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Title: Ecology and Revolutionary Thought Author: Murray Bookchin Date: February 1965 Language: en Topics: ecology, human ecology, social ecology, revolution Source: Chapter from *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*.
In almost every period since the Renaissance the development of
revolutionary thought has been heavily influenced by a branch of
science, often in conjunction with a school of philosophy.
Astronomy in the time of Copernicus and Galileo helped to change a
sweeping movement of ideas from the medieval world, riddled by
superstition, into one pervaded by a critical rationalism and openly
naturalistic and humanistic in outlook. During the Enlightenment—the era
that culminated in the French Revolution—this liberatory movement of
ideas was reinforced by advances in mechanics and mathematics. The
Victorian era was shaken to its very foundations by evolutionary
theories in biology and anthropology, by Marx’s contributions to
political economy, and by Freudian psychology.
In our own time, we have seen the assimilation of these once-liberatory
sciences by the established social order. Indeed, we have begun to
regard science itself as an instrument of control over the thought
processes and physical being of man. This distrust of science and of the
scientific method is not without justification. “Many sensitive people,
especially artists,” observes Abraham Maslow, “are afraid that science
besmirches and depresses, that it tears things apart rather than
integrating them, thereby killing rather than creating.”[1] What is
perhaps equally important, modern science has lost its critical edge.
Largely functional or instrumental in intent, the branches of science
that once tore at the chains of man are now used to perpetuate and gild
them. Even philosophy has yielded to instrumentalism and tends to be
little more than a body of logical contrivances; it is the handmaiden of
the computer rather than of the revolutionary.
There is one science, however, that may yet restore and even transcend
the liberatory estate of the traditional sciences and philosophies. It
passes rather loosely under the name “ecology”—a term coined by Haeckel
a century ago to denote “the investigation of the total relations of the
animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment.”[2] At
first glance, Haeckel’s definition is innocuous enough; and ecology
narrowly conceived of as one of the biological sciences, is often
reduced to a variety of biometrics in which field workers focus on food
chains and statistical studies of animal populations. There is an
ecology of health that would hardly offend the sensibilities of the
American Medical Association and a concept of social ecology that would
conform to the most well-engineered notions of the New York City
Planning Commission.
Broadly conceived of, however, ecology deals with the balance of nature.
Inasmuch as nature includes man, the science basically deals with the
harmonization of nature and man. The explosive implications of an
ecological approach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically a
critical science—critical on a scale that the most radical systems of
political economy have failed to attain—but also because it is an
integrative and reconstructive science. This integrative, reconstructive
aspect of ecology, carried through to all its implications, leads
directly into anarchic areas of social thought. For, in the final
analysis, it is impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature
without creating a human community that lives in a lasting balance with
its natural environment.
The critical edge of ecology, a unique feature of the science in a
period of general scientific docility, derives from its subject
matter—from its very domain. The issues with which ecology deals are
imperishable in the sense that they cannot be ignored without bringing
into question the survival of man and the survival of the planet itself.
The critical edge of ecology is due not so much to the power of human
reason—a power which science hallowed during its most revolutionary
periods—but to a still higher power, the sovereignty of nature. It may
be that man is manipulable, as the owners of the mass media argue, or
that elements of nature are manipulable, as the engineers demonstrate,
but ecology clearly shows that the totality of the natural world—nature
viewed in all its aspects, cycles and interrelationships—cancels out all
human pretensions to mastery over the planet. The great wastelands of
the Mediterranean basin, once areas of a thriving agriculture or a rich
natural flora, are historic evidence of nature’s revenge against human
parasitism.
No historic examples compare in weight and scope with the effects of
man’s despoliation—and nature’s revenge—since the days of the Industrial
Revolution, and especially since the end of the Second World War.
Ancient examples of human parasitism were essentially local in scope;
they were precisely examples of man’s potential for destruction, and
nothing more. Often, they were compensated by remarkable improvements in
the natural ecology of a region, such as the European peasantry’s superb
reworking of the soil during centuries of cultivation and the
achievements of Inca agriculturists in terracing the Andes Mountains
during the pre-Columbian times.
Modern man’s despoliation of the environment is global in scope, like
his imperialisms. It is even extraterrestrial, as witness the
disturbances of the Van Alien Belt a few years ago. Today human
parasitism disrupts more than the atmosphere, climate, water resources,
soil, flora and fauna of a region: it upsets virtually all the basic
cycles of nature and threatens to undermine the stability of the
environment on a worldwide scale.
As an example of the scope of modern man’s disruptive role, it has been
estimated that the burning of fossil fuels (coal and oil) adds 600
million tons of carbon dioxide to the air annually, about .03 percent of
the total atmospheric mass-this, I may add, aside from an incalculable
quantity of toxicants. Since the Industrial Revolution, the overall
atmospheric mass of carbon dioxide has increased by 25 percent over
earlier, more stable, levels. It can be argued on very sound theoretical
grounds that this growing blanket of carbon dioxide, by intercepting
heat radiated from the earth, will lead to more destructive storm
patterns and eventually to melting of the polar ice caps, rising sea
levels, and the inundation of vast land areas. Far removed as such a
deluge may be, the changing proportion of carbon dioxide to other
atmospheric gases is a warning about the impact man is having on the
balance of nature.
A more immediate ecological issue is man’s extensive pollution of the
earth’s waterways. What counts here is not the fact that man befouls a
given stream, river or lake—a thing he has done for ages—but rather the
magnitude water pollution has reached in the past two generations.
Nearly all the surface waters of the United States are now polluted.
Many American waterways are open cesspools that properly qualify as
extensions of urban sewage systems. It is a euphemism to describe them
as rivers or lakes. More significantly, large amounts of ground water
are sufficiently polluted to be undrinkable, and a number of local
hepatitis epidemics have been traced to polluted wells in suburban
areas. In contrast to surface-water pollution, the pollution of ground
or subsurface water is immensely difficult to eliminate and tends to
linger on for decades after the sources of pollution have been removed.
An article in a mass-circulation magazine appropriately describes the
polluted waterways of the United States as “Our Dying Waters.” This
despairing, apocalyptic description of the water pollution problem in
the United States really applies to the world at large. The waters of
the earth are literally dying. Massive pollution is destroying the
rivers and lakes of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well as the
long-abused waterways of highly industrialized continents, as media of
life. (I speak here not only of radioactive pollutants from nuclear bomb
tests and power reactors, which apparently reach all the flora and fauna
of the sea; the oil spills and the discharge of diesel oil have also
become massive pollution problems, claiming marine life in enormous
quantities every year.)
Accounts of this kind can be repeated for virtually every part of the
biosphere. Pages could be written on the immense losses of productive
soil that occur annually in almost every continent of the earth; on
lethal air pollution episodes in major urban areas; on the worldwide
distribution of toxic agents, such as radioactive isotopes and lead; on
the chemicalization of man’s immediate environment—one might say his
very dinner table—with pesticide residues and food additives. Pieced
together like bits of a jigsaw puzzle, these affronts to the environment
form a pattern of destruction that has no precedent in man’s long
history on earth.
Obviously, man could be described as a highly destructive parasite who
threatens to destroy his host—the natural world—and eventually himself.
In ecology, however, the word “parasite” is not an answer to a question,
but raises a question itself. Ecologists know that a destructive
parasitism of this kind usually reflects the disruption of an ecological
situation; indeed, many species that seem highly destructive under one
set of conditions are eminently useful under another set of conditions.
What imparts a profoundly critical function to ecology is the question
raised by man’s destructive abilities: What is the disruption that has
turned man into a destructive parasite? What produces a form of
parasitism that results not only in vast natural imbalances but also
threatens the existence of humanity itself?
Man has produced imbalances not only in nature, but, more fundamentally,
in his relations with his fellow man and in the very structure of his
society. The imbalances man has produced in the natural world are caused
by the imbalances he has produced in the social world. A century ago it
would have been possible to regard air pollution and water contamination
as the result of the self-seeking activities of industrial barons and
bureaucrats. Today, this moral explanation would be a gross
oversimplification. It is doubtless true that most bourgeois enterprises
are still guided by a public-be-damned attitude, as witness the
reactions of power utilities, automobile concerns and steel corporations
to pollution problems. But a more serious problem than the attitude of
the owners is the size of the firms themselves—their enormous
proportions, their location in a particular region, their density with
respect to a community or waterway, their requirements for raw materials
and water, and their role in the national division of labor.
What we are seeing today is a crisis in social ecology. Modern society,
especially as we know it in the United States and Europe, is being
organized around immense urban belts, a highly industrialized
agriculture and, capping both, a swollen, bureaucratized, anonymous
state apparatus. If we put all moral considerations aside for the moment
and examine the physical structure of this society, what must
necessarily impress us is the incredible logistical problems it is
obliged to solve—problems of transportation, of density, of supply (of
raw materials, manufactured commodities and foodstuffs), of economic and
political organization, of industrial location, and so forth. The burden
this type of urbanized and centralized society places on any continental
area is enormous.
The problem runs even deeper. The notion that man must dominate nature
emerges directly from the domination of man by man. The patriarchal
family planted the seed of domination in the nuclear relations of
humanity; the classical split in the ancient world between spirit and
reality—indeed, between mind and labor—nourished it; the antinaturalist
bias of Christianity tended to its growth. But it was not until organic
community relations, feudal or peasant in form, dissolved into market
relationships that the planet itself was reduced to a resource for
exploitation. This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating
development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently competitive
nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it
also pits the mass of humanity against the natural world. Just as men
are converted into commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted
into a commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised
wantonly. The liberal euphemisms for the processes involved are
“growth,” “industrial society” and “urban blight.” By whatever language
they are described, the phenomena have their roots in the domination of
man by man.
The phrase “consumer society” complements the description of the present
social order as an “industrial society.” Needs are tailored by the mass
media to create a public demand for utterly useless commodities, each
carefully engineered to deteriorate after a predetermined period of
time. The plundering of the human spirit by the marketplace is
paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital. (The liberal
identification is a metaphor that neutralizes the social thrust of the
ecological crisis.)
Despite the current clamor about population growth, the strategic ratios
in the ecological crisis are not the population growth rates of India
but the production rates of the United States, a country that produces
more than half of the world’s goods. Here, too, liberal euphemisms like
“affluence” conceal the critical thrust of a blunt word like “waste.”
With a ninth of its industrial capacity committed to war production, the
U.S. is literally trampling upon the earth and shredding ecological
links that are vital to human survival. If current industrial
projections prove to be accurate, the remaining thirty years of the
century will witness a fivefold increase in electric power production,
based mostly on nuclear fuels and coal. The colossal burden in
radioactive wastes and other effluents that this increase will place on
the natural ecology of the earth hardly needs description.
In shorter perspective, the problem is no less disquieting. Within the
next five years, lumber production may increase an overall twenty
percent; the output of paper, five percent annually; folding boxes,
three percent annually; plastics (which currently form one to two
percent of municipal wastes), seven percent annually. Collectively,
these industries account for the most serious pollutants in the
environment. The utterly senseless nature of modern industrial activity
is perhaps best illustrated by the decline in returnable (and reusable)
beer bottles from 54 billion bottles in 1960 to 26 billion today. Their
place has been taken over by “one-way” bottles (a rise from 8 to 21
billion in the same period) and cans (an increase from 38 to 53
billion). The “one-way” bottles and the cans, of course, pose tremendous
problems in solid waste disposal.
The planet, conceived of as a lump of minerals, can support these
mindless increases in the output of trash. The earth, conceived of as a
complex web of life, certainly cannot. The only question is whether the
earth can survive its looting long enough for man to replace the current
destructive social system with a humanistic, ecologically oriented
society.
Ecologists are often asked, rather tauntingly, to locate with scientific
exactness the ecological breaking point of nature—the point at which the
natural world will cave in on man. This is equivalent to asking a
psychiatrist for the precise moment when a neurotic will become a
nonfunctional psychotic. No such answer is ever likely to be available.
But the ecologist can supply a strategic insight into the directions man
seems to be following as a result of his split with the natural world.
From the standpoint of ecology, man is dangerously oversimplifying his
environment. The modern city represents a regressive encroachment of the
synthetic on the natural, of the inorganic (concrete, metals, and glass)
on the organic, of crude, elemental stimuli on variegated, wide-ranging
ones. The vast urban belts now developing in industrialized areas of the
world are not only grossly offensive to the eye and the ear, they are
chronically smog-ridden, noisy, and virtually immobilized by congestion.
The process of simplifying man’s environment and rendering it
increasingly elemental and crude has a cultural as well as a physical
dimension. The need to manipulate immense urban populations—to
transport, feed, employ, educate and somehow entertain millions of
densely concentrated people—leads to a crucial decline in civic and
social standards. A mass concept of human relations—totalitarian,
centralistic and regimented in orientation—tends to dominate the more
individuated concepts of the past. Bureaucratic techniques of social
management tend to replace humanistic approaches. All that is
spontaneous, creative and individuated is circumscribed by the
standardized, the regulated and the massified. The space of the
individual is steadily narrowed by restrictions imposed upon him by a
faceless, impersonal social apparatus. Any recognition of unique
personal qualities is increasingly surrendered to the manipulation of
the lowest common denominator of the mass. A quantitative, statistical
approach, a beehive manner of dealing with man, tends to triumph over
the precious individualized and qualitative approach which places the
strongest emphasis on personal uniqueness, free expression and cultural
complexity.
The same regressive simplification of the environment occurs in modern
agriculture.[3] The manipulated people in modern cities must be fed, and
to feed them involves an extension of industrial farming. Food plants
must be cultivated in a manner that allows for a high degree of
mechanization—not to reduce human toil but to increase productivity and
efficiency, to maximize investments, and to exploit the biosphere.
Accordingly, the terrain must be reduced to a flat plain-to a factory
floor, if you will—and natural variations in topography must be
diminished as much as possible. Plant growth must be closely regulated
to meet the tight schedules of food-processing factories. Plowing, soil
fertilization, sowing and harvesting must be handled on a mass scale,
often in total disregard of the natural ecology of an area. Large areas
of the land must be used to cultivate a single crop—a form of plantation
agriculture that not only lends itself to mechanization but also to pest
infestation. A single crop is the ideal environment for the
proliferation of pest species. Finally, chemical agents must be used
lavishly to deal with the problems created by insects, weeds, and plant
diseases, to regulate crop production, and to maximize soil
exploitation. The real symbol of modern agriculture is not the sickle
(or, for that matter, the tractor), but the airplane. The modern food
cultivator is represented not by the peasant, the yeoman, or even the
agronomist—men who could be expected to have an intimate relationship
with the unique qualities of the land on which they grow crops—but the
pilot or chemist, for whom soil is a mere resource, an inorganic raw
material.
The simplification process is carried still further by an exaggerated
regional (indeed, national) division of labor. Immense areas of the
planet are increasingly reserved for specific industrial tasks or
reduced to depots for raw materials. Others are turned into centers of
urban population, largely occupied with commerce and trade. Cities and
regions (in fact, countries and continents) are specifically identified
with special products—Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Youngstown with steel,
New York with finance, Bolivia with tin, Arabia with oil, Europe and the
U.S. with industrial goods, and the rest of the world with raw materials
of one kind or another. The complex ecosystems which make up the regions
of a continent are submerged by an organization of entire nations into
economically rationalized entities, each a way station in avast
industrial belt-system, global in its dimensions. It is only a matter of
time before the most attractive areas of the countryside succumb to the
concrete mixer, just as most of the Eastern seashore areas of the United
States have already succumbed to subdivisions and bungalows. What will
remain in the way of natural beauty will be debased by trailer lots,
canvas slums, “scenic” highways, motels, food stalls and the oil slicks
of motor boats.
The point is that man is undoing the work of organic evolution. By
creating vast urban agglomerations of concrete, metal and glass, by
overriding and undermining the complex, subtly organized ecosystems that
constitute local differences in the natural world—in short, by replacing
a highly complex, organic environment with a simplified, inorganic
one-man is disassembling the biotic pyramid that supported humanity for
countless millennia. In the course of replacing the complex ecological
relationships, on which all advanced living things depend, for more
elementary relationships, man is steadily restoring the biosphere to a
stage which will be able to support only simpler forms of life. If this
great reversal of the evolutionary process continues, it is by no means
fanciful to suppose that the preconditions for higher forms of life will
be irreparably destroyed and the earth will become incapable of
supporting man himself.
Ecology derives its critical edge not only from the fact that it alone,
among all the sciences, presents this awesome message to humanity, but
also because it presents this message in a new social dimension. From an
ecological viewpoint, the reversal of organic evolution is the result of
appalling contradictions between town and country, state and community,
industry and husbandry, mass manufacture and craftsmanship, centralism
and regionalism, the bureaucratic scale and the human scale.
Until recently, attempts to resolve the contradictions created by
urbanization, centralization, bureaucratic growth and statification were
viewed as a vain counterdrift to “progress”—a counterdrift that could be
dismissed as chimerical and reactionary. The anarchist was regarded as a
forlorn visionary, a social outcast, filled with nostalgia for the
peasant village or the medieval commune. His yearnings for a
decentralized society and for a humanistic community at one with nature
and the needs of the individual—the spontaneous individual, unfettered
by authority—were viewed as the reactions of a romantic, of a declassed
craftsman or an intellectual “misfit.” His protest against
centralization and statification seemed all the less persuasive because
it was supported primarily by ethical considerations-by Utopian,
ostensibly “unrealistic,” notions of what man could be, not by what he
was. In response to this protest, opponents of anarchist
thought—liberals, rightists and authoritarian “leftists”—argued that
they were the voices of historic reality, that their statist and
centralist notions were rooted in the objective, practical world.
Time is not very kind to the conflict of ideas. Whatever may have been
the validity of libertarian and non-libertarian views a few years ago,
historical development has rendered virtually all objections to
anarchist thought meaningless today. The modern city and state, the
massive coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, the later,
more rationalized, systems of mass production and assembly-line systems
of labor organization, the centralized nation, the state and its
bureaucratic apparatus—all have reached their limits. Whatever
progressive or liberatory role they may have possessed, they have now
become entirely regressive and oppressive. They are regressive not only
because they erode the human spirit and drain the community of all its
cohesiveness, solidarity and ethico-cultural standards; they are
regressive from an objective standpoint, from an ecological standpoint.
For they undermine not only the human spirit and the human community but
also the viability of the planet and all living things on it.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the anarchist concepts of a
balanced community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology
and a decentralized society—these rich libertarian concepts—are not only
desirable, they are also necessary. They belong not only to the great
visions of man’s future, they now constitute the preconditions for human
survival. The process of social development has carried them out of the
ethical, subjective dimension into a practical, objective dimension.
What was once regarded as impractical and visionary has become eminently
practical. And what was once regarded as practical and objective has
become eminently impractical and irrelevant in terms of man’s
development towards a fuller, unfettered existence. If we conceive of
demands for community, face-to-face democracy, a humanistic liberatory
technology and decentralization merely as reactions to the prevailing
state of affairs-a vigorous “nay” to the “yea” of what exists today—a
compelling, objective case can now be made for the practicality of an
anarchist society.
A rejection of the prevailing state of affairs accounts, I think, for
the explosive growth of intuitive anarchism among young people today.
Their love of nature is a reaction against the highly synthetic
qualities of our urban environment and its shabby products. Their
informality of dress and manners is a reaction against the formalized,
standardized nature of modern institutionalized living. Their
predisposition for direct action is a reaction against the
bureaucratization and centralization of society. Their tendency to drop
out, to avoid toil and the rat race, reflects a growing anger towards
the mindless industrial routine bred by modern mass manufacture in the
factory, the office or the university. Their intense individualism is,
in its own elemental way, a de facto decentralization of social life—a
personal withdrawal from mass society.
What is most significant about ecology is its ability to convert this
often nihilistic rejection of the status quo into an emphatic
affirmation of life—indeed, into a reconstructive credo for a humanistic
society. The essence of ecology’s reconstructive message can be summed
up in the word “diversity.” From an ecological viewpoint, balance and
harmony in nature, in society and, by inference, in behavior, are
achieved not by mechanical standardization but by its opposite, organic
differentiation. This message can be understood clearly only by
examining its practical meaning.
Let us consider the ecological principle of diversity—what Charles Elton
calls the “conservation of variety”—as it applies to biology,
specifically to agriculture. A number of studies—Lotka’s and Volterra’s
mathematical models, Bause’s experiments with protozoa and mites in
controlled environments, and extensive field research-clearly
demonstrate that fluctuations in animal and plant populations, ranging
from mild to pestlike proportions, depend heavily upon the number of
species in an ecosystem and on the degree of variety in the environment.
The greater the variety of prey and predators, the more stable the
population; the more diversified the environment in terms of flora and
fauna, the less likely there is to be ecological instability. Stability
is a function of variety and diversity: if the environment is simplified
and the variety of animal and plant species is reduced, fluctuations in
population become marked and tend to get out of control. They tend to
reach pest proportions.
In the case of pest control, many ecologists now conclude that we can
avoid the repetitive use of toxic chemicals such as insecticides and
herbicides by allowing for a greater interplay between living things. We
must leave more room for natural spontaneity, for the diverse biological
forces that make up an ecological situation. “European entomologists now
speak of managing the entire plant-insect community,” observes Robert L.
Rudd. “It is called manipulation of the biocenose[4] The biocenetic
environment is varied, complex and dynamic. Although numbers of
individuals will constantly change, no one species will normally reach
pest proportions. The special conditions which allow high populations of
a single species in a complex ecosystem are rare events. Management of
the biocenose or ecosystem should become our goal, challenging as it
is.”[5]
The “manipulation” of the biocenose in a meaningful way, however,
presupposes a far-reaching decentralization of agriculture. Wherever
feasible, industrial agriculture must give way to soil and agricultural
husbandry; the factory floor must yield to gardening and horticulture. I
do not wish to imply that we must surrender the gains acquired by
large-scale agriculture and mechanization. What I do contend, however,
is that the land must be cultivated as though it were a garden; its
flora must be diversified and carefully tended, balanced by fauna and
tree shelter appropriate to the region. Decentralization is important,
moreover, for the development of the agriculturist as well as for the
development of agriculture. Food cultivation, practiced in a truly
ecological sense, presupposes that the agriculturist is familiar with
all the features and subtleties of the terrain on which the crops are
grown. He must have a thorough knowledge of the physiography of the
land, its variegated soils—crop land, forest land, pasture land—its
mineral and organic content and its micro-climate, and he must be
engaged in a continuing study of the effects produced by new flora and
fauna. He must develop his sensitivity to the land’s possibilities and
needs while he becomes an organic part of the agricultural situation. We
can hardly hope to achieve this high degree of sensitivity and
integration in the food cultivator without reducing agriculture to a
human scale, without bringing agriculture within the scope of the
individual. To meet the demands of an ecological approach to food
cultivation, agriculture must be re-scaled from huge industrial farms to
moderate-sized units.
The same reasoning applies to a rational development of energy
resources. The Industrial Revolution increased the quantity of energy
used by man. Although it is certainly true that pre-industrial societies
relied primarily on animal power and human muscles, complex energy
patterns developed in many regions of Europe, involving a subtle
integration of resources such as wind and water power, and a variety of
fuels (wood, peat, coal, vegetable starches and animal fats).
The Industrial Revolution overwhelmed and largely destroyed these
regional energy patterns, replacing them first by a single energy system
(coal) and later by a dual system (coal and petroleum). Regions
disappeared as models of integrated energy patterns—indeed, the very
concept of integration through diversity was obliterated. As I indicated
earlier, many regions became predominantly mining areas, devoted to the
extraction of a single resource, while others were turned into immense
industrial areas, often devoted to the production of a few commodities.
We need not review the role this breakdown in true regionalism has
played in producing air and water pollution, the damage it has inflicted
on large areas of the countryside, and the prospect we face in the
depletion of our precious hydrocarbon fuels.
We can, of course, turn to nuclear fuels, but it is chilling to think of
the lethal radioactive wastes that would require disposal if power
reactors were our sole energy source. Eventually, an energy system based
on radioactive materials would lead to the widespread contamination of
the environment—at first in a subtle form, but later on a massive and
palpably destructive scale. Or we could apply ecological principles to
the solution of our energy problems. We could try to re-establish
earlier regional energy patterns, using a combined system of energy
provided by wind, water and solar power. We would be aided by devices
more sophisticated than any known in the past.
Solar devices, wind turbines and hydro-electric resources, taken singly,
do not provide a solution for our energy problems and the ecological
disruption created by conventional fuels. Pieced together as a mosaic,
as an organic energy pattern developed from the potentialities of a
region, they could amply meet the needs of a decentralized society. In
sunny latitudes, we could rely more heavily on solar energy than on
combustible fuels. In areas marked by atmospheric turbulence, we could
rely more heavily on wind devices; and in suitable coastal areas or
inland regions with a good network of rivers, the greater part of our
energy would come from hydro-electric installations. In all cases, we
would use a mosaic of non-combustible, combustible, and nuclear fuels.
The point I wish to make is that by diversifying our use of energy
resources, by organizing them into an ecologically balanced pattern, we
could combine wind, solar and water power in a given region to meet the
industrial and domestic needs of a given community with only a minimal
use of harmful fuels. And, eventually, we might sophisticate our
non-combustion energy devices to a point where all harmful sources of
energy could be eliminated.
As in the case of agriculture, however, the application of ecological
principles to energy resources presupposes a far-reaching
decentralization of society and a truly regional concept of social
organization. To maintain a large city requires immense quantities of
coal and petroleum. By contrast, solar, wind and tidal energy reach us
mainly in small packets; except for spectacular tidal dams, the new
devices seldom provide more than a few thousand kilowatt-hours of
electricity. It is difficult to believe that we will ever be able to
design solar collectors that can furnish us with the immense blocks of
electric power produced by a giant steam plant; it is equally difficult
to conceive of a battery of wind turbines that will provide us with
enough electricity to illuminate Manhattan Island. If homes and
factories are heavily concentrated, devices for using clean sources of
energy will probably remain mere playthings; but if urban communities
are reduced in size and widely dispersed over the land, there is no
reason why these devices cannot be combined to provide us with all the
amenities of an industrialized civilization. To use solar, wind and
tidal power effectively, the megalopolis must be decentralized. A new
type of community, carefully tailored to the characteristics and
resources of a region, must replace the sprawling urban belts that are
emerging today.
To be sure, an objective case for decentralization does not end with a
discussion of agriculture and the problems created by combustible energy
resources. The validity of the decentralist case can be demonstrated for
nearly all the “logistical” problems of our time. Let me cite an example
from the problematical area of transportation. A great deal has been
written about the harmful effects of gasoline-driven motor
vehicles—their wastefulness, their role in urban air pollution, the
noise they contribute to the city environment, the enormous death toll
they claim annually in the large cities of the world and on highways. In
a highly urbanized civilization it would be useless to replace these
noxious vehicles by clean, efficient, virtually noiseless, and certainly
safer, battery-powered vehicles. The best of our electric cars must be
recharged about every hundred miles—a feature which limits their
usefulness for transportation in large cities. In a small, decentralized
community, however, it would be feasible to use these electric vehicles
for urban or regional transportation and establish monorail networks for
long-distance transportation.
It is fairly well known that gasoline-powered vehicles contribute
enormously to urban air pollution, and there is a strong sentiment to
“engineer” the more noxious features of the automobile into oblivion.
Our age characteristically tries to solve all its irrationalities with a
gimmick—afterburners for toxic gasoline fumes, antibiotics for ill
health, tranquilizers for psychic disturbances. But the problem of urban
air pollution is too intractable for gimmicks; perhaps it is more
intractable than we care to believe. Basically, air pollution is caused
by high population densities—by an excessive concentration of people in
a small area. Millions of people, densely concentrated in a large city,
necessarily produce serious local air pollution merely by their
day-to-day activities. They must burn fuels for domestic and industrial
reasons; they must construct or tear down buildings (the aerial debris
produced by these activities is a major source of urban air pollution);
they must dispose of immense quantities of rubbish; they must travel on
roads with rubber tires (the particles produced by the erosion of tires
and roadway materials add significantly to air pollution). Whatever
pollution-control devices we add to automobiles and power plants, the
improvements these devices will produce in the quality of urban air will
be more than canceled out by future megalopolitan growth.
There is more to anarchism than decentralized communities. If I have
examined this possibility in some detail, it has been to demonstrate
that an anarchist society, far from being a remote ideal, has become a
precondition for the practice of ecological principles. To sum up the
critical message of ecology: if we diminish variety in the natural
world, we debase its unity and wholeness; we destroy the forces making
for natural harmony and for a lasting equilibrium; and, what is even
more significant, we introduce an absolute retrogression in the
development of the natural world which may eventually render the
environment unfit for advanced forms of life. To sum up the
reconstructive message of ecology: if we wish to advance the unity and
stability of the natural world, if we wish to harmonize it, we must
conserve and promote variety. To be sure, mere variety for its own sake
is a vacuous goal. In nature, variety emerges spontaneously. The
capacities of a new species are tested by the rigors of climate, by its
ability to deal with predators and by its capacity to establish and
enlarge its niche. Yet the species that succeeds in enlarging its niche
in the environment also enlarges the ecological situation as a whole. To
borrow E. A. Gutkind’s phrase, it “expands the environment,”[6] both for
itself and for the species with which it enters into a balanced
relationship.
How do these concepts apply to social theory? To many readers, I
suppose, it should suffice to say that, inasmuch as man is part of
nature, an expanding natural environment enlarges the basis for social
development. But the answer to the question goes much deeper than many
ecologists and libertarians suspect. Again, allow me to return to the
ecological principle of wholeness and balance as a product of diversity.
Keeping this principle in mind, the first step towards an answer is
provided by a passage in Herbert Read’s “The Philosophy of Anarchism.”
In presenting his “measure of progress,” Read observes: “Progress is
measured by the degree of differentiation within a society. If the
individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life will be limited,
dull, and mechanical. If the individual is a unit on his own, with space
and potentiality for separate action, then he may be more subject to
accident or chance, but at least he can expand and express himself. He
can develop—develop in the only real meaning of the word—develop in
consciousness of strength, vitality, and joy.”
Read’s thought, unfortunately, is not fully developed, but it provides
an interesting point of departure. What first strikes us is that both
the ecologist and the anarchist place a strong emphasis on spontaneity.
The ecologist, insofar as he is more than a technician, tends to reject
the notion of “power over nature.” He speaks, instead, of “steering” his
way through an ecological situation, of managing rather than recreating
an ecosystem. The anarchist, in turn, speaks in terms of social
spontaneity, of releasing the potentialities of society and humanity, of
giving free and unfettered rein to the creativity of people. Both, in
their own way, regard authority as inhibitory, as a weight limiting the
creative potential of a natural and social situation. Their object is
not to rule a domain, but to release it. They regard insight, reason and
knowledge as means for fulfilling the potentialities of a situation, as
facilitating the working out of the logic of a situation, not as
replacing its potentialities with preconceived notions or distorting
their development with dogmas.
Turning to Read’s words, what strikes us is that both the ecologist and
the anarchist view differentiation as a measure of progress. The
ecologist uses the term “biotic pyramid” in speaking of biological
advances; the anarchist, the word “individuation” to denote social
advances. If we go beyond Read we will observe that, to both the
ecologist and the anarchist, an ever-increasing unity is achieved by
growing differentiation. An expanding whole is created by the
diversification and enrichment of its parts.
Just as the ecologist seeks to expand the range of an ecosystem and
promote a free interplay between species, so the anarchist seeks to
expand the range of social experience and remove all fetters to its
development. Anarchism is not only a stateless society but also a
harmonized society which exposes man to the stimuli provided by both
agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental activity, to
unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal
solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and
worldwide brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the
elimination of toil and the promotion of craftsmanship. In our schizoid
society, these goals are regarded as mutually exclusive, indeed as
sharply opposed. They appear as dualities because of the very logistics
of present-day society—the separation of town and country, the
specialization of labor, the atomization of man—and it would be
preposterous to believe that these dualities could be resolved without a
general idea of the physical structure of an anarchist society. We can
gain some idea of what such a society would be like by reading William
Morris’s News From Nowhere and the writings of Peter Kropotkin. But
these works provide us with mere glimpses. They do not take into account
the post-World War II developments of technology and the contributions
made by the development of ecology. This is not the place to embark on
“utopian writing,” but certain guidelines can be presented even in a
general discussion. And in presenting these guidelines, I am eager to
emphasize not only the more obvious ecological premises that support
them, but also the humanistic ones.
An anarchist society should be a decentralized society, not only to
establish a lasting basis for the harmonization of man and nature, but
also to add new dimensions to the harmonization of man and man. The
Greeks, we are often reminded, would have been horrified by a city whose
size and population precluded a face-to-face, often familiar,
relationship between citizens. There is plainly a need to reduce the
dimensions of the human community—partly to solve our pollution and
transportation problems, partly also to create real communities. In a
sense, we must humanize humanity. Electronic devices such as telephones,
telegraphs, radios and television receivers should be used as little as
possible to mediate the relations between people. In making collective
decisions—the ancient Athenian ecclesia was, in some ways, a model for
making social decisions—all members of the community should have an
opportunity to acquire in full the measure of anyone who addresses the
assembly. They should be in a position to absorb his attitudes, study
his expressions, and weigh his motives as well as his ideas in a direct
personal encounter and through face-to-face discussion.
Our small communities should be economically balanced and well rounded,
partly so that they can make full use of local raw materials and energy
resources, partly also to enlarge the agricultural and industrial
stimuli to which individuals are exposed. The member of a community who
has a predilection for engineering, for instance, should be encouraged
to steep his hands in humus; the man of ideas should be encouraged to
employ his musculature; the “inborn” farmer should gain a familiarity
with the workings of a rolling mill. To separate the engineer from the
soil, the thinker from the spade, and the farmer from the industrial
plant promotes a degree of vocational overspecialization that leads to a
dangerous measure of social control by specialists. What is equally
important, professional and vocational specialization prevents society
from achieving a vital goal: the humanization of nature by the
technician and the naturalization of society by the biologist.
I submit that an anarchist community would approximate a clearly
definable ecosystem; it would be diversified, balanced and harmonious.
It is arguable whether such an ecosystem would acquire the configuration
of an urban entity with a distinct center, such as we find in the Greek
polis or the medieval commune, or whether, as Gutkind proposes, society
would consist of widely dispersed communities without a distinct center.
I n any case, the ecological scale for any of these communities would be
determined by the smallest ecosystem capable of supporting a population
of moderate size.
A relatively self-sufficient community, visibly dependent on its
environment for the means of life, would gain a new respect for the
organic interrelationships that sustain it. In the long run, the attempt
to approximate self-sufficiency would, I think, prove more efficient
than the exaggerated national division of labor that prevails today.
Although there would doubtless be many duplications of small industrial
facilities from community to community, the familiarity of each group
with its local environment and its ecological roots would make for a
more intelligent and more loving use of its environment. I submit that,
far from producing provincialism, relative self-sufficiency would create
a new matrix for individual and communal development—a oneness with the
surroundings that would vitalize the community.
The rotation of civic, vocational and professional responsibilities
would stimulate the senses in the being of the individual, creating and
rounding out new dimensions in self-development. In a complete society
we could hope to create complete men; in a rounded society, rounded men.
In the Western world, the Athenians, for all their shortcomings and
limitations, were the first to give us a notion of this completeness.
“The polis was made for the amateur,” H. D. F. Kitto tells us. “Its
ideal was that every citizen (more or less, according as the polis was
democratic or oligarchic) should play his part in all of its many
activities-an ideal that is recognizably descended from the generous
Homeric conception of arete as an all-round excellence and an all-round
activity. It implies a respect for the wholeness or the oneness of life,
and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for
efficiency-or rather a much higher ideal of efficiency; and efficiency
which exists not in one department of life, but in life itself.”[7] An
anarchist society, although it would surely aspire to more, could hardly
hope to achieve less than this state of mind.
If the ecological community is ever achieved in practice, social life
will yield a sensitive development of human and natural diversity,
falling together into a well balanced, harmonious whole. Ranging from
community through region to entire continents, we will see a colorful
differentiation of human groups and ecosystems, each developing its
unique potentialities and exposing members of the community to a wide
spectrum of economic, cultural and behavioral stimuli. Falling within
our purview will be an exciting, often dramatic, variety of communal
forms—here marked by architectural and industrial adaptations to
semi-arid ecosystems, there to grasslands, elsewhere by adaptation to
forested areas. We will witness a creative interplay between individual
and group, community and environment, humanity and nature. The cast of
mind that today organizes differences among humans and other life-forms
along hierarchical lines, defining the external in terms of its
“superiority” or “inferiority,” will give way to an outlook that deals
with diversity in an ecological manner. Differences among people will be
respected, indeed fostered, as elements that enrich the unity of
experience and phenomena. The traditional relationship which pits
subject against object will be altered qualitatively; the “external,”
the “different,” the “other” will be conceived of as individual parts of
a whole all the richer because of its complexity. This sense of unity
will reflect the harmonization of interests between individuals and
between society and nature. Freed from an oppressive routine, from
paralyzing repressions and insecurities, from the burdens of toil and
false needs, from the trammels of authority and irrational compulsion,
individuals will finally, for the first time in history, be in a
position to realize their potentialities as members of the human
community and the natural world.
New York
February 1965
[1] Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Van Nostrand; New
York, 1962), p. viii.
[2] Quoted in Angus M. Woodbury, Principles of General Ecology
(Blakiston; New York, 1954), p. 4.
[3] For insight into this problem the reader may consult The Ecology of
Invasions by Charles S. Elton (Wiley; New York, 1958), Soil and
Civilisation by Edward Hyams (Thames and Hudson; London, 1952), Our
Synthetic Environment by Murray Bookchin [pseud. Lewis Herber] (Knopf;
New York, 1962), and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin;
Boston, 1962). The last should be read not as a diatribe against
pesticides but as a plea for ecological diversification.
[4] Rudd’s use of the word “manipulation” is likely to create the
erroneous impression that an ecological situation can be described by
simple mechanical terms. Lest this impression arise, I would like to
emphasize that our knowledge of an ecological situation and the
practical use of this knowledge are matters of insight rather than
power. Charles Elton states the case for the management of an ecological
situation when he writes: “The world’s future has to be managed, but
this management would not be like a game of chess ... [but] more like
steering a boat.”
[5] Robert L. Rudd, “Pesticides: The Real Peril,” The Nation, vol. 189
(1959), p. 401.
[6]
E. A. Gutkind, The Twilight of the Cities (Free Press; Glencoe, N.Y.,
1962), pp. 55–144.
[7]
H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Aldine; Chicago, 1951), p. 16.