Social Ecology

Historical development

Bookchin wrote one of the first books about the ecological crisis, Our Synthetic Environment (1962), under the name Lewis Herber. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971) he argued that technology could free people for an ecological, decentralised society. The Ecology of Freedom (1982) is his major statement. It traces the history of hierarchy from early organic societies through the state, and offers a vision of “free nature” in which humanity, as “nature rendered self-conscious”, completes natural evolution instead of fighting it.

In the late 1980s Bookchin attacked deep ecology as mystical and misanthropic, a quarrel that split the radical environmental movement. In his last years he developed communalism. After his death Abdullah Öcalan and the Kurdish movement in Rojava adopted his ideas, in modified form, as “democratic confederalism”.

Principal claims

• Humanity’s domination of nature comes from social domination. Human nature and technology as such are not the cause.
• “First nature”, the natural world, and “second nature”, human society, are continuous. Humanity is nature become self-conscious, and it can help nature flourish.
• Hierarchy is the problem, including the state and capitalism. The answer is direct democracy and confederation.
• The economy should belong to the municipality, the whole community, instead of to the state or to workers’ cooperatives alone.
• Suitable, “liberatory” technology and decentralised renewable energy can support an ecological society.
• Ethics rests on evolution’s tendency toward more complexity, more subjectivity and more freedom. Biocentric equality is the wrong foundation.

Policy implications

Social ecology calls for face-to-face democratic assemblies with real power, confederations to coordinate between them in place of the nation-state, and municipal ownership of the means of production. It favours decentralised farming and energy, ecological technology, and joining town and country together. It supports communities managing their own ecosystems actively and democratically, and it distrusts both wilderness that excludes people and central agencies.

Internal disagreements

Social ecologists disagree about whether social ecology is a form of anarchism. Bookchin eventually said it was not. They differ on whether to stand in municipal elections, on how confederations should handle disagreement, on social ecology’s relationship with Marxism, and on how its humanist ethics fits with the value of non-human nature.

Criticisms and controversies

Deep ecologists accused Bookchin of a human-centred faith in reason and of hostility to wilderness. Anarchists disliked his later turn to municipal elections. Marxists found his analysis of hierarchy idealist. Critics in general doubt that confederated municipalities could manage problems on the scale of the climate. Bookchin’s combative style drove away many allies.

Supporters point to Rojava and to the continuing municipalist movement as proof that the model can be put into practice.

Relationships to other traditions

Social ecology is the intellectual source of much green anarchism and municipalism. It is a relative of ecosocialism that rejects the state, a sharp critic of deep ecology, and an influence on community conservation and on thinking about appropriate technology. It shares an analysis of domination with ecofeminism.