Foreword: Turning Debate Into Dialogue

by David Levine, Founder and Director, The Learning Alliance

This small but important book grows out of “The Great Debate.” That’s what — for months in advance — many environmental activists around the country called the first public meeting between social ecology theorist Murray Bookchin and deep ecology activist Dave Foreman. Most expected political fireworks at the joint talk organized in November 1989 by the Learning Alliance, New York City’s alternative education and action organization.

Given the confrontational rhetoric and the all-too-frequent name-calling that has characterized the volatile political debate between various advocates of “social ecology” and “deep ecology,” the expectation of sparks flying was quite understandable. Over the last few years, the radical ecology movement has been torn by bitter ideological divisions. One of the most serious divisions, and certainly the one which has received the most play in the media, has been between “deep” and “social” ecology — between a “biocentric” philosophy which makes protecting the welfare of the wilderness the most essential human project and a left-libertarian “ecological humanist” philosophy which sees radical social transformation as the main key to defending the Earth.

In recognition of the seriousness of this ongoing and often heated debate, the Learning Alliance set up a face-to-face meeting between Bookchin, a founder of the Institute of Social Ecology and an influential philosopher within the international green movement, and Foreman, a founder of, and, at the time, an important spokesperson for Earth First!. Both Bookchin and Foreman had been among the most vocal contenders in the debate between deep and social ecology philosophies over the last few years.

The Learning Alliance, however, never intended this event to be a “debate” in any conventional sense. It was meant, instead, to be a constructive dialogue between two articulate spokespeople from different wings of the relatively small, but potentially powerful, radical ecology movement. We sought a dialogue that identified common ground and complementary differences, as well as one that carefully probed areas of serious disagreement. We were looking for a renewed sense of unity-in-diversity and a higher level of political discussion within the movement.

At the Learning Alliance, we are convinced that the radical ecology movement cannot afford to expend its time and energy in unproductive and divisive infighting, particularly in light of the continuing harassment of the movement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. While we agree that important differences in philosophy, analysis, vision, and strategy should be vigorously addressed, we feel this is best done in respectful and cooperative situations whenever and wherever possible. While a few of our differences may actually be contradictory, many others are complementary and can actually strengthen our movement if recognized and appreciated. Furthermore, at least some of our differences can be resolved rather than endlessly argued. Our goal for this event was to create a cooperative forum for just such ground-breaking discussions.

Thanks to the generous spirit evidenced by both Bookchin and Foreman, the event was a success. Bookchin, who spoke first, set the tone of reconciliation and mutual respect by declaring that he stands “shoulder to shoulder with everyone in Earth First! who is trying to save the wilderness.” Foreman replied by acknowledging that the greed of multinational corporations and the power of competitive nation-states threatens human dignity and social justice as well as the evolutionary integrity of the natural world. Echoing Bookchin, he asserted that our various movements, whatever their primary emphases, need to address, or at least respect, both the struggle for the well-being of humanity and the struggle for the survival and well-being of all other species. “We face the same enemy no matter what we emphasize,” argued Foreman.

Indeed, both Bookchin and Foreman agreed that as long as hierarchical social relationships are the foundation for our societies, there is very little hope for creating an ecological society that will not seek to dominate or exploit the Earth. Similarly, both agreed that protecting wilderness areas and fostering a new ecological sensibility and a direct moral concern for other species was an urgent task that could no longer be ignored or postponed.

This fragile but real unity between Bookchin and Foreman and their clearly stated respect for diversity within the movement represent an important achievement. Such principled unity is important because thousands of people are now becoming active in seeking a sustainable and ecologically sound future — whether by organizing against toxic wastes, setting up recycling centers, purchasing “green products,” participating in Earth Day events, contributing to environmental organizations, or protesting corporate environmental degradation. While these initial efforts often fall short of the level of understanding and activism that is necessary, they do represent an important step forward. They are a foundation upon which a broad-based, radical ecology movement can ultimately be built.

To achieve this goal, however, today’s radical ecologists need to focus their strongest criticisms not against each other, but against those institutional forces which are the source of so much of today’s environmental degradation and which are now trying to co-opt and contain the growing grassroots reform movement that is emerging in this country and throughout the world. While there is certainly room for diverse philosophical and strategic approaches within an effective movement to defend the Earth, there is certainly no room within our movement for major timber companies who claim that “Every day is Earth Day” while they continue to clearcut major sections of the Northwest. There is no room for chemical companies who are producing hazardous materials and, at the same time, claim that they are producing environmentally safe products now that they are repackaging them in a green bottle. There is no room for the many other corporate and political interests who claim their exploitative policies are healthy for either the Earth or its people. The ecology movement needs to mean more than that.

The negative effects of these corporate and government “environmentalists” are already being felt. A number of big environmental organizations have corporate and politically conservative voices among their executive staff, their boards, and their hinders. The result, of course, is more and more compromised positions, more and more timid strategies, and, ultimately, a more and more ineffective ecology movement. The examples are, unfortunately, all too plentiful: from “mainstream” environmental organizations which allow destructive development projects to move forward at the request of business forces within their organization to groups which advocate “responsible” legislation to protect one or two endangered species while they allow the rain forests and lifeways of indigenous people to be economically plundered and drastically altered without protest.

Fortunately, as the discussion between Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman shows, a potential counterforce to this corporate “environmentalism” has been growing for some time. Indeed, there is a diverse proliferation of more radical ecological schools of thought and action including deep ecologists, social ecologists, eco-feminists, bioregionalists, Native American traditionalists, eco-socialists, and greens. These small groups have the potential to reach out to the general public and the growing grassroots environmental movement in educational and empowering ways that can transform today’s reformist environmental movement into a broad-based movement seeking fundamental change. I believe that the future of the planet may well depend on how effectively today’s radical ecologists can work together and build such a movement.

It would be a crime, I think, if today’s pioneering radical ecologists allowed principled political debate and dialogue among themselves to degenerate into sectarian squabbles and ego-bashing. Successful social movements are not built this way. If radical ecologists continue to approach their differences in such destructive, combative ways, they will likely only end up alienating rather than educating the expanding segment of the general public that is beginning to face up to the reality of the ecological crisis. Luckily, as the dialogue between Bookchin and Foreman recreated and expanded in this book so clearly attests, building a principled unity-in-diversity is possible.

In Chapter 1, as in the original dialogue, Bookchin and Foreman begin to cooperatively explore their differing, but often overlapping, perspectives on a wide range of issues: nature philosophy, environmental ethics, social theory, and social change strategy. In Chapter 2, prompted by comments and questions from Paul McIsaac, a longtime activist and a reporter for National Public Radio, both Foreman and Bookchin discuss their views on what the radical left tradition offers or doesn’t offer to the radical ecology movement. In Chapter 3, Linda Davidoff, executive director of New York City’s Park Council, challenges both Bookchin and Foreman on their negative views of reformist social change strategies and sparks each of them to spell out how they each think their more radical visions and strategies can be realistic and effective in the less-than-perfect political world here and now. In Chapter 4, Jim Haughton, a leader of the black community group Harlem Fight Back, sparks an important discussion between Foreman and Bookchin by raising the particularly thorny issue of racism in the ecology movement and how this affects the future of the planet.

The result of these discussions is a surprising amount of agreement even though some important differences still exist (some of which are taken up in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book which were written especially for this book by Foreman and Bookchin a year after the original dialogue took place). These differences, along with several others, need to be explored even further and, if possible, resolved. To its credit, this book points the way forward. Besides being packed with provocative ideas and insights, this book is a model of how best to raise difficult political differences within a movement. If Bookchin and Foreman can do it, then so can the rest of us.

This book proves that there are creative opportunities within the radical ecology movement for building alliances and connections across community, issue, race, gender, class, and political lines. If nature itself shows the need for diverse species to co-exist within any particular environment, then we humans should also understand the imperative of unity through diversity. The struggle across this country and the world for more meaningful communities, institutions, and ways of life is not an easy task. It will require the cooperation of those who choose to stop bulldozers in wilderness areas, who work to counter racism within the urban ecology of our cities, who develop alternative technologies, who directly challenge major environmental plunderers, who try to revive and strengthen the empowering institutions and processes of grassroots democracy, and who encourage a deeper spiritual understanding of the natural world and the human community.

Not surprisingly, this book itself represents the cooperative work of several people. My thanks, of course, go out especially to Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman. Thanks also go to Paul McIsaac, Linda Davidoff, and Jim Haughton who added so much to the discussion and to South End Press for making this important and historic dialogue available in book form. I particularly want to thank Greg Bates from South End, who came up with the orignal idea for publishing this dialogue as a book, and Steve Chase, the South End editor who was able to “translate” and expand a taped conversation into an accessible, readable book as well as write an insightful introduction to this dialogue. Several people read and commented on various parts of this manuscript. These people include Janet Biehl, John Davis, Bill Lynn, Patrick McNamara, Roxanne Pacheco, Kirkpatrick Sale, and Bill Wernburg. The Learning Alliance is proud to have been a partner in this important project.

Introduction: Whither the Radical Ecology Movement?

by Steve Chase

Since at least as far back as 1866, when the German biologist Ernest Haeckel coined the term “ecology,” scientific ecologists have repeatedly split into different camps in how they view the question of humanity’s proper place and role within nature. According to historian Donald Worster, “one might very well cast the history of ecology as a struggle between rival views of the relationship between humans and nature: one view devoted to the discovery of intrinsic value and its preservation, the other to the creation of an instrumentalized world and its exploitation.”

It should come as no surprise then that this same philosophical conflict splits the ranks of today’s political activists who seek to reshape our society’s relations with the rest of the natural world along more ecological lines. In his recent book, Green Political Thought, English author Andrew Dobson draws an important distinction between “light green” reform environmentalism and “dark green” radical ecologism. According to Dobson, conventional environmentalism represents an instrumental, imperial approach to nature that argues that our environmental problems, however serious, “can be solved without fundamental changes in present values or patterns of production and consumption.” Radical ecologism, in contrast, raises the ethical ideal of a beloved eco-community and “argues that care for the environment... presupposes radical changes in our relationship with it, and in our mode of social and political life.”

This difference in political orientation, while perhaps not yet obvious to the general public, is not news to most people who are actively concerned with ecological politics today. The distinction between reform environmentalism and radical political ecologism was first made over 25 years ago. This book’s co-author, Murray Bookchin, was among the first to draw attention to this distinction in several pioneering essays during the 1960s and 1970s. As Bookchin has noted, ecologism “refers to a broad, philosophical, almost spiritual, outlook toward humanity’s relationship to the natural world, not to environmentalism [which is] a form of natural engineering that seeks to manipulate nature as mere ‘natural resources’ with minimal pollution and public outcry.”

In strikingly similar terms, the renowned Norwegian eco-philosopher and activist Arne Naess made the same basic distinction in a 1973 essay contrasting the “shallow” reform environmental movement with the emerging “deep, long-range ecology movement.” While this essay did not receive significant attention in the U.S. until 1980, it is now quite common in both activist and academic circles to characterize the central political fault line within the ecology movement as the ideological division between “shallow” and “deep” ecologists. For many, “deep ecology” has become a generic rubric to describe all political ecologists who a) believe that the natural world has an intrinsic value of its own, b) seek to end industrial society’s attempted domination of the biosphere, and c) work to radically reconstruct human society along ecological lines. In this very broad sense, social ecologists, eco-feminists, bioregionalists, radical greens, Earth First!ers, Native American traditionalists, many academic eco-philosophers, and some animal liberationists can all fairly be called “deep ecologists.”

It thus came as a surprise to many ecology activists when Murray Bookchin strongly challenged the political perspective of deep ecology in the summer of 1987 at the second National Green Gathering at Amherst, Massachusetts. In his keynote address to the conference, Bookchin warned that the academic philosophers of deep ecology as well as several leading spokespeople for Earth First!, the self-proclaimed “action wing of deep ecology movement,” were guilty of propagating a deeply flawed and potentially dangerous ecological perspective. In that speech, and in several later articles, Bookchin declared that the growing popularity of deep ecology suggests that a “major crisis of purpose, conscience, and direction exists in the U.S. ecology movement.”

Was Bookchin rejecting his long standing commitment to radical ecologism? Accustomed to the generic usage of the term deep ecology to describe the whole radical wing of the ecology movement, many activists interpreted the ensuing social vs. deep ecology debate as the latest volley between shallow environmentalism (admittedly combined this time with a radical social politics) and a deeper, more radical ecological philosophy, analysis, vision, and strategy. This interpretation, however, ignores the important shift in the meaning of the term deep ecology that occurred between the time Naess first used the term in 1973 and when Bookchin finally challenged the deep ecology perspective.

By the mid-1980s, the term deep ecology had increasingly come to mean Deep Ecology — a very particular, though eclectic, body of ideas developed by academics such as Naess, Warwick Fox, George Sessions, and Bill Devall on the one hand and by militant wilderness activists in Earth First! such as Ed Abbey, Christopher Manes, and Dave Foreman on the other. As Warwick Fox notes, “The term deep ecology can therefore be seen as one that does double duty, referring on the one hand to a whole class of approaches (i.e., all nonanthropocentric approaches) and on the other hand to a particular kind of approach within this class... a distinctive kind of approach to nonanthropocentrism.” This distinctive approach is the deep ecology perspective criticized so strenuously by Bookchin.

The deep vs. social ecology debate is thus not a heated rehash of the old environmentalism/ecologism debate. It is best understood as an intense dialogue across a new philosophical and political fault fine that has emerged from within radical ecologism itself. At its heart, the debate between social and deep ecology suggests the existence of differing answers to the question, “Whither the radical ecology movement?”

Yet, even among those activists who recognize the novel nature of the debate, many were still surprised at the sharpness of Bookchin’s critique of deep ecology. Were social and deep ecology really so far apart? Bookchin himself had long advocated, indeed pioneered, several of the key insights championed by deep ecologists. According to

Roderick Nash, a historian of American environmental ethics, Bookchin’s theoretical work in social ecology, which began in the early 1950s, contributed greatly to the development of deep ecology in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, one of Bookchin’s essays on nature philosophy was included in the first anthology on deep ecology published in the United States, and he was prominently quoted as a deep ecology pioneer in the popular Deep Ecology manifesto written by George Sessions and Bill Devall a year later in 1985. As Christopher Manes has noted, “up until [the U.S. green gathering in] 1987, Bookchin’s works often received high praise in Deep Ecology literature.”

Few activists familiar with the literature on radical ecological philosophy would disagree that there are some significant differences in the philosophical origins, strategic focuses, and primary concerns of social and deep ecology. Yet most — at least up until the Green Gathering in Amherst — felt that these differences were not a significant problem. Unity-in-diversity is a basic attribute of healthy eco-communities. Why shouldn’t it be a healthy characteristic for the radical ecology movement?

In his Amherst speech, Bookchin posed the question of whether these differences were, or could become, complementary or whether the two schools of thought were fundamentally, and inevitably, antagonistic. After reflecting on the work of several academic deep ecologists and on the published statements of a few Earth First! activists, Bookchin decided that deep and social ecology were fundamentally antagonistic after all. His assessment, put in its simplest terms, was that deep ecology was not just a radical pro-nature philosophy, but that it was potentially — and, in some cases, explicitly — anti-social and anti-human.

Bookchin’s critique was soon answered by several people in the deep ecology movement and the resulting debate, as well as back and forth charges of “misanthropy” and “anthropocentrism,” quickly spilled over into the pages of Earth First!, The Nation, Utne Reader, Z Magazine, The Guardian, Socialist Review, Environmental Ethics, Mother Jones, Green Perspectives, Our Generation, Whole Earth Review, Green Letter, Omni, The New York Times and popular books like Christopher Manes’ Green Rage. Over the last few years, the debate has increasingly become a lively topic of discussion in movement circles. Perhaps never before has there been such a widespread political debate in the United States on the interrelationship between environmental ethics, nature philosophy, and radical social theory.

Unfortunately, until the face-to-face meeting between Dave Foreman and Murray Bookchin that provides the core of this book, the debate frequently tended to generate more heat than light. A number of grassroots ecology activists have been dismayed by the hostile, almost sectarian, nature of the debate. Some blame Bookchin and the social ecologists who have admittedly offered fierce and sweeping criticisms. Bookchin, for instance, characterized some of the leading lights of Earth First! as “barely disguised racists, survivalists, macho Daniel Boones, and outright social reactionaries.” Foreman was perhaps the most frequent target of Bookchin’s wrath. In his speech at Amherst, Bookchin called Foreman “a patently anti-humanist and macho mountain man” guilty of “a crude eco-brutalism.”

Others blame deep ecologists for the rancorous, all-or-nothing, tone of the debate. While Dave Foreman largely avoided critical outbursts and name-calling, naturalist writer Ed Abbey, the literary inspiration of Earth First!, publicly called Bookchin a “fat old lady” and declared that he didn’t care if that “sounded sexist.” In a somewhat more civil response, Bill Devall publicly reversed his earlier opinion of Bookchin’s work and started characterizing social ecology as just another “old paradigm” leftist ideology that falls far short of a genuinely ecological philosophy. Christopher Manes went so far as to charge Bookchin with a “Faustian ambition to seize control of evolution” and dominate nature.

Several rank and file activists responded to the intense and often angry tone of this debate with a “plague-on-both-your-houses” weariness and treated it as little more than an intellectual “cock-fight” without serious political substance. Yet most activists realize that, regardless of the relative merit of the rhetorical fireworks, some very real and important issues are at stake here, issues that need to be explored and resolved one way or another if the radical ecology movement is going to play a creative and influential role within our society in the years ahead.

Back in 1982, Roderick Nash observed that two different visions have emerged within the radical ecology movement over the last two or three decades. Nash calls these different radical ecological scenarios the “wilderness” vision and the “garden” vision. If he were to write about these differing visions today, he might well connect these different visionary alternatives to deep ecology and social ecology. While these different visions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they have, up to now, rarely been well integrated and they have frequently been formulated in extreme, near exclusive ways. This extremism may well be the primary source of conflict between proponents of deep and social ecology.

Nash, for example, believes that deep ecology wilderness lovers have much to fear from the advocates of the garden vision. As he puts it,

There are two ways of thinking about the end of wilderness on earth. One might be termed the wasteland scenario. It anticipates a ravaged planet; one which is paved and poisoned to the point that the world dies with T.S. Eliot’s celebrated whimper. This nightmare of creeping urbanization traditionally fired the protests of nature lovers, conservationists, and preservationists. It could still occur, especially given the increase of technological capability, but the greatest long-term threat to the interests of people who covet the wild may reside in the garden scenario. It too ends wilderness, but beneficently rather than destructively. René Dubos points the way with his vision of a bounteous, stable and, to many tastes, beautiful earth that is totally modified. In a garden-earth the fertility of the soil is not only maintained but enhanced. Fruit trees support songbirds. Carefully managed streams run clear and pure. The air is unpolluted. Forests provide an endless supply of wood. Large cities are rare as people decentralize into the hinterland. Many live on self-sufficient family farms. The animals permitted to exist are safe and useful. A softer variety of technology enables [people] to live gracefully and gratefully as part of the natural community. There is a minimum of pavement, cows dot the meadows, democracy thrives, and the kids have [healthy faces.] It is an appealing vision whose roots run back through Thomas Jefferson’s deification of the yeoman farmer to the Garden of Eden.

At first glance, at least, the garden scenario described by Nash bears more than a passing resemblance to the Utopian vision of social ecology. Murray Bookchin, after all, described microbiologist René Dubos in 1974 as an important early social ecology thinker. While Bookchin’s and Dubos’ views were far from identical even then, their visions for the humanly inhabited portions of the Earth did overlap significantly. Bookchin, however, expressed himself in much more radical terms. Following Peter Kropotkin, the visionary nineteenth-century anarchist geographer, Bookchin has argued that we need to transform our oppressive industrial capitalist society into “an ecological society based on non-hierarchical relationships, decentralized democratic communities, and eco-technologies like solar power, organic agriculture, and humanly scaled industries.”

According to Bookchin, decentralized forms of production and food cultivation tailored to the carrying capacities of particular bioregions are not only more efficient and ecologically sustainable, they also restore humanity’s intimate contact with soil, plant and animal life, sun, and wind. This, he believes, is the only way to fully anchor and sustain a widespread ecological sensibility within our culture. Furthermore, he maintains that only by challenging the profitseeking, “grow or die” dynamic of the corporate capitalist economy and creating an alternative economy oriented to ecologically sustainable production to meet vital human needs can we genuinely protect the planet from the ravages of acid rain, global warming, and ozone destruction.

Bookchin, of course, is not the only modern radical ecological thinker to draw on Kropotkin. Several writers, including some deep ecologists, have echoed Kropotkin’s eco-anarchist ideas of communitarian democracy, deurbanization, industrial decentralization, alternative technology, organic agriculture, limits to growth, and a renewed naturalist sensibility. Social ecology, however, is the body of ideas that has most self-consciously built on this eco-anarchist foundation and further developed and elaborated a workable vision of “an ecological society.” In doing so, social ecology makes an enormous contribution to the radical ecology movement, one which is neglected at our peril. Earth First! activist Judi Bari is sadly ill-informed when she maintains that the contours of an ecological society are “not spoken to in any leftist theory.”

Important questions remain, however: What do social ecologists have to say about the remaining wilderness areas of the planet that are increasingly encroached on and destroyed by our expansionary industrial society? Will wilderness be valued and allowed to flourish in the social ecology vision of the future? Are social ecologists fully sensitive to the call of environmental ethics beyond the moral imperative to provide a sustainable, healthy, beautiful, and productive natural environment for all members of the human community?

If we take Dubos as the definitive social ecologist, the answer is clearly no. Towards the end of his life, Dubos adopted a very exclusive and totalistic version of the garden vision and advocated “humanizing” and “managing” the entire surface of the planet. His vision, as Nash points out, was of a planet “totally modified,” albeit prudently and carefully, by human intervention. Dubos was, in fact, quite open about the consequences of his perspective. As he put it, “the humanization of Earth inevitably results in destruction of wilderness and of many living species that depend on it.” This is seen by Dubos as an acceptable price to pay as we move the planet toward a new stage of humanly-managed natural evolution. Deep ecologists are quite right to criticize this extremist version of the garden vision. It does represent a form of anthropocentric, albeit sustainable, hubris.

In sharp contrast, however, Murray Bookchin has never embraced such a one-sided garden vision. While some of Bookchin’s deep ecology critics have repeatedly tried to paint Bookchin’s views as if they were identical to those of Dubos, such charges are very wide of the mark. In his most important philosophical work, The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin adamantly rejects the vision of a completely “domesticated” and “pacified” planet, calling instead for an appreciation of “a high degree of natural spontaneity” and urging “caution in disturbing natural processes.” Furthermore, since as far back as the 1960s, Bookchin has repeatedly asserted that one of the essential goals of social ecology is to “guard and expand wilderness areas and domains for wildlife.”

Significantly, Bookchin bases his views on ethical as well as practical grounds. Unlike reform environmentalism, says Bookchin, social ecology “sees the balance and integrity of the biosphere as an end in itself.” “Natural diversity,” he says, “is to be cultivated not only because the more diversified the components that make up an ecosystem, the more stable the ecosystem; diversity is also desirable for its own sake, a value to be cherished as part of a spiritized notion of the living universe.” Other social ecologists, such as John Clark, have echoed Bookchin’s nonanthropocentric approach to environmental ethics and argued the need for “humanity to situate its good within the larger context of the planetary good.”

Bookchin’s and Clark’s views on wilderness and environmental ethics are very different from Dubos’. Philosopher Thomas Berry has argued that it is best to call Dubos’ approach “humanist ecology” and to clearly distinguish it from social ecology. Bookchin would no doubt agree. He has certainly never drawn another connection between Dubos and social ecology since his comment in 1974. Dubos, himself, likely distinguished his position from Bookchin’s. Significantly, he never identified himself as a social ecologist in any of his books.

It should come as no surprise then that very few social ecologists actively embrace Dubos’ extreme anti-wilderness garden vision. Yet, at the same time, it is also true that many social ecologists do not fully appreciate or share Bookchin’s long-standing commitment to a nonanthropocentric ethic and nature philosophy. Bookchin’s position on these questions is very influential in social ecology circles, but it is far from a movement-wide norm. In theory and practice, many social ecology activists fall somewhere between Bookchin’s more radical philosophical perspective and the more conventional and anthropocentric approach of the later Dubos.

Like Bookchin and the early Dubos, nearly all social ecologists believe that “both the humanized landscape and the wilderness have a place” in any desired ecological future. However, like the later Dubos, many social ecologists often experience “ambivalent attitudes regarding the comparative merits and rights of the wilderness and humanized environments.” Not surprisingly, given the strong anthropocentric bias of the dominant culture as well as of conventional Marxist and anarchist theory, many social ecology activists unconsciously resolve this ambivalence by excessively privileging the needs and desires of human societies over the interests of other life-forms in “mixed” and wilderness communities. While perhaps not as extreme as Dubos, there is an identifiable extremist garden tendency within social ecology circles. This tendency has inhibited the social ecology movement as a whole from developing a normative perspective that holistically integrates radical garden and wilderness visions.

This situation calls into question John Clark’s claim that social ecology represents a highly “developed approach to all the central issues of theory and practice” in ecological philosophy and politics. For all of his commitment at the philosophical level to integrating a wilderness vision with his highly developed social vision of a humane and ecological society, even Bookchin has never provided a sustained and searching exploration of how and why to practically restore the balance between town, country, and wilderness. His primary intellectual focus, like that of other socially-oriented ecological thinkers of his generation such as Lewis Mumford, E.F. Schumacher, E.A. Gutkind, and Wendell Berry, has always been on restoring the social and ecological balance between town and country — the humanly-inhabited portions of the planet.

Bookchin is not alone in leaving this element of social ecology theory relatively undeveloped. Elaborating a detailed and radical vision and strategy for wilderness preservation has, to date, never taken center stage in any work in the literature of social ecology. In John Clark’s recent anthology of social ecology writings, for example, there is not a single article on wilderness preservation. Nor has conservation biology and the preservation and restoration of wilderness ever been a part of the curriculum at the Institute for Social Ecology. It would appear then, that for all of social ecology’s wisdom about creating a humane and ecological society, and for all of Bookchin’s commitment to a nonanthropocentric nature philosophy, social ecology’s practical day to day commitment to wilderness preservation has never been fully developed and it’s vision has only rarely exceeded the limited wilderness vision of the mainstream conservation movement.

Whatever else can be said about him, Dave Foreman, the other co-author of this book, has clearly thought long and hard about wilderness. In this respect, he represents a radical alternative to the relatively undeveloped wilderness vision of social ecology. Indeed, since the founding of Earth First! by Foreman and four other disgruntled wilderness activists in 1980, Foreman and the others have launched a powerful philosophical attack on the impoverished wilderness vision of the mainstream conservation movement. In terms as sharp and stinging as Bookchin’s critique of deep ecology, Earth First! co-founder Howie Wolke publicly charged that the reformist conservation movement was guilty of “raging moderation, irresponsible compromise, knee-jerk Sierra Club dogma, and unknowing (ok, sometimes knowing) duplicity in the systematic destruction” of wilderness. Foreman went so far as to argue that the “worldview of the [then] executive director of the Sierra Club is closer to that of James Watt or Ronald Reagan than to Earth First!’s.”

To these deep ecologists, the tepid wilderness vision projected by the mainstream conservation movement (as well as by several social ecologists) amounts to little more than preserving a few minor ecological museums in hard to develop places, maintaining numerous small wildlife sanctuaries, and protecting some rugged outdoor recreational resorts. In sharp contrast, the deep ecology movement embraces the more radical wilderness commitments of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Bob Marshall.

In June 1983, Dave Foreman and two other Earth First! founders unveiled the visionary centerpiece of their environmental defense program, a proposal called the Wilderness Preserve System which seeks to declare over fifty large wilderness areas in North America “off-limits to industrial human civilization as preserves for the freeflow of natural processes.” This detailed plan, covering over 716 million acres, was conceived as one component of a larger vision to restore an ecological balance between town, country, and wilderness by protecting all remaining roadless public lands over a few thousand acres. As Christopher Manes reports, these large preserves would allow:

no human habitation (except, in some cases, indigenous peoples with traditional life-styles); no use of mechanized equipment or vehicles; no roads; no logging, mining, water diversion, industrial activity, agriculture, or grazing; no use of artificial chemical substances; no suppression of wildfires; no overflights by aircraft; and no priority given to the safety and convenience of human visitors over the functioning of the eco-system.

This stringent plan, already a reform conservationist’s nightmare, does not limit itself to protecting ecological communities within existing national parks and forests, however. The plan boldly goes on to call for the inclusion of large areas of privately owned and even already “developed” land which could be carefully restored by conservation biologists into a more wild state suitable for inclusion under the Preserve System.

While never believing that their proposal was an acceptable legislative initiative within the current political context, Earth First! pushed the Preserve plan to clearly distinguish itself from reformist environmentalists and to force people to come to terms with its radical ecological vision. Indeed, no group in history, with the exception of the Native Americans who resisted the European invasion of this continent, has ever projected such a sweeping vision for preserving wilderness and, as a direct result, containing and rolling back an environmentally destructive industrial civilization.

Philosophically, Foreman’s vision of “Big Wilderness” grows directly out of one of the most basic principles of deep ecology, which, as articulated by Naess and Sessions, affirms that “the well-being and flourishing” of non-human life and its habitat has “intrinsic value” and should be respected by human beings “independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.” Indeed, most deep ecologists see a commitment to Big Wilderness as a litmus test of whether someone has firmly adopted a nonanthropocentric ecological ethic that transcends mere environmental pragmatism and enlightened human self-interest.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that most deep ecologists are not also mindful of the ecological, scientific, aesthetic, and spiritual benefits of wilderness to human beings and to human civilization. A consistent theme throughout much of the literature, for example, is the cultural value of intimate and respectful human interaction and identification with the wild and its creatures. Following the lead of respected human ecologist Paul Shepard, many deep ecologists point to the growing evidence that psychological and cultural maturity is enhanced and deepened, given our own evolutionary history, by rich wilderness experiences. As deep ecology poet and essayist Gary Snyder warns, “a culture that alienates itself from the... wilderness outside... and from that other wilderness, the wilderness within, is doomed to a very destructive behavior, ultimately perhaps self-destructive behavior.”

While deep ecology philosophy does tend to focus primarily on wilderness, it is not necessarily unaware or unconcerned with the ecological and social concerns of human civilization, a fact that has sometimes been lost in Bookchin’s critique. Some deep ecologists, in fact, are as concerned as social ecologists with radical social transformation and creating decentralized, non-hierarchical, and democratic bioregional human communities with a dynamic steady-state economy based on eco-technologies and ecologically sound production and consumption practices. As Gary Snyder puts it, “if [humanity] is to remain on earth [it] must transform the five-millennia long urbanizing civilization tradition into a new ecologically-sensitive harmony-oriented wild-minded scientific/spiritual culture... nothing short of total transformation will do much good.”

However, this integration of wilderness and garden visions is not necessarily the norm. Just like their nemesis René Dubos, deep ecologists often experience very “ambivalent attitudes regarding the comparative merits and rights of the wilderness and of humanized environments.” It is telling that some deep ecologists have chanted “Down With Human Beings!” around campfires at Earth First! gatherings. This is, as Dave Foreman has put it, “an honest expression” of some deep ecologists’ perspective.

The wilderness vision can clearly be stretched to exclusive, anti-human, anti-social extremes. Indeed, what first sparked Bookchin’s alarm about deep ecology was the publication of remarks by a handful of influential deep ecology wilderness activists which showed a callous disregard for human life and a serious ignorance of the underlying social roots of the global ecological crisis. As Bookchin has noted, the wilderness vision, taken to extremes, “has a less innocent side.”

It can lead to a rejection of human nature, an introverted denial of social intercourse, a needless opposition between wilderness and civilization...[and] a revolt against one’s own kind; indeed, a disclaiming of natural evolution as it is embodied in human beings. This pitting of a seemingly wild “first nature” against social “second nature” reflects a blind and tortured inability to distinguish what is irrational and anti-ecological in capitalist society from what could be rational and ecological in a free society.

In contrast to social ecologists, who trace the roots of the ecological crisis to the rise of hierarchical and exploitative human societies, many deep ecology activists talk of the human species itself as a blight on the planet. As Dave Foreman has put it, “It is time for a warrior society to rise up out of the Earth and throw itself in front of the juggernaut of destruction, to be antibodies against the human pox that’s ravaging this precious beautiful planet.” Given this analysis, the primary long-term goal of many deep ecologists is not transforming society but rather drastically depopulating the Earth as if human numbers were all that mattered and the various kinds of societies that people can create are of little or no relevance to the ecological question.

While never advocating active genocide, more than a few deep ecology activists have seriously talked of “letting nature take its course” in depopulating the Earth and have openly counseled people to do nothing to avert such “natural” disasters as famine or epidemic disease. More than one prominent deep ecologist has even advocated active measures such as militarily closing the U.S.-Mexican border to stem the tide of immigrants from Latin America, whom Ed Abbey once described as “morally-culturally-generically” inferior people. All of this has led to a number of feminist and anti-racist critiques of such positions within the ecology movement by such ecological writers as Marti Kheel, Ynestra King, Janet Biehl, Carl Anthony, and the many authors of We Speak For Ourselves: Social Justice, Race, and Environment

While not necessarily the norm, there is clearly a misanthropic strain within the more extreme wilderness visions articulated by some deep ecologists. This blunts the social perspective and ethic of the entire movement and its members. Indeed, the deep ecology movement as a whole lacks a consistent or clear social analysis of the ecology crisis or even a consistent commitment to humane social ethics. Anarchistic ecotopian visions coexist with potentially chilling and authoritarian perspectives as well as calls to completely “unmake civilization” and return to hunter and gatherer societies everywhere on the planet.

Dave Foreman is perhaps one of the best individual examples of this wide range of deep ecology social thought. Contrary to countless criticisms of him, however, Foreman has most often embraced a radical bioregional social vision as his chosen goal for the humanly inhabited portions of the Earth. At other times, however, his social thinking has been much more accommodating to the status quo, as if he actually believed that the Earth’s remaining wilderness areas could be successfully protected long-term without replacing the industrial capitalist social system. In his book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, for example, Foreman emphatically asserts that direct-action efforts such as Earth First!’s “do not aim to overthrow any social, political or economic system.” Even more troubling are a few of Foreman’s past comments, particularly those on immigration and famine, which suggest an icy indifference to human suffering similar to the oppressive sensibilities of the very power elites that Foreman has, at other times, called “the thugs who run modern civilization.” Foreman’s occasional calls for a “return to the Pleistocene” also suggest a wholesale and uncritical rejection of agriculture, technology, natural science, and humanist social philosophy.

Foreman’s personal confusion over these social questions and his occasional flirtation with a reactionary and extremist wilderness vision in the name of deep ecology could perhaps be dismissed as an aberration but such positions have been repeated or allowed to go unchallenged by many other deep ecology activists and thinkers. Given this situation, it is little wonder that some deep ecologists adopt an even more profoundly anti-human, exclusive version of the wilderness vision and routinely sacrifice fragile social ethics in the name of enhancing our environmental ethics.

Social ecologists offer an important and needed alternative to these anti-human extremes within deep ecology philosophy and social thought. For one thing, all social ecologists believe that human aspirations for creating healthy and democratic human communities are legitimate moral concerns in and of themselves, and a vital interest of our species. In contrast, deep ecologists have very mixed views on the moral legitimacy of these human-centered concerns. While key philosophers in both radical tendencies agree on the limits of an exclusive, anthropocentric concern for human beings, social ecologists take the humanistic aspect of their politics very seriously. Most believe that the radical ecology movement ought to articulate and resolutely support a nonanthropocentric, ecological humanism as one essential aspect of its larger moral vision.

The other key insight that social ecology offers to the radical ecology movement is its emphasis on the historic and organic connection between social hierarchy and the ecological crisis. Perhaps the most basic principle of social ecology today is that the social factor most underlying the destructive relationship between human societies and the rest of the natural world is the historic breakdown of community solidarity within early human societies and the resulting expansion of hierarchy, domination, and exploitation within the global human community. This social history, argues Bookchin, has profoundly conditioned “the way we experience reality as a whole, including nature and nonhuman life-forms.” Historically, this conditioning fosters anthropocentrism and encourages the very idea of dominating nature.

Given this analysis, it is inconceivable to social ecologists that ecology activists can effectively defend the Earth, in any long-term fashion, if they leave the tapeworm of human oppression firmly embedded within the very guts of our society. For Bookchin and other social ecologists, wilderness preservation, even on the scale proposed by Earth First!, is not nearly radical enough. They argue instead that the essential task, if we are to defend the Earth successfully, is not simply to try to contain ecologically destructive societies but to ultimately and fundamentally transform them.

Can common ground be found between these two wings of the radical ecology movement? When the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Dave Foreman on trumped-up charges of “terrorism” in 1989, it became clear that the radical ecology movement is now under heavy official attack. The need for a principled unity among all the wings of the movement, regardless of their continuing differences, became increasingly obvious. In order to counter the traditional divide-and-conquer tactics of the FBI, Bookchin and Foreman accepted the Learning Alliance’s long-standing invitation for a joint public meeting in order to show their solidarity, acknowledge the common ground that could be found between them, and explore their philosophical and political differences in a way that showed that deep ecologists and social ecologists can listen to and learn from each other.

The result, as revealed in this book, is a remarkable and thought-provoking rejection of the extremes of both the wilderness and garden visions and a move toward a genuinely integrated radical vision. Not all their differences were resolved, of course. Bookchin and Foreman had to agree to disagree on a number of important topics raised. Yet, the shared contours of an exciting radical ecological politics that integrates the best of the garden and wilderness visions was clear for all to see.

This is a important victory for the radical ecology movement. It reflects the significant movement away from one-sided programs and strategies on the part of many deep and social ecologists. It is heartening, for example, to hear a prominent deep ecologist like Bill Devall finally acknowledge that “Marxist, socialist, and anarchist perspectives can help deep ecologists explore and understand the political and social factors — including the role of capitalism and multinational corporations — involved in the degradation of our planet.” It is also encouraging to see new, more socially-oriented, leaders emerge in Earth First! and to see their efforts to build an environmental alliance with timber workers to save old-growth forests and replace the corporate timber companies with environmentally responsible worker-owned cooperatives.

It is equally heartening to see social ecology groups such as the Left Green Network asserting more forcefully than ever that they “stand with every struggle for the protection of nonhuman life...the conservation of species diversity, habitats, and ecosystems, and the expansion of wilderness areas.” The long standing social ecology commitment to wilderness is now clearly more than rhetorical. Social ecology groups such as the Earth Action Network not only called for “vastly expanding public parks, wilderness areas and wildlife habitat,” they actively helped organize Redwood Summer and are now organizing other “sustained environmental actions involving civil disobedience, direct action, and creative resistance.” In Vermont, the Burlington Greens have actively pushed a voter initiative drive for a moratorium on economic development, including development of lucrative lakefront property and ski resorts. They also recently launched a major direct-action campaign against a large biotechnology research firm operating within their city.

A more unified, more holistic, more integrated radical ecology movement may well be emerging. If so, this movement will be neither anthropocentric nor misanthropic. It will seek both to expand wilderness and create a humane and ecological society. Its vision will balance creative human intervention in nature with bumble and caring restraint. Furthermore, this movement will understand and accept ecological and ethical limits to global economic and population growth while seeking sustainable and just development of all societies. It will also seek to break up the modern imperialist system that ravages one human community to advance the interests of another and, on a more personal level, it will foster the (re)emergence of an ecological sensibility that can ground our lives in a heartfelt sense of connection and communion with the entire world of life.

This book points the way towards such an inspiring movement. Happily, it does so in a way that both deep and social ecologists can clearly understand. The integrative perspective evidenced here builds on the strengths of both schools of thought. This book, of course, represents only a beginning, not an ending. It is just one needed step by two influential activists and thinkers. Other voices need to be seriously considered as well. The larger movement, for example, needs to listen well to eco-feminists, black environmentalists, Native Americans, sympathetic union organizers, and Third World activists.

It would be hard to overestimate the value of this dialogue, however. Together, in this book, Bookchin and Foreman offer provocative and insightful answers to that increasingly important question, “Whither the radical ecology movement?”

Part I: The Dialogue — Winter 1989

Chapter 1: Looking for Common Ground

Murray Bookchin:

I have been a social activist for over 55 years. I was a radical labor union organizer in the 1930s and 1940s, and I was deeply involved in the civil rights movement, the New Left, and the countercultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I have also been a longtime activist in the ecology movement. I am pleased, for example, that Roderick Nash set the record straight in his book The Rights of Nature by pointing out that I was on the ecological battlefront a long time ago, well before the word “ecology” was even widely used.

Most people do not know that I was on the ecological frontlines as far back as 1952. At that time, I opposed the use of pesticides and additives in food. In 1954, I campaigned against nuclear testing and fallout. I protested the radioactive pollution problems of the “peaceful atom” that became public with the Windscale nuclear reactor incident in Great Britain in 1956 and then later when Con Edison attempted to construct the world’s largest nuclear reactor in the very heart of New York City in 1963. Since then, I have been active in anti-nuke alliances such as Clamshell and Shad and their predecessors such as Ecology Action East. More recently, I’ve done what I can as a member of the Burlington Greens in Vermont and I have helped start a continental Left Green Network that works within the Green Committees of Correspondence. My goal has long been to help build a genuinely radical North American green movement that will harmonize the relationships among human beings and between society and the biosphere.

However, I have never limited my efforts to activism and organizing. I have had a long and vital concern with ecological philosophy and social theory. I do not think it is possible to overestimate the value of thinking insightfully and creatively about defending the Earth. We need ideas, good ideas, to guide our activist work. That is what we have always emphasized at the Institute for Social Ecology which I co-founded in 1974 with Dan Chodorkoff, and which is still going strong today.

In the book by Roderick Nash I just mentioned, Nash maintains that I have “few equals” when it comes to “time spent laboring in the trenches of radical environmental theory.” I like to think that this is true. Without sounding too immodest, I have been on the “frontline” of green political thought. Since 1952, I have written over thirteen books on social/ecological theory, including Our Synthetic Environment, which came out six months before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Toward An Ecological Society, The Ecology of Freedom, The Modern Crisis, and, most recently, Remaking Society: Pathways to a Green Future. I have also taught over 2,000 students at the Institute and have traveled and lectured widely.

So I urge people: when you feel that you want to be critical of my ideas, and I think that you should, please be good enough to read my writings and listen to what I have to say. I’m getting a lot of critical stuff right now from the academic professorial crowd in which people are criticizing me on the basis of only one or two articles and sometimes even hearsay. I am not asking ask you to read all of my stuff, just enough to make a responsible assessment and criticism.

If people do read my work, they will discover that besides having been a labor organizer in foundries and auto plants in a number of big industrial cities, besides having been a revolutionary leftist for over 55 years, I share a good deal of the ecological state of mind of my conservation friends in Earth First!. Does that surprise people? Frankly, I see eye to eye with the activists of Earth First! on a large number of things. In many ways, I think they and Dave Foreman are doing a wonderful job. I feel a very keen sympathy for their many direct-action campaigns to protect wilderness. They are not terrorists as the FBI would have you believe. They are doing important work, work I strongly support.

While support for wilderness preservation is peppered throughout my writings, people may not realize that I am a “wilderness freak.” I have not spent all my time on picket lines, in meetings, in my office, or in libraries. My passion for wilderness areas, for wildlife, is a lifelong passion. From my childhood onward, when the Bronx still had some stands of original forest, I loved exploring the wild world. I’ve been to almost every national forest and every national park in the United States and many in Europe, from the Olympics and the Smokeys to the Black Forest in Germany. I’ve picked up the Appalachian Trail as far north as Vermont, and as far south as Tennessee. I’ve hiked it everywhere in between. I couldn’t stop heading for the Ramapo Mountains every single weekend for the greater part of two years when I taught in New Jersey. I love those mountains dearly.

Some of the greatest moments in my life have been hiking deep into forest areas in winter alone, where if I so much as sprained my ankle I would freeze to death. My greatest regret now that I am 70 and suffer from a severe case of osteoarthritis is that I can no longer hike in the wilderness. Today, I have to be a more distant admirer. I would physically stand shoulder to shoulder with everyone in Earth First! to defend wild areas if I could. On this score, there is no opposition between Dave Foreman and myself, none whatsoever!

Our society has got to learn to live in peace with the planet, with the rest of the biosphere. We are in complete agreement on this fundamental point. We now live under the constant threat that the world of life will be irrevocably undermined by a society gone mad in its need to grow — replacing the organic by the inorganic, soil by concrete, forest by barren earth, and the diversity of life-forms by simplified ecosystems; in short, by turning back the evolutionary clock to an earlier, more inorganic, mineralized world that is incapable of supporting complex life-forms of any kind, including the human species. The entire world of life, including those few but wonderful wild places that remain, must be protected. Indeed, wild areas must be expanded. Dave and I have no disagreement on this.

I also agree that we need to promote a rational solution to the human population problem. The world’s human population needs to be brought into a workable equilibrium with the “carrying capacity” of the planet. Sooner or later, the mindless proliferation of human beings will have to be dealt with. It is absolutely essential, however, that we first clearly identify what we mean by terms like “overpopulation” and “carrying capacity.”

This is where the thinking of some deep ecologists frightens me. We need an understanding of the problem that has nothing to do with gas chambers and racism. I know what it means to face the brunt of a “population control” program. All my relatives in Europe are dead. They were murdered in the Nazi Holocaust. They were slaughtered in the name of a “population problem.” For Hitler, the world would be overpopulated if just one Jew was left alive.

I’ve never believed that people in Earth First! are fascists. I am afraid, however, of certain positions and statements, the tendency of which remind me of things I heard fifty years ago when there was a world-wide fascist movement that used “naturalistic” Malthusian arguments to justify racist population control policies. This abuse of the “overpopulation” issue is not just a distant historical issue, either. The abuse of the population issue is ongoing. Just look at what the Rockefeller crowd is trying to do in the Third World. It is a remarkably dangerous question which has to be carefully and rationally discussed if we are to resist racism, sexism, and genocide. Even deep ecologists like Warwick Fox agree that it is “monstrous” to talk of AIDS as a population control measure or, in the name of “letting nature seek its balance,” refusing to aid starving children in Ethiopia.

So I ask all of you, everyone in the ecology movement, to please be careful about the population problem. This is a hot issue; a very hot issue. Don’t kid yourselves about the objectives of many of those who talk of population control. I went through the 1930s. We paid the price of sixty million lives back then as the result of a racist, imperialist war and mass extermination policy. This sort of thing is not radical ecology. We have to explore this matter carefully and respect the very reasonable fears of women and people of color who have been victimized by population control programs in the past. We have to explore what a humane and ecologically sound solution is. It is important that we unscramble what constitutes the social aspects of the problem from the purely biological ones and to understand how these two aspects of the problem interact with each other. Please, let us be careful. Can we agree on this?

Let me move on to another concern. The ultimate moral appeal of Earth First! is that it urges us to safeguard the natural world from our ecologically destructive societies, that is, in some sense, from ourselves. But, I have to ask, who is this “us” from which the living world has to be protected? This, too, is an important question. Is it “humanity?” Is it the human “species” per se? Is it people, as such? Or is it our particular society, our particular civilization, with its hierarchical social relations which pit men against women, privileged whites against people of color, elites against masses, employers against workers, the First World against the Third World, and, ultimately, a cancerlike, “grow or die” industrial capitalist economic system against the natural world and other life-forms? Is this not the social root of the popular belief that nature is a mere object of social domination, valuable only as a “resource?”

All too often we are told by liberal environmentalists, and not a few deep ecologists, that it is “we” as a species or, at least, “we” as an amalgam of “anthropocentric” individuals that are responsible for the breakdown of the web of life. I remember an “environmental” presentation staged by the Museum of Natural History in New York during the 1970s in which the public was exposed to a long series of exhibits, each depicting examples of pollution and ecological disruption. The exhibit which closed the presentation carried a startling sign, “The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth.” It consisted simply of a huge mirror which reflected back the person who stood in front of it. I remember a black child standing in front of that mirror while a white school teacher tried to explain the message which this arrogant exhibit tried to convey. Mind you, there was no exhibit of corporate boards of directors planning to deforest a mountainside or of government officials acting in collusion with them.

One of the problems with this asocial, “species-centered” way of thinking, of course, is that it blames the victim. Let’s face it, when you say a black kid in Harlem is as much to blame for the ecological crisis as the President of Exxon, you are letting one off the hook and slandering the other. Such talk by environmentalists makes grassroots coalition-building next to impossible. Oppressed people know that humanity is hierarchically organized around complicated divisions that are ignored only at their peril. Black people know this well when they confront whites. The poor know this well when they confront the wealthy. The Third World knows it well when it confronts the First World. Women know it well when they confront patriarchal males. The radical ecology movement needs to know it too.

All this loose talk of “we” masks the reality of social power and social institutions. It masks the fact that the social forces that are tearing down the planet are the same social forces which threaten to degrade women, people of color, workers, and ordinary citizens. It masks the fact that there is a historical connection between the way people deal with each other as social beings and the way they treat the rest of nature. It masks the fact that our ecological problems are fundamentally social problems requiring fundamental social change. That is what I mean by social ecology. It makes a big difference in how societies relate to the natural world whether people live in cooperative, non-hierarchical, and decentralized communities or in hierarchical, class-ridden, and authoritarian mass societies. Similarly, the ecological impact of human reason, science, and technology depends enormously on the type of society in which these forces are shaped and employed.

Perhaps the biggest question that all wings of the radical ecology movement must satisfactorily answer is just what do we mean by “nature.” If we are committed to defending nature, it is important to clearly understand what we mean by this. Is nature, the real world, essentially the remnants of the Earth’s prehuman and pristine biosphere that has now been vastly reduced and poisoned by the “alien” presence of the human species? Is nature what we see when we look out on an unpeopled vista from a mountain? Is it a cosmic arrangement of beings frozen in a moment of eternity to be abjectly revered, adored, and untouched by human intervention? Or is nature much broader in meaning? Is nature an evolutionary process which is cumulative and which includes human beings?

The ecology movement will get nowhere unless it understands that the human species is no less a product of natural evolution than blue-green algae, whales, and bears. To conceptually separate human beings and society from nature by viewing humanity as an inherently unnatural force in the world leads, philosophically, either to an anti-nature “anthropocentrism” or a misanthropic aversion to the human species. Let’s face it, such misanthropy does surface within certain ecological circles. Even Arne Naess admits that many deep ecologists “talk as if they look upon humans as intruders in wonderful nature.”

We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. To a very large degree we go through a kind of biological evolution as fetuses. It is not alien to natural evolution that a species called human beings has emerged over billions of years which is capable of thinking in sophisticated ways. Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity — our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels — can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.

We need to understand that the human species has evolved as a remarkably creative and social life-form that is organized to create a place for itself in the natural world, not only to adapt to the rest of nature. The human species, its different societies, and its enormous powers to alter the environment were not invented by a group of ideologues called “humanists” who decided that nature was “made” to serve humanity and its needs. Humanity’s distinct powers have emerged out of eons of evolutionary development and out of centuries of cultural development. These remarkable powers present us, however, with an enormous moral responsibility. We can contribute to the diversity, fecundity, and richness of the natural world — what I call “first nature” — more consciously, perhaps, than any other animal. Or, our societies — “second nature” — can exploit the whole web of life and tear down the planet in a rapacious, cancerous manner.

The future that awaits the world of life ultimately depends upon what kind of society or “second nature” we create. This probably affects, more than any other single factor, how we interact with and intervene in biological or “first nature.” And make no mistake about it, the future of “first nature,” the primary concern of conservationists, is dependent on the results of this interaction. The central problem we face today is that the social evolution of “second nature” has taken a wrong turn. Society is poisoned. It has been poisoned for thousands of years, from before the Bronze Age. It has been warped by rule by elders, by patriarchy, by warriors, by hierarchies of all sorts which have led now to the current situation of a world threatened by competitive, nuclear-armed, nation-states and a phenomenally destructive corporate capitalist system in the West and an equally ecologically destructive, though now crumbling, bureaucratic state capitalist system in the East.

We need to create an ecologically oriented society out of the present anti-ecological one. If we can change the direction of our civilization’s social evolution, human beings can assist in the creation of a truly “free nature,” where all of our human traits — intellectual, communicative, and social — are placed at the service of natural evolution to consciously increase biotic diversity, diminish suffering, foster the further evolution of new and ecologically valuable life-forms, and reduce the impact of disastrous accidents or the harsh effects of harmful change. Our species, gifted by the creativity of natural evolution itself, could play the role of nature rendered self-conscious.

Audience Member:

Excuse me, I want to know what you have to say about the technological fix called genetic engineering? I’m hearing other species, other animals, being spoken about by you as subordinate moments in the evolution of human consciousness, the self-consciousness which you call “second nature.” It seems to me that if we choose to believe this about other organisms then there is no reason to resist genetically engineering other organisms to suit our wishes. What kind of spiritual perspective does this represent?

Murray Bookchin:

I have some surprising news for you. I don’t believe that human beings are lords over nature and that animals and other forms of life are subordinates. I beg you again, please, read what I have written and listen with care to what I have to say. For years, I have advocated an ethics of complementarity. Complementarity, as distinguished from domination, presupposes anew sensibility that respects other forms of life for their own sake and that responds actively in the form of a creative, loving, and supportive symbiosis.

Let me make it very plain. I don’t trust the current scientific establishment to invent a toothpick, let alone tinker with bio-engineering. I believe that we have to bring all of this garbage to an end right now. The current social setup means that the scientific establishment is not morally capable of dealing with bio-technology. The truth is, given the current structure of technological innovation, it will put almost anything it creates to some kind of malicious and vicious purpose.

I am not advancing a view that approves of “natural engineering.” The natural world, as I have stressed repeatedly in my writings, is much too complex to be “controlled” by human ingenuity, science, and technology. My own anarchist proclivities have fostered in my thinking a love of spontaneity, be it in human behavior or in natural development. Natural evolution cannot be denied its own spontaneity and fecundity. That is why one part of our struggle should always be to protect and expand wilderness areas.

Furthermore, let’s completely put an end to the claims that I approve of cruelty to animals. Admittedly, I’d like to see a cure, if possible, to cancer, to diseases that cause pain and so on, but believe me, torturing animals in the name of research is monstrous. It has to be stopped. I just saw a documentary about what they do to research animals. It is unspeakable what a man preparing an MA thesis will do to an animal in order to merely prove that the animal feels pain. Do they have to “discover” that? These are great minds at work indeed! The power to torment living beings has to be taken away from researchers. The current state of affairs is horrible.

So understand that at this moment, where things stand right now, I am practically a Luddite. I should make that plain. Our society is so immoral that it can’t be entrusted to invent anything until we are able to sit down and decide, as a socially responsible, ecologically sensitive community, how we’re going to design and use our technology. This is not to say that I oppose research or technology, but this society is not morally fit to decide what is necessary or not.

Another way is possible, of course. Eco-technologies can and should be developed. There has been some interesting work in this area during the last twenty-five years. I have personally experimented with various eco-technologies since 1974 at the Institute for Social Ecology. There we put up solar collectors, windmills, ecologically designed buildings; we worked with aquaculture and organic agriculture assisted by a variety of tools and techniques. Other groups such as the New Alchemy Institute have been working on these things even more intensely than we have. I am convinced a liberatory eco-technology is possible. Hopefully, we can all agree on that.

If people do read my work, we can also put to rest the supposition that my outlook is anti-spiritual. This claim is utter nonsense. Anyone who reads The Ecology of Freedom will find that it repeatedly calls for a new ecological sensibility, for a new spirituality. There is full agreement on the need for a spiritual connection to the natural world.

The only possible disagreement is whether or not this ecological spiritual sensibility will be naturalist or supernaturalist in orientation.

Since spirituality can mean a decent, indeed, a wholesome sensitivity to nature and its subtle interconnections, it is very important that we keep the ecology movement from degrading this concept into a required or expected belief in an atavistic, simple-minded form of nature worship peopled by gods, goddesses, and eventually by a new hierarchy of priests and priestesses. People who believe that the solution to the ecological crisis is to create a new “green religion” or to revive beliefs in ancient gods, goddesses, or wood-sprites are mystically obscuring the need for social change. The tendency to do just this among many deep ecologists, eco-feminists, and “New Age” greens concerns me. The distinction I make between a needed naturalistic spirituality and an unnecessary, and potentially harmful, supernaturalistic “green religion” is a valuable contribution, I think.

Let me close by saying I believe that there is much common ground between Dave Foreman and myself. As I said before, we should give our support to Earth First! and their direct-action campaigns to preserve what is left of wild nature. Dave is on the frontline on this question and deserves, together with the rest of Earth First!, our full support, especially now when Earth First! is under attack by the FBI.

We cannot let the FBI get away with painting the radical ecology movement as “terrorist.” I’ve been involved in radical direct-action politics all my life. I know what it is like to be attacked by the FBI. I know what a bunch of lunatics they are. People seriously working to defend the Earth will soon find themselves going up against powerful utilities, large corporations, private detective agencies, local police departments, and the FBI. I only wish I still had the physical ability to directly take part in daring nonviolent direct-action campaigns such as Redwood Summer.

I also want to say that I think that many of the political differences between Dave and myself are complementary. Dave and Earth First! work on preserving the wilderness; I and others are trying to create a new grassroots municipal politics, anew cooperative economics, anew pattern of science and technology to go along with their direct action, demonstrations, rallies, and protests to protect wilderness. We need to learn that we are different aspects of a single movement. We also need to try to amicably deal with those principled political differences that do exist between us. There are probably still some major problems between us that have to be explored. Yet, even if we can’t straighten them all out, we must at least learn how to better work together on what we can agree on. Our future depends on it.

Dave Foreman:

I agree with everything Murray just said, and I feel like I should just sit down. I’m not sure I have a whole lot more to add. Agreeing with Murray might seem a little strange for someone who started his political career as a college freshman campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964. Yet, I really do.

Let me begin my remarks by giving you a little background on my own work and perspective within the ecology movement. I’ll leave out, for now, the story of my getting over my brief infatuation with Goldwaterism. All I can say in my defense is that I didn’t know at the time that Goldwater stood for paranoid anti-communism and subservience to big business. I thought he was talking about a return to libertarian, Jeffersonian democracy.

Anyway, by the early 1970s I was working as a mule-packer and horse-shoer up in northern New Mexico and getting more and more concerned about what was happening to the national forests up there. Finally, I decided to go back to Albuquerque and try to get a graduate degree in biology and get involved in the conservation movement. I immediately got involved in the U.S. Forest Services’s first Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE) program, which turned out to be a horrible farce. I was also studying herpetology at the time and we were supposed to go out and pickle 50 snakes and lizards before the end of the semester. Well, I was studying herpetology because I liked snakes and lizards, so I ended up dropping out of grad school by the middle of the first semester and I have been a professional rabble-rousing conservationist ever since.

I first went to work for The Wilderness Society early in 1973 for $250 a month as their New Mexico representative and I slowly worked my way up until I went to Washington, D.C. in the late 1970s as their chief lobbyist. After going through the Carter administration process, where we got lobbied more than we lobbied them, and where it seemed like the more influence and access we had, the more we compromised, a number of us began to ask what had happened to the environmental movement. At that time, newspapers and TV news were reassigning all their environmental reporters, because the environmental movement was dull. We were also concerned that environmental groups were becoming indistinguishable from the corporations they were supposedly fighting. I guess if you organize yourself like a corporation, you begin to think like a corporation. People who had once gotten a job in the movement by being active volunteers now were more concerned with improving their individual careers. They did not want to rock the boat because they didn’t want to spoil their chances of being administrative aide to a senator, or an assistant secretary of the interior at some point in the future.

Given our frustration with the conventional conservation movement, several of us who worked for The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth began talking about sparking a fundamentalist revival within the environmental movement. We wanted to get back to the basics of John Muir and Aldo Leopold. So on a camping trip in the desert in Mexico, we decided it was time to quit talking about how bad things had gotten and actually do something about it.

We started Earth First!. Maybe we were all just going through an early mid-life crisis. I don’t know. We sure had fun lowering banners down the front of the Glen Canyon Dam, making it look like it had cracked. That was one of our first actions. We were kicking up our heels a bit and playing the Coyote of the environmental movement. We tried to do things with a sense of humor. Lord knows most of the social change movement in this country lacks a sense of humor. This was one of the things we very much wanted to bring to our work. Perhaps because of it, Earth First! caught on a lot better than we ever dreamed it would.

As we developed Earth First!, we began to explore some techniques of radical organizing. Earth First! originally came out of the mainstream conservation movement, and that is still where my roots are, and that is still the audience that I feel most comfortable speaking to and trying to influence. I think the greatest strength and accomplishment of Earth First! has been our ability to redefine the parameters of the national environmental debate. Back at the beginning of the Reagan administration, the Sierra Club was being called a bunch of environmental extremists. Well, we in Earth First! put an end to all that.

Back in those days, there was a spectrum of debate with the rape-the-land artists over at one end and the “Big Ten” environmental organizations over at the other. Yet, in an attempt to be credible, proper, and respectable, the conservationists kept moving over towards the rape-the-land-artists before we ever even opened our mouths. The eventual result, of course, was a narrowing of the spectrum of debate, a narrowing that favored the big industry developers. So, we in Earth First! tried to create some space on the far end of the spectrum for a radical environmentalist perspective. And, as a result of our staking out the position of unapologetic, uncompromising wilderness lovers with a bent for monkeywrenching and direct action, I think we have allowed the Sierra Club and other groups to actually take stronger positions than they would have before and yet appear to be more moderate than ever. What’s different now is that they are compared to us.

I think that the role of an avant garde group is to throw out ideas that are objected to as absurd or ridiculous at first, but which end up trickling into the mainstream and becoming more accepted over time. We were the first people to talk about the preservation of all old-growth forests. Before us, no mainstream conservation groups were even talking about old growth. Now we’ve got the Audubon Society and The Wildlife Federation coming in on this issue. We were the first people to really bring direct action to rainforest campaigns. And now that’s become very much a mainstream activity.

We were pretty clear from the beginning, however, that we were not the radical environmental movement. We only saw ourselves as one slice of the radical environmental movement. I know I have no absolute, total, and complete answer to the worldwide ecological crisis we are in. My path is not the right path; it’s the path that works for me. I think there are dozens and dozens of other approaches and ideas that we will need in order to solve the crisis we’re in right now. We need that kind of diversity within our movement. In Earth First!, we have tended to specialize in what we’re good at: wilderness preservation and endangered species. That doesn’t mean the other issues aren’t important; it just means that we mostly talk about what we know most about. We work on what moves us most particularly. It doesn’t mean that we’re the whole operation, or that we’re covering all the bases. We need all the approaches and angles.

I need to emphasize, too, that while I work on those things I know best, on those issues which touch me the most deeply, it doesn’t mean that the social problems that Murray mentioned are irrelevant, or that I’m not sympathetic to them. Hell, I’ve been arrested six times standing in front of bulldozers, or logging trucks, or otherwise fighting giant corporations that are trying to destroy our national parks and our national forests. I think my book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching is probably one of the most effective little anti-capitalist tracts ever written. I know we are talking radical, anti-capitalist social change here.

One problem I’ve had in getting the fullness of my message out comes from my impatience at seeing eco-catastrophe going on all around me while so many of those on the left who are always talking about social justice don’t seem to even see the problem or care about other species. Let’s face it: right now we’re in the greatest extinction crisis in the entire three and one half billion year history of life on this planet. Raymond Dasmann has said that World War III has already begun and that it is being waged by the multinational corporations against the Earth. We may lose one-third of all species in the next 20 years because of multinational greed.

I am deeply concerned about what is happening to people all over the world. Yet, unlike much of the left, I’m also very concerned with what’s happening to a million other species on the planet who haven’t asked for this eco-catastrophe to happen to them. And I have a connection that is very fundamental and very passionate with those other species. I feel a real kinship with them, as well as with members of my own species. And I think, as Murray pointed out, it’s very difficult to separate the two concerns. Or, at least, it should be. Regardless of what our emphasis is, regardless of whether it’s goose music that plays a symphony to us, or the diversity of people in a vibrant place like New York City that plays a symphony to us, I think we have to recognize that we are on the same side.

Unfortunately for me, when you see this kind of eco-crisis all around you and you react to it, and you begin to suggest some of the things that may happen if we don’t wise up and change our way of living on this planet, your ideas may come out as though you’re welcoming some of those things. It may come out as though you’re saying “ought” instead of “is.” I think the problem of the Cassandra is to try to make it very clear that you’re predicting certain things because you don’t want them to happen, because you want people to wake up. It’s not that you’re chortling over any suffering. You are compassionate. You are concerned. You’re on the side of all the people who are the victims of multinational imperialism around the world. That probably hasn’t come out as clearly as it should have in my discussions to date of ecological problems. But it is very real to me, and I’m very concerned about it.

Audience Member:

Mr. Foreman, if you have the slightest commitment to linking issues of social justice with questions of ecological degradation and to trying to find common ground here, how do you reconcile this new tone with your repeated statements in the Earth First! journal that in order to save the ecology of the United States we need to militarily close the U.S.-Mexican border and keep what you call the Latin American hordes from overwhelming us?

Dave Foreman:

I don’t think you’ve ever read anything I’ve written! I’ve seen comments circulating like you’ve described. Ed Abbey has said things somewhat like that, but I’ve never written anything about militarily sealing the border. Listen, I live in the Southwest. All my relatives on my sister’s side are Hispanic. I spend a lot of time in Mexico and have a lot of concern for Central America’s problems. I support bilingual education and legislation. I have also actively supported the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua and opposed U.S. foreign policy in the region.

I think, however, that there comes a time when we have to ask some tough questions about whether standard political solutions are going to work. I’ve looked at what happens to people from south of the border and Arizona, how they’re exploited by large corporations. I look at how an open border serves as an overflow safety valve to get rid of dissidents in Latin America and to provide a source of cheap, nonunion labor for corporations here at home. And I ask myself, what is being solved by that? I think we delude ourselves when we pretend that somehow by having an open border we’re solving any problems in Latin America.

I’m not saying seal the border. I don’t think that works. Hell, I’m in complete sympathy with the Central American sanctuary movement. I see the repression and the police state that the border patrol is creating in California. But I think that we delude ourselves when we come up with simple solutions to complex problems. It’s not sealing the border and its not opening the border. I think that we will have to solve the deeper problem on a much more multi-pronged basis.

For one thing, it is probably going to require changing U.S. foreign policy. I think if we’re going to help solve the social and ecological problems of Latin America we’ve got to get the CIA out of there; we’ve got to get United Fruit Company out of there; we’ve got to get the United States government backed into the position where it can’t go in and prop up dictators when their own people throw them out. Our government has done that in Guatemala, in Chile, and it keeps trying in Nicaragua. That is at the heart of most of the problems. As I said before, I’d be happy to join all of you sitting in front of military disembarkation points when they start to invade Nicaragua, which is certainly the most progressive and the most ecological country in Latin America right now, despite the concessions that the U.S. government keeps forcing the Sandinistas to make.

We are all engaged in a battle for life against profit. We are engaged in a struggle for a life of egalitarianism instead of a life of greed and imperialism. We have the same enemies. We are fighting the same battle, regardless of what we emphasize. Gifford Pinchot, the first Director of the United States Forest Service, said there are only two things on Earth, people and natural resources. I think Donald Trump and George Bush would amend that by saying there’s only one thing on Earth, natural resources. Ordinary people become just another “natural resource” to the big imperial man. Murray is right. It’s one fight.

I must say, however, that for all my intellectual understanding of imperialism, it was directly encountering the repressive power of the FBI and doing a little time in federal custody that really brought home to me the reality of peoples’ suffering throughout the world. Personally experiencing a little of the repressive power of the state has a tendency, I think, to create a lot more sympathy for oppressed groups around the world. I certainly have a more visceral appreciation for peoples’ suffering these days since the FBI visited me.

From my viewpoint, the FBI effort against me began at about five in the morning on May 30, 1989. A Doberman down the street started barking, so I put my ear plugs in. About two hours later, my wife went to answer the door as it was about to be broken down and opened it up to six men standing there with drawn .357 Magnums and wearing bulletproof vests. They flashed badges at her and pushed her out of the way. They then started running down the hall to our bedroom — they somehow already knew right where it was.

At this point, I vaguely began to come awake as I heard an unfamiliar but authoritative voice yelling my name. I opened up my eyes, still with my ear plugs in, disoriented. May in Tucson is very hot, and I didn’t have anything on. And I woke up and there were three guys with bulletproof vests and drawn .357 Magnums standing around the bed. That kind of alarm clock doesn’t have a snooze button; you can’t go back to sleep for another five minutes. At first I thought, am I on Candid Camera? But I realized very quickly that these guys were serious.

I then started thinking about some of the FBI attacks on the Black Panthers, like the FBI/Chicago Police murder of Fred Hampton, who was shot in his apartment while he lay asleep in bed. I fully expected bullets to start coming my way. But being a nice, middle-class honky male, they can’t get away with that stuff quite as easily as they could with Fred, or with all the native people on the Pine Ridge Reservation back in the early 70s. So they just dragged me out of bed. They let me put on a pair of shorts, and they hauled me outside.

I did not know what I was being arrested for until six hours later, when I saw a magistrate. Essentially what had happened, we found out, was that the FBI had spent three years and two million dollars trying to frame a bunch of people in Earth First! for trying to create a conspiracy to damage government property. We now know for a fact that the FBI infiltrated Earth First! groups across the country with informers and agent-provocateurs seeking to entrap people into illegal activities. They have amassed 500 hours of tape recordings of our meetings, our personal conversations, and our phone calls. They have also broken into our houses and offices and tried to intimidate numerous ecology activists in several states by agent interrogations and grand jury investigations.

My supposed co-conspirators, three unarmed activists who were arrested by some 50 armed FBI agents on foot, on horseback, and in two helicopters while standing at the base of a power line tower in the desert, were arrested the day before me. Mind you, these three environmentalists were driven to the site by an undercover FBI agent who had infiltrated Earth First!. The whole escapade was largely his idea. He was the only one talking about explosives. I, of course, was nowhere near the “scene” but I was still described by the FBI as “the financier, the leader, the guru to get all this going.” I was likened to a “mafia boss” and the other three defendants were described as my “munchkins.”

I had only met the FBI infiltrator a couple of times before and very briefly. I couldn’t even remember his last name. We had never planned to do anything together. But that doesn’t matter to the FBI. Back in the 1970s, the FBI issued a memo to all their field offices telling them that when you are trying to break up a dissident group, don’t worry if you have any evidence or facts. Just go in, make a big arrest, make wild charges, have a press conference, and that’s what the media’s going to pick up. That’s the news story. The damage to the group is done. You can always drop the charges against them later. That’s no problem. It almost invariably gets less attention in the press. The big lie that the FBI pushed at their press conference the day after the arrests was that we were a bunch of terrorists conspiring to cut the power lines into the Palo Verde and Diablo Canyon nuclear facilities in order to cause a nuclear meltdown and threaten public health and safety.

Essentially what we need to understand is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was formed just after the Palmer raids in 1921, was set up from the very beginning to inhibit internal political dissent. They rarely go after criminals. They’re a thought police. And let’s face it, that’s what the whole government is. Foreman’s first law of government reads that the purpose of the state, and all its constituent elements, is the defense of an entrenched economic elite and philosophic orthodoxy. Thankfully, there’s a corollary to that law — they aren’t always very smart and competent in carrying out their plans.

In this case, I think the U.S. government has made a major tactical mistake, because even the usually compliant mass media are not buying its story. We have gotten some remarkably even-handed press coverage. I also recently spoke to the Sierra Club international assembly and had a terrific response. People just aren’t buying it. So I’m very hopeful we’re going to overcome this, though we will undoubtedly be hearing more from the FBI in the future.

Before I close, let me just say that I agree with Murray that the warped social evolution of our civilization has left us with a very weird way of looking at reality. I agree a lot with Dave Ehrenfeld, who characterizes the dominant philosophy of the modern world as being one where human beings are the measure of all value; where we think that we can solve all problems, either through technological means or through sociological means; where we believe that all resources are either infinite or have infinite substitutes; and where we believe that human civilization will continue to progress and will exist forever. And to me, that is stark, raving insanity.

I think there is no reason, divine or otherwise, why human beings, unless they wake up, will not make themselves extinct. There is a great deal of madness around us. Julian Simon, for example, is a Republican economist who said recently that there really are no limits to economic growth because, after all, we’ll soon be able to change any element into any other element. Therefore, the supply of copper is restrained only by the entire weight of the universe. I can’t even begin to talk to somebody like that. I mean, we aren’t only speaking a different language, we’re living on different planets in different dimensions.

And it’s that kind of common madness that I think is profoundly irrational. I talk a lot about being non-rational, about using all sides of my brain, including the good old reptilian cortex back here. But I think there is nothing more rational, nothing more sensible than trying to keep in mind what Aldo Leopold called the first rule of intelligent tinkering: save all the pieces. We aren’t saving all the pieces. Species and whole habitats are being destroyed at a rate unparalleled in the Earth’s history. It is as if we are going through a complicated Swiss watch with a bulldozer right now.

My own response to this situation 