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Title: Yes! — Whither Earth First?
Author: Murray Bookchin
Date: 1987
Language: en
Topics: Earth First!, fascism, racism
Source: Retrieved on 20 January 2011 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/gp/perspectives10.html
Notes: From Green Perspectives #10

Murray Bookchin

Yes! — Whither Earth First?

Editors’ Note: The following article was written nearly a year ago in

response to a supplement in the November 1, 1987, issue of Earth First!

The greater part of the supplement attacked the author, Murray Bookchin,

for some six columns. After an orgy of personal recriminations,

unfounded accusations. and sheer falsehoods, Earth First! refused to

print this response. Its existence was merely mentioned in passing in a

later issue by the editor of Earth First!, David Foreman, near the end

of his column, “Around the Campfire.”

These attacks continued into the next issue. The passages quoted here

are drawn from articles by R. Wills Flowers, Chim Blea, and Foreman in

the November 1 issue. Because the quotations adequately depict the tenor

of the attacks directed against Bookchin, we do not reproduce them in

their entirety here. Readers of Green Perspectives who would like to see

the original articles may write to Earth First!. P.O. Box 2358, Lewiston

ME 04241, requesting the Nov. 1, 1987, issue and enclosing $2.

Owing to a continuing demand for copies of Bookchin’s response, the

article is reproduced here in its entirely, apart from several sentences

asking about the identity of Miss Ann Thropy. ”

Now that readers of the November 1 issue of Earth First! have been

warned that I am the “Pope of Anarchy” who is plotting a “Redgreen

Putsch” to engage in a “pogrom” (no less!) against “biocentric or

nonleftist ecologists, — let’s end this utter nonsense and get down to

the issues these childish invectives are meant to obscure. I address the

following remarks not to the Arizona Junta and its entourage of

“warriors” (to use Foreman’s description of himself and his supporters)

but to the well — meaning, sincere, and thinking people who make up

Earth First! as a movement.

Basic Issues

I wrote “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology” [Green Perspectives #4 — 5]

neither to assert the “superiority” of social ecology over “deep

ecology” nor to engage in an “ideological turf war” with anyone, as

Professor R. Wills Flowers puts it in the Nov. 1 issue. Quite to the

contrary: if “turf” were an issue, Bill Devall and I would not have

initiated a friendly correspondence, despite our differences, that I had

hoped (as I believe Devall hoped) would yield a creative and collegial

interchange of ideas. But to subject a critic to psychoanalysis and

character assassination seems to be a common way for the Arizona Junta

and its “warriors” to cope with complex criticisms.

No, the “central thesis” (to use Flowers’s words) of my article is a

more serious matter than a turf war. What shook me profoundly and

removed any illusion that a commonality of views could exist between

“deep ecology” and social ecology was the laudatory interview Devall

conducted with David Foreman [Simply Living, vol. 2, no. 12, n.d.]. In

this interview, Foreman bluntly declared that “the worst thing we could

do in Ethiopia is to give aid [to the starving children] — the best

thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let people

there just starve.” This odious mentality that degrades social issues

like civil war in Africa and the role of colonial regimes on the

continent into “natural” ones reminds me of the pitiless ideology I

encountered in the 1930s during the upswell of German fascism. I am not

yelling “fascist” at a cop like a typical 1960s radical, as Professor

Flowers puts it. I opposed this form of behavior twenty years ago, and I

still do today. I am talking about a genocidal ideology used by big and

little Hitlers to justify the extermination of people on seemingly

“natural” grounds.

What ended my interchange of views with Devall was the stunning fact

that he said nothing whatever in reply to Foreman’s chilling advice. He

asked no further questions, voiced no objections, hardly even seemed to

gulp, as far as I could judge. Does Devall accept Foreman’s position,

then? Does George Sessions accept it? Does Arne Naess? No one should be

silent, in my opinion, when such vicious stuff emerges in what professes

to be an ecology movement — indeed, in a self styled radical one at

that.

And what do those good gentlemen think about Foreman’s demand that we

close our borders to Latin Americans (of which more later) because they

put “more pressure on the resources we have in the USA”? Shall we kick

“them” out to spare “our” forests and water including Indians, whose

ancestors came to this continent thousands of years ago? If so, how many

little Hitlers will “we” need to round “them” up? What detention camps,

police, military forces, and coercive institutions established by the

State will “we” need to expedite “their” removal — that is, until “we”

need “their” labor to harvest “our” crops and feed “our” faces? They

will keep coming, you know, because “our” corporations, banks, and oil

magnates destroyed their revolution in Mexico three generations ago and

inflicted a terrifying hell upon them. Although they did this with the

aid of their own bourgeois thugs, it was “ours” who guided them. Much of

the land “we” occupy was stolen from “them” by “our” own thugs in the

last century, particularly land in the Southwest and in California.

where the Arizona Junta and its “warriors” have their stamping grounds.

Yes. this kind of demographics is indeed the “litmus test (to use

another of Foreman’s expressions) that overrides all the pious rhetoric,

the “biocentric” philosophizing, and the costumed theatrics: do we want

to give food to Ethiopian children, or will we merely engage in

posturing and pious lamentations amidst the outright starvation in the

“Third World”? Until I know what the “deep zoologists” — to characterize

deep ecology for what it seems to be — really think about this scaring

and concrete issue (the Arizona Junta has made Its views loud and

clear), I am obliged to regard all their equivocations, academic papers,

and anthologies as ideological foreplay for reaction and an

authoritarian state.

Another issue that is central to my article is the various plaudits for

AIDS that appear in Earth First!. Who is hiding behind the pseudonym

“Miss Ann Thropy” — and why a pseudonym in the first place? Why be so

coy? ... Why such reticence about speaking up, about being forthright

like good muscular “warriors” in a “warrior society” (again, the

language of David Foreman)? On such issues, silence is essentially

complicity, and equivocation is opportunism.

Finally, I call to the attention of the largely decent people in Earth

First! another, more recent issue. Does a criticism of Foreman, Abbey,

“Miss Ann Thropy,” and the rest of the “warriors” in the Arizona Junta

constitute an attack on Earth First! itself? I have exercised the

greatest care in distinguishing Earth First! as a movement from the

Arizona Junta and its guardian “warriors.” There is not a line. not a

phrase, indeed not a word in my article that attacks Earth First! as a

movement. I repeatedly made a distinction between the Junta and the

movement at the national Green conference at Amherst — both on the

podium and on the floor. I even corrected an erroneous citation in the

Utne Reader that had me saying that “most” Earth Firsters! are

“ecofascists,” pointing out again in my response that a distinction must

be drawn between the movement and the Junta.

This did not prevent Andrew Caffrey from appearing on television and

raising the clamor that I was “attacking Earth First!” at Amherst.

Foreman himself, not to be outdone by one of his fellow “warriors,”

repeats this blatant falsehood in the Nov. 1 issue of Earth First! by

writing that a “full scale attack [!] was launched on Earth First! by

one of the most noted proponents of ‘radical ecology’ in the United

States, Murray Bookchin, at a major national Green conference.”

Do Earth First!ers accept the implicit contention that criticism of the

Arizona Junta and its “warriors” is an attack on themselves? Are the

Junta and Earth First! interchangeable entities? Have Foreman and the

Junta replaced the membership so that any criticism of the two

necessarily constitutes a criticism of Earth First! as a movement? In

short, is Earth First! acquiring an aristocracy and a system of top —

down control in which a line will be laid down that everyone must follow

or else be forced out of the movement and invited to form his or her own

organization?

Anarchism, I may add, knows no “Popes.” When I speak or write, I do so

for myself. I have no organization that follows in my wake. The one

organization to which I belong — the Vermont Greens — includes many

different tendencies, and I would never regard a criticism of my views

as a criticism of the Vermont Greens. Indeed, the feisty people with

whom I work would be justifiably outraged if a criticism of me were

taken as a criticism of the Vermont Greens as a whole.

The Nazi Issue

Professor R. Wills Flowers is palpable evidence that one doesn’t have to

be very bright or knowledgeable to make it as a professor these days.

Not that them aren’t any bright and knowledgeable professors around. But

no one in Earth First! should be overawed by an academic title, a claim

to have “spent two decades in various aspects of ecology,” or pompous

sermons spiced by crude, often scandalous remarks.

Leaving aside the petty quibbling Professor Flowers rains on us about

the precise meaning of the word “ecology” as a mere biological science

(if it were, it would put scores of thinkers out of business, from

Bateson to Naess), his basic criticism rests on an appallingly

simplified interpretation of German fascism. According to Professor

Flowers, we’ve all been deluded over the real “substance” of Adolf

Hitler’s intentions between 1933 and 1945, when the Führer finally blew

out his brains in his Berlin bunker. Hitler, Professor Flowers tells us,

really was just a dirty old “anthropocentrist” who was hell-bent on

“development” and “looked on Eastern Europe in much the same way

mulitinational tycoons look at a rainforest.” That “most Eastern

Europeans and Russians” were relegated to nonhumans because they stood

in the way of the Führer’s “development” schemes reflects the practical

needs that confront developers everywhere — the trade-offs, you know,

between what stands in the way of a developer’s plans and what can be

retained. That this picture looks uncannily like the most vulgar type of

Marxist economic and productivist explanations of history seems as far

removed from Professor Flowers’s thinking as his knowledge of German

fascism generally. Hitler’s extermination program of the Jews is largely

buried in the wash: in fact, many writers have “concentrated” too

strongly on the “dehumanization” [!] campaign the Nazis launched against

the Jews and other non-Aryans. Yet few have noticed a basic

anthropocentric hypocrisy: what is accepted as a matter of course when

humans are doing it to animals becomes ‘unparalleled evil’ when humans

do the same to other humans.”

I will not try to describe the nausea I feel as a human being and as a

Jew when I encounter what is little more than an unfeeling smirk in

response to what happened to a whole people more than forty years ago.

If “biocentricity” and “anti-humanism” ever showed their ugly faces, it

is in these icy remarks by Professor Flowers — remarks in which Hitler’s

attempt to exterminate the Jewish people as a whole takes the form of a

viciously reactionary reproach. Note well that this reproach is directed

not so much against Hitler as against the Jews who doubtless got what

they deserve inasmuch as they have an “anthropocentric” and “humanistic”

religion. More than one person I’ve met in the “ecology movement” has

said this in barely veiled attacks upon Judaism as the very source of

“anthropocentrism” and “humanism” in history.

Bookchin, Professor Flowers implies, is no different in principle from

Hitler because, as an “anthropocentrist,” he gives “blanket [!]

justification” to human intervention into nature. Bookchin’s theory of

social ecology regards “humanity as the apex [!] of evolution” because

“he glue[s] his ‘social ecolgoy’ to the thoroughly hierarchical [!] and

now discredited ‘evolution-as-ladder’ paradigm which, as Stephen J.

Gould has clearly shown, is not only wrong but is the Big Daddy of

reactionary doctrines: a frequent justification for the very class

domination, racism, and other intrahuman nastiness that social

ecologists’ see as their main targets.”

To respond to this buckshot argument, which scatters its pellets all

over the place, would require a full-size article in itself. Suffice it

to say that one would have to be brain-dead to believe that Hitler was

simply another “developer” in town or even another “multinational”

salivating over a rain forest. Mein Kampf was required reading for every

youth and even literate youngster in the Third Reich, not only a

best-seller among German adults. It was not merely a propaganda stunt

for focusing on Jewish scapegoats, as so many of us believed fifty years

ago. Adolf Hitler had murder in his eyes when it came to the Jews. and

this murder derived from a form of deep zoology that fostered the most

extreme and deadly racism in history.

To paint Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people — a project

he envisioned on an international scale! — as part of the overall

murders the Nazis committed has a very ugly undertaste of indifference

to a historically terrifying phenomenon whose scale is waning into the

dim mists of the past. To gain some perspective on Nazi anti-Semitism,

which Professor Flowers buries in the racism that marked German fascism

as a whole, we should take note of the following facts. When Armenians

were faced with Turkish genocide early in this century, they had only to

convert to Islam if they wished to save their lives. Even American

Indians had the opportunity to fight back, and an aroused public opinion

often came to their rescue when cowboys and the cavalry invaded their

lands. During World War II, Russian prisoners of war could join General

Vlasov’s SS — groomed army and enjoy relatively comfortable living

conditions. Poles were reasonably well-fed, as things went, in those

bitter years of hunger. Ukrainians, starved as many were, had a way out

if they “volunteered” to work for the Third Reich (as many did), even as

concentration-camp guards. I could go on with this account for every

people in Europe with data that would submerge Professor Flowers and

more than fill a full issue of Earth First!

Not so with the Jews. Apart from Jews here and there who could count on

the Nazi appetite for larceny and buy themselves off, the entire Jewish

people of Europe down to the last child was doomed if Hitler could have

his way. Hitler’s version of deep zoology was so frantic that it even

shook Goebbels, the Führer’s famous propaganda minister, who wrote in

his diary for March 27,1942, “the Führer is the unrelenting protagonist

and advocate to a radical solution [of the “Jewish question”]” (Goebbels

Tagebücher aus den Jahren 1942 — 42, pp. 142 — 43). Even a Catholic nun

recently beatified by Pope John Paul II was snatched from her sisters

and killed in an SS murder camp because she had been born a Jewess.

As a people, the Jews were not so numerically significant that they

interfered with Hitler’s “development” plans for Lebensraum, or “living

space.” Nor were the racism directed against them and ultimately their

mass murder part of a propaganda ploy, as Professor Flowers seems to

imply — like the Nazi version of “socialism.” Quite to the contrary: the

whole program of extermination was venomously “biological” and executed

in the deepest secrecy, often with “code words” that kept the knowledge

of anti-Semitic genocide from the German public — that is, until many

witnesses began to spread the word among the good citizens of the Third

Reich. Indeed, so avidly did the Führer and his SS pursue this project,

rooted as it was in the Nazi version of deep zoology, that even the

European railroad system was seriously disrupted by transports of the

Jews to murder camps — transports whose trains were direly needed to

supply war materiel to the German military machine. Although this

disruption spanned the most crucial years of World War II, from 1942 to

early 1945, it went on and on, even to the frustration of German army

commanders who were grimly in need of troops, supplies, and ammunition.

The Nazi version of deep zoology can be seen not only in terms of

Hitler’s unswerving attempt to exterminate the Jews as a “race,”

irrespective of age, intermarriage, or conversions to Christianity.

Rather, the Nazi version of deep zoology was vastly expansive. It

reached into the German family itself. reducing women to breeders of men

for the army and men into “warrior” cannon fodder. The Hitler Youth were

thoroughly indoctrinated in a crude biologism that stressed, ironically,

the virtues of wilderness, wildlife, and the rugged joys of a

comradeship formed around the campfire. Teutonic paganism and “folk

tribalism” were given so much emphasis that they led to protests by

priests and religious parents — usually to no avail. I know this not

from Toland, one of the biographers of Hitler on whom Flowers seems to

rely, but from direct discussions with Germans who were obliged to join

the Hitler Youth and from Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

I have hiked. camped, and lived for weeks in nearly all the major

national parks and forests of the United States. I am in no way accusing

Earth First! of Nazism. The importance of wilderness and wildlife in

shaping a sound naturalistic and ecological outlook does not have to be

demonstrated to me. But it becomes very troubling to me indeed when such

a naturalistic and ecological outlook becomes polluted by

Malthusianisin, xenophobia, misanthropy, and general denunciations of

human beings — reinforced by cracks of a bullwhip and references to a

warrior society. The growing anti-rationalism in the ecology movement —

an anti-rationalism that draws no distinction between analytic and

organismic forms of reason — also disquiets me, as does the new emphasis

on the Super-natural — which actually undermines an appreciation of

nature for its own sake and the fecundity, creativity, and richness of

natural evolution.

Viruses and AIDS

Readers of Earth First! will have to consult the volumes of my writings,

from 1952 (“The Problem of Chemicals in Food”) to my latest book on

urbanization (1987), to ascertain if I ever gave “blanket [!]

justification” to human intervention into nature. If they do, they will

discover that professors do not have to be very bright or knowledgeable

to make it in the academy — provided they know how to lie in their

teeth. One may quarrel over how much human intervention into nature is

justifiable and in what ways, a view that even Sessions and Devall

express when they write: “Humans have modified the earth and will

probably continue to do so. At issue is the nature and extent of such

interference” (Deep Ecology, p. 72).

This is a far cry from the “noninterference” that is so often touted in

Earth First! and the “misanthropy” Foreman celebrates in “Around the

Campfire” with an allusion to Patrick Henry — a man who, as a product of

the eighteenth — century Enlightenment, would have regarded Foreman as a

buffoon. Leaving aside the question of who will decide how much to

“modify” in nature and what kind of society is needed to resolve these

questions in a ecological way, what beliefs do all these gentlemen

actually have in common? Are Sessions and Devall misanthropes? Or do

their views have a “misanthropic flavor,” to use the words of Chim Blea

in her “Cat Tracks” column of Nov. 1? Do Sessions and Devall believe

that Eskimos should have snowmobiles, for example, and can we serve such

“vital needs” (to use Devall and Sessions) without the industries and

energy resources needed to produce them? The whole business gets sillier

and sillier as one explores the real and potential differences that have

produced the unholy alliance between the Arizona Junta and deep zoology.

But it is by no means a “silly quibble to ask whether AIDS and smallpox

organisms have rights.” to use Professor Flowers’s condescending remarks

on this issue. Indeed, the “rights” of viruses are one of the sizzling

“issues” raised by “anti — humanists” and their papa, David Ehrenfeld,

who earns high praise in the literature of deep zoology. I didn’t raise

this issue: Ehrenfeld did, and so did the professorial establishment of

“anti-humanism” that writes for the academic press. I feel obliged to

ask if Ehrenfeld’s “Noah Principle” is part of deep zoology? Is every

living thing, including the AIDS virus, plague bacillus, and smallpox

virus to be preserved because “Existence is the only criterion of the

value of parts of Nature,” as Ehrenfeld puts it in The Arrogance of

Humanism (p. 208). Do Sessions and Devall. accept Ehrenfeld’s notion

that “for those who reject the humanist basis of modern life, there is

simply no way to tell whether one arbitrarily [?] chosen part of Nature

has more ‘value’ than another, so like Noah we do not bother to make the

effort”? (p. 208)

These astonishing formulations, in fact, center on the “need” to

preserve the Variola virus, the pathogenic agent of smallpox, which is

characterized by Ehrenfeld as an “endangered species” because of the

smallpox vaccine (p. 209). Like Devall and Sessions, Ehrenfeld guards

his endangered rear-end with qualifiers like “arbitrarily chosen,”

counterposing wild extremes and answering the problems this procedure

raises with even wilder answers that are suitably hedged by qualitifers.

The “beauty” of the Noah Principle, in fact, is precisely its mindless

simplicity. Mere existence, you see, is the only fact that confers

“value” on an organism. Equipped with this guiding maxim, we no longer

have to think about the consequences an organism — or who knows? maybe

an institution or a social system like Nazism — produces in the

biosphere. Like Noah responding to God’s command. we simply collect two

of everything, even of deadly pathogens. After all, it exists, so we

rescue it. Inasmuch as Ehrenfeld is writing in the sanitary comfort of

his New Jersey home (a reasonable assumption of how this man lives), I

am obliged to ask in the name of simple decency and conscience which

group of people is likely to become a host for smallpox and plague:

people of color in the “Third World,” or the “beautiful people” of the

“First World”? As it happens, “Third World” people are the real victims

of these microbes while “First World” people are the beneficiaries of

vaccines and viruses.

One can go on endlessly with the sickening dilemmas, shady qualifiers,

and carefully chosen subordinate clauses that express pious sympathy for

suffering people while otherwise dooming them to death in the name of a

Noah Principle, the conservation of “nature” that is often little more

than corporate greed, and a “we” — against — “them” mentality that

reflects the competitive image the marketplace foists on the natural

world. The “sympathy” voiced by Foreman is all the more tasteless

because it serves to remove any sense of guilt from advocates of this

position, just as a hanging judge’s verdict is closed with the pious

remark. “May God have mercy on your soul.” Amen, brother — but stop

voicing little pieties when you promote a lethal ideology that validates

the death of millions.

What Is Social Ecology?

Social ecology is not a body of views that was hatched by “the dogmatic

Left to attack the Deep Ecology/Earth First! movements,” to use Chim

Blea’s lurid language in “Cat Tracks.” There is no “Red Putsch” in the

offing, no “coordinated attempt by American Redgreens to launch a

pre-emptive strike on the Green Greens in the United States.” much less

a “pogrom,” unless it exists in the fevered imagination of Chim Blea,

whose column voices these absurd warnings. If Earth First!ers have

reason to be concerned about anything in Blea’s prose, it is the

accuracy of the information she dispenses in her column. This “cynical

Earth Firster! of the misanthropic flavor,” as she calls herself. makes

a complete hash out of the factions that exist in the German Greens. The

German Realos (or “Realists”) have tried to denature the Greens into a

conventional political party with a moderate middle-class program. These

are not the “Green Greens” or Fundies (“Fundamentalists”) whose radical

environmentalism Chim Blea professes to admire — the faction that wants

to close nuclear power plants immediately and withdraw from NATO, and

that participates in direct action as well as electoral activity. Let it

be known, then that these marvelous Fundies or “Green Greens” are —

horror of horrors! — supported by the so-called ecosocialists or

“Redgreens” like Thomas Ebermarm and Rainer Trampert of Hamburg. Indeed,

without the support of the Hamburg Left Greens, the influence of the

Fundies or “Green Greens” would be greatly diminished in the German

Greens. Chim Blea, to put it bluntly, couldn’t tell Germany and the

German Greens from Tasmania and the Tasmanian Labor Party.

All of which raises the question of what direction the ecology movement

in the United States and Canada will go in if it follows the outlook

fostered by deep zoology and the Arizona Junta in Earth First! Both

morally and socially, the movement is faced not with a shift to the

right or the left but with a long march backward into the Pleistocene,

where it will lose itself in self-indulgent whoops and howls that

“speak” not even to animals, much less to human beings. What is at stake

is whether we will fall down on all fours and bay at the moon or whether

we will develop our ideas and our movement in forms that address people

who are concerned with ecological breakdown. Nor will any clarification

of ideas within the movement occur by grossly distorting positions —

notably claims that social ecology is a form of “dogmatic leftism” that

is “fixated on capitalism.” People have only to read the literature of

social ecology to discover for themselves that such claims are cynical

and scandalous falsehoods and are as demeaning to readers of Earth

First! as they are to the people who express them in the periodical.

Coyotes should be respected for what they are, and the balance of nature

should be respected for what is. Out of this primal “first nature,”

which is largely a product of biological evolution, we have created a

terribly unfinished and self — destructive — second nature,” or society,

that is largely a product of social evolution. This second nature has

formed us in a way that is now less than what human beings could be —

free, rich in mind, emancipated in spirit, and ecological in outlook and

practice. Our social lives have yet to be completed. They cannot be left

in a terrifying gap between innocent animality and a cruel caricature of

“humanity.” There is no way to go back to animal innocence. Indeed, to

even try to do so would be to regress into a privatistic withdrawal from

the world and from the need to solve its growing problems. Rather, we

have to unite both of our “natures” — animal first nature and social

second nature — into a new synthesis that takes our two natures into

account: a “free nature” in which humanity’s consciousness can be

brought into the service of natural as well as social evolution. To be

human and to be conscious in the fullest sense of the word are no less

natural than to be a bear or a coyote that fulfills its own

potentialities as a life form.

I have no reservations about expressing this ecological humanism, a view

that in no way should be confused with Henryk Skolimowski’s Teilhardian

theistic humanism or Ehrenfeld’s appalling degradation of the word

humanism to mean self-serving “anthropocentricity.” I have little doubt

that Professor Flowers, the Arizona Junta, and its guardian “warriors”

will seize these words and completely distort their meaning. Buzzwords

are growing up all over the ecology movement that produce adrenaline

before many people have the faintest idea of what they mean or the

contexts in which they are used. “Humanism” is now ipso facto bad, and

“biocentricity” is ipso facto good. Hence my remarks are addressed to

those people of sensibility who can read and understand what I mean —

and hopefully, in fact, join with me in an exploration of a social

ecology that goes beyond bumper sticker slogans and dreamy pieties.

Ironically, the Arizona Junta. its guardian “warriors.” and its academic

deep zoologists can ultimately only be effective — all its Yippie

theatrics aside — in thoroughly marginalizing the ecology movement. in

closing off its message to people of color and victims of oppression,

and in reducing it to an elite group of privileged whites. Thereafter,

all the ecology movement’s promise for renewal and reconstruction will

disappear, to be replaced only by environmental reformists and small

bands of heckling critics.

I can fully understand why thinking and sensitive people respond to

envirorimental reformism by creating militant direct-action groups that

will “get something done.” This has been my view for decades, as anyone

who knows me or has even dipped into my writings must know. I can also

understand the fear of cooptation that such people have, and their need

to retain an uncompromising stand against any attempt to make them bend

to the status quo. But I do not understand why such well-meaning people

— Foreman no less than others — have responded to a one-sided view by

adopting another that is equally one-sided. If you like wildlife now,

for example, you have to hate “humanity” — as though “humanity” were

more than an abstraction today that is not composed of women as well as

men, people of color as well as Euro-American whites, poor as well as

rich, the exploited ‘Third World — as well as its “First World”

exploiters.

This kind of one-sided thinking has appeared over and over again. In the

late 1960s, SDS shifted over to a lunatic Maoism that was no more

effectual than the formless liberalism of an earlier time. Yet this did

not prevent many SDSers, faced by the bankruptcy of both extremes, from

becoming manipulative political brokers in the 1970s and money-minded

stockbrokers in the 1980s. Will this be the fate of the ecology movement

in the United States and Canada? Will Malthusianism, anti-humanism,

mindless biocentrism, and denunciations of a mythical “humanity” become

the new Maoism of the resurgent ecology movement, and will deep zoology,

with its buzzwords and its bumper-sticker slogans, become its

“theoretical” underpinning?

For my part, I hold neither to “biocentricity” nor to

anthropocentricity.” As an opponent of hierarchy in any form — be it a

hierarchical vision of nature, a way of structuring society, a way of

relating between people, or, yes, a way of thinking — I oppose the whole

idea of centricity as such. This is especially the case when centricity

is used to justify the “subordination” either of nature to humanity (as

in Marxism and liberalism) or of humanity to nature (as in deep

zoology). For Professor Flowers to willfully distort my ideas and accuse

me of promoting a hierarchical viewpoint scandalously illustrates the

cynicism that permeates his article in Earth First! For him to add that

I am “fixated” on capitalism is to recycle the very criticism that I

have voiced against Marxism for its narrow class analysis — and to

ignominiously throw it back at — me in total ignorance of what I have

written for over a generation. I dare not guess what Professor Flowers

learned when he read Toland’s account of Hitler, but he would be well

advised to acquire even a glancing knowledge of my own work if his

academic credentials are to be taken seriously.

Social ecology rests on the basic minimal claim that our entire endeavor

to dominate nature stems from the domination of human by human — not

from agriculture, from technology per se, from a vague thing called

industrialism, from religion, from anthropocentrism, from humanism, or

from whatever buzzword one chooses to pull out of the bumper-sticker

slogans of deep zoology. Which is not to say that agriculture,

technology, religion, and the rest are unimportant. But they should not

be used to distract us from the all — important fact that social

domination, particularly hierarchy as well as class exploitation, has

given rise to all the religious, moral, and philosophical justifications

for the domination of nature, the destruction of wildlife, and the

destruction of human life. Every ecological problem that we face today

apart from those caused by nature itself has its roots in social

problems. To bury this all-important fact under a razzledazzle of

secondary factors like religion and philosophy, to cite only a few that

pop up in deep zoology, is utterly obfuscatory. Only the complete

substitution of hierarchical society as it has developed over thousands

of years with all the moral, spiritual. religious, philosophical,

economic , and political paraphernalia that has accompanied that

development — by an ecological society can finally bring nature and a

fulfilled humanity into harmony with each other. Indeed, it is only in

an ecological society, free of all hierarchy and domination, that this

fulfilled humanity can find its ecological role in developing a free

nature — one in which nature is rendered fully self — conscious by a

species of its own creation and by rational faculties that have emerged

from its own evolution. This places such fulfilled humanity neither at

the apex of a hierarchy, as Professor Flowers would argue, nor at the

bottom, nor in the middle, any more than it places blue-green algae at

the bottom of an “evolution-as-ladder’ paradigm,” in Flowers’s bright

words. Almost unknown to himself, the professor is so deeply riddled by

a hierarchical mentality that any function — be it bluegreen algae’s

oxygen-producing capacity or human consciousness — is implicitly ranked

in his own mind as above or below, rather than for what it

self-evidently is in its own right

I will not enter into the implications of deep zoology and its use by

xenophobic elements in the Arizona Junta, notably Edward Abbey, who

fears, as expressed in The Bloomsbury Review (April — May 1986), that

the immigration of Mexicans into the United States threatens to

“Latinize” our “northern European” (Aryan?) culture and force us to

“accept a more rigid class system, a patron style of politics, less

democracy and more oligarchy, a fear and hatred of the natural world. a

densely populated land base, a less efficient and far more corrupt

economy, and a greater reliance on crime and violence as normal

instruments of social change.” I will leave it up to ecologically

concerned people to decide how much of this applies to the United

States; to Holland, with its intensely dense population; to England.

with its ossified class system; to Calvinist Scotland, which can hardly

be celebrated for its love of nature; and to a group of American cities

that are famous for settling social issues with “crime and violence,”

especially Dallas (Jack Kennedy), Memphis (Martin Luther King, Jr.), and

San Francisco (Bobby Kennedy). That Abbey’s piece opens with the

generous remark that “the immigration issue really is a matter of ‘we’

versus ‘they’ or ‘us’ versus ‘them’ is a problem that I do not have to

answer. but it requires an answer from Sessions, Naess, and Devall. Do

they agree? If not, let us hear the reason why. If they do, why do they

exclude Garrett Hardin, with his noxious “lifeboat ethic,” from their

pantheon of Malthusian heroes?

Racism today usually wears a cultural face rather than a genetic one.

Hardly any of our domestic fascists preach a gospel of racial fascism,

except so far a blacks are concerned. It is no longer fashionable to

speak of Jewish “racial inferiority”; rather, such cults as the Aryan

Nation speak of a “Zionist conspiracy” to control the United States.

Needless to say, since most Jews are viewed as Zionists by our homebred

fascists. what can the Aryan Nation do? Get ‘em out? Kill ‘em? — and

strike a blow for “Aryanism,” a blow that was actually undertaken by The

Order, whose pistol-toting thugs murdered a Jewish radio personality who

had spoken in favor of civil rights.

Mexicans — and Indians, I may add — do not need the evocative account of

their stolen lands and place names in the Southwest that Foreman penned

in the Nov. 1 issue of Earth First!, nor his rhetorical offer of a rifle

and a thousand rounds of ammunition. to recognize when they are being

asked to disappear in the name of “radical environmentalism.” Their

oppressors do not only live in Mexico; they occupy far too many boards

of directors in U.S. concerns. To hear the Arizona Junta bemoan their

plight at home and then try to ship them out of the country that their

ancestors once lived in is a hypocrisy that defies anything Chim Blea

could impute to me.

What ultimately counts in the whole mess created by the Arizona Junta,

its “warriors,” and the deep zoologists is whether an ecological

humanism will replace the ecobrutalisin that is slowly polluting the

ecology movement. If the movement reduces ecological issues to zoology

at one extreme or to new forms of religious Super-naturalism at the

other, if it cannot fight the wanton destruction of wildlife without

fighting at the same time the wanton destruction of human life; if it

cannot maintain a simple decency and ethics that renders discourse

possible and fruitful, I for one want no part of it.

Deep zoology has degraded its own spokespeople an surely as it threatens

to degrade the ecology movement itself. The clumsy lie, the character

assassination, the distortion, the lack of compassion for the suffering

of humans as well as animals, and the diluting of social issues in the

name of a “naturalism” structured around “dog-eat-dog” competition — all

are things I cannot abide. I’m much too close to seventy to be worried

about my ideological “turf,” my status, or my influence in a movement

that threatens to degenerate into an environmental version of the Wild

Bunch rather than welcome caring people. If we cannot “reenchant”

humanity, we win never “reenchant” nature. How the Arizona Junta, its

“warriors,” and its deep zoologists with bullwhips expect to save

wildlife and nature without showing any concern for people is utterly

beyond my comprehension.