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Title: A Social Ecology Author: John Clark Date: 2000 Language: en Topics: economics, Murray Bookchin, philosophy, social ecology, spirituality Source: Retrieved on 20 March 2010 http://library.nothingness.org/articles/anar/en/display/303 Notes: The article can be used if you note that it is forthcoming in M. Zimmerman et al., Environmental Philosophy, second edition (Prentice Hall, 1997)]
“Humanity is Nature achieving self-consciousness.” — Elisée Reclus [1]
In its deepest and most authentic sense, a social ecology is the
awakening earth community reflecting on itself, uncovering its history,
exploring its present predicament, and contemplating its future. [2] One
aspect of this awakening is a process of philosophical reflection. As a
philosophical approach, a social ecology investigates the ontological,
epistemological, ethical and political dimensions of the relationship
between the social and the ecological, and seeks the practical wisdom
that results from such reflection. It seeks to give us, as beings
situated in the course of real human and natural history, guidance in
facing specific challenges and opportunities. In doing so, it develops
an analysis that is both holistic and dialectical, and a social practice
that might best be described as an eco-communitarianism.
A social ecology is first of all, an ecology. There are strong
communitarian implications in the very term ecology. Literally, it means
the logos, the reflection on or study of, the oikos, or household.
Ecology thus calls upon us to begin to think of the entire planet as a
kind of community of which we are members. It tells us that all of our
policies and problems are in a sense “domestic” ones. While a social
ecology sometimes loses its bearings as it focuses on specific social
concerns, when it is consistent it always situates those concerns within
the context of the earth household, whatever else it may study within
that community. The dialectical approach of a social ecology requires
social ecologists to consider the ecological dimensions of all “social”
phenomena. There are no “non-ecological” social phenomena to consider
apart from the ecological ones.
In some ways, the term “social” in “social ecology” is the more
problematical one. There is a seeming paradox in the use of the term
“social” for what is actually a strongly communitarian tradition.
Traditionally, the “social” realm has been counterposed to the
“communal” one, as in Tönnies’ famous distinction between society and
community, Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft. Yet this apparent
self-contradiction may be a path to a deeper truth. A social ecology is
a project of reclaiming the communitarian dimensions of the social, and
it is therefore appropriate that it seek to recover the communal
linguistic heritage of the very term itself. “Social” is derived from
“socius,” or “companion.” A “society” is thus a relationship between
companions — in a sense, it is itself a household within the earth
household.
Over the past quarter-century, a broad social and ecological philosophy
has emerged under the name “social ecology.” While this philosophy has
recently been most closely associated with the thought of social
theorist Murray Bookchin, it continues a long tradition of ecological
communitarian thought going back well into the nineteenth century. The
lineage of social ecology is often thought to originate in the
mutualistic, communitarian ideas of the anarchist geographer Kropotkin
(1842–1921). One can certainly not deny that despite Kropotkin’s
positivistic tendencies and his problematical conception of nature, he
has an important relationship to social ecology. His ideas concerning
mutual aid, political and economic decentralization, human-scaled
production, communitarian values, and the history of democracy have all
made important contributions to the tradition. [3] However, it is rooted
much more deeply in the thought of another great anarchist thinker, the
French geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). During the latter half of
the last century, and into the beginning of the present one, Reclus
developed a far-ranging “social geography” that laid the foundations of
a social ecology, as it explored the history of the interaction between
human society and the natural world, starting with the emergence of homo
sapiens and extending to Reclus’ own era of urbanization, technological
development, political and economic globalization, and embryonic
international cooperation.
Reclus envisioned humanity achieving a free, communitarian society in
harmony with the natural world. His extensive historical studies trace
the long record of experiments in cooperation, direct democracy and
human freedom, from the ancient Greek polis, through Icelandic
democracy, medieval free cities and independent Swiss cantons, to modern
movements for social transformation and human emancipation. At the same
time, he depicts the rise and development of the modern centralized
state, concentrated capital and authoritarian ideologies. His sweeping
historical account includes an extensive critique of both capitalism and
authoritarian socialism from an egalitarian and anti-authoritarian
perspective, and an analysis of the destructive ecological effects of
modern technology and industry allied with the power of capital and the
state. It is notable that a century ago Reclus’ social theory attempted
to reconcile a concern for justice in human society with compassionate
treatment of other species and respect for the whole of life on earth —
a philosophical problematic that has only recently reemerged in
ecophilosophy and environmental ethics. [4]
Many of the themes in Reclus’ work were developed further by the
Scottish botanist and social thinker Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), who
described his work as “biosophy,” the philosophical study of the
biosphere. Geddes focuses on the need to create decentralized
communities in harmony with surrounding cultural and ecological regions
and proposes the development of new technologies (neotechnics) that
would foster humane, ecologically-balanced communities. He envisions an
organicically developing cooperative society, based on the practice of
mutual aid at the most basic social levels and spreading throughout
society as these small communities voluntarily federate into larger
associations. Geddes orients his work around the concepts of “Place,
Work, and Folk,” envisioning a process of incorporating the
particularities of the natural region, humane, skillful and creative
modes of production, and organically developing local culture into his
“Eutopia” or good community. Geddes calls his approach a “sociography,”
or synthesis of sociological and geographical studies. He applies this
approach in his idea of the detailed regional survey as a means of
achieving community planning that is rooted in natural and cultural
realities and grows out of them organically. He thus makes an important
contribution to developing the empirical and bioregional side of the
social ecological tradition. [5]
Many of Geddes’ insights were later integrated into the expansive vision
of society, nature, and technology of his student, the American
historian and social theorist Lewis Mumford (1895–1992), who is one of
the most pivotal figures in the development of the social ecological
tradition. Ramachandra Guha is certainly right when he states that
“[t]he range and richness of Mumford’s thought mark him as the pioneer
American social ecologist ...” [6] Most of the fundamental concepts to
which Bookchin later attached to the term “social ecology” were borrowed
from Mumford’s much earlier ecological regionalism. [7] The
philosophical basis for Mumford’s social analysis is what he calls an
“organic” view of reality, a holistic and developmental approach he
explicitly identifies as an “ecological” one. [8] In accord with this
outlook, he sees the evolution of human society as a continuation of a
cosmic process of organic growth, emergence, and development. Yet he
also sees human history as the scene of a counter-movement within
society and nature, a growing process of mechanization.
Much like Reclus before him, Mumford depicts history as a great struggle
between freedom and oppression. In Mumford’s interpretation of this
drama, we find on one side the forces of mechanization, power,
domination, and division, and on the other, the impulse toward organism,
creativity, love, and unification. The tragedy of history is the
increasing ascendancy of mechanism, and the progressive destruction of
our organic ties to nature and to one another. The dominant moment of
history, he says, has been “one long retreat from the vitalities and
creativities of a self-sustaining environment and a stimulating and
balanced communal life.” [9]
Mumford describes the first decisive step in this process as the
creation in the ancient world of the Megamachine, in the form of
regimented, mechanized massing of human labor-power under hierarchical
control to build the pyramids as an expression of despotic power. While
the Megamachine in this primal barbaric form has persisted and evolved
over history, it reemerges in the modern world in a much more complex,
technological manifestation, with vastly increased power, diverse
political, economic and cultural expressions, and apparent
imperviousness to human control or even comprehension. Mumford sees the
results of this historical movement as the emergence of a new
totalitarian order founded on technological domination, economic
rationality and profit, and fueled by a culture of obsessive
consumption. The results are a loss of authentic selfhood, a dissolution
of organic community, and a disordered, destructive relationship to the
natural world.
Mumford’s vision of the process of reversing these historical tendencies
is a social ecological one. He foresees a process of social
decentralization in which democratic institutions are recreated at local
and regional levels as part of organic but diverse communities. “Real
human communities,” he contends, are those that combine unity with
diversity and “preserve social as well as visual variety.” [10]
Following Geddes and prefiguring bioregionalism, Mumford believes that
the local community must be rooted in the natural and cultural realities
of the region. “Strong regional centers of culture” are the basis for
“an active and securely grounded local life.” [11] Regionalism is not
only an ecological concept, but also a political and cultural one, and
is the crucial link between the most particular and local dimensions and
the most universal and global ones. “The rebuilding of regional
cultures” Mumford says, “will give depth and maturity to the world
culture that has likewise long been in the process of formation.” [12]
Mumford contends that an epochal process of personal and social
transformation is necessary if the course of history is to be redirected
toward a humane, ecological, life-affirming future. Much in the spirit
of communitarian philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965), he foresees a
humanized, cooperative world culture emerging out of regenerated
regional cultures that arise in turn out of a regenerated human spirit.
[13]
While he begins with a general perspective on society and nature that is
close to Mumford’s, Bookchin makes a number of crucial contributions to
the further development of a social ecology. [14] Most significantly, he
broadens the theoretical basis of the communitarian, organicist, and
regionalist tradition developed by Reclus, Geddes and Mumford by making
dialectical analysis a central focus. He thereby opens the way for more
critical and theoretically sophisticated discussions of concepts like
holism, unity-in-diversity, development, and relatedness. He also
develops Mumford’s defense of an organic world view into a more
explicitly ecological theoretical perspective. Mumford’s analysis of the
historical transformation of organic society into the Megamachine is
expanded in Bookchin’s somewhat broader account of the emergence of
diverse forms of domination and of the rise of hierarchical society. He
devotes more detailed attention to the interaction of the state,
economic classes, patriarchy, gerontocracy, and other factors in the
evolution of domination. Of particular importance is Bookchin’s emphasis
on the central role of the developing global capitalist economy in
ecological crisis, which corrects Mumford’s tendency to overemphasize
the technical at the expense of the economic. [15] He also adds some
additional chapters to the “history of freedom,” especially in his
discussions of the mutualistic, liberatory and ecological dimensions of
tribal societies, millenarian religious movements and utopian
experiments. Finally, while his predecessors presented a rather general
vision of a politics that was anti-authoritarian, democratic,
decentralist and ecological, Bookchin gives a concrete political
direction to the discussion of such a politics in his proposals for
libertarian municipalism and confederalism.
Some of these contributions have come at a considerable cost. Although
Bookchin develops and expands the tradition of social ecology in
important ways, he has at the same time also narrowed it through
dogmatic and non-dialectical attempts at philosophical system-building,
through an increasingly sectarian politics, and through intemperate and
divisive attacks on “competing” ecophilosophies and on diverse
expressions of his own tradition. [16] To the extent that social ecology
has been identified with Bookchinist sectarianism, its potential as an
ecophilosophy has not been widely appreciated.
Fortunately, the fundamental issues posed by a social ecology will not
fade away in the smoke of ephemeral (and eminently forgettable) partisan
skirmishes. Inevitably, a broad, vibrant, and inherently self-critical
tradition like social ecology will resist attempts to restrict it in a
manner that contradicts its most fundamental values of holism,
unity-in-diversity, organic growth and dialectical self-transcendence.
Thus, despite its temporary setbacks, the project of a social ecology
continues to develop as a general theoretical orientation, as an
approach to the analysis of specific problems, and as a guide to
practical efforts at social and ecological regeneration.
A social ecology, as a holistic vision, seeks to relate all phenomena to
the larger direction of evolution and emergence in the universe as a
whole. Within this context, it also examines the course of planetary
evolution as a movement toward increasing complexity and diversity and
the progressive emergence of value. According to Mumford, an examination
of the “creative process” of “cosmic evolution” reveals it to be
“neither random nor predetermined” and shows that a “basic tendency
toward self-organization, unrecognizable until billions of years had
passed, increasingly gave direction to the process.” [17]
This outlook is related to the long teleological tradition extending
“from ancient Greek thought to the most recent organicist and process
philosophies. It is in accord with Hegel’s insight that “substance is
subject,” if this is interpreted in an evolutionary sense. There is no
complete and “given” form of either subject or substance, but rather a
universal process of substance-becoming-subject. Substance tends toward
self-organization, life, consciousness, self-consciousness, and,
finally, transpersonal consciousness (though the development takes place
at all levels of being and not merely in consciousness). Social ecology
is thus linked to theories of evolutionary emergence. Such a position
remains implicit in Hegel’s dialectical idealism, [18] receives a more
explicit expression in Samuel Alexander’s cosmic evolutionism, [19]
underlies the metaphysics of Whitehead and contemporary process
philosophy, [20] is given a rather technocentric and anti-naturalist
turn in Teilhard de Chardin, [21] is synthesized with Eastern traditions
in Radhakrishnan and Aurobindo, [22] and finds its most developed
expression in Ken Wilber’s recent effort at grand evolutionary
synthesis. [23]
A social ecology interprets planetary evolution and the realization of
social and ecological possibilities as a holistic process, rather than
merely as a mechanism of adaptation. This evolution can only be
understood adequately by examining the interaction and mutual
determination between species and species, between species and
ecosystem, and between species, ecosystem and the earth as a whole, and
by studying particular communities and ecosystems as complex, developing
wholes. Such an examination reveals that the progressive unfolding of
the potentiality for freedom (as self-organization, self-determination,
and self-realization) depends on the existence of symbiotic cooperation
at all levels — as Kropotkin pointed out almost a century ago. We can
therefore see a striking degree of continuity in nature, so that the
cooperative ecological society that is the goal of a social ecology is
found to be rooted in the most basic levels of being.
Some critics of social ecology have claimed that its emphasis on the
place of human beings in the evolutionary process betrays a
non-ecological anthropocentrism. While this may be true of some aspects
of Bookchin’s thought, it does not describe what is essential to a
social ecology. Although we must understand the special place that
humanity has within universe and earth history, the consequences of such
understanding are far from being hierarchical, dualistic, or
anthropocentric. A dialectical analysis rejects all “centrisms,” for all
beings are at once centers (of structuration, self-organization,
perceiving, feeling, sensing, knowing, etc.) and also expressions of
that which exists at a distance, since from a dialectical perspective,
determination is negation, the other is immanent in a being, and the
whole is immanent in the part. There exists not only unity-in-diversity,
and unity-in-difference but also unity-in-distance. We must interpret
our place in nature in accord with such an analysis, comprehending the
ways in which our being is internally related, we might say
“vertically,” to more encompassing realms of being, and, we might say
“horizontally,” to wider realms of being. By exploring our many modes of
relatedness we discover our social and ecological responsibility — our
capacity to respond to the needs of the human and natural communities in
which we participate. [24]
The use of metaphors such as community and organism in a dialectical and
holistic account of diverse phenomena is certainly not unproblematical.
There has rightly been much debate in ecophilosophy concerning the
status of such images, and their function and limitations must be a
subject of continuing reflection. [25] A dialectical approach assumes
their provisional nature, the importance of avoiding their use in a
rigid, objectifying way, and the necessity of allowing all theoretical
concepts to develop in the course of inquiry. Thus, there are certainly
senses in which the earth or the biosphere cannot be described as a
community. One might define community as a relationship existing between
beings who can act reciprocally in certain ways, taking the criterion
for reciprocity to be showing respect, carrying out obligations, or some
other capacity. If one adopts such a “model” of a community, the earth
is certainly not one, any more than it is an organic whole, if that term
is taken to mean having the qualities of a biological organism. Yet the
term “community” has in fact much more expansive connotations than those
just mentioned. A community is sometimes thought to include not only
competent adult human beings (moral agents), but infants and children,
the mentally incompetent, past generations, future generations,
domesticated animals, artifacts, architecture, public works, values and
ideals, principles, goals, symbols, imaginary significations, language,
history, customs and traditions, territory, biota, ecosystems and other
constituents that are thought essential to its peculiar identity. To be
a member of a community is often thought to imply responsibilities of
many kinds in relation to some or all of the categories listed.
Questions are also raised about the totalizing implications of holism.
Critics of holism sometimes identify it with an extreme organicism that
denies the significance, reality, or the value of the parts. [26] It is
important therefore to understand that “holism” does not refer
exclusively to a view in which the whole is ontologically prior to the
part, more metaphysically real than the part, or deserving of more moral
consideration than the part. In fact, a dialectical holism rejects the
idea that the being, reality or value of the parts can be distinguished
from that of the whole in the manner presupposed by such a critique.
This is sometimes misunderstood when critics overlook an important
distinction within a dialectical holism. In its comprehensively holistic
analysis, the parts of a whole are not mere parts but rather holons,
which are themselves relative wholes in relation to their own parts.
[27] The good of the part can therefore not be reduced to a function of
its contribution to the good of the whole. Its good can be also be
considered in relation to its participation in the attainment of the
good of a whole which it helps constitute. But beyond this, to mention
what is most relevant to the critiques of holism, its attainment of its
own good as a unique expression of wholeness must also be considered.
There is a striking irony here. An authentic holism is capable of
appreciating the value of kinds of wholeness (realized form,
self-organization, attainment of good) that are often ignored by
“individualisms” that defend one level of wholeness against its possible
dissolution in some larger whole. Holism does not mean the fetishization
of some particular kind of whole, which would constitute a version of
the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, but rather an exploration of the
meaning of many kinds of wholeness that appear in many ways and on many
levels within developing unity-in-diversity.
So much for the truth of the whole. However, a dialectical holism
refuses to objectify, reify or absolutize any whole, including the whole
of nature. Just as our experience of objects or things points to the
reality of that which escapes objectification and reification, our
experience of the whole of nature points to the reality of that which
which cannot be reduced to nature.[28]
Since the beginnings of philosophical reflection, dialectical thinkers
of both East and West have proposed that beneath all knowing and objects
of knowledge there is a primordial continuum, the eternal
one-becoming-many, the ground of being. It is what Lao Tzu described in
the Tao Te Ching as the reality that precedes all conceptualization, or
“naming,” and all determination, or “carving of the block”:
“The Tao (Way) that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth ...” [29]
This reality is ontologically prior to ecological differentiation, and
indeed, to “nature” itself — which is one reason that a mere
“naturalism” can never be adequately dialectical. It is an apprehension
of the conditional reality of all phenomena that drives dialectical
thought to an affirmation of both the being and non-being of all
objects, categories, and concepts. This ground is what social ecological
theorist Joel Kovel refers to as the “plasma of being.” It is also what
mystical philosophers like Böhme have, quite dialectically, called “the
groundless Ground,” attempting to express the idea that it is a
non-objectifiable grounding of being, rather than an objectified ground,
or substance, on which anything can be thought to stand, or which
“underlies” other realities. If we wish to attach any concept to this
ultimate, it should perhaps be (following Whitehead) “creativity.”
Kovel points out, contemporary science has shown that such a continuum
underlies the diversity of beings.
“In the universe as a whole, there is no real separation between things;
there are only, so far as the most advanced science can tell us,
plasmatic quantum fields; one single, endlessly perturbed, endlessly
becoming body.” [30]
Kovel’s account of the our relation to this primordial ground is both
phenomenological and psychoanalytic. It reveals the ways in which we are
ecological beings, and indeed spiritual beings, because our being
extends beyond the limits of the ego or socially constructed selfhood.
Much of our experience reveals to us that this self is not sufficient,
or primary,
“but is rather that ensemble of social relations which precipitates out
of a primordium which comes before social causation — a core which,
crucially, remains active throughout life. Before the self, there is
being; and before being is the unconscious primordium. Society
intersects with the individual through a set of cultural
representations. It is a naming, a designation, an affixing from
without. Without this naming, the stuff of a person would never take
form. But the unconscious, in its core, is prerepresentational.” [31]
Thus, there are fundamental aspects of being that connect us,
physically, psychologically and ontologically, with greater (or deeper)
realities — with other living beings, with our species, with the earth,
with the primordial ground of being.
This idea of connectedness leads us to the question of the place of the
concept of spirit in a dialectical holism. The most radical “critical”
and dialectical views after Hegel, beginning with the Young Hegelians —
Feuerbach, Stirner, Marx and their peers — were intent on banishing
Hegel’s central category from the philosophical realm. The post-Hegelian
dialectical tradition has been dominated by a reductive materialism that
has dogmatically rejected the possibility of dialectical inquiry into
the most fundamental ontological questions. Some versions of social
ecology have inherited this anti-spiritual tendency of Western
materialism. Thus, while Bookchin has sometimes invoked the concept of
“ecological spirituality” in his writings, it has usually been in the
weak sense of a vague ecological or even ethical sensibility and he has
increasingly sought to banish any strong conception of “spirit” from his
social ecological orthodoxy.
It is becoming evident, however, that the most radically dialectical and
holistic thinking restores the ontological and political significance of
the concept of spirit. Without implying any of the dogmatic and
one-sided idealist aspects of Hegel’s conception of spirit, a social
ecology can find in the concept an important means of expressing our
relationship to the evolving, developing, unfolding whole and its deeper
ontological matrix. Kovel begins his discussion of spirit with the
statement that it concerns “what happens to us as the boundaries of the
self give way.” [32] The negation of ego identity that he intends by
this concept takes place when we discover our relationship to the
primordial continuum and to its expressions in the processes of life,
growth, development, and the striving toward wholeness. A social ecology
can give meaning to an ecological spirituality that will embody the
truth of the religious consciousness, [33] which is a liberatory truth,
however mystified and distorted it may have been for purposes of
domination and social conformism. Such a spirituality is the synthesis
and realization of the religion of nature and the religion of history.
It consists of a response to the sacredness of the phenomena, of the
multiplicity of creative expressions of being, and of the whole that
encompasses all beings. It is also an expression of wonder and awe at
the mystery of becoming, the unfolding of the universe’s potentiality
for realized being, goodness, truth and beauty.
A social ecology applies its holistic and dialectical approach of the
question of the nature of the self. While it emphasizes wholeness, it
does not accept the illusory and indeed repressive ideal of a completely
harmonious, fully-integrated selfhood. Rather it sees the self as a
developing whole, a relative unity-in-diversity, a whole in constant
process of self-transformation and self-transcendence. The very
multiplicity of the self, “the chaos within one,” is highly valued,
since it attests to the expansiveness of selfhood and to our continuity
with the larger context of being, of life, of consciousness, of mind.
Such a view of selfhood shows a respect for the uniqueness of each
person, and for the striving of each toward a highly particularized (in
some ways incomparable) good that flows from his or her own nature. But
it also recognizes that personal self-realization is incomprehensible
apart from one’s dialectical interaction with other persons, with the
community, and with the larger natural world. The development of
authentic selfhood means the simultaneous unfolding of both
individuality and social being. The replacement of the voracious yet
fragile and underdeveloped ego of consumer society with such a
richly-developed selfhood is one of the preeminent goals of social
ecology.
Within this general orientation, there remain many areas for development
of the social-ecological conception of the self. As Kovel points out,
the realm of signification creates an imaginary sphere in which there is
a necessary degree of separation from nature, and even from oneself as
nature. He explains that
“we are at one time part of nature, fully participating in natural
processes; and at the same time we are radically different from nature,
ontologically destined by a dialectic between attachment and separation
to define ourselves in a signified field which by its very ‘nature’
negates nature.” [34]
Because of this “basic negativity” in the human standpoint toward the
world,
“the relationship between the self and nature cannot be comprehended
though any simple extrapolation of an ecological model grounded in unity
in diversity.” [35]
Moreover, the “thinglike” aspects of the self — the realm of the
preconceptual and of the most primordial layers of desire — can never be
fully transcended in either thought or experience. Part of the social
ecological project of comprehending “unity-in-diversity” is to theorize
adequately this duality and the necessary experiential and ontological
moments of alienation, separation, and distance within a general
non-dualistic, holistic framework (rather than merely to explain these
moments away).
In doing so, social ecology will delve more deeply into those
inseparable dimensions of body and mind that dualism has so fatefully
divided. As we explore such realities as thought, idea, image, sign,
symbol, signifier, language, on the one hand, and feeling, emotion,
disposition, instinct, passion, and desire on the other, the
interconnection between the two “realms” will become increasingly
apparent. The abstract “naturalism” of Bookchin’s social ecology will be
transformed into a richer, more dialectical, and many-sided
naturalization. As Abram notes,
“[w]e can experience things — can touch, hear, and taste things — only
because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and
have our own textures, sounds and tastes. We can perceive things at all
only because we are entirely a part of the sensible world that we
perceive! We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh
of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us.” [36]
Such a holistic concept of human-nature interaction is a necessary
complement to the conception of humanity as “nature becoming
self-conscious” or “nature knowing itself,” which might otherwise be
taken in a one-sidedly intellectual, objectifying, and ultimately
idealist sense.
For a social ecology, our ecological responsibility as members of the
earth community arises from both our relationship to the interrelated
web of life on earth and also from our place as a unique form of
nature’s and the earth’s self-expression. As we accept the
responsibilities implied by our role in “nature becoming
self-conscious,” we can begin to reverse our presently anti-evolutionary
and ecocidal direction, and begin to contribute to the continuation of
planetary natural and social evolution. We can also cooperate with
natural evolution through our own self-development. The overriding
ethical challenge to humanity is to determine how we can follow our own
path of self-realization as a human community while at the same time
allowing the entire earth community to continue its processes of
self-manifestation and evolutionary unfolding. [37] A crucial link
between these two goals is the understanding of how the flourishing of
life on earth is constitutive of the human good, as we dialectically
develop in relation to the planetary whole. As Thomas Berry has noted, a
central aspect of the human good is to enjoy and indeed celebrate the
goodness of the universe, a goodness that is most meaningfully
manifested for us in the beauty, richness, diversity and complexity of
life on earth (the social and ecological unity-in-diversity).
A dialectical and holistic theory of value attempts to transcend
atomistic theories, without dissolving particular beings (including
human beings) into the whole, whether the whole of nature or of the
biosphere. Holmes Rolston’s holistic analysis, and especially his
critique of the conventional division of value into intrinsic and
instrumental varieties, can contribute much to the development of a
social ecology of value. When value is generated in a system (or, as a
social ecology would state it, within a whole that is not reducible to a
mere sum of parts), we find that it is not generated in an
“instrumental” form, for there is no specific entity or entities for the
good of which the value is generated as a means. Nor do we find
“intrinsic” value in the sense that it there is a single coherent,
definable good or telos for the system. Therefore, we must posit
something like what Rolston calls “systemic value.” According to this
conception, the value that exists within the system “is not just the sum
of the part-values. No part values increase of kinds, but the system
promotes such increase. Systemic value is the productive process; its
products are intrinsic values woven into instrumental relationships.”
[38]
Such a holistic analysis helps us to reach an authentically ecological
understanding of value within ecosystems or eco-communities. For
Rolston, the “species-environment complex ought to be preserved because
it is the generative context of value.” [39] The ecosystem — that is,
the eco-community which has shaped the species, is internally related to
it, and is embodied in its very mode of being — is a value-generating
whole. Ultimately, the earth must be comprehended as, for us, the most
morally-significant value-generating whole. We must fully grasp the
conception of a planetary good realizing itself through the greatest
mutual attainment of good by all the beings that constitute that whole —
in terms of both their own goods and their contribution to shared
systemic goods of the various wholes in which they participate.
If a social ecology is to contribute to radical ecological social
transformation, it must address theoretically all the significant
institutional dimensions of society. It must take into account the fact
that every social institution contains organizational, ideological, and
imaginary aspects (moments that can only be separated from one another
for purposes of theoretical analysis). An economic institution, for
example, includes a mode of organizing persons and groups, their
activities and practices, and of utilizing material means for economic
ends. It also includes a mode of discourse, and a system of ideas by
which it understands itself and seeks to legitimate its ends and
activities. Finally, it includes a mode of self-representation and
self-expression by which it symbolizes itself and imagines itself. The
social imaginary is part of this third sphere, and consists of the
system of socially-shared images by which the society represents itself
to itself.
One essential task of a social ecology is to contribute to the creation
of an ecological imaginary, an endeavor that presupposes an awareness of
our own standpoint within the dialectical movement of the social world.
A social ecology of the imagination therefore undertakes the most
concrete and experiential investigation of the existing imaginary. To
the extent that this has been done, it has been found that we live in an
epoch that is defined above all by the dominant economistic
institutions. This dominance is exercised through all the major
institutional spheres: economistic forms of social organization,
economistic ideology, and an economistic imaginary. But the dominant
economism is far from simple and monolithic. Most significantly, it is
divided into two essential moments which interact in complex and
socially efficacious ways.
These two essential moments, productionism and consumptionism, are
inseparable and mutually interdependent. As Marx pointed out long ago in
the classical dialectical inquiry on this subject, “production,
distribution, exchange and consumption ... all form the members of a
totality, distinctions within a unity.” [40] While Marx’s analysis was
profoundly shaped by the productionist era in which he lived, all
subsequent inquiry is a continuation of the dialectical project that he
suggests in this passage. A social ecology ignores none of the moments
Marx identifies, but rather looks at distribution and exchange as
mediating terms between production and consumption.
But it will focus on the contemporary world as the scene of a strange
dialectic between abstract, systemic rationality and social and
ecological irrationality. The economistic society drives relentlessly
toward absolute rationality in the exploitation of natural and human
resources, in the pursuit of efficiency of production, in the
development of technics, in the control of markets through research, and
in the manipulation of behavior through marketing. At the same time, it
rushes toward complete irrationality in the generation of infinite
desire, in the colonization of the psyche with commodified images, in
the transformation of the human and natural world into a system of
objects of consumption, and most ultimately and materially, in
undermining the ecological basis for its own existence. Whatever the
shortcomings of Marx as economist and political theorist, he is
unsurpassed as a prophet insofar as he revealed that the fundamental
irrationality of economistic society is in its spirituality — the
fetishism of commodities.
One result of the careful study of the social imaginary is the
realization that a decisive moment in social transformation is the
development of a counter-imaginary. Success in the quest for an
ecological society will depend in part on the generation of a powerful
ecological imaginary to challenge the dominant economistic one. While
this process is perhaps in an embryonic stage, we have in fact already
developed certain important elements of an emerging ecological
imaginary.
The image of the region poses a powerful challenge to the economistic,
statist and technological imaginaries. Regions are a powerful presence,
yet have no clearly definable boundaries. This is the case whether these
regions be ecoregions, georegions, bioregions, ethnoregions,
mythoregions, psychoregions, or any other kind. Regionalism evokes a
dialectical imagination that grasps the mutual determination between
diverse realms of being, between culture and nature, unity and
multiplicity, between form and formlessness, between being and
nothingness. The concept of regionality implies an interplay between the
overlapping, evolving boundaries of natural spaces and the flowing,
redefining boundaries of imaginary spaces. [41]
The region is intimately connected to another powerful ecological image
— that of the wild. The wild is present in the spontaneous aspects of
culture and nature. We find it in forms of wild culture, wild nature,
and wild mind: in the poetic, in the carnavalesque, in dreams, in the
unconscious, in wilderness. We find it in the living earth, and in the
processes of growth and unfolding on the personal, communal, planetary
and cosmic levels. The point is not to find the wild in any “pristine”
state; it is always intermixed with civilization, domestication, and
even domination. The discovery of the wild within a being or any realm
of being means the uncovering of its self-manifestation, its creative
aspects, its relative autonomy. It is the basis for respect for beings,
but even more, for wonder, awe, and a sense of the sacred in all things.
The revolts and individualisms of the dominant culture appear quite tame
when civilization is subjected to the critique of the wild. [42]
The image of the earth as “Home,” or planetary household, and humans as
members of the earth community has great imaginary power. As we develop
greater knowledge of ecological complexity, and as we rediscover the
marvelous richness of place, the earth image begins to incorporate
within itself a rich regional and local specificity, and become a
holistic representation of planetary unity-in-diversity. As the horror
of economistic-technocratic globalism becomes increasingly apparent, and
as the world is remade in the image of the factory, the prison and the
shopping mall, the rich, dialectical counter-image of the earth will
necessarily gain increasing imaginary force.
The ecological imaginary can be expanded further to cosmic or universal
dimensions. All cultures have felt the need to imagine the macrocosm and
orient themselves in relation to the whole. Brian Swimme and Thomas
Berry contend that the universe story, taken from contemporary cosmology
and transformed into a culturally-orienting narrative “is the only way
of providing, in our times, what the mythic stories of the universe
provided for tribal peoples and for the earlier classical civilizations
in their times.” [43] Through the universe and earth story, people see
themselves as part of larger processes of development and “unfolding of
the cosmos.” They thus achieve “a sense of relatedness to the various
living and nonliving components of the earth community.” [44] These
powerful, indeed sublime narratives relativize cultural absolutes and
shake the dominant imaginary, just as they give new imaginary meaning to
human existence, consciousness and creativity.
The larger processes of self-realization and unfolding of potentialities
have often (since Hegel) been described as the emegence of freedom in
the history of humanity, the earth, and the universe. A social ecology
carries on this tradition and seeks to give an ecological meaning to
such a conception of freedom. It rejects both the “negative freedom” of
mere non-coercion or “being left alone” of the liberal individualist
tradition, and also the “positive freedom” of the “recognition of
necessity” found in many strongly organicist forms of holism. A social
ecological conception of freedom focuses on the realization of a being’s
potentialities for identity, individuality, awareness, complexity,
self-determination, relatedness, and wholeness. In this sense, freedom
is found to some degree at all levels of being: from the self-organizing
and self-stabilizing tendencies of the atom to the level of the entire
universe evolving to higher levels of complexity and generating new
levels of being. In our own planetary history, embryonic freedom can be
found in the directiveness of all life, and takes on increasingly
complex forms, including, ultimately, the possibility of humans as
complex social beings attaining their good through a highly-developed
and respectful relationship to other humans and the natural world. The
realization of such freedom requires that humanity attain consciousness
of its place in the history of the earth and of the universe, that it
develop the ethical responsibility to assume its role in larger
processes of self-realization, and that human social institutions be
reshaped to embody the conditions that would make this knowledge and
ethical commitment into practical historical forces. Bookchin’s
conception of “free nature” focuses on the way in which human
self-realization, culminating in creation of an ecological society,
establishes a growing planetary realm of freedom. This occurs as
humanity “add[s] the dimension of freedom, reason, and ethics to first
[i.e., non-human] nature and raise[s] evolution to a level of
self-reflexivity ...” [45] The activity of humanity and human
self-realization are thus seen as central to the achievement of freedom
in nature.
But there is another, larger ecological dimension to freedom. The
realization of planetary freedom requires not only the human
self-realization that is emphasized in Bookchin’s “free nature,” but
also the human recognition of limits and the human forbearance that is
expressed in Arne Naess’s usage of that same term. [46] In this sense,
“free nature” is the spontaneous, creative nature that has given rise to
the entire rich, diverse system of self-realizing life on this planet.
It has also given rise to humanity itself, and dialectically shaped
humanity through our interaction with the all the other expressions of
this free activity, and made us the complex beings that we are. As
necessary as it is for humanity to rectify its disastrous disruptions of
natural processes, and although a restorative ecological practice is
undoubtedly required, a social ecology must also help humanity regain
its capacity for creative non-action, for the Taoist wu wei, for
“letting-be.” The social ecological conception of freedom as spontaneous
creative order points to the need for a larger sphere of wild nature so
that biodiversity can be maintained and evolutionary processes can
continue their self-expression, not only in human culture and humanized
nature, but in the natural world substantially free of human influence
and control. A social ecology therefore implies the necessity not only
for wilderness preservation but for an extensive expansion of wilderness
(and relative wilderness) areas where they have been largely destroyed.
A social ecology’s vision human freedom and “free nature” is closely
related to its fundamental project of critique of the forms of
domination that have stood in the way of human and planetary
self-realization. However, there have been some widespread
misconceptions about the social ecological analysis of domination. These
result in part from Bookchin’s definition of social ecology as the view
that “ecological problems arise from deep-seated social problems,” [47]
and his claims that the “quest to dominate nature” results from actual
domination within human society. In a sense, contemporary
ecophilosophies in general assert that ecological problems stem from
social ones. For example, deep ecology holds that ecological problems
result from the social problem of anthropocentrism, and ecofeminism
holds that ecological problems result from the social problem of
patriarchal ideologies and social structures. But there remains a
fundamental dispute between those who, like Bookchin, give causal
priority in the creation of ecological crisis to social institutions
(like capitalism or the state) and others who stress the causal priority
of social ideologies (like dualism, anthropocentrism, or patriarchal
values).
But both sides in this dispute have often seemed less than dialectical
in their approach. The roots of ecological crisis are at once
institutional and ideological, psychological and cultural. A critical
approach to the issue will avoid both one-sided materialist explanations
(identifying economic exploitation or other “material conditions” as
“the problem”) and one-sided idealism (identifying a system of ideas
like anthropocentrism as “the problem.”) It is indeed tempting to see
the emergence of certain hierarchical institutions as the precondition
for human destructiveness toward the natural world. Yet these very
institutions could only emerge because of the potential for domination,
hierarchical values, objectification, and power-seeking that have roots
in the human psyche and which are actualized under certain historical
conditions. Furthermore, as a system of domination develops it does so
through its dialectically interacting institutional, ideological and
imaginary spheres, all of which are related to a “transhistorical” human
nature developed over a long history of species evolution. Any account
of the origins of hierarchy and domination and of their possible
“dissolution” must therefore address at once the material,
institutional, psychological and even ontological moments of both the
development of these phenomena and the process of reversing it.
A social ecology seeks to restore certain elements of an ancient
conception of the political, and to expand the limits of the concept.
According to a classic account, if ethics is the pursuit of the good
life or self-realization, then politics is the pursuit of the good life
in common and self-realization for the whole community. A social ecology
affirms the political in this sense, but reinterprets it in ecological
terms. It seeks recover our long-obscured nature as zoon politikon and
to explore new dimensions of that nature. By this term is meant not
simply the “political animal” who participates in civic decision-making
processes, but the social and communal being whose selfhood is developed
and expressed through active engagement in many dimensions of the life
of the community.
A social ecology investigates the ways in which we can encourage the
emergence of humane, mutualistic, ecologically-responsible institutions
in all areas of social life. It sees not only “politics,” but all areas
of social interaction, including production and consumption, personal
relationships, family life, child-care, education, the arts, modes of
communication, spiritual life, ritual and celebration, recreation and
play, and informal modes of cooperation to be political realms in the
most profound sense. Each is an essential sphere in which we can develop
our social being and communal individuality, and in which a larger
communitarian reality can find much of its basis. Such a conception of
the political requires that practices and institutions be humane in
spirit and scale, life-affirming, creative, decentralized,
non-hierarchical, rooted in the particularity of people and place, and
based on grassroots, participatory democracy to the greatest degree
practically possible.
The social ecological tradition has long emphasized the importance of
local democracy. Reclus and Kropotkin both wrote extensively about its
history, and Mumford argues that
“the neighborhood ... must be built again into an active political unit,
if our democracy is to become active and invigorated once more, as it
was two centuries ago in the New England village, for that was a
superior political unit. The same principles apply again to the city and
the interrelationship of cities in a unified urban and regional network
or grid.” [48]
This conception of regional democracy based in local democracy is a
corollary of the general social ecological conception (expressed by
Geddes) of regional and larger communities growing out of household,
neighborhood, and local communities.
Bookchin has carried on this tradition in arguing for the liberatory
potential of the town or neighborhood assembly, and has given his
libertarian predecessors’ ideas of social and political decentralization
a more specific and concrete expression. He and other social ecologists
point out the ways in which such an assembly offers the community an
arena in which its needs and aspirations can be formulated publicly in
an active and creative manner, and in which a strong and vital
citizenship can be developed and exercised in practice. The community
assembly offers a means through which a highly-valued multiplicity and
diversity can be unified and coordinated, as the citizens engage
practically in the pursuit of the good of the whole community. It is
also on a scale at which the community’s many-sided relationship to its
specific ecological and bioregional milieu can be vividly grasped and
achieve political expression.
What is debated vigorously among social ecologists is the validity of a
“libertarian municipalism” that would make a program of creating local
assembly government and federations of libertarian municipalities into a
privileged politics of social ecology. In this ideology, the citizens
(as Bookchin defines them) and the municipalist movement assume much of
the historical role of the working class and the party in classical
Marxist theory, and are endowed with a similar mystique. Yet, it seems
clear that the municipalist program and Bookchin’s new “revolutionary
subject” cannot be uniquely deduced from the general premises of social
ecological analysis, nor can they be shown to be the only plausible
basis for an ecological politics. It is therefore not surprising that
most activists influenced by social ecology do not direct most of their
efforts into municipalism, but rather work in many political, economic
and cultural realms. [49]
A social ecology recognizes that political forms, as important as they
may be, are given meaning and realize whatever liberatory and
communitarian potential they may have within a larger political culture.
The political culture is thus both historically and theoretically more
fundamental. Consequently, when contemplating a promising political
form, a social ecology will consider the ways in which the political
culture may limit or liberate the potentials in that form. The
institution of the assembly, for example, possesses not only the
potential to foster freedom, authentic democracy, solidarity and civic
virtue, but also a considerable potential for the generation of elitism,
egotism, domineering personality traits, and power-seeking behavior.
Such dangers are avoided not only through procedures within assemblies
themselves, but above all by the creation of a communitarian, democratic
culture that will express itself in decision-making bodies and in all
other institutions. For assemblies and other organs of direct democracy
to contribute effectively to an ecological community, they must be
purged of the competitive, agonistic, masculinist aspects that have
often corrupted them. They can only fulfill their democratic promise if
they are an integral expression of a cooperative community that embodies
in its institutions the love of humanity and nature.
Barber makes exactly this point when he states that “strong” democracy
“attempts to balance adversary politics by nourishing the mutualistic
art of listening,” and going beyond mere toleration, seeks “common
rhetoric evocative of a common democratic discourse” that should
“encompass the affective as well as the cognitive mode.” [50] Such
concerns echo recent contributions in feminist ethics, which have
pointed out that the dominant moral and political discourse have
exhibited a one-sided emphasis on ideas and principles, and neglected
the realm of feeling and sensibility. In this spirit, a social ecology
will explore the ways in which the transition from formal to substantive
democracy depends not only on the establishment of more radically
democratic forms, but on the establishment of cultural practices that
foster a democratic sensibility.
In view of the dominance of the economic in contemporary society and the
importance of the economic in any society, a social ecology must devote
considerable attention to the means of creating a socially and
ecologically responsible system of production and consumption. Bookchin
has stressed the contribution that can be made by such alternatives as
community credit unions, community supported agriculture, community
gardens, “civic banks to fund municipal enterprises and land purchases”
and community-owned enterprises. [51] In a discussion of how a
municipalist movement might be initiated practically, he presents
proposals that emphasize cooperatives and small individually-owned
businesses. He suggests that the process could begin with the public
purchase of unprofitable enterprises (which would then be managed by the
workers), the establishment of land trusts, and the support for
small-scale productive enterprises. He concludes that in such a system
“cooperatives, farms, and small retail outlets would be fostered with
municipal funds and placed under growing public control.” [52] Taken
together, such suggestions describe the beginnings of a “Green
economics” that could have a major transformative effect on society.
[53]
One of the most compelling aspects of Bookchin’s political thought is
the centrality of his ethical critique of the dominant economistic
society, and his call for the creation of a “moral economy” as a
precondition for a just ecological society. He asserts that such a
“moral economy” implies the emergence of “a productive community” to
replace the amoral “mere marketplace,” that currently prevails. It
requires further that producers “explicitly agree to exchange their
products and services on terms that are not merely ‘equitable’ or ‘fair’
but supportive of each other.” [54] Such an analysis assumes that if the
prevailing system of economic exploitation and the dominant economistic
culture based on it are to be eliminated, a sphere must be created in
which people find new forms of exchange to replace the capitalist
market, and this sphere must be capable of continued growth. Bookchin
sees this realm as that of the municipalized economy, in which property
becomes “part of a larger whole that is controlled by the citizen body
in assembly as citizens.” [55]
However, for the present at least, it is not clear why the municipalized
economic sector should be looked upon as the primary realm, rather than
as one area among many in which significant economic transformation
might begin. It is possible to imagine a broad spectrum of self-managed
enterprises, individual producers and small partnerships that would
enter into a growing cooperative economic sector that would incorporate
social ecological values. The extent to which the strong communitarian
principle of distribution according to need could be achieved would be
proportional to the degree to which cooperative and communitarian values
had evolved — a condition that would depend on complex historical
factors that cannot be predicted beforehand.
Bookchin suggests that in a transitional phase the “rights” of the small
businesses will not be infringed upon, [56] though his goal is a
fully-developed municipalist system in which these businesses will not
be allowed to exist. It is far from obvious, however, why these
enterprises should not continue to exist in the long term, alongside
more cooperative forms of production, as long as the members of the
community choose to support them. There is no conclusive evidence that
such small enterprises are necessarily exploitative or that they cannot
be operated in an ecologically sound manner. Particularly if the larger
enterprises in a regional economy are democratically operated, the
persistence of such small individual enterprises does not seem
incompatible with social ecological values. This possibility is even
more plausible to the degree that the community democratically
establishes just and effective parameters of social and ecological
responsibility. The dogmatic assertion that in an ecological society
only one form of economic organization can exist (whether municipalized
enterprises or any other form) is incompatible with the affirmation of
historical openness and social creativity and imagination that is basic
to a social ecology.
If a social ecology cannot be dogmatic in its economic prescriptions for
the future, it must be entirely forthright in its judgment concerning
the dominant role of global corporate capital in today’s intensifying
social and ecological crisis. While some social ecologists have repeated
vague cliches about the market and capitalism (sometimes confusedly
conflating the two), social ecological analysis consistently results in
the inescapable conclusion that the growing global dominance of
corporate power is the major institutional factor in the crisis.
Whatever good intentions individual employees, managers, executives and
stockholders may have, large corporations operate according to the
constraints built into their organizational structures and according to
the requirements of global economic competition. To the degree that the
prevailing conception of global “free trade” is realized in practice, a
corporation that operates according to ecologically optimal
decision-making processes will be devoured by its more ruthlessly
rational competitors. While there are in some cases strong incentives
for transnational corporations to appear socially and ecologically
responsible, there are stronger pragmatic requirements of rational
self-interest that they act in socially and ecologically irresponsible
ways. A social ecology must therefore concern itself with the various
means by which more responsible decision-making might be achieved. This
might include regulation by local, regional and national governmental
bodies, organization of consumers, organization of workers,
transformation of organizational structures of existing enterprises,
creation of new and more responsible forms of economic organization, and
various forms of citizens’ direct action. The effectiveness of any of
these approaches can only be determined through experience and
experimentation. There has been no convincing demonstration that change
in personal and cultural values, changes in individual behavior,
regulatory legislation, structural political and economic reform,
citizens’ direct action, voluntary association, and large-scale
resistance movements do not each have roles to play in social ecological
transformation under various historical conditions.
To date, the best general assessment of economic globalization and
corporate power from a social ecological perspective is Athanasiou’s
Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor. [57] Athanasiou points out
how the link between systemic social issues and ecological crisis is
increasingly becoming evident. He notes, for example, that while until
recently “only a few isolated radicals saw the Third World’s crushing
international debt as a green issue, it is well known as a key link in
the fiscal chains strangling the world’s ecosystems.” [58] Athanasiou
presents a model of social ecological analysis that goes far beyond
generalizations about a human “quest for domination” or a “grow or die”
economy. For example, he explains how in return for loans, the
International Monetary Fund and the World Bank impose on poor countries
“Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs) that are socially and
ecologically disastrous, as rational they may seem from a narrow
economistic perspective. SAPs demand drastic reductions in public
spending for education, health, housing and other social goods,
eliminate subsidies for agriculture, food and social services, encourage
production for export, eliminate trade barriers, raise interest rates
and lower wages. The result is a more rationalized and superficially
stable economy in which poverty increases, the quality of life declines
for most people, and environmental destruction accelerates to fuel
export-based production.
The phenomenon of globalization shows with increasing clarity the link
between transnational capital, the state, the technological system, and
the growing and intimately interrelated social and ecological crises.
There is no better example of the power of broad social ecological
analysis.
Future research in social ecology will consist of much more detailed
study of these issues and many other questions related to the
development of the global economic, political and technological systems
and the resulting social and ecological consequences. The critical
theoretical framework of social ecology will become richer and more
highly articulated as it incorporates these empirically-based studies.
At the same time, its theoretical vision of a communitarian regionalism
will be enriched and rendered more determinate by the proliferation of
empirical, experiential projects in the tradition of Geddes’ regional
survey, and its political and economic theory will be transformed as
evidence is assimilated from continuing experiments in ecological and
communitarian organization and social practice.
Social ecology is at the present moment in a stage of rapid
transformation, self-reflection, and expansion of its theoretical
horizons. It is in the process of escaping from the dogmatic tendencies
that have threatened its theoretical vitality and practical relevance,
and the sectarian narrowness that has reactively defined it in
opposition to other ecophilosophies. It is ready to withdraw from the
“contest of ecologies” and move forward in its theoretical development,
in creative dialogue with other philosophies. [59] It is now in a
position to realize its potential as a holistic and dialectical
philosophy that seeks greater openness and opportunity for growth, works
toward a more adequate synthesis of theoretical reflection and empirical
inquiry, attains an increasingly comprehensive theoretical scope, and
strives for a truly dialectical relation to creative social practice —
offering the guidance of reflection and remaining open to guidance by
the truth of experience.
The project of a social ecology will certainly gain impetus through the
growing awareness of global ecological crisis and deterioration of the
ties of human community. Yet it will be moved and inspired most by its
affirmative ecological faith — by its love of humanity in all its
magnificent expressions, its wonder at the diverse manifestations of
life on earth, and its awe at the mystery of being. It will also learn
to accept human limitations and the tragic dimension of history, and put
aside the illusions of shallow progressivism, revolutionary fantasy, and
Promethean heroism. It will find hope rather in a vision of the human
community — freed from its quest for domination of self, of others, of
objects, of nature — realizing its own good through participating in and
contributing to the good of the larger community of life. In pursuing
this vision, social ecology realizes its deepest meaning as a reflection
on the earth household, a reflection that reveals our place as
companions in our common journey.
[1] Elisée Reclus, L’Homme et la Terre, 6 vol. (Paris: Librairie
Universelle, 1905–08), Vol. I, p. i.
[2] “Social ecology” is also an interdisciplinary field of academic
study that investigates the interrelationship between human social
institutions and ecological or environmental issues. It is closely
related to human ecology, the area of the biological sciences that deals
with the role of human beings in ecosystems. However, studies in social
ecology are much broader in scope, incorporating many areas of social
and natural science in their analysis. This interdisciplinary social
ecology offers much of the empirical data which philosophical social
ecology utilizes in its theoretical reflection.
[3] See especially Fields, Factories and Workshops (New York: Benjamin
Blom, 1968) and Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (Boston: Extending
Horizons, 1955) for important discussions of many of these topics, and
his pamphlet, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom Press, 1970)
on communitarian and democratic traditions.
[4] For the first English translation of some of Reclus’ most important
texts, and an extensive commentary on his thought, see John Clark and
Camille Martin, Liberty, Equality, Geography: The Social Thought of
Elisée Reclus (Littleton, CO: Aigis Publications, 1996). For a concise
discussion of Reclus’ relevance to contemporary ecological thought, see
John Clark, “The Dialectical Social Geography of Elisée Reclus” in
Philosophy and Geography 1 (forthcoming).
[5] For discussions of Geddes’ guiding values of “Sympathy, Synthesis
and Synergy,” and his regional concepts of “Place, Work, and Folk,” see
Murdo Macdonald, “Patrick Geddes in Context” in The Irish Review
(Autumn/Winter 1994) and “Art and the Context in Patrick Geddes’ Work”
in Spazio e Società/Space and Society (Oct.-Dec. 1994): 28–39.
[6] Ramachandra Guha, “Lewis Mumford, the Forgotten American
Environmentalist: An Essay in Rehabilitation,” in David Macauley, ed.
Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology (New York: Guilford Press,
1996), p. 210.
[7] Mumford did not choose to coin any convenient term to epitomize his
social theory. I take the term “ecological regionalism” from Mark
Luccarelli’s very helpful study, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region
(New York: Guilford Press, 1995).
[8] The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970),
p. 386.
[9] “The Human Prospect” in Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922–1972
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), p. 465.
[10] Ibid., p. 471
[11] The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1944),
p. 403.
[12] Ibid., p. 404.
[13] An adequate account of the eco-communitarian tradition would
explore Buber’s enormous contribution. See his major political work,
Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), including his chapters on
his predecessors Kropotkin and Landauer, and, especially, his essay, “In
the Midst of Crisis.” Significantly, Buber defines the “social” in terms
of the degree to which the “center” extends outward, and is “earthly,”
“creaturely,” and “attached.” (p. 135).
[14] Bookchin’s best presentation of his version of social ecology is
found in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of
Hierarchy (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982).
[15] Unfortunately, he lapses into the undialectical “fallacy that
technology is a neutral tool to be used or abused by the one who wields
it,” as David Watson notes in Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future
Social Ecology (Brooklyn, NY and Detroit, MI: Autonomedia and Black &
Red, 1996), p. 119. See the entire chapter, “The social ecologist as
technocrat” (pp. 119–167) for a careful dissection of Bookchin’s
technological optimism from a social ecological perspective.
[16] All done in the name of such values as “mutuality” and
“cooperation,” and on behalf of an “ethics of complementarity”!
[17] Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, p. 390.
[18] “But God does not remain stony and dead; the stones cry out and
raise themselves to Spirit.” Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences 247, cited in Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, (Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 103.
[19] See Alexander’s classic evolutionary treatise, Space, Time, and
Deity. 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1966.
[20] The ecological and cosmic evolutionary implications that are
implicit in a Whiteheadian “philosophy of organism” are elaborated
eloquently in Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., The Liberation of
Life (Denton, TX: Environmental Ethics Books, 1990).
[21] See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York:
Harper and Row, 1961) and The Future of Man. (New York: Harper and Row,
1969).
[22] See S. Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life (New York: Barnes
and Noble, Inc., 1964), ch. vi., “Matter, Life and Mind,” and Sri
Aurobindo, The Essential Aurobindo (New York: Schocken Books, 1973),
part one, “Man in Evolution.”
[23] See Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala,
1995) and A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996).
[24] We do not simply “identify” with a larger whole, but rather explore
specific modes of relatedness and develop our outlook and feelings in
relation to what we discover about self and other. In this analysis, a
dialectical social ecology has more in common with eco-feminist thought
than with those ecological theories that stress “expanded” selfhood.
[25] As in Eric Katz’s very useful discussion in “Organism, Community,
and the ‘Substitution Problem’” in Environmental Ethics 7 (1985):
241–256. Katz raises many important issues, though he overstates the
opposition between the two approaches by interpreting them as rather
rigid “models.”
[26] The most flagrant case is Tom Regan’s attack on “Holism as
Environmental Fascism” in his essay “Ethical Vegetarianism and
Commercial Animal Farming,” reprinted in James White, ed. Contemporary
Moral Problems (St. Paul MN: West Publishing Co., 1988): 327–341. Note
Mumford’s severe critique, from a holistic, “organicist” perspective, of
the extreme, totalizing holism of Teilhard de Chardin in The Pentagon of
Power, pp. 314–319.
[27] The concept of the “holon” was first proposed by Arthur Koestler in
The Ghost in the Machine (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967), ch. 3 and
passim. Its fundamental importance has recently been defended by Ken
Wilber. For a concise discussion of Wilber’s analysis of holons, their
characteristics of “identity,” “autonomy” and “agency,” and their
constitution of “holarchies,” see A Brief History of Everything, ch. 1.
[28] One of the most dialectical moves in recent ecological thought is
Gary Snyder’s choice of the title “No Nature” for his collected poems.
Starting out from Hakuin’s allusion to “self-nature that is no nature,”
he reminds us corrigible logocentrists, “Nature is not a book.” No
Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. v, 381.
[29] Tao Te Ching 1 (Chan trans.) in Wing-Tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in
Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p.
139.
[30] History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 161. It is in relation to this idea of
the primordial continuum of being that Merleau-Ponty’s dialectical
phenomenology can make an important contribution to a social ecology.
David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “the Flesh,” as “the
mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the
perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous
activity.” [David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and
Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), p.
66.] This concept unites subject and object dialectically as
determinations within a more primordial reality. Merleau-Ponty himself
refers to “that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor
the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From
this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break; it
has neither the tight construction of the mechanism nor the transparency
of a whole which precedes its parts.” [“The Concept of Nature, I” in
Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952–1960 (Chicago:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 65–66.]
[31] Kovel, History and Spirit, pp. 166–67.
[32] Ibid., p. 1.
[33] According to Harris, Hegel sees religion “as the felt awareness and
conviction of the infinite immanent and potent in all reality, in both
nature and history, and transcendent above all finite existence,” and as
“one form of that final self-realization of the whole which is the
truth, and without which there would be no dynamic to propel the
dialectical process,” so that, consequently, “[t]o repudiate spirit and
reject all religion is thus to paralyze the dialectic, and in effect to
abandon it.” Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, p. 54. If we are careful to
read “transcendent” as “trans-finite” and not as “supernatural,” and if
we remember that no self-realization of the whole is “final,” then this
also describes an important aspect of the meaning of “spirituality” for
a dialectical holism.
[34] “The Marriage of Radical Ecologies” in Zimmerman et al.,
Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 1^(st)
ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), p. 410–11. While social
ecology and other Western ecophilosophies have come to terms with
unity-in-diversity, perhaps they would do well to consider the radically
dialectical concept of difference-non-difference, the bhedabhedavada of
Indian philosophy.
[35] “Human Nature, Freedom, and Spirit” in John Clark, ed., Renewing
the Earth: The Promise of Social Ecology (London: Green Print, 1990), p.
145.
[36] Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 68.
[37] This is precisely the social ecological problematic first proposed
by Lao Tzu two and a half millennia ago.
[38] Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in
the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University. Press, 1988), p.
188.
[39] Ibid., p. 154
[40] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 99.
[41] For a discussion of the radical implications of regionalism, see
Max Cafard, “The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto” in Exquisite Corpse 8
(1990): 1, 22–23.
[42] See Gary Snyder’s classic essay, “Good, Wild, Sacred” in The
Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).
[43] Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story: From the
Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era (New York: HarperCollins,
1992), p. 3.
[44] Ibid., p. 5.
[45] Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montréal: Black
Rose Books, 1990), p. 182.
[46] The extent to which Bookchin holds a Promethean view of human
activity is suggested when he asks how humanity is “to organize a ‘free
nature.’” (“What Is Social Ecology?” in Zimmerman, et al. Environmental
Philosophy, 1^(st) ed., p. 370.
[47] Ibid., p. 354.
[48] Mumford, “The Human Prospect,” p. 471.
[49] Bookchin’s reduction of eco-communitarian politics to libertarian
municipalism is a deeply flawed, undialectical and fundamentally
dogmatic political problematic, and it is not possible to discuss most
of its shortcoming here. For a detailed critique, see John Clark,
“Municipal Dreams: Murray Bookchin’s Idealist Politics” in Andrew Light,
ed., Social Ecology After Bookchin (New York: Guilford Publications,
forthcoming).
[50] Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New
Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 176.
[51] Murray Bookchin, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of
Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987), p. 276 and
“Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview” in Green Perspectives 24 (1991):
4.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Brian Tokar, in his book The Green Alternative, has sketched an
even more extensive Green economic program, based on what is
fundamentally a social ecological analysis. Tokar’s concise and
well-written introduction to the Green movement should be consulted for
a clear example of an experimental, non-dogmatic social ecological
politics and economics. See The Green Alternative: Creating an
Ecological Future (San Pedro, CA: R. & E. Miles, 1992).
[54] Murray Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia, PA: New Society
Publishers, 1986), p. 91.
[55] Bookchin, The Rise of Urbanization, p. 263.
[56] Ibid., p. 275.
[57] Tom Athanasiou, Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor
(Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996).
[58] Ibid., p. 9.
[59] I have suggested some of the ways in which dialogue between social
ecology and deep ecology might be usefully explored in “How Wide Is Deep
Ecology?” in Inquiry 39 (June 1996): 189–201.