems, given its size and design regarding the

eco-social space under its domain. Thus, for bioregionalists, the State

is a dysfunctional spatial configuration and the “typically large scale

of the nation-state as a territorial unit, when combined with the

centralized nature of the state as a decision-making body, ensures that

it is insufficiently responsive to the idiosyncratic needs of specific

ecosystems” (Davidson 2009, 50). The management of complex, non-lineal

and irreversible changes of environmental problems do not fit well in

the labyrinthine bureaucratic framework (Dryzek 1992) and innate

features (hierarchy, accumulation of power and material resources,

administrative boundaries) of environmental states. It may also be

stressed the problems associated with the delimitation of administrative

units. Bioregionalists insist in the conflict between political

boundaries and ecological-natural divisions. Indeed, Snyder warns in

regards to these frontiers, that “the lines are quite often arbitrary

and serve only to confuse people’s sense of natural associations and

relationships” (Snyder 1980, 24–25). That would be a proof of how, in

spite of the creation of supra-national bodies in order to collaborate

for the management of cross-national ecosystems, conflicts between

nation-states and administrations on which is the responsible or the

ruler over these areas are far to be resolved.

Alternatives to the entropic “megamachine” of State (Mumford 1970) are

driven to create either communities or cultures which would be

“integrated with nature at the level of the particular ecosystem”

(Gorsline and House 1990). Based in these precepts, the utopianism of

Charles Fourier was for many contemporary anarchists, such as L. Mumford

and Murray Bookchin, the first social ecologist ever, inasmuch as he

connected the social order with the laws of Nature (Mumford 1970;

Bookchin 1982). If these laws are properly understood, will “conduct the

human race to opulence, sensual pleasures and global unity” (Beecher and

Bienvenu 1972: 1). In the words of Mumford, it would be to move from

“megatechnics” or “power” to “biotechnics” or “plenitude”: “If we are to

prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect

of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a

radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from

living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems)” (Mumford 1970,

395).

As it may be deduced, and considering the diversity of strands that

eco-anarchism has enabled, the realization of this utopia differs among

partisans of those strands. One of the differential factors is the

intensity of the adaptive capacity of the community to the environmental

boundaries and biodiversity. For instance, anarcho-primitivists (J.

Zerzan, D. Jensen) mirrors the spirit of early anarchist such as Henry

David Thoreau (1817–1862) and his quest of wilderness and they “deem

‘civilisation’ in all its various guises to be inherently destructive”

(Smith 2007, 472). Consequently, they defend a returning to a more

primitive lifestyle. This is supposed to be a kind of tribal

organization, achieving a sustaining and pure connection with Nature. On

the other hand, bioregionalists and social ecologists keep the duality

nature/culture in the political sense, and imagine communities based in

principles such as decentralization, self-sufficiency, self-ruling and

communal land (Davidson 2009); all of them inspired by the internal

performance of natural ecosystems. They will set the conditions for

having non- hierarchical relations and avoid the inefficacy of

accumulated power of statist institutions, its coercive methods and the

delegating responsibilities and rights. Such social utopias would demand

a transition from national-state to local governance, but self-ruling

cannot be performed in isolation and autarkical way (Sale 2000),

considering both the permeability of environmental boundaries and the

serious limitation of resources in poorer contexts.

To this regard, some central points are subjected to controversy. For

instance, the delimitation of administrative units based on

environmental and natural boundaries are exposed to an enormous

casuistry. This complicates the determination of a proper scale or basic

unit to which span the management of communities. Social ecologists and

Murray Bookchin in particular commit to libertarian municipalism,

moulding communities to the ecosystems in which they are located

(Bookchin 1974). Bioregionalists advocate the bioregion as “an important

and unique method of demarcating political space” stressing the

importance of “watershed boundaries (the distribution of rivers) as the

primary method or regional demarcation” (Purchase 1997). The former has,

technically, more problems than the latter, insofar as the political

boundaries of municipalities may be a burden to achieve a proper

adaptation and management of local ecosystems. On the other hand, the

bioregion arises the problem of generating tough constraints to the

freedom and internal diversity of population in terms of rude adaptation

of available natural goods and environmental thresholds; thereby, and

considering a strict application of this natural edges, population would

be condemned to a kind of environmental determinism. In this sense,

Barry notes, “that would leave some resource-poor economies in a worse

position than they need be in the absence of trade and redistribution”

(Barry 1996, 233), as he considers inappropriate an autarkic government,

to which some bioregionalists and deep-ecology thinkers are partisans

(Price 2019). Both scenarios would justify the existence of trade,

charity or barter in order to compensate natural imbalances between

communities, and to get environmental justice between territories, but

far from neoliberal and capitalist codes. In any case, this localist

approach, whether forcing previous political demarcations or creating

new ecologically-based ones, would potentially respond to the natural

diversity and carrying- capacity of the environments, and be more

flexible than the restricted form of how environmental policies have

been applied by means of statist intervention. This approach would

question the existence of same protocols and procedures in different

cities, towns and regions, in order to obey higher-scale guidelines by

states or cross-national organisms, which in the end lead to a

standardization of the solutions: “countries are becoming increasingly

similar in how and when they respond to environmental problems” (Duit et

al. 2016, 10).

A hypothetical transition to localism demands to reply to the problem

that environmental crisis is a global matter that inevitably require a

respective global environmental governance, in order to have common

agreements and strategies. The same old song that sounds in the

situation that environmental states are experimenting and acting

nowadays. Nothing new under the sun. Within the philosophy of

bioregionalism and social ecology coordinating bodies are proposed and

both are moving in the line of federalism. The French anarchist Proudhon

was a firm partisan of federalism, and he considered as a system to

emphasize the political autonomy and the social order by means of social

contracts and contractual exchanges of goods and services (Mac Laughlin

2017). Probably stimulated by this foundational idea, bioregionalists

propose a confederation of communities in the shape of communication and

information networks, political deliberative and decision-making body

(Sale 2000, 96). Murray Bookchin, distancing from the most autarkic

ideal of bioregionalism, advocated “libertarian forms of confederalism”,

being “a network of administrative councils”, due to “decentralism (and)

self- sufficiency which (is not enough)” to “achieve a rational

ecological society” (Bookchin, 1989, 6). Yet, they look alike statist

institutions (Barry 1996; Davidson 2009), and critical scholars together

with eco- anarchist are not very optimistic that bioregions and

municipalism by themselves, namely people without authority, even within

coordinated and federal structures, will ensure entirely democratic and

real commitment with environmental issues, without a quota of coercive

power (Goldsmith 1978; Miller 1984; Barry 1996; Davidson 2009). In sum,

and considering these vicissitudes, an eco-anarchist would conclude that

“a free and ecological society is best organized on the twin pillars of

decentralization and federation” with “a direct and participatory form

of democracy” (Marshall 2001).

A Statist Discourse Uprooted From Nature

A third aspect of the public legitimation of environmental state

resides, once again, in an ontological premise: the human being has

created a second nature, outside our first nature (Marshall 1992, 606).

This binary vision is actually an Aristotelian-Hegelian teleological

tradition that have influenced from the early to the contemporary

eco-anarchists, but such entities were not conceived as separated and

isolated. For instance, E. Reclus and Murray Bookchin interpreted these

two realms as one emerging from the other. That is, second nature is the

product of human society, which subsequently and simultaneously emerges

from the first nature. All their artefacts, technologies, landscapes,

political institutions and ideas are the “consciousness” of the first

nature (Reclus 1905–08; Bookchin 1986; Toro 2018), that is, our

biological condition and source of material goods. The State would be

within the second nature but, under anarchist precepts, it hinders and

distorts our necessary approximation and vital link with Nature.

Bookchin appealed to a historical analysis of societies and how power

and hierarchical relations have been built up to the present moment. He

concluded that the State is “not only a constellation of bureaucratic

and coercive institutions but also a state of mind, an instilled

mentality for ordering reality” (Bookchin 1982, 94). In this regard, he

understands the State as a psyche that has penetrated the way of

understanding politics. Therefore, according to him, the management of

nature has been colonized by a statist praxis. Since “environmentalism

does not question the most basic premises of our society based on

domination and hierarchy” (Marshall 1992, 611), our actions and

practices toward Nature are reproducing hierarchical, coercive and

authoritarian attitudes as the State ones; to which we may added the

individualist and selfish behaviours. Even more, there are eco-friendly

practices that are not officially recognized and counted by public

institutions, out of control of their protocols or normative framework,

for instance: domestic reutilization and recycling of products -non

officially classified waste-, organic agriculture without the statist

guarantee stamp and informal transmission of environmentalist values and

education.

Indeed, the environmental concern of the State and governmental

institutions determine, for the social ecologists, the conception of an

official environmentalism, guided by an instrumental sensibility of

Nature. Thus, the managed Nature would be a simple passive habitat

composed of objects, where, at the very best, it must act for the

conservation of healthy and pristine redoubts of wild nature and for the

control of pollution (Marshall 1992, 611). This reification of

environmental compounds is, for Bookchin, the most determinant cause of

the ecological crisis. It is not due to the State itself, but any

institution or system that coercively or violently fosters, through its

authority, obedience, domination and exploitation of society, whether

political, religious, social or even cultural (Bookchin 1982). Such

behaviours have characterized the state intervention aligned with

private corporations; involving them in the most severe damages of

twentieth century (McNeil 2000).

Undoubtedly, eco-anarchist thinkers, combining contemporary

environmentalism with early traditions, contemplate violence, injustice,

coercion and abuse of power non lined up with a constructive and

carefully attitude toward natural realm (first nature). Bookchin

attempted to synthetize such argument in “Ecology of Freedom” (1982),

the title of one of his works. This would mean that a free society can

only be achieved through a more respectful and closer relationship to

what Nature offers us. Not in vain, for Bookchin, the term libertarian

has as its source of inspiration the own functioning of the ecosystem:

“the image of unity in diversity, spontaneity, and complementary

relations, free of all hierarchy and domination” (Bookchin 1982, 30). An

idea shared with early anarchists such as Reclus and Kropotkin, for whom

Nature would act as a moralizing force and as a dispenser of values and

teachings for fairer and liberating social orders (Reclus 1881;

Kropotkin 1893; Toro 2016). Thus, Nature has to be conceived beyond an

instrumental way, i.e., as a simple source of resources and goods.

Peaceful and moralizing attitudes are relevant for deep ecology

partisans, betting for a directly experienced immersion with the natural

world (Heckert 2010, 26). For A. Naess, “supporters of the deep ecology

movement seem to move more in the direction of non-violent anarchism

than toward communism” (Naess 1989, 156).

The official discourse of statist environmentalism is also supported by

the structure and design of State. For bioregionalists, the spatial

configuration of states feed the epistemic disconnection of society from

nature (Davidson 2009, 50). As we argued above, the centralized and

hierarchical power of environmental state directly or indirectly is

monopolizing the usage and management of Nature. In doing so, it is

liberating of responsibilities to the society and creating a perceptual

and cognitive filter between the real Nature (first nature) and

citizenship. People no longer have to be concerned with manipulating and

caring environmental goods, because all of these practices are a matter

of State. Public environmentalist propaganda is thus mainly diverted to

divulgate a biased and partial knowledge and interrelationship with

Nature. Governmental and regulatory institutions will offer solutions

and measures that citizenship could and ought to assume (recycling

practices, austere habits, use of public transport) because they are

regulated and performed according to a normative apparatus,

subsidization and taxes. Also, wild spaces and natural parks are

systematically organized to make a light and comfortable engagement of

society into an iconic and domestic Nature, but keeping everything under

the statist control.

The legitimation of environmental actions of State has an added turn,

based in the construction of discourses and commonplaces. As Ward

asserted: “Shorn of the metaphysics with which politicians and

philosophers have enveloped it, the state can be defined as a political

mechanism using force” which “is directed at the enemy without, but it

is aimed at the subject society within” (Ward 1996, 24). Not rarely,

Nature, the non-domesticated nature or first nature and its changes and

forces we cannot control, are presented as this external enemy. In the

majority of Environmental Summits, states and governments frequently

invocate to a “struggle against climate change”. Certainly, this

responds to a deliberative strategy of evading own responsibilities, and

bringing together the most of the public involvement, and being

condescending with the neoliberal powers and institutions.

Discussion: Divergences Within the Eco-Anarchist Utopias Around

Politics and State

Green strands of contemporary anarchism are far to reproduce a unique

discourse in their construction of society-Nature relationship utopia,

but also in their critiques of the State. It is not surprising that

Bookchin revealed his clear divergence, at least in his early works,

with the proposals of eco-Marxism, just because of the role that the

State has to accomplish in an environmental facet. He argues that the

Marxist conception of environment and its justification of statist

governance are clearly capitalist in its understanding of the productive

relationship with Nature. There is plenty of evidence during the

contemporary environmental history that pollution and environmental

degradation were something inherent to both capitalist and communist

states, as long as the coexistence of these two blocks existed. On the

other hand, historically, there were many samples of sustainable

stateless communities, but it does not mean that contemporary ecological

attitudes will be ensured throughout communities that may be based on

bioregional or municipalist organizations.

It is true that social ecology, defended by Bookchin, is not exempt from

certain controversies. For instance, he argued that human beings,

through technological advances, ought to transform Nature as a way to

expand opportunities and thus achieve higher levels of freedom and

comfort for society: “an ecotechnology would be use the inexhaustible

energy capacities of nature... to provide the ecocommunity with

non-polluting materials or wastes that could be easily recycled”

(Bookchin 1974, 83–84). Anarcho-primitivists and deep ecologists, in a

lesser extent, are oppose to a firmly dependence from technology.

Instead, for Bookchin, technology might and has to be emancipatory, but

this has not been proven in such a way in green capitalist states or

even along the history. Indeed, the analysis of the anarchist thinker L.

Mumford on “megamachine” showed the strong ties between statist power

and the usage of technology in order to control societies and Nature

(Mumford 1967; Mumford 1970). Bookchin saw the State, according to his

critical questioning of Marxism, in a transitional period, a period of

austerity and sacrifice. For him, precisely the anarchist society should

move from the terrain of necessity (Marxist view) to the terrain of

freedom (Marshall 1992, 609). Through this interpretation, Bookchin is

creating a kind of anarchist cornucopia that does not seem very real in

a future scenario of scarcity and degrowth.

Another controversial position within social ecologists and Bookchin is

the omitted responsibility with non-human species, an issue that

predecessors such as E. Reclus understood as nuclear in the restoration

of our links with Nature (Toro 2018). The French geographer conceived

non-human and human life as a great family and even acknowledged its

quota of importance in political action. As a corollary, Reclus inquired

into historical samples to illustrate his thesis and showed how animals

have a political weight in some non-statist cultures (Reclus 1896). In

the same line, anarcho-primitivists pretend to extend the moral

consideration towards animals (Hall 2011), but without questioning a

kind of supremacy of human being: “while condemning hierarchical

domination and professing rights for all, the Left fails to take into

account the weighty needs and interests of billions of oppressed

animals” (Best 2009, 191). However, in Bookchin’s thought there is no

hint of considering the extension of the political and moral community

to other individuals or forms of existence.

This position, qualified, by himself and other authors, as humanist

(Bookchin 1974; 1982; Marshall 1992; Smith 2007) and clearly

anthropocentric, distances him from other eco-anarchist philosophies.

Hence, for example, the internal tensions between social ecology and

anarcho-primitivism (Smith 2007), to which we should also add the deep

ecology. The discrepancies lie in the interpretation of how the human

being has evolved until to fall in a planetary global crisis. Bookchin’s

vision is more optimistic, believing that technological development has

allowed –and not the control of the means of production, as Marxism

defends– to place the human species in an unbeatable situation to build

a cooperativist and free society, within a well-balanced and intimate

relationship with Nature. In some of his works he fell into a certain

instrumentalism, probably inheritance of P. Kropotkin’s insights who, in

M. Hall’s opinion, considered that Nature was “something that humanity

has to grapple with, to fight and to colonise” (Hall 2011, 378); or when

Bakunin considered that “Man ... can and should conquer and master this

external world. He, on his part, must subdue it and wrest from it his

freedom and humanity” (Maximoff 1953). On the other hand, the vision of

anarcho-primitivism is that human race tends towards an increasingly

wider and therefore disturbing distance with Nature, which requires a

return to a primitive state or early stages of evolution, in order to

recover the link with what offers us subsistence and durability on this

planet. That is, to achieve the abolition of State by a process of

rewilding.

In addition, Bookchin showed a considerably dissident attitude, almost

derogatory, with those positions in defence of Nature that make an

alleged naive and illusory restoration to Nature, through its

sacralisation, spiritualisation or anthropomorphism. To reinforce this

thesis, H. Bull warns that ecological degradation an all the sins

assigned to the State (such as violence, injustice, power abuse) were

somehow already in pre-statist societies. Indeed, for Bookchin, this

excess of romanticism has reached the point to constitute one of the

ideological foundations of the most shameful state-totalitarian

projects, through the defence of a naturalistic nationalism, which had

its apogee in Nazism: “deep ecology is subject to the dangers

represented by earlier antirational and intuitionist worldviews that,

carried over into the political realm, have produced antihumanistic and

even genocidal movements” (Biehl and Bookchin 1995). In any case, and

according to the right conclusion of M. Smith, “deep ecology ‘allies’

cannot be dismissed as irrational nature mystics sliding down a slippery

slope to eco-fascism without engaging in serious historical distortions

and omissions” (Smith 2007, 476).

Finally, we may stress the divergence between bioregionalists and social

ecologists, especially notorious in the way of conceiving a green

community organization: “Bioregionalists tend to be more committed to

the principle of autarky, whereas social ecologists advocate confederal

structures” (Davidson 2009, 49). The future management natural resources

scarcity is not very far from the irruption of national autarkic

projects, led by coercive and neo-fascist politics, and raised by the

society in representative democracies. This non anarchist scenario show,

however, similarities with the bioregionalist proposal, imagining

communities based on the self-management of local resources and the

defence of a patriotic idea of Nature: “decentralism (and)

self-sufficiency... do not constitute a guarantee that we will achieve a

rational ecological society. In fact (these principles) have at one time

or another supported parochial communities, oligarchies, and even

despotic regimes” (Bookchin 1989). For bioregionalism, the State is a

not a requisite, but this does not mean that it must be abolished. It is

understood that “the quality of social relations within stateless

communities is such that the laws, procedures and institutions of the

state are unnecessary for governance” (Barry 1996: 114).

Final Remarks

After this analysis, the different ecologically-oriented strands of

anarchism deal with a central idea: the incompatibility between free,

local and sustainable communities and the State as a hierarchical,

oppressive and coercive body, in order to challenge a more responsible

and proper management of environmental issues. In fact, anarchists may

contribute to influence a critical side of environmentalism which

considers the role of environmental state as non-negotiable. Indeed,

according to Davidson: “many greens have attempted to take on board

eco-anarchist criticisms of current state structures when formulating

their own account of what a green state would look like” (Davidson 2009,

49). Evidently, for eco-anarchists, any more sustainable future would

involve the dismantling of governmental institutions. A proper and

successful environmental management would demand not bureaucratized and

centralized polities, on the line of libertarian municipalism or

bioregionalist confederalism. But, following Bookchin, it would not be

enough its elimination from the political organizations of societies. In

fact, hierarchy and abuse of power are exercised in different strata and

areas of society; so, this would require a process of decolonization of

the “statist imaginary”. More extravagant and unrealizable seem the

anarcho-primitivist proposal, though it may be a source of inspiration

thinking in biocentric and ecocentric positions in ethics and politics.

To this regard, it would be intricate to undertake the role of

technology in this transition, since this has been frequently associated

to the exercise of bureaucratized power and to a vertical and linear way

of managing problems: standardized procedures, instrumentalization of

the use of Nature, dependency from green technologies to implement

solutions, liberation of responsibilities to citizens and little

initiative to reflection, education and household practices. Thus,

eco-anarchists should work to clarify the weight of technology in an

emancipatory and sustainable transition and would be recommendable

revisit Lewis Mumford’s theory about “megamachine” (Mumford 1967;

Mumford 1970). A deeper reflection and theorization are also missing on

how the State and governmental institutions, as well as the function of

the public sphere, have negatively affected the environmental conception

and concerning that society has today. For instance, the analysis

political organization of societies should be complemented and enriched

with: the examination of individual versus collective behaviours in the

management of Nature; the exploration of the idea of Nature in

pre-statist and statist societies and; the analysis of how politics of

Nature has been determinant in the consolidation of modern idea of

State, etc.

This obviously requires an interpretative framework that integrates

approaches involving other disciplines such as environmental psychology,

environmental history, ecological anthropology or historical geography,

along with political ecology. In addition, decolonial approaches of

eco-anarchism and buen vivir are needed to make visible other forms of

social organization not mediated by hierarchical and centralizing

structures (Barrera-Bassols and Barrera 2018). Probably, it is time to

recycle many of the insights of eco-anarchists, from the early to the

contemporary approaches, in order to build a more adequate post-statist

theory to the current context. Being extraordinarily useful and valued,

perhaps there is too much reverence for these approaches, requiring a

necessary and fertile revision. Something Bookchin dropped when he

considered that anarchism, in the analysis of the roots of the

ecological crisis, must go beyond the State. Even more, when, at the

present moment, we are facing new ways of oppression and authority on

Internet, by means of, for instance, the use of social networks, the

frenetic production of fake information and the post-truth. In any case,

the role of anarchism in a transition to a fruitful relationship with

Nature seems out of doubt and “is thus scientifically vindicated and

presented as the only possible alternative to the threatening ecological

extinction” (Marshall 1992).

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