The Ecological Anarchism of Murray Bookchin
On a cool autumn Saturday in September 1992, I took the only bus heading for Burlington, Vermont from Montreal. The Green Mountain state deserves its moniker, its rolling hills pulling me away from my book, offering me a tempting visual spectacle.
As it was my first trip to the US, my anxiety rose to my throat as we approached the border crossing. Our line-up at US Customs was annoying, especially to the woman behind me. After I heard her mumbling in frustration, I chanced to say, "It's like a police-state isn't it?" She laughed and we began chatting about the cultural implications of being American and Canadian. She was a Boston native now living in Montreal and loving it.
I thought about these things with some purpose. I was going to meet Murray Bookchin in person and spend the weekend with him. Bookchin's theoretical works have profoundly shaped my political beliefs and the thought of meeting my intellectual mentor made me feel like a groupie in search of a guru.
Bookchin's influence has only recently made an impact within the North American Green movement although he's been active in ecology movements for over 40 years, publishing a book-length essay on the problems of chemicals in the food supply almost a decade before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
He has spent most of his life educating himself and others. His intellectual roots were in Marxism and Trotskyism but by the 1950s he had abandoned these positions in favour of an ecological formulation of his ideas. By the mid 1960s he realized an affinity of his ideas with those of the classical anarchists such as Kropotkin. His essays and books in the 1970s and 1980s acknowledge a debt to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the American democracy of the eighteenth-century, Hegel and Marx.
He is what you might call a social ecologist:
'Social ecology is a fairly integrated and coherent viewpoint that encompasses a philosophy of natural evolution and of humanity's place in that evolutionary process; a reformulation of dialectics along ecological lines, an account of the emergence of hierarchy; a historical examination of the dialectic between legacies and epistemologies of domination and freedom; an evaluation of technology from a historical, ethical and philosophical standpoint; a wide-ranging critique of Marxism, the Frankfurt School, justice, rationalism, scientism, and instrumentalism; and finally an eduction of a vision of a utopian, decentralized, confederal, and aesthetically grounded future society based on an objective ethics of complementarity.'
On my way home to Montreal, I began reading his book, The Spanish Anarchists. This book is now out of print but he gave me one of his copies. I realized that this was my connection to the nineteenth-century, and maybe, just maybe, I'll be somebody's link to the twentieth-century.
The Ecological Anarchism of Murray Bookchin
On a cool autumn Saturday in September 1992, I took the only bus heading for Burlington, Vermont from Montreal. The Green Mountain state deserves its moniker, its rolling hills pulling me away from my book, offering me a tempting visual spectacle.
As it was my first trip to the US, my anxiety rose to my throat as we approached the border crossing. Our line-up at US Customs was annoying, especially to the woman behind me. After I heard her mumbling in frustration, I chanced to say, "It's like a police-state isn't it?" She laughed and we began chatting about the cultural implications of being American and Canadian. She was a Boston native now living in Montreal and loving it.
I thought about these things with some purpose. I was going to meet Murray Bookchin in person and spend the weekend with him. Bookchin's theoretical works have profoundly shaped my political beliefs and the thought of meeting my intellectual mentor made me feel like a groupie in search of a guru.
Bookchin's influence has only recently made an impact within the North American Green movement although he's been active in ecology movements for over 40 years, publishing a book-length essay on the problems of chemicals in the food supply almost a decade before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.
He has spent most of his life educating himself and others. His intellectual roots were in Marxism and Trotskyism but by the 1950s he had abandoned these positions in favour of an ecological formulation of his ideas. By the mid 1960s he realized an affinity of his ideas with those of the classical anarchists such as Kropotkin. His essays and books in the 1970s and 1980s acknowledge a debt to the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the American democracy of the eighteenth-century, Hegel and Marx.
He is what you might call a social ecologist:
'Social ecology is a fairly integrated and coherent viewpoint that encompasses a philosophy of natural evolution and of humanity's place in that evolutionary process; a reformulation of dialectics along ecological lines, an account of the emergence of hierarchy; a historical examination of the dialectic between legacies and epistemologies of domination and freedom; an evaluation of technology from a historical, ethical and philosophical standpoint; a wide-ranging critique of Marxism, the Frankfurt School, justice, rationalism, scientism, and instrumentalism; and finally an eduction of a vision of a utopian, decentralized, confederal, and aesthetically grounded future society based on an objective ethics of complementarity.'
On my way home to Montreal, I began reading his book, The Spanish Anarchists. This book is now out of print but he gave me one of his copies. I realized that this was my connection to the nineteenth-century, and maybe, just maybe, I'll be somebody's link to the twentieth-century.