💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › uri-gordon-eco-anarchism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:27:34. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Eco-Anarchism Author: Uri Gordon Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: eco-anarchy, green anarchism, introductory Source: Gordon, Uri. “Eco-Anarchism.” In The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present, edited by Immanuel Ness, 1051–1052. Vol. 3. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Gale eBooks (accessed June 22, 2021).
Environmental direct action has been a major site for the revival of
anarchist political culture since the 1970s. In tandem, a diverse body
of eco-anarchist thought has emerged in response to the environmental
crisis.
In Germany and France, mobilizations against nuclear energy in the 1970s
provided the major vehicle of continuity for the radical surge of 1968,
and formed a laboratory for direct action tactics and autonomous
organization. In the United States, anti-nuclear campaigns turned toward
direct action in 1976 with the Clamshell Alliance’s occupations of the
planned site of the Seabrook reactor in New Hampshire. The occupation
inspired similar direct action groups nationwide, including the Abalone
Alliance in California, where anarchist eco-feminists including Starhawk
(Miriam Simos, b. 1951) had a prominent role in imbuing its political
culture with direct democracy, non-violence, and an earth-based
spirituality.
Eco-feminism was also influential in the European and American
anti-militarist movements of the 1980s (at Greenham Common, Seneca
Falls, Pantex), where connections were made between a militarized
culture, poverty, and environmental destruction as manifestations of
patriarchal contempt for life. Ecological, feminist anti-militarism
expressed an anarchist critique of domination as such, stressing an
inexorable connection between the domination of nature and domination of
humans (with patriarchy as the prototype of both).
Throughout the 1990s, a new cycle of environmental direct action emerged
with distinctly anarchist cultures, including British and Israeli
anti-roads movements, North American forest defense campaigns, and, to
some extent, the animal liberation movement. The Earth First! network
(especially in Europe) is broadly considered to be anarchist, as are the
action-banners Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front.
Eco-anarchism as a body of writing represents diverse engagements with
the connection between environmental crisis, capitalism, hierarchy, and
the ideology of economic growth and technological progress – stressing
the social critiques disemphasized in the holistic,
consciousness-transformational message of deep ecology. At the same
time, the anarchist emphasis on decentralization and worker/community
ownership strongly coheres with the requirements of a low-throughput
economy, leading to visions of communistic localism and bio-regionalism.
Murray Bookchin was among the first to address environmental problems in
decentralist anti-capitalist terms. His dialectical and evolutionary
theory of social ecology argued that humans belong to a natural
continuum but that their second, sociocultural nature has been
disfigured by the rise of hierarchy – initially from gerontocracy in
stateless societies. Bookchin’s vituperative claims to theoretical
exclusivity and his promotion of electoral democracy, however, drew
harsh criticism from anarchists.
Since the mid-1980s, a major current of eco-anarchist expression has
been anarchoprimitivism. First articulated in the Detroit magazine Fifth
Estate, the current was developed by authors including Fredy Perlman,
John Zerzan, and David Watson and in publications such as Green Anarchy
(US) and Green Anarchist (UK). Strongly antagonistic to industrial
society, technology, and modernity, primitivist critiques reject
civilization as essentially hierarchical, posit hunter-gatherer
communities as sites of primitive anarchy, and promote a reconnection to
the wild as part of anarchist revolutionary struggles.
SEE ALSO: Abalone Alliance ; Anarchism ; Anti-Nuclear Protest Movements
; Earth First! ; Ecological Protest Movements ; Kropotkin, Peter
(1842–1921) ; Reclaim the Streets ; Reclus, Elisée (1830–1905)
Bookchin, M. (1982) The Ecology of Freedom. Palo Alto: Cheshire.
Epstein, B. (1991) Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent
Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Perlman, F. (1983) Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! Detroit: Black
& Red.
Purchase, G. (1992) Anarchism and Ecology. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Seel, B. et al. (Eds.) (2000) Direct Action in British Environmentalism.
London: Routledge.
Watson, D. (1998) Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its
Enemies. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
Zerzan, J. (1994) Future Primitive. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.