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Title: What is Social Ecology?
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1993
Language: en
Topics: social ecology, green anarchism, ecology
Source: *Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology*, edited by M.E. Zimmerman, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993.
Notes: This text was substantially revised for

Murray Bookchin

What is Social Ecology?

Murray Bookchin has long been a major figure in anarchlst and utopian

political theory, theory of technology, urbanism, and the philosophy of

nature. He is the cofounder and director emeritus of the Institute 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 esthetic

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 Society

Let us begin, then, with basics—namely, by asking what we mean by nature

and society. Among the many definitions of nature that have been

formulated over time, one is rather elusive and often difficult to grasp

because it requires a certain way of thinking—one that stands at odds

with what we popularly call “linear thinking.” This form of “nonlinear”

or organic thinking is developmental rather than analytical, or, in more

technical terms, dialectical rather than instrumental. Nature, conceived

in terms of developmental thinking, is more than the beautiful vistas we

see from a mountaintop or in the images that are fixed on the backs of

picture postcards. Such vistas and images of nonhuman nature are

basically static and immobile. Our attention, to be sure, may be

arrested by the soaring flight of a hawk, or the bolting leap of a deer,

or the low-slung shadowy loping of a coyote. But what we are really

witnessing in such cases are the mere kinetics of physical motion,

caught in the frame of an essentially static image of the scene before

our eyes. It deceives us into believing in the “eternality” of a single

moment in nature.

If we look with some care into nonhuman nature as more than a scenic

view, we begin to sense that it is basically an evolving phenomenon, a

richly fecund, even dramatic development that is forever changing. I

mean to define nonhuman nature precisely as an evolving process, as the

totality, in fact of its evolution. This encompasses the development

from the inorganic into the organic, from the less differentiated and

relatively limited world of unicellular organisms into that of

multicellular ones equipped with simple, later complex, and presently

fairly intelligent neural apparatuses that allow them to make innovative

choices. Finally, the acquisition of warm-bloodedness gives to organisms

the astonishing flexibility to exist in the most demanding climatic

environments.

This vast drama of nonhuman nature is in every respect stunningly

wondrous. It is marked by increasing subjectivity and flexibility and by

increasing differentiation that makes an organism more adaptable to new

environmental challenges and opportunities and renders a living being

more equipped to alter its environment to meet its own needs. One may

speculate that the potentiality of matter itself—the ceaseless

interactivity of atoms in forming new chemical combinations to produce

ever more complex molecules, amino acids, proteins, and, under suitable

conditions, elementary life-forms—is inherent in inorganic nature. Or

one may decide, quite matter-of-factly, that the “struggle for

existence” or the “survival of the fittest” (to use popular Darwinian

terms) explains why increasingly subjective and more flexible beings are

capable of dealing with environmental changes more effectively than are

less subjective and flexible beings. But the fact remains that the kind

of evolutionary drama I have described did occur, and is carved in stone

in the fossil record. That nature is this record, this history, this

developmental or evolutionary process, is a very sobering fact.

Conceiving nonhuman nature as its own evolution rather than as a mere

vista has profound implications—ethical as well as biological—for

ecologically minded people. Human beings embody, at least potentially,

attributes of nonhuman development that place them squarely within

organic evolution. They are not “natural aliens,” to use Neil Evernden’s

phrase, strange “exotics,” phylogenetic “deformities” that, owing to

their tool-making capacities, “cannot evolve with an ecosystem

anywhere.”[2] Nor are they “intelligent fleas,” to use the language of

Gaian theorists who believe that the earth (“Gaia”) is one living

organism.[3] These untenable disjunctions between humanity and the

evolutionary process are as superficial as they are potentially

misanthropic. Humans are highly intelligent, indeed, very self-conscious

primates, which is to say that they have emerged“not diverged“from a

long evolution of vertebrate life-forms into mammalian, and finally,

primate life-forms. They are a product of a significant evolutionary

trend toward intellectuality, self-awareness, will, intentionality, and

expressiveness, be it in oral or body language.

Human beings belong to a natural continuum, no less than their primate

ancestors and mammals in general. To depict them as “aliens” that have

no place or pedigree in natural evolution, or to see them essentially as

an infestation that parasitizes a highly anthropomorphic version of the

planet (Gaia) the way fleas parasitize dogs and cats, is bad thinking,

not only bad ecology. Lacking any sense of process, this kind of

thinking—regrettably so commonplace among ethicists—radically bifurcates

the nonhuman from the human. Indeed, to the degree that nonhuman nature

is romanticized as “wilderness,” and seen presumably as more

authentically “natural” than the works of humans, the natural world is

frozen into a circumscribed domain in which human innovation, foresight,

and creativity have no place and offer no possibilities.

The truth is that human beings not only belong in nature, they are

products of a long, natural evolutionary process. Their seemingly

“unnatural” activities—like the development of technology and science,

the formation of mutable social institutions, of highly symbolic forms

of communication, of esthetic sensibilities, the creation of towns and

cities—all would be impossible without the large array of physical

attributes that have been eons in the making, be they large brains or

the bipedal motion that frees their hands for tool making and carrying

food. In many respects, human traits are enlargements of nonhuman traits

that have been evolving over the ages. Increasing care for the young,

cooperation, the substitution of mentally guided behavior for largely

instinctive behavior—all are present more keenly in human behavior. The

difference between the development of these traits among nonhuman beings

is that among humans they reach a degree of elaboration and integration

that yields cultures or, viewed institutionally in terms of families,

bands, tribes, hierarchies, economic classes, and the state, highly

mutable societies for which there is no precedent in the nonhuman

world—unless the genetically programmed behavior of insects is to be

regarded as “social.” In fact, the emergence and development of human

society is a shedding of instinctive behavioral traits, a continuing

process of clearing a new terrain for potentially rational behavior.

Human beings always remain rooted in their biological evolutionary

history, which we may call “first Nature,” but they produce a

characteristically human social nature of their own which we may call

“second nature.” And far from being “unnatural,” human second nature is

eminently a creation of organic evolution’s first nature. To write the

second nature created by human beings out of nature as a whole, or

indeed, to minimize it, is to ignore the creativity of natural evolution

itself and to view it onesidedly. If “true” evolution embodies itself

simply in creatures like grizzly bears, wolves, and whales—generally,

animals that people find esthetically pleasing or relatively

intelligent—then human beings are literally de-natured. In such views,

whether seen as “aliens” or as “fleas,” humans are essentially placed

outside the self-organizing thrust of natural evolution toward

increasing subjectivity and flexibility. The more enthusiastic

proponents of this de-naturing of humanity may see human beings as

existing apart from nonhuman evolution, thereby dealing with people as a

“freaking,” as Paul Shepard puts it, of the evolutionary process. Others

simply avoid the problem of humanity’s unique place in natural evolution

by promiscuously putting human beings on a par with beetles in terms of

their “intrinsic worth.” In this “either/or” propositional thinking, the

social is either separated from the organic, or flippantly reduced to

the organic, resulting in an inexplicable dualism at one extreme or a

naive reductionism at the other. The dualistic approach, with its

quasi-theological premise that the world was “made” for human use is

saddled with the name of “anthropocentricity,” while the reductionist

approach, with its almost meaningless notion of a “biocentric

democracy,” is saddled with the name of “biocentricity.”

The bifurcation of the human from the nonhuman reveals a failure to

think organically, and to approach evolutionary phenomena with an

evolutionary way of thought. Needless to say, if we are content to

regard nature as no more than a scenic vista, mere metaphoric and poetic

description of it might suffice to replace systematic thinking about it.

But if we regard nature as the history of nature, as an evolutionary

process that is going on to one degree or another under our very eyes,

we dishonor this process by thinking of it in anything but a processual

way. That is to say, we require a way of thinking that recognizes that

“what-is” as it seems to lie before our eyes is always developing into

“what-it-is-not,” that it is engaged in a continual self-organizing

process in which past and present, seen as a richly differentiated but

shared continuum, give rise to a new potentiality for a future,

ever-richer degree of wholeness. Accordingly, the human and the nonhuman

can be seen as aspects of an evolutionary continuum, and the emergence

of the human can be located in the evolution of the nonhuman, without

advancing naive claims that one is either “superior to” or “made for”

the other.

By the same token, in a processual, organic, and dialectical way of

thinking, we would have little difficulty in locating and explaining the

emergence of the social out of the biological, of second nature out of

first nature. It seems more fashionable these days to deal with

ecologically significant social issues like a bookkeeper. One simply

juxtaposes two columns—labeled “old paradigm” and “new paradigm”—as

though one were dealing with debits and credits. Obviously distasteful

terms like “centralization” are placed under “old paradigm,” while more

appealing ones like “decentralization” are regarded as “new paradigm.”

The result is an inventory of bumper-sticker slogans whose “bottom line”

is patently a form of “absolute good versus absolute evil.” All of this

maybe deliciously synoptic and easy for the eyes, but it is singularly

lacking as food for the brain. To truly know and be able to give

interpretative meaning to the social issues so arranged, we should want

to know how each idea derived from others and is part of an overall

development. What, in fact, do we mean by the notion of

“decentralization,” and how does it derive from or give rise in the

history of human society to “centralization”? Again: processual thinking

is needed to deal with processual realities so that we can gain some

sense of direction—practical as well as theoretical—in dealing with our

ecological problems.

Social ecology seems to stand alone, at present, in calling for the use

of organic, developmental, and derivative ways of thinking out problems

that are basically organic and developmental in character. The very

definition of the natural world as a development indicates the need for

an organic way of thinking, as does the derivation of human from

nonhuman nature—a derivation that has the most far-reaching consequences

for an ecological ethics that can offer serious guidelines for the

solution of our ecological problems.

Social ecology calls upon us to see that nature and society are

interlinked by evolution into one nature that consists of two

differentiations: first or biotic nature, and second or human nature.

Human nature and biotic nature share an evolutionary potential for

greater subjectivity and flexibility. Second nature is the way in which

human beings as flexible, highly intelligent primates inhabit the

natural world. That is to say, people create an environment that is most

suitable for their mode of existence. In this respect, second nature is

no different from the environment that every animal, depending upon its

abilities, creates as well as adapts to, the biophysical

circumstances—or ecocommunity—in which it must live. On this very simple

level, human beings are, in principle, doing nothing that differs from

the survival activities of nonhuman beings—be it building beaver dams or

gopher holes.

But the environmental changes that human beings produce are

significantly different from those produced by nonhuman beings. Humans

act upon their environments with considerable technical foresight,

however lacking that foresight may be in ecological respects. Their

cultures are rich in knowledge, experience, cooperation, and conceptual

intellectuality; however, they may be sharply divided against themselves

at certain points of their development, through conflicts between

groups, classes, nation states, and even city-states. Nonhuman beings

generally live in ecological niches, their behavior guided primarily by

instinctive drives and conditioned reflexes. Human societies are

“bonded” together by institutions that change radically over centuries.

Nonhuman communities are notable for their fixity in general terms or by

clearly preset, often genetically imprinted, rhythms. Human communities

are guided in part by ideological factors and are subject to changes

conditioned by those factors.

Hence human beings, emerging from an organic evolutionary process,

initiate, by the sheer force of their blology and survival needs, a

social evolutionary development that profoundly involves their organic

evolutionary process. Owing to their naturally endowed intelligence,

powers of communication, capacity for institutional organization, and

relative freedom from instinctive behavior, they refashion their

environment—as do nonhuman beings—to the full extent of their biological

equipment. This equipment now makes it possible for them to engage in

social development. It is not so much that human beings, in principle,

behave differently from animals or are inherently more problematical in

a strictly ecological sense, but that the social development by which

they grade out of their biological development often becomes more

problematicai for themselves and non human life. How these problems

emerge, the ideologies they produce, the extent to which they contribute

to biotic evolution or abort it, and the damage they infiict on the

planet as a whole lie at the very heart of the modern ecological crisis.

Second nature, far from marking the fulfillment of human potentialities,

is riddled by contradictions, antagonisms, and conflicting interests

that have distorted humanity’s unique capacities for development. It

contains both the danger of tearing down the biosphere and, given a

further development of humanity toward an ecological society, the

capacity to provide an entirely new ecological dispensation.

Social Hierarchy and Domination

How, then, did the social—eventually structured around status groups,

class formations, and cultural phenomena“emerge from the biological? We

have reason to speculate that as biological facts such as lineage,

gender distribution, and age differences were slowly institutionalized,

their uniquely social dimension was initially quite egalitarian. Later

it acquired an oppressive hierarchical and then an exploitative class

form. The lineage or blood tie in early prehistory obviously formed the

organic basis of the family. Indeed, it joined together groups of

families into bands, clans, and tribes, through either intermarriage or

fictive forms of descent, thereby forming the earliest social horizon of

our ancestors. More than in other mammals, the simple biological facts

of human reproduction and protracted maternal care of the infant tended

to knit siblings together and produced a strong sense of solidarity and

group inwardness. Men, women, and their children were brought into a

condition of a fairly stable family life, based on mutual obligation and

an expressed sense of affinity that was often sanctified by marital vows

of one kind or another.

Outside the family and all its elaborations into bands, clans, tribes

and the like, other human beings were regarded as “strangers,” who could

alternatively be welcomed hospitably or enslaved or put to death. What

mores existed were based on an unreflected body of customs that seemed

to have been inherited from time immemorial. What we call morality began

as the commandments of a deity, in that they required some kind of

supernatural or mystical reinforcement to be accepted by the community.

Only later, beginning with the ancient Greeks, did ethical behavior

emerge, based on rational discourse and reflection. The shift from blind

custom to a commanding morality, and finally, to a rational ethics

occurred with the rise of cities and urban cosmopolitanism. Humanity,

gradually disengaging itself from the biological facts of blood ties,

began to admit the “stranger” and increasingly recognize itself as a

shared community of human beings rather than an ethnic folk—a community

of citizens rather than of kinsmen.

In the primordial and socially formative world that we must still

explore, other of humanity’s biological traits were to be reworked from

the strictly natural to the social. One of these was the fact of age and

its distinctions. In the emerging social groups that developed among

early humans, the absence of a written language helped to confer on the

elderly a high degree of status, for it was they who possessed the

traditional wisdom of the community, the kinship lines that prescribed

marital ties in obedience to extensive incest taboos, and techniques for

survival that had to be acquired by both the young and the mature

members of the group. In addition, the biological fact of gender

distinctions were to be slowly reworked along social lines into what

were initially complementary sororal and fraternal groups. Women formed

their own food-gathering and care taking groups with their own customs,

belief systems, and values, while men formed their own hunting and

warrior groups with their own behavioral characteristics, mores, and

ideologies.

From everything we know about the socialization of the biological facts

of kinship, age, and gender groups—their elaboration into early

institutions—there is no reason to doubt that people existed in a

complementary relationship with one another. Each, in effect, was needed

by the other to form a relatively stable whole. No one “dominated” the

others or tried to privilege itself in the normal course of things. Yet

with the passing of time, even as the biological facts that underpin

every human group were further reworked into social institutions, so the

social institutions were slowly reworked at various periods and in

various degrees, into hierarchical structures based on command and

obedience. I speak here of a historical trend, in no way predetermined

by any mystical force or deity, a trend that often did not go beyond a

very limited development among many preliterate or aboriginal cultures,

and even in certain fairly elaborate civilizations. Nor can we foretell

how human history might have developed had certain feminine values

associated with care and nurture not been overshadowed by masculine

values associated with combative and aggressive behavior.

Hierarchy in its earliest forms was probably not marked by the harsh

qualities it has acquired over history. Elders, at the very beginnings

of gerontocracy, were not only respected for their wisdom but often

beloved of the young, and their affection was often reciprocated in

kind. We can probably account for the increasing stridency and harshness

of later gerontocracies by supposing that the elderly, burdened by their

failing powers and dependent upon the community’s goodwill, were more

vulnerable to abandonment in periods of material want than any other

part of the population. In any case, that gerontocracies were the

earliest forms of hierarchy is corroborated by their existence in

communities as far removed from each other as the Australian Aborigines,

tribal societies in East Africa, and Indian communities in the Americas.

“Even in simple food-gathering cultures, individuals above fifty, let us

say, apparently arrogated to themselves certain powers and privileges

which benefitted themselves specifically,” observes anthropologist Paul

Radin, “and were not necessarily, if at all, dictated by considerations

either of the rights of others or the welfare of the community.”[4] Many

tribal councils throughout the world were really councils of elders, an

institution that never completely disappeared (as the word “alderman”

suggests), even though they were overlaid by warrior societies,

chiefdoms, and kingships.

Patricentricity, in which male values, institutions, and forms of

behavior prevail over female ones, seems to have followed gerontocracy.

Initially, this shift may have been fairly harmless, inasmuch as

preliterate and early aboriginal societies were largely domestic

communities in which the authentic center of material life was the home,

not the “men’s house” so widely present in tribal societies. Male rule,

if such it can be strictly called, takes on its most severe and coercive

form in patriarchy, an institution in which the eldest male of an

extended family or clan has a life-and-death command over all members of

the group. Women are by no means the exclusive or even the principal

target of the patriarch’s domination. The sons, like the daughters, may

be ordered how to behave and whom to marry and may be killed at the whim

of the “old man.” So far as patricentricity is concerned, however, the

authority and prerogative of the male are the product of a slow, often

subtly negotiated development in which the male fraternity tends to edge

out the female sorority by virtue of the former’s growing “civil”

responsibilities. Increasing population, marauding bands of outsiders

whose migrations may be induced by drought or other unfavorable

conditions, and vendettas of one kind or another, to cite common causes

of hostility or war, create a new “civil” sphere side by side with

woman’s domestic sphere, and the former gradually encroaches upon the

latter. With the appearance of cattle-drawn plow agriculture, the male

begins to invade the horticultural sphere of woman, who had used the

simple digging stick, and her earlier economic predominance in the

community’s life is thereby diluted. Warrior societies and chiefs carry

the momentum of male dominance to the level of a new material and

cultural constellation. Male dominance becomes extremely active and

ultimately yields a world that is managed by male elites who dominate

not only women but also other men.

“Why” hierarchy emerges is transparent enough: the infirmities of age,

increasing population, natural disasters, certain technological changes

that privilege male activities of hunting and caring for animals over

the horticultural functions of females, the growth of civil society, the

spread of warfare. All serve to enhance the male’s responsibilities at

the expense of the female’s. Marxist theorists tend to single out

technological advances and the presumed material surpluses they produce

to explain the emergence of elite strata—indeed, of exploiting ruling

classes. However, this does not tell us why many societies whose

environments were abundantly rich in food never produced such strata.

That surpluses are necessary to support elites and classes is obvious,

as Aristotle pointed out more than two millennia ago. But too many

communities that had such resources at their disposal remained quite

egalitarian and never “advanced” to hierarchical or class societies.

It is worth emphasizing that hierarchical domination, however coercive

it may be, is not to be confused with class exploitation. Often the role

of high-status individuals is very well-meaning, as in the case of

commands given by caring parents to their children, of concerned

husbands and wives to each other, or of elderly people to younger ones.

In tribal societies, even where a considerable measure of authority

accrues to a chief—and most chiefs are advisers rather than rulers—he

usually must earn the esteem of the community by interacting with the

people, and he can easily be ignored or removed from his position by

them. Many chiefs earn their prestige, so essential to their authority,

by disposing of gifts, and even by a considerable disaccumulation of

their personal goods. The respect accorded to many chiefs is earned, not

by hoarding surpluses as a means to power but by disposing of them as

evidence of generosity.

Classes tend to operate along different lines. Power is usually gained

by the acquisition of wealth, not by its disposal; rulership is

guaranteed by outright physical coercion, not simply by persuasion; and

the state is the ultimate guarantor of authority. That hierarchy is more

entrenched than class can perhaps be verified by the fact that women

have been dominated for millennia, despite sweeping changes in class

societies. By the same token, the abolition of class rule and economic

exploitation offers no guarantee whatever that elaborate hierarchies and

systems of domination will disappear.

In nonhierarchical and even some hierarchical societies, certain customs

guide human behavior along basically decent lines. Of primary importance

in early customs was the “law of the irreducible minimum” (to use

Radin’s expression), the shared notion that all members of a community

are entitled to the means of life, irrespective of the amount of work

they perform. To deny anyone food, shelter, and the basic means of life

because of infirmities or even frivolous behavior would have been seen

as a heinous denial of the very right to live. Nor were the resources

and things needed to sustain the community ever completely privately

owned: overriding individualistic control was the broader principle of

usufruct—the notion that the means of life that were not being used by

one group could be used, as need be, by another. Thus unused land,

orchards, and even tools and weapons, if left idle, were at the

disposition of anyone in the community who needed them. Lastly, custom

fostered the practice of mutual aid, the rather sensible cooperative

behavior of sharing things and labor, so that an individual or family in

fairly good circumstances could expect to be helped by others if their

fortunes should change for the worse. Taken as a whole, these customs

became so sedimented into society that they persisted long after

hierarchy became oppressive and class society became predominant.

The Idea of Dominating Nature

“Nature,” in the broad sense of a biotic environment from which humans

take the simple things they need for survival, often has no meaning to

preliterate peoples. Immersed in nature as the very universe of their

lives it has no special meaning, even when they celebrate animistic

rituals and view the world around them as a nexus of life, often

imputing their own social institutions to the behavior of various

species, as in the case of “beaver lodges” and humanlike spirits. Words

that express our conventional notions of nature are not easy to find, if

they exist at all, in the languages of aboriginal peoples.

With the rise of hierarchy and human domination, however, the seeds are

planted for a belief that nature not only exists as a world apart, but

that it is hierarchically organized and can be dominated. The study of

magic reveals this shift clearly. Early forms of magic did not view

nature as a world apart. Its worldview tended to be such that a

practitioner essentially pleaded with the “chief spirit” of the game to

coax an animal in the direction of an arrow or a spear. Later, magic

becomes almost entirely instrumental; the game is coerced by magical

techniques to become the hunter’s prey. While the earliest forms of

magic may be regarded as the practices of a generally nonhierarchical

and egalitarian community, the later forms of animistic beliefs betray a

more or less hierarchical view of the natural world and of latent human

powers of domination.

We must emphasize, here, that the idea of dominating nature has its

primary source in the domination of human by human and the structuring

of the natural world into a hierarchical Chain of Being (a static

conception, incidentally, that has no relationship to the evolution of

life into increasingly advanced forms of subjectivity and flexibility).

The biblical injunction that gave to Adam and Noah command of the living

world was above all an expression of a social dispensation. Its idea of

dominating nature can be overcome only through the creation of a society

without those class and hierarchical structures that make for rule and

obedience in private as well as public life. That this new dispensation

involves changes in attitudes and values should go without saying. But

these attitudes and values remain vaporous if they are not given

substance through objective institutions, the ways in which humans

concretely interact with each other, and in the realities of everyday

life from childrearing to work and play. Until human beings cease to

live in societies that are structured around hierarchies as well as

economic classes, we shall never be free of domination, however much we

try to dispel it with rituals, incantations, ecotheologies, and the

adoption of seemingly “natural” ways of life.

The idea of dominating nature has a history that is almost as old as

that of hierarchy itself. Already in the Gilgamesh Epic of Mesopotamia,

a drama that dates back some 7,000 years, the hero defies the deities

and cuts down their sacred trees in his quest for immortality. The

Odyssey is a vast travelogue of the Greek warrior, albeit a more canny

than a heroic one, who essentially dispatches the nature deities that

the Hellenic world inherited from its less well-known precursors. That

elitist societies devastated much of the Mediterranean basin as well as

the hillsides of China provides ample evidence that hierarchical and

class societies had begun a sweeping remaking and despoliation of the

planet long before the emergence of modern science, “linear”

rationality, and “industrial society,” to cite causal factors that are

invoked so freely in the modern ecology movement. Second nature, to be

sure, did not create a Garden of Eden in steadily absorbing and

inflicting harm on first nature. More often than not, it despoiled much

that was beautiful, creative, and dynamic in the biotic world, just as

it ravaged human life itself in murderous wars, genocide, and acts of

heartless oppression. Social ecology refuses to ignore the fact that the

harm elitist society inflicted on the natural world was more than

matched by the harm it inflicted on humanity; nor does it overlook the

fact that the destiny of human life goes hand-in-hand with the destiny

of the nonhuman world.

But the customs of the irreducible minimum, usufruct, and mutual aid

cannot be ignored, however troubling the ills produced by second nature

may seem. These customs persisted well into history and surfaced almost

explosively in massive popular uprisings, from early revolts in ancient

Sumer to the present time. Many of those demanded the recovery of caring

and communitarian values when these were under the onslaught of elitist

and class oppression. Indeed, despite the armies that roamed the

landscape of warring areas, the tax-gatherers who plundered ordinary

village peoples, and the daily abuses that were inflicted by overseers

on workers, community life still persisted and retained many of the

cherished values of a more egalitarian past. Neither ancient despots nor

feudal lords could fully obliterate them in peasant villages and in the

towns with independent craft guilds. In ancient Greece, religions based

on austerity and, more significantly, a rational philosophy that

rejected the encumbering of thought and political life by extravagant

wants, tended to scale down needs and delimit human appetites for

material goods. They served to slow the pace of technological innovation

to a point where new means of production could be sensitively integrated

into a balanced society. Medieval markets were modest, usually local

affairs, in which guilds exercised strict control over prices,

competition, and the quality of the goods produced by their members.

“Grow or Die!”

But just as hierarchies and class structures tend to acquire a momentum

of their own and permeate much of society, so too the market began to

acquire a life of its own and extended its reach beyond limited regions

into the depths of vast continents. Exchange ceased to be primarily a

means to provide for modest needs, subverting the limits imposed upon it

by guilds or by moral and religious restrictions. Not only did it place

a high premium on techniques for increasing production; it also became

the procreator of needs, many of which are simply useless, and gave an

explosive impetus to consumption and technology. First in northern Italy

and the European lowlands, later—and most effectively—in England during

the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the production of goods

exclusively for sale and profit (the capitalistic commodity) rapidly

swept aside all cultural and social barriers to market growth.

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the new

industrial capitalist class with its factory system and commitment to

limitless expansion began to colonize the entire world, and finally,

most aspects of personal life. Unlike the feudal nobility, which had its

cherished lands and castles, the bourgeoisie had no home but the

marketplace and its bank vaults. As a class, they turned more and more

of the world into an ever-expanding domain of factories. Entrepreneurs

of the ancient and medieval worlds had normally gathered their profits

together to invest in land and live like country gentry—given the

prejudices of their times against “ill-gotten” gains from trade. On the

other hand, the industrial capitalists of the modern world spawned a

bitterly competitive marketplace that placed a high premium on

industrial expansion and the commercial power it conferred, and

functioned as though growth were an end in itself.

It is crucially important, in social ecology, to recognize that

industrial growth does not result from a change in a cultural outlook

alone, and least of all, from the impact of scientific rationality on

society. It stems above all from harshly objective factors churned up by

the expansion of the market itself, factors that are largely impervious

to moral considerations and efforts at ethical persuasion. Indeed,

despite the close association between capitalist development and

technological innovation, the most driving imperative of the capitalist

market, given the dehumanizing competition that defines it, is the need

to grow, and to avoid dying at the hands of savage rivals. Important as

greed or the power conferred by wealth may be, sheer survival requires

that an entrepreneur must expand his or her productive apparatus to

remain ahead of other entrepreneurs and try, in fact, to devour them.

The key to this law of life-to survival-is expansion, and greater

profit, to be invested in still further expansion. Indeed, the notion of

progress, once identified by our ancestors as a faith in the evolution

of greater human cooperation and care, is now identified with economic

growth.

The effort by many well-intentioned ecology theorists and their admirers

to reduce the ecological crisis to a cultural rather than a social

problem can easily become obfuscatory. However ecologically concerned an

entrepreneur may be, the harsh fact is that his or her very survival in

the marketplace precludes a meaningful ecological orientation. To engage

in ecologically sound practices places a morally concerned entrepreneur

at a striking, and indeed, fatal disadvantage in a competitive

relationship with a rival—notably one who lacks any ecological concerns

and thus produces at lower costs and reaps higher profits for further

capital expansion.

Indeed, to the extent that environmental movements and ideologies merely

moralize about the “wickedness” of our anti-ecological society, and

emphasize change in personal life and attitudes, they obscure the need

for social action. Corporations are skilled at manipulating this desire

to be present as an ecological image. Mercedes-Benz, for example,

declaims in a two-page ad, decorated with a bison painting from a

Paleolithic cave wall, that “we must work to make more environmentally

sustainable progress by including the theme of the environment in the

planning of new products.”[5] Such deceptive messages are commonplace in

Germany, one of western Europe’s worst polluters. Advertising is equally

self-serving in the United States, where leading polluters piously

declare that for them, “Every day is Earth Day.”

The point social ecology emphasizes is not that moral and spiritual

change is meaningless or unnecessary, but that modern capitalism is

structurally amoral and hence impervious to any moral appeals. The

modern marketplace has imperatives of its own, irrespective of who sits

in the driver’s seat or grabs on to its handlebars. The direction it

follows depends not upon ethical factors but rather on the mindless

“laws” of supply and demand, grow or die, eat or be eaten. Maxims like

“business is business” explicitly tell us that ethical, religious,

psychological, and emotional factors have absolutely no place in the

impersonal world of production, profit, and growth. It is grossly

misleading to think that we can divest this brutally materialistic,

indeed, mechanistic, world of its objective character, that we can

vaporize its hard facts rather than trans forming it.

A society based on “grow or die” as its all-pervasive imperative must

necessarily have a devastating ecological impact. Given the growth

imperative generated by market competition, it would mean little or

nothing if the present-day population were reduced to a fraction of what

it is today. Insofar as entrepreneurs must always expand if they are to

survive, the media that have fostered mindless consumption would be

mobilized to increase the purchase of goods, irrespective of the need

for them. Hence it would become “indispensable” in the public mind to

own two or three of every appliance, motor vehicle, electronic gadget,

or the like, where one would more than suffice. In addition, the

military would continue to demand new, more lethal instruments of death,

of which new models would be required annually.

Nor would “softer” technologies produced by a grow-or-die market fail to

be used for destructive capitalistic ends. Two centuries ago, the

forests of England were hacked into fuel for iron forges with axes that

had not changed appreciably since the Bronze Age, and ordinary sails

guided ships laden with commodities to all parts of the world well into

the nineteenth century. Indeed, much of the United States was “cleared”

of its forests, wildlife, soil, and aboriginal inhabitants with tools

and weapons that would have been easily recognized, however much they

were modified, by Renaissance people who had yet to encounter the

Industrial Revolution. What modern technics did was to accelerate a

process that was well under way at the close of the Middle Ages. It did

not devastate the planet on its own; it abetted a phenomenon, the

ever-expanding market system that had its roots in one of history’s most

fundamental social transformations: the elaboration of hierarchy and

class into a system of distribution based on exchange rather than

complementarity and mutual aid.

An Ecological Society

Social ecology is an appeal not only for moral regeneration but also,

and above all, for social reconstruction along ecological lines. It

emphasizes that an ethical appeal to the powers that be (that embody

blind market forces and competitive relationships), taken by itself, is

likely to be futile. Indeed, taken by itself, it often obscures the real

power relationships that prevail today by making the attainment of an

ecological society seem merely a matter of “attitude,” of “spiritual

change,” or of quasi-religious redemption.

Although always mindful of the need for spiritual change, social ecology

seeks to redress the ecological abuses that society has inflicted on the

natural world by going to the structural as well as the subjective

sources of notions like the “domination of nature.” That is, it

challenges the entire system of domination itself and seeks to eliminate

the hierarchical and class edifice that has imposed itself on humanity

and defined the relationship between nonhuman and human nature. It

advances an ethics of complementarity in which human beings must play a

supportive role in perpetuating the integrity of the biosphere, as

potentially, at least, the most conscious products of natural evolution.

Indeed humans are seen to have a moral responsibility to function

creatively in the unfolding of that evolution. Social ecology thus

stresses the need for embodying its ethics of complementarity in

palpable social institutions that will give active meaning to its goal

of wholeness, and of human involvement as conscious and moral agents in

the interplay of species. It seeks the enrichment of the evolutionary

process by diversification of life-forms. Notwithstanding romantic

views, “Mother Nature” does not necessarily “know best.” To oppose

activities of the corporate world does not mean that one has to become

naively romantic and “biocentric.” By the same token, to applaud

humanity’s potential for foresight and rationality, and its

technological achievements, does not mean that one is “anthropocentric.”

The loose usage of such buzzwords, so commonplace in the ecology

movement, must be brought to an end by reflective discussion.

Social ecology, in effect, recognizes that—like it or not—the future of

life on this planet pivots on the future of society. It contends that

evolution, whether in first nature or in second, is not yet complete.

Nor are the two realms so separated from each other that we must choose

one or the othereither natural evolution with its “biocentric” halo, or

social evolution, as we have known it up to now, with its

“anthropocentric” halo—as the basis for a creative biosphere. We must go

beyond both the natural and the social toward a new synthesis that

contains the best of both. Such a synthesis will transcend them in the

form of a creative, self-conscious, and therefore “free nature,” in

which human beings intervene in natural evolution with their best

capacities—their moral sense, their unprecedented degree of conceptual

thought, and their remarkable powers of communication.

But such a goal remains mere verbiage unless it can be given logistical

and social tangibility. How are we to organize a “free nature” that goes

beyond the rhetoric so plentiful in the ecology movement? Logistically,

“free nature” is unattainable without the decentralization of cities

into confederally united communities sensitively tailored to the natural

areas in which they are located. It means the use of ecotechnologies,

and of solar, wind, methane, and other sources of energy, the use of

organic forms of agriculture, the design of humanly scaled, versatile

industrial installations to meet regional needs of confederated

municipalities. It means, too, an emphasis not only on recycling, but on

the production of high-quality goods that can last for generations. It

means the substitution of creative work for insensate labor and an

emphasis on artful craftspersonship in preference to mechanized

production. It means the leisure to be artful and engage in public

affairs. One would hope that the sheer availability of goods and the

freedom to choose one’s material lifestyle would sooner or later

influence people to adopt moderation in all aspects of life as a

response to the “consumerism” that is promoted by the capitalist

market.[6]

But no ethics or vision of an ecological society, however inspired, can

be meaningful unless it is embodied in a living politics. By “politics”

I do not mean the statecraft practiced by what we call

“politicians”—namely, representatives elected or selected to formulate

policies as guidelines for social life and to manage public affairs. To

social ecology, politics means what it once meant in the democratic

polis of Athens some two thousand years ago the formation of policy by

popular assemblies and their administration by mandated, carefully

supervised boards of coordinators who could easily be recalled if they

failed to abide by the decisions of the assembly’s citizens. I am very

mindful that Athenian politics, even in its most democratic periods, was

marred by the existence of slavery, patriarchy, and the exclusion of the

stranger from public life. In this respect, it differed very little from

most of the Mediterranean civilizations—and Asian ones of the time. What

made Athenian politics unique, however, was that it produced

institutions that were extraordinarily democratic—even directly so—by

comparison with republican institutions in the so-called “democracies”

of the Western world. Either directly or indirectly they inspired later,

more all-encompassing democracies, such as certain medieval towns, the

little-known “sections” of Paris (which were essentially forty-eight

neighborhood assemblies) that propelled the French Revolution in a

highly radical direction in 1793, New England town meetings, and more

recent attempts at civic self-governance.[7]

Any community, however, risks the danger of becoming parochial, even

racist, if it tries to live in isolation and develop a seeming

self-sufficiency. Hence, the need to extend ecological politics into

confederations of ecocommunities, and to foster a healthy

interdependence, rather than an introverted, stultifying independence.

Social ecology would embody its ethics in a politics of confederal

municipalism, in which municipalities cojointly gain rights to

self-governance through networks of confederal councils, to which towns

and cities would send their mandated, recallable delegates to adjust

differences. All decisions would have to be ratified by a majority of

the popular assemblies of the confederated towns and cities. This

institutional process could occur in the neighborhoods of giant cities

as well as in networks of small towns. In fact, the formation of

numerous “town halls” has already repeatedly been proposed in cities as

large as New York and Paris, only to be defeated by well-organized

elitist groups that sought to centralize power, rather than allow its

decentralization.

Power will always belong to elite strata if it is not diffused, in

face-to-face democracies, among the people, who are empowered as partly

autonomous, partly social beings—that is to say, as free individuals,

but as individuals responsible to popular institutions. Empowerment of

the people in this sense will constitute a challenge to the

nation-state—the principal source of nationalism, a regressive ideology,

and of statism, the principal source of coercion. Diversity of cultures

is obviously a desideratum, the source of cultural creativity, but never

can it be celebrated in a nationalistic “apartness” from the general

interests of humanity as a whole, without a regression into folkdom and

tribalism. The full reality of citizenship has begun to wane, and its

disappearance would mark an irrevocable loss in human development.

Citizenship. in the classical sense of the term, meant a lifelong,

ethically oriented education to participation in public affairs, not the

empty form of national legitimation that it so often indicates today. It

meant the cultivation of an affiliation with the interests of the

community, one in which the communal interest was placed above personal

interest, or, more properly, in which the personal interest was

congruent with and realized through the common.

Property, in this ethical constellation, would be shared and, in the

best of circumstances, belong to the community as a whole, not to

producers (“workers”) or owners (“capitalists”). In an ecological

society composed of a “Commune of communes,” property would belong,

ultimately, neither to private producers nor to a nation-state. The

Soviet Union gave rise to an overbearing bureaucracy; the

anarcho-syndicalist vision to competing “worker-controlled” factories

that ultimately had to be knitted together by a labor bureaucracy. From

the standpoint of social ecology, property “interests” would become

generalized, not reconstituted in different conflicting or unmanageable

forms. They would be municipalized, rather than nationalized or

privatized. Workers, farmers, professionals, and the like would thus

deal with municipalized property as citizens, not as members of a

vocational or social group. Leaving aside any discussion of such visions

as the rotation of work, the citizen who engages in both industrial and

agricultural activity, and the professional who also does manual labor,

the communal ideas advanced by social ecology would give rise to

individuals for whom the collective interest is inseparable from the

personal, the public interest from the private, the political interest

from the social.

The step-by-step reorganization of municipalities, their confederation

into ever-larger networks that form a dual power in opposition to the

nation-state, the remaking of the constituents of republican

representatives into citizens who participate in a direct democracy—all

may take a considerable period of time to achieve. But in the end, they

alone can potentially eliminate the domination of human by human and

thereby deal with those ecological problems whose growing magnitude

threatens the existence of a biosphere than can support advanced forms

of life. To ignore the need for these sweeping but eminently practical

changes would be to let our ecological problems fester and spread to a

point where there would no longer be any opportunity to resolve them.

Any attempt to ignore their impact on the biosphere or deal with them

singly would be recipe for disaster, a guarantee that the

anti-ecological society that prevails in most of the world today would

blindly hurtle the biosphere as we know it to certain destruction.

[1] Murray Bookchin, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,” initially

published in the ecoanarchist journal New Directions in Libertarian

Thought (Sept., 1964), and collected, together with all my major essays

of the sixties in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley: Ramparts Press,

1972; republished, Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1977). The expression

“ethics of complementarity” is from The Ecology of Freedom (San

Francisco: Cheshire Books, 1982; revised edition, Montreal: Black Rose

Books, 1991).

[2] Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien (Toronto: University of Toronto

Press,1986), p. 109.

[3] Quoted in Alan Wolfe, “Up from Humanism,” in The Arnerican Prospect

(Winter, 1991), p. 125.

[4] Paul Radin, The World of Primitive Man (New York: Grove Press,

1960), p. 211.

[5] See Der Spiegel (Sept. 16, 1991), pp. 144–45.

[6] All of these views were spelled out in the essay “Ecology and

Revolutionary Thought” by this writer in 1965, and were assimilated over

time by subsequent ecology movements. Many of the technological views

advanced a year later in “Toward a Liberatory Technology” were also

assimilated and renamed “appropriate technology,” a rather socially

neutral expression in comparison with my original term “ecotechnology.”

Both of these essays can be found in Post-Scarcity Anarchism.

[7] See the essay “The Forms of Freedom,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism,

“The Legacy of Freedom,” in The Ecology of Freedom, and “Patterns of

Civic Freedom” in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of

Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987).