Green Anarchism

Historical development

Anarchism’s ecological strand goes back to two geographers. Élisée Reclus described humanity in L’Homme et la Terre (1905–08) as “nature becoming self-conscious”. Peter Kropotkin argued in Mutual Aid (1902) that cooperation, as well as competition, drives evolution, and proposed decentralised farming and industry working together in Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899).

Murray Bookchin made the link explicit from the 1960s, and his social ecology became the most fully worked-out form. In the 1980s and 1990s, Earth First! and the wider radical environmental movement drew on anarchist ways of organising, and anarcho-primitivism arose as a rejection of civilisation itself. Colin Ward’s Anarchy in Action (1973) offered a gentler, practical anarchism of allotments, squats and self-build housing.

Principal claims

• The state and capitalism are the organised forms of domination that produce ecological destruction. Reforming them cannot be enough.
• Free communities that govern themselves and join together by choice can manage their environments better than any central authority.
• Land and resources should be owned in common.
• Mutual aid and cooperation come naturally to people, and they are the basis of a sustainable society.
• Change comes through direct action. Petitioning those in authority does not bring it.

Policy implications

Green anarchism has no policies in the governmental sense. Its programme is to build the new society now: communes, cooperatives, community gardens, land occupations, mutual aid networks, direct action against extractive projects, and institutions that can take over from the state. It favours commons, local food, decentralised energy and, in most forms, small-scale technology.

Internal disagreements

The great divide is over technology and civilisation. Social ecologists see liberating technology as part of a free society. Anarcho-primitivists see agriculture, industry and perhaps even symbolic culture as the fall. Related arguments concern population, the value of wilderness, the place of violence in direct action, and whether standing in local elections betrays anarchist principle.

Criticisms and controversies

Critics of every kind argue that stateless federations could not deal with planetary problems, enforce ecological limits or defend themselves. Marxists see anarchism as ineffective politics. Liberals see direct action as undemocratic. The primitivist wing has been accused of misanthropy and of romanticising the past.

Anarchists answer that states have had a century to deal with the ecological crisis and have overseen its deepening.

Relationships to other traditions

Green anarchism contains social ecology and anarcho-primitivism. It overlaps with degrowth and ecosocialism in criticising growth and capital. Some of its currents share deep ecology’s ethics and others reject them. It is the opposite of eco-authoritarianism and of centralised planetary stewardship.