Thinking Fondly of Murray Bookchin

I heard mention of the social ecologist Murray Bookchin today for the first time in a long time. Journalist George Monbiot mentioned him briefly in another of his doomsday articles in the Guardian, and journalist Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs (FYI, the Guardian fired Robinson, along with some other progressive journalists, but that’s another story) interviewed Janet Biehl, Bookchin’s former colleague and partner. She has a new book out called Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS about how the Kurds in Turkey and later Iraq and Syria tried to establish their autonomy based on some of Bookchin’s principles of decentralized control of a community. She also wrote Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin.

I haven’t thought about Bookchin in a while, but my politics were influenced by his thinking as a “post-Marxist leftist,” organized around issues of democracy and ecology. Back in the 1980s he said things like “capitalism is barbarism” and embraced technology only so far as it would eliminate toil. He’s particularly germane to how I’m dealing with politics today: focusing all my energy on what I can accomplish locally in projects where I have a voice while turning off the outside noise of chaotic late stage capitalism.

Back in the day, though, I read Bookchin as an antidote to the deep ecology warriors like Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First! who were anti-immigrant, misogynist, and saw humans as a scourge upon the earth. Bookchin’s movement, social ecology, recognized that destruction of the earth was the result of social inequality and hierarchy of man over woman, white over black, rich over poor. He wrote we must think and act "not simply in terms of economic questions but in terms of every aspect of life … not merely of class domination but hierarchical domination." He and Foreman eventually wrote a book together, Defending the Earth: A Dialog Between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, after the mud slinging from the warriors became intolerable.

The book didn’t do much to resolve the conflict between the two movements, however. This is what Mark and I wrote in an editorial in the September 1997 issue of La Jicarita News, about the escalating conflict between urban environmentalists and the land based communities of northern New Mexico: :

“The battle lines being drawn in northern New Mexico mirror the internecine struggle within the national environmental movement. Those activists who come to the environmental movement with a background in social justice—labor organizing, civil rights, the New Left—are often called social ecologists: They see human beings as an integral part of the natural world that is being manipulated and exploited by the industrial, capitalistic economic system. Other activists, often called deep ecologists, come to the movement to save our wildlands as a moral statement apart from any value these lands may have to human culture. In the introduction to a book entitled Defending the Earth, in which social ecologist Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, come together to try to find common ground between these two philosophies, editor Steve Chase says: "While social ecologists . . . trace the roots of the ecological crisis to the rise of hierarchial and exploitative human societies, many deep ecology activists talk of the human species itself as a blight upon the planet . . . . Indeed, the deep ecology movement as a whole lacks a consistent or clear social analysis of the ecology crisis or even a consistent commitment to humane social ethics."

I actually knew Dave Foreman back in the early 1970s in Albuquerque—that’s where he’s from—when we both worked at the environmental center there that Terry Lamm (brother of former governor of Colorado Dick Lamm) founded. I was going to UNM part time after dropping out of Antioch. Dave had just come back from D.C. working as a lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. He was a staunch Republican. He founded Earth First! in 1980 but quit in 1990 because he thought it had become too Marxist and anarchist (in the Dave Foreman Wikipedia post it says, “Many Earth First! members attribute Foreman's departure from the organization as having to do with his alleged sexism and racism.”) But don’t worry, Dave, wherever you are. I can attest that there are still plenty of deep ecology activists out there who are staunch misanthropes.

No Boletes for Me

I saw my first wild mushroom of the year the other day on my hike with the dogs on the Borrego/Bear Wallow loop. Until the rains came—in torrents—in mid June, two weeks early in our monsoon season, I figured there would be no mushrooms at all. At my house in El Valle, while the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fire roared on the other side of the mountains, the land was woefully barren except for where I’d irrigated: the orchard and hay field. I’d say it was the driest and brownest it’s ever been, even though we’ve lived through many previous drought years.

Now, after those first few drenching storms and a return to a somewhat normal monsoon—I know, I know, there is no normal anymore—everything is verdant green and growing way too fast for me to keep up with, considering that I’m living in Santa Fe. Yesterday, I went to El Valle from the dentist’s office in Taos hoping to mow the orchard. Five minutes after I got there the deluge arrived. At least I was in the hoop house, where I watered—it’s inside, remember—and pulled weeds until the rain stopped. No mowing the soggy orchard grass, of course.

But I digress. I expect there will be a bounty of mushrooms, just like last year, when the spring rains came in April and the monsoon season flourished. But I won’t be eating any. The only ones I feel confident to harvest are boletes (porcini), those round, fully capped little things that are easily identifiable. I remember eating them years ago when my friend David stopped by and fried some up on his way home from Las Trampas Canyon. I remember frying some up after a long trip up towards Chama with Peter.

Last year, everyone in El Valle was harvesting them all over the forest and sharing with those who weren’t harvesting. I cut them up and put them in the freezer. Then I went up the Santa Barbara Trail with Marty and we brought down a bagful. I froze them as well, waiting to cook them in a stew or in stirfry. One night, however, I decided to thaw and put them on a pizza, which I ate for dinner, around 6 or 7 in the evening. Around 10 that same evening, I became sick to my stomach, rushed down to the toilet, and threw everything up. Then I was fine and went back to bed.

I didn’t know whose mushrooms I’d eaten, Marty’s and my collection, or Alonso’s, or someone else’s. I figured I’d cooked a rotten one: bad enough to make me sick but not bad enough to kill me (you can’t really die from eating boletes). But on a cautionary note, I threw out the rest of the mushrooms in my freezer.

A little later that summer I went to a party in my neighbor Luke’s field (he lives in Albuquerque and intends to build a house in El Valle someday). They were cooking food outside and I decided to take just a little stew, because after Luke’s I was on my way to Taos to attend a memorial for my friend Bill Whaley, the one who died of a heart attack on the Taos Ski Valley slopes while skiing with his granddaughter (see April 25, 2021 blog post). As I dug in, Luke said, “Kay, you know there’s some boletes in there. I heard about what happened to you.” I thought about it for a minute, that everyone else had been eating this stew, and went ahead and finished my small bowl.

At Bill’s memorial, at a lovely restaurant in Taos, I sat with my friend John Nichols and ate some hors d’oeuvres and reminisced about Bill. But John, who is 80 years old, wasn’t feeling too well and asked me if I’d read what he’d written about Bill when it came time for our stories. He left and went home. John, by the way, is at his most brilliant when he’s eulogizing or remembering a friendship: full of sentiment mitigated by humor and lots of love. Once he’s read his piece there can be no follow up. So I’m sitting there, waiting for the remembrance to begin, when my stomach starts to rumble and I know exactly what’s happening: I’m going to throw up that bolete stew I ate. Which I did, in the restaurant bathroom, and then came out and stood up before all of Bill’s friends and read John’s remembrance, which was indeed brilliant.

So that’s it for me and boletes. I’ll be happy to go out with anyone who wants to look for them on a walk in the woods. I’ll harvest them and carry them and give them to anyone who wants them but I won’t eat them ever again. I have no idea why I suddenly developed some kind of allergy to this specific mushroom, but it doesn’t bother me too much. Now if it were potato chips or pickles, that would be a different story.