ECOLOGY OR CATASTROPHE: The Life of Murray Bookchin

By Janet Biehl

Oxford

Last year, global average temperatures were the hottest ever, and by the widest margin on record. Except for a dwindling minority of those who “can’t handle the truth,” most people finally understand that global warming is the greatest threat now facing humanity.

In contrast, the late American political philosopher and ecologist Murray Bookchin was far ahead of his time. More than 50 years ago, he wrote that a, “growing blanket of carbon dioxide ... will lead to more destructive storm patterns and eventually to melting the polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas.”

In addition to the environment, Bookchin — who died in 2006 — wrote and lectured on an impressively wide range of issues, including the nature of cities, anthropology, the Spanish Civil War, technology, social movements, and political philosophy. He coined the phrase, social ecology to denote the central element in his world view: that the ultimate source of humanity’s domination and exploitation of nature is based on the continuing domination and exploitation of human beings by those in positions of power in society.

In other words, ecological problems are rooted in political problems, especially the lack of authentic democracy.

Janet Biehl has written an insightful and compelling biography of Bookchin, which not only illuminates the details of his fascinating life, but which also captures a vivid sense of his times: the Depression-haunted 1930s in New York where he grew up, the civil rights struggle, the counterculture of the late 1960s, the peace movements in the ’70s and ’80s, as well as the gradual emergence of a global ecological consciousness of the past few decades.

She notes, however, that this is not a “full flesh-and-bones biography; it is rather a political biography” of Bookchin’s ideas, the groups to which he belonged, the people who influenced him, and so on.

Bookchin’s first major work, a collection of essays titled, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, was published in 1971 in the U.S. (and in Canada by Black Rose Books). One of its central points was that, due to the unprecedented productive power of modern technology, all scarcities in the world — food, medical care, education, even free time — were all artificial and unnecessary.

It also argued that even those of us living in the richer countries are oppressed, not just by the need to sell our time and creativity to survive, but that we have lost sight of our true humanity and have been conditioned to give up our dreams.

The ultimate source of these problems is, in Bookchin’s view, the result of the global capitalist economy, which prioritizes corporate greed over both people and the natural world.

As Biehl observes, this book, “hit the New Left and the counterculture like a thunderclap” and Bookchin was in demand everywhere. “In the early 1970s, he spoke at colleges and universities all over the United States and Canada,” including UBC, SFU, and Langara College during his first visit to Vancouver in 1973. (He also met with local organizers here, including Bob Hunter, who wrote for The Sun and was a key founder of Greenpeace).