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Title: Utopia, not futurism
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1978
Language: en
Topics: utopia, utopianism, Futurism, speech, communalism, ecology, social ecology, environmentalism, post-scarcity, technology
Source: Retrieved on 2nd February 2021 from http://unevenearth.org/2019/10/bookchin_doing_the_impossible/
Notes: Transcribed and edited by Constanze Huther.

Murray Bookchin

Utopia, not futurism

On August 24, 1978, Murray Bookchin gave a lecture at the Toward

Tomorrow Fair in Amherst, Massachusetts. Also speaking at that year’s

gathering were several prominent thinkers, including R. Buckminster

Fuller and Ralph Nader. In his speech, Bookchin argues against the

ideology of futurism and for ecological utopianism. In the Q&A session,

he points out that he is not against technology itself, he is against

technocracy, and he also describes, in detail, his political vision for

the future.

The speech is surprisingly relevant in today’s context: it’s as if he

predicted the rise of fascist ideology and lifeboat ethics in the

21^(st) century, and it feels like a direct rebuttal of Elon Musk-esque

technocratic futurism on both the right and the left.

Because his speech is so applicable today, we decided to republish it

here, making it accessible to a wider audience. It has been transcribed

and edited lightly for flow, brevity, and grammar, and we have divided

it into sub-sections for ease of reading. The text is published with the

permission of The Bookchin Trust.

---

This morning at eleven o’clock, I tried to explain to you why I was not

an environmentalist, but rather was an ecologist. And I tried to give

you some idea, at least from my point of view, what ecology meant, as

distinguished from environmentalism. The point that I tried to make most

fundamentally is that environmentalism tries to patch things up, applies

band-aids, cosmetics, to the environment. It sort of takes hold of

nature, strokes it, and says, ‘Produce!’ It tries to use soil, pour

chemicals into it and if only they weren’t poisonous everything would be

great. Whereas ecology believes in a genuine harmonization of humanity

with nature. And that harmonization of humanity with nature depends

fundamentally on the harmonization of human beings with each other. The

attitude that we’ve had towards nature has always depended on the

attitude we’ve had towards each other. Let’s not kid ourselves, there is

no such thing as a ‘pure nature.’

The simple fact now is that I’m not only not an environmentalist, I’ve

got some hot news—I’m not a futurist. I’m not a futurist at all. I’m a

utopian. I want to see this word revived. I want to see us use it. I

want to see us think utopian. Not think futurism. And it’s these

questions that I’d like to talk about, if I may.

What is futurism?

What is futurism? Futurism is the present as it exists today, projected,

one hundred years from now. That’s what futurism is. If you have a

population of X billions of people, how are you going to have food, how

are you going to do this… nothing has changed. All they do is they make

everything either bigger, or they change the size—you’ll live in thirty

story buildings, you’ll live in sixty-story buildings. Frank Lloyd

Wright was going to build an office building that was one mile high.

That was futurism.

The simple fact is, I just don’t believe that we have to extend the

present into the future. We have to change the present so that the

future looks very, very different from what it is today. This is a

terribly important notion to convey. So a lot of people are walking

around today who sound very idealistic. And what do they want to do?

They want multinational corporations to become multi-cosmic corporations

[laughter from the audience]—literally!

They want to bring them up in space, they want to colonize the Moon,

they can’t wait to go to Jupiter, much less Mars. They’re all very busy,

they’re coming around, they even have long hair and they even have

beards, and they come around and they say ‘Oh, I can’t wait to get into

my first space shuttle!’—that is the future.

This is regarded as ecology and it’s not ecology. It’s futurism! It’s

what Exxon wants to do. It’s what Chase Manhattan wants to do. It’s what

all the corporations want to do. But it is not utopia, it is pure

futurism. It is the present extended into the future.

A mass society, and how do we keep in touch with each other? We don’t

even have to look at each other. We’ll look at television screens. I’ll

press a button, I’ll see you on the television screen, you’ll be on

Mars, for all I know, and we’ll have a wonderful conversation with each

other, and we’ll say ‘Gee whiz! We’ve got an alternate technology!’ The

point is it isn’t a liberatory technology. I may know people in the

future for years and years—play chess games with them, have interesting

intellectual conversations with them—and never touch them once. If that

is what the future is going to look like, I’m glad I’m fifty-seven years

old and don’t have that much to go. I don’t want it. [laughter from

audience] I am very serious.

Now I’d like to touch a few nerves. I don’t believe that the Earth is a

spaceship.[1] I’m asking you to think about what it means to think of

the Earth as a spaceship. It does not have valves. It does not have all

kinds of radar equipment to guide it. It is not moved by rockets. It

hasn’t got any plumbing. We may have plumbing. But it is not ‘a

spaceship’. It’s an organic, living thing, to a very great extent, at

least on its surface, built of inorganic material. It is in the process

of growth and it is in the process of development. It is not ‘a

spaceship’.

We’re beginning to develop a language which has nothing whatever in

common with ecology. It has a lot to do with electronics. We talk of

input. ‘Give me your input. Plug in!’ [laughter] Well, I don’t ‘plug

in’, I discuss [applause]. Machines ‘plug in’. Radar is the language

that produced it and the military is the language that produced the

words ‘plug in’.

‘Give me your input’. That is not what I want. I don’t want your output,

I want you. I want to hear your words. I want to hear your language. I’m

not engaged in ‘feedback’ with you [laughter], I’m engaged in a

dialogue, a discussion. It isn’t your ‘feedback’ I want, I want your

opinion. I want to know what you think. I don’t want to have a circuit

plugged into me where I can get your ‘feedback’ and you can get my

‘input’. [laughter]

Please, I’m making a plea here, and if you think I’m talking about

language, I think you would be wrong. I’m not talking about language,

I’m talking about sensibility. A plant does not have ‘input’ or

‘output’. It does something for which electronics has absolutely no

language—it grows! It grows! [applause]. And let me tell you another

thing, it not only grows, it does more than change; it develops. We have

a big problem with all these words which reflect a way in which we

think, and that’s what bothers me.

This is the sensibility of futurism. It is the language of futurism, in

which people themselves are molecularized and then atomized and then

finally reduced to subatomic particles, and what we really have in the

way of an ecosystem is not growth, and not development, what we have

is—plumbing. We run kilocalories through the ecosystem. And we turn on

valves here and we turn off valves there.

Now, this may be useful, I don’t deny that. We should know how energy

moves through an ecosystem. But that alone is not an ecosystem. We’re

beginning to learn that plants have a life of their own and interact

with each other. That there are subtle mechanisms which we cannot really

understand. They can’t be reduced to energy, they can’t be reduced to

kilocalories, we have to look at them from a different point of view. We

have to view them as life, as distinguished from the non-living, and

even that distinction is not so sharp and clear as many people think.

Most futurists start out with the idea, ‘you got a shopping mall, what

do you do then?’ Well, the first question to be asked is, ‘why the hell

do you have a shopping mall?’

So this is the language of futurism, and the language of electronics,

which reflects a very distinct sensibility, that bothers me very, very,

much. It is not utopian—and I’ll get to that afterwards—it is the

language of manipulation. It is the language of mass society. Most

futurists start out with the idea, ‘you got a shopping mall, what do you

do then?’ Well, the first question to be asked is, ‘why the hell do you

have a shopping mall?’ [laughter] That is the real question that has to

be asked. Not ‘what if’ you have a shopping mall, then what do you do.

Out there in the great vast distance, which people feel we should

colonize, moving out into spacecraft, or somehow relate to the distant

universe and listen to the stars, but we haven’t even begun to listen to

our own feelings. We haven’t even begun to listen to our own locality.

This planet is going down in ruin, and people are talking about means of

projecting space platforms out there, talking of a global village,[2]

when we don’t have villages anywhere on this planet to begin with. We

don’t have them. We don’t have any villages, we don’t have any

communities, we live in a state of atomization, and we expect to

electronically communicate with each other through global villages. This

bothers me because it may be good physics, it may be good mechanics, it

may be good dynamics, it may be good anything you wish, but it is not

ecology. It is not ecology.

What is ecology?

The most fundamental mistake begins with the idea that things change.

Now, you know, to change may mean something or may mean nothing. If I

step away here and walk three feet away, I have ‘undergone change’. I’ve

moved three feet away, but I haven’t done a damn thing so far as I’m

concerned, or so far as you are concerned. It is not ‘change’ that I’m

concerned about. What I’m concerned about is development, growth. I

don’t mean growth in the business sense, I mean growth of human

potentiality, I mean growth of human spirit. I mean growth of human

contact. That is ecological. To develop is what is really ecological. To

change can mean anything. The question is, what is the end toward which

you want to develop? What is the goal you’re trying to realize, and

then, afterward, whether or not you have developed to that goal. So mere

input and output and feedback, mere motion means nothing—the real

problem is discussion and dialogue, recognition of personality, growth

and development, which is what biology is concerned with. It is not

concerned merely with change.

Lastly, it must be made very clear that if you believe that the Earth is

a spaceship, then you believe that the world is a watch. You and Sir

Isaac Newton agree perfectly, the world is a clock, just as a spaceship

is a lot of plumbing with a lot of rockets, with a lot of dials, with a

lot of pilots, and all the rest of that stuff. And if you believe in

addition that the beauty, today, of change is that you can move all over

the place in a helicopter, which will pick up your geodesic dome,[3] or

use some type of electronic communications to relate to somebody who is

three thousand miles away, whom you may never see, then we are not

changing, in the developmental sense, anything at all, we’re making

things worse, and worse all the time. And that is a matter, also, of

very great concern to me.

Ecology—social ecology—must begin with a love of place. There must be

home. Oikos—home—ecology—the study of the household. If we do not have a

household—and that household is not an organic, rich community—if we do

not know the land we live on, if we do not understand its soil, if we do

not understand the people we live with, if we cannot relate to them,

then at that particular point we are really in a spaceship. We are

really out in a void.

Ecology must begin with a very deep understanding of the interaction

between people, and the interaction between people and the immediate

ecosystem in which we live. Where you come from, what you love, what is

the land that you love. I don’t mean the country or the state, I’m

talking about the land that you may occupy. It may even be a village, it

may be a city, it may be a farmstead.

But first and foremost, without those roots that place you in nature,

and in a specific form of nature, it is a deception to talk about cosmic

oneness, it is a deception to talk about spaceships, it is a deception

even to talk about ecosystems without having this sense of unity with

your immediate locale, with your soil, with your community, with your

home. Without that community and without that sense of home, without

that sense of the organic—of the organic and the developmental rather

than the mere inorganic and ‘change’ in which you merely change

place—you are changing nothing, the problems are merely amplified or

diminished, but they remain the same problems.

What isn’t ecology?

It is for this reason that futurism today plays an increasingly very

very reactionary role, because it works with the prejudice that what you

have is given. You have to assume what exists today, and you extrapolate

into the future, and you play a numbers game. And then you go around and

you logistically manipulate here and there, and implicit in all of this

is the idea that you are things to be manipulated. There are all kinds

of technicians who are going to decide through their knowledge of

electronics, through their ‘know-how’, through their ‘feedback’ and

their ‘input’, where you go, what you should do: and this is becoming a

very serious problem today, particularly when it is mistaken for

ecology, based on the organic, on the growing, on the development as an

individual, as a community and as a place.

You then finally reach the most sinister numbers game of all: who should

live and who should die. The ‘population game’. The terrifying lifeboat

ethic, in which now in the name of ecology, today views are being

proposed that are almost indistinguishable from German fascism.

There are those who are made to drown, they happen to live in India.

Conveniently, they happen to have black or dark skin, and you can

identify them. And then there are those who occupy another lifeboat,

that lifeboat is called North America. And in that lifeboat, you have to

conserve what you have, you see?

You have to be prepared to develop an ethic, you have to be prepared to

develop the stamina to see people die. Of course you’ll regret it, but

scarce resources and growing population, what can you do? You’re out

there on the ocean, the ship is sinking, so instead of trying to find

out what was wrong with the ship that makes it sink, and instead of

trying to build a ship that will make it possible for all of us to share

the world, you get into a lifeboat, just like you get into a spaceship,

and at that particular point, the world be damned. And that is a very

sinister ideology.

I speak as one who comes from the thirties, and remembers, very

dramatically, that there was the demographic ecology, if you like, in

Germany, no different from some of the demographic ecology I have been

witnessing today.[4] Remember well that the implications of some of

these conceptions are extremely totalitarian, extremely un-ecological,

extremely inorganic, and tend, if anything, to promote a totalitarian

vision of the future in which there is no human scale, in which there is

no human control.

Another thing that troubles me very deeply is the enormous extent to

which social ecology or ecological problems are reduced simply to

technological problems. That is ridiculous. It’s absurd. The factory is

a place where people are controlled, whether they build solar collectors

or not. It makes no difference. [Applause] The same relationships will

exist there as under any other circumstances of domination exist. If

‘household’ means that women take care of the dishes, and men go out and

do the manly work such as make war and clean up the planet, and reduce

the population, where have we gone? Nothing has changed. What will a

‘spaceship’ on earth look like? What will it be? Who will be the general

to give the orders, who will be the navigator to decide which way the

‘spaceship’ goes?

Please bear in mind what the implications of these things are. If people

live in cities that are one mile high, how the hell can you get to know

each other? How can you have a feeling for the land in which you live,

when the landscape that you see goes up to a horizon twenty, thirty,

forty miles away? On top of the World Trade Center, I have no feeling

for New York. If I were just an ordinary, simple product of the United

States Airforce, and I were ordered from the World Trade Center, way up

there, to bomb Manhattan, looking down upon it, I would see nothing. I

would press the button and it would be meaningless. Up would go the

great bomb, the great flash, the great cloud. It wouldn’t have any

meaning to me. Down on the ground, when I look up at the Empire State

Building or the World Trade Center, I feel oppressed. I feel that I have

been reduced to a lowly ant. I begin to feel the demand for an

environment that I can control. That I can begin to understand. But when

I see plants growing around me, when I see life existing around me—human

life, animal life of all its different forms, flora—then I can relate.

This is my land.

Think human

What we have to do is not only ‘think small’, we have to think human.[5]

Small is not enough. What is human is what counts, not just what is

small. What is beautiful are people, what is beautiful is the ecosystems

and their integrity in which we live. What is beautiful is the soil

which we share with the rest of the world of life. And particularly that

special bit of soil in which we feel we have some degree of stewardship.

It is not only what is small that is beautiful, it is what is ecological

that is beautiful, what is human that is beautiful.

What is important is not only that a technology is appropriate. As I

have said before: the Atomic Energy Commission is absolutely convinced

that nuclear power plants are appropriate technology—to the Atomic

Energy Commission. The B1 bombers are very appropriate technology—to the

Air Force.

What I am concerned with is, again, what is liberatory, what is

ecological. We have to bring these value-charged words, and we have to

bring these value-charged concepts into our thinking, or else we will

become mere physicists, dealing with dead matter and dealing with people

as though they are mere objects to be manipulated, in spaceships, or to

be connected through various forms of electronic devices, or subject to

world games, or finally, set adrift on a raft or a lifeboat in which

they kick off anyone who threatens to eat their biscuits or threatens to

drink their distilled water—and that becomes ecofascism. That becomes

ecofascism, and it horrifies me to think that anything ecological—even

that word ‘eco’—could be attached to fascism.

First and foremost, we must go back to the utopian tradition, in the

richest sense of the word. Not to the electronic tradition, not to the

tradition of NASA, not to the tradition of Sir Isaac Newton, in which

the whole world was a machine or a watch.

You can travel all over the country and learn nothing, because you’re

carrying something that’s very important with you, that will decide

whether you learn or not, and that is: yourself. Move to California

tomorrow, and if you’ve still got the same psychological and spiritual

and intellectual problems, you’ll be sweating it out in San Francisco no

differently than you do in Amherst or New York. That is the important

thing—to recover yourself, to begin to create a community. And what kind

of community imagination can begin to create.

What does it mean to be utopian?

‘Imagination to power’, as the French students said. ‘Be practical, do

the impossible’, because if you don’t do the impossible, as I’ve cried

out over and over again, we’re going to wind up with the unthinkable—and

that will be the destruction of the planet itself. So to do the

impossible is the most rational and practical thing we can do. And that

impossible is both in our own conviction and in our shared conviction

with our brothers and sisters, to begin to try to create, or work toward

a very distinct notion of what constitutes a finally truly liberated as

well as ecological society. A utopian notion, not a futuristic notion.

It finally means this: that we have to begin to develop ecological

communities. Not just an ecological society—ecological communities, made

up of comparatively small numbers of groups, and beautiful communities

spaced apart from each other so that you could almost walk to them, not

merely have to get into a car and travel sixty or seventy miles to reach

them. It means that we have to reopen the land and reuse it again to

create organic garden beds, and learn how to develop a new agriculture

in which we’ll all participate in the horticulture.

If you don’t do the impossible, we’re going to wind up with the

unthinkable—and that will be the destruction of the planet itself.

We have to look into communities that we can take into a single view, as

Aristotle said more than 2200 years ago—and we have yet to learn a great

deal from the Greeks, despite all their shortcomings as slave-owners and

as patriarchs—a community that we can take into a single view, so that

we can know each other. Not a community in which we know each other not

by virtue of sitting around and talking over the telephone, or listening

to some honcho talk over a microphone, or listening to some bigger

honcho talk over a television screen. It has to be done by sitting

around in communities, in those town meetings, and in those structures

which we have here in the United States as part of the legacy, at

least—the best legacy of the United States—and start thinking utopian in

the fullest sense of the word.

We have also to develop our own technologies. We can’t let other people

simply build them for us. They can’t be transported from God knows where

to us. We have to know how to fix our faucets, and create our own

collectives. We have to become richly diversified human beings. We have

to be capable of doing many different things. We have to be

farmer-citizens and citizen-farmers. We have to recover the ideal that

even a Ben Franklin—who by no means can be regarded, in my opinion

anyway, as anything slightly more than a philistine—believed in the

18^(th) century: you can both print and read, and when you printed, you

read what you printed. That’s what we have to bring to ourselves. We

have to think not in terms, merely, of change; we have to think in terms

of growth. We have to use the language of ecology so that we can touch

each other with the magic of words and communicate with each other, with

the magic and the richness of concepts, not of catchphrases that are

really snappy [snaps fingers]—’input’, ‘output’.’Dialogue’ is longer,

but it has a beautiful ring to it. Dia logos, speech between two,

talking between two. Logos—logic, reasoning out creatively,

dialectically, and growing through conversation, and growing through

communication. This is what I mean by utopia. We have to go back to

Fourier, who said that measure of a society’s oppression could be

determined by the way it treats its women. It was not Marx who said

that, it was Charles Fourier…. We have to go back to the rich tradition

of the New England town meeting, and all that was healthy in it and

recover that and learn a new type of confederalism.

Today, the real movements of the future insofar as they are utopian in

their outlook—insofar as they are trying to create not an extension of

the present, but trying to create something that is truly new, that

alone can rescue life, human spirit, as well as the ecology of this

planet—must be built around a new, rich communication, not between

leader and led—but between student and teacher, so that every student

can eventually become a teacher, and not a dictator, a governor, a

controller and a manipulator.

And above all, we have to think organically. We have to think

organically—not electronically. We have to think in terms of life and

biology, not in terms of watches and physics. We have to think in terms

of what is human, not what is merely small or big, because that alone

will be beautiful. Any society that seeks to create utopia will not only

be a society that is free, it also has to be a society that is

beautiful. There can no longer be any separation—any more than between

mind and body—between art and the development of a free society. We must

become artists now, not only ecologists, utopians. Not futurists, not

environmentalists.

[applause]

Murray Bookchin was asked two relevant questions from the audience,

which were inaudible in the recording. The first questioner asked if he

was against technology.

Murray Bookchin: No, that is not at all true. I see a very great use for

technology. What I’m talking about is a technocracy. What I’m talking

about is rule by technicians. What I’m talking about is the use of

various types of technological devices that are inhuman to people and

inhuman in their scale, and cannot be controlled by people. The beauty

of an ecological technology—an ecotechnology, or a liberatory

technology, or an alternative technology—is that people can understand

it if they are willing to try to devote some degree of effort to doing

so. It’s simplicity, wherever possible, it’s small-scale, wherever

possible. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about going

back to the paleolithic, I’m not talking about going back into caves. We

cannot go back to that and I don’t think we want to go back to that.

In the next question from the audience, Bookchin is asked to, very

concretely, describe his political vision. There is laughter after the

question.

I’m going to be really hard rocks about this and get down to it and not

just tell you that I’m giving you some vague philosophical principles. I

would like to see communities, food cooperatives, affinity groups, all

these types of structures—town meetings developed all over the United

States. I’d like to see neighborhood organizations, non-hierarchical in

their form, developed all over the United States, from New York City to

San Francisco, from rural Vermont to urban California. When these

particular organizations develop rapidly and confederate, at first

regionally, and hopefully, nationally, and perhaps even

internationally—because we are no longer talking about the United States

alone, we’re even talking about what’s going on in the Soviet Union to a

very great extent—I hope they will then, through one way or another, by

example and through education win the majority of people to this

sensibility. And having done this, demand that society be changed, and

then afterward we’ll have to face whatever we have to face. The only

alternative we have after that, if we don’t do that, will be as follows:

we will be organized into bureaucracies, bureaucracies in the name of

progress, as well as bureaucracies in the name of reaction, as well as

bureaucracies in the name of the status quo. And if we’re organized in

the form of these bureaucracies, whether we use solar power or nerve

gas, it makes no difference, we’re going to wind up, ultimately, with

the same thing. In fact, the idea that solar power or wind power or

methane is today being used instead of fossil fuels, will merely become

an excuse for maintaining the same multinational, corporate, and

hierarchical system that we have today.

So I propose that those types of organizations, and those types of

social forms, be developed all over the country, and increasingly

hopefully affect the majority of opinion, to a point where the American

people, in one way or another, make their voices heard, because they are

the overwhelming majority, and say they want to change the society. And

if America turns over, the whole world will change, in my personal

opinion. Because this happens to be the center, literally the keystone

of what I would call the whole capitalistic system that today envelops

the world, whether it be China, Cuba and Russia, or whether it be the

United States, Canada and Western Europe. That is, very concretely, what

I propose.

Daydreams are dangerous. They are pieces of imagination, they are bits

of poetry. They are the balloons that fly up in history.

I’d like to make this very clear, the American people first will begin

to change unconsciously, before they change consciously. You’ll go

around to them and you’ll say, what do you think of work? And they’ll

say it’s noble. You’ll ask them what do you think of property? And

they’ll say it’s sacred. And you’ll ask them, what do they think of

motherhood, they’ll say it’s grand, it’s godly. What do you think of

religion and they’ll say they belong to it and they are completely

devoted to it. You’ll ask them, what do they think of America, and

they’ll say, either love it or leave it. You’ll say, what do you think

of the flag and they’ll say it’s glorious, Old Glory.

But then one day something is going to happen. One day, the unconscious,

the expectation, the dream, the imagination, the hope that you go to bed

with as you sink into the twilight hours of sleep, or the early morning

when you daydream, just after the alarm clock has gone off and you’ve

shut it down—those expectations and dreams that lie buried in the

unconscious mind of millions upon millions of American people are going

to break right into consciousness. And when they break right into

consciousness, heaven help this society. [audience cheers] I’m very

serious.

That is the strange catalysis, the strange process of education;

everyone today is schizophrenic, we’re all leading double lives, and we

know it. And not only are we leading double lives, those

ordinary—so-called ‘ordinary’—people out there are also leading double

lives. And one day, that double life is going to become one life. Maybe

it’ll be for the worse. But maybe it’ll be for the better. At that

particular point, maybe something like May, June 1968 in Paris will

start. All over the place, all kinds of flags will go up that don’t look

like the flag we’re accustomed to seeing. [laughter from audience] Maybe

black or red, I don’t know. At that particular point, millions of people

will stop working, and they’ll start discussing.

Then you’ll have that terrifying situation called mob rule. But that

will happen, and that’s what happened here in 1776, they believed in the

King, right up until July 1776. In the meantime, they were having

doubts. They didn’t even know they didn’t like the monarchy. But one day

they woke up and said, the hell with King George. And they ran ahead,

and they wrote the Declaration of Independence, and it was read to the

troops. At that particular point, the Union Jack went down and the Stars

and Stripes went up. This is the way people actually change. People

change unconsciously before they change consciously. They begin to float

dreams—daydreams are dangerous. Daydreams are pieces of imagination,

they are bits of poetry. They are the balloons that fly up in history.

[1] ‘Spaceship Earth’ was a popular term beginning in the 1960s, made

famous by a speech to the UN by Adlai Stevenson and often used by the

famous inventor and thinker R. Buckminster Fuller. The term came out of

the growing ecological consciousness of the time, when it was used to

highlight the finitude of our available resources and the need for world

peace. Bookchin may have been directly commenting on Fuller’s use of the

term, who was likely in the room at the time.

[2] Bookchin is referring to Marshall McLuhan’s argument that modern

mass media has allowed us to live in a ‘global village’.

[3] Another dig at R. Buckminster Fuller, who often promoted the

geodesic dome as a housing model of the future.

[4] Bookchin is referring to books like The Population Bomb by Paul and

Anne Ehrlich, published in 1968.

[5] This is a reference to the hugely popular book, Small is beautiful:

A Study of Economics As If People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher,

published in 1973.