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.