By David Vanek

Murray Bookchin, born in 1921, has been involved in leftist politics for seven decades and has written almost two dozen books on a great variety of subjects, encompassing ecology, nature philosophy, history, urban studies, and the Left, particularly Marxism and anarchism. In the 1950s, with his long 1952 essay “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” he warned against the chemicalization of agriculture and the environment, and with this and other writings, he helped lay foundations of the modern radical ecology movement. He is the cofounder of the Institute for Social Ecology, where he lectures each summer, and professor emeritus at Ramapo College of New Jersey. He is currently finishing the third volume of a trilogy, /The Third Revolution,/ which is a history of the great European and American revolutions.