Eco Anarchism

10 Key excerpts on "Eco Anarchism"

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  Global Green Politics

  • Peter Newell(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Bookchin, for example, argues that an anarchist society is a ‘ precondition for the practice of ecological principles ’ ( 1971 : 71), while Wood-cock ( 1983 ) suggests that anarchism depends on an acceptance of ‘ natural laws ’ such that anarchists see themselves as representatives of the ‘ true ’ evolution of human society. They oppose all forms of domination of the human and non-human world. For eco-anarchists, society is best transformed from below through popular struggles: direct action and direct democracy and local self-help and mutual aid initiatives aimed at building the political and economic autonomy of local commu-nities (Carter 1999 ). In a more dystopian vein, echoes of this strand of thinking about the return to (local) community and rejection of all forms of conventional politics may be found in the work of writers from the Dark Mountain project whose devastating critique of the failings of modernity leads to preparations for ecological collapse and sowing the seeds of a new world in the damaged soil of a world in decline (Kingsnorth 2017 ). Many eco-anarchist strategies imply the abolition of the state since it usurps the decision-making autonomy of local communities. As Bookchin suggests, ‘ we are committed to dissolving state power, authority and sovereignty into an inviolate form of personal empowerment ’ ( 1982 : 340). This view explains their opposition to pursuing change through parliamentary means, grounded in a refusal to distin-guish between ends and means. If the goal is the creation of an ecological society of inter-dependent but autonomous bioregions and communities, the means cannot involve further strengthening the state but rather the building of communes and alternative intentional communities.

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  Rethinking Green Politics

  Nature, Virtue and Progress

  • John Barry(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Conclusion What this chapter has argued is that eco-anarchism is not an essential component of green politics, in that the values greens espouse may be institutionalized in non-anarchistic ways. For example, the eco-anarchist concern with autonomy and self-determination is something which as a green value can be realized in non-anarchist ways. Autonomy is dis-cussed in Chapter 6 where an ecological virtue perspective on human flourishing is argued to hinge on the relationship between human autonomy and welfare. Nor is it desirable that, as it stands, the eco-anarchist utopia acts as a fetter on the future development of green theory, unnecessarily precluding its positive engagement with the state. It is perhaps not completely contingent that a reassessment of eco-anarchism within green theory is occurring at a time when the minds of greens are turning from ideals to principles, and from principles to practice. This is not to say that eco-anarchism is to be ejected from the green political canon: the integration of its insights within the context of green theory moving from negative criticism to positive proposals calls for it to become a regulative rather than a constitutive ideal for green politics -that is, informing and guiding, but not determining its goals. Thus while eco-anarchism may not have all that much to offer by way of green thinking about possible institutional structures for a sustainable society, it does have much to offer by way of what one can call a 'cultural ' (including inspirational) contribution to green political theory, particularly, as Eckersley (1992a: 1 86 ) points out, when eco-anarchism shifts from a utopianism of form to a utopianism of process. Institutional arrangements are thus to be judged instrumentally in terms of whether they hinder or promote green practices and values, the 98 RETHINKING GREEN POLITICS sum of which I term 'collective ecological management' .

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  Ideology in a Global Age

  Continuity and Change

  • R. Soborski(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  While ecologism and anarchism share a number of features, including their localist inclination, their respective motivations are different. A crucial distinction between anarchism and ecologism is the difference between the emphasis that the former places on society and the latter on nature. In other words, to borrow a succinct phrase by David Pepper, ‘while anarchism does have positions on human and non-human “nature” it is not principally a philosophy of nature’ (1993: 152). Consequently, whereas ecologism adjusts the idea of localization to its guiding principle of ecocentrism, the well-being of nature is for anarchists secondary to free, harmonious and egalitarian social relations. This does not imply that anarchism represents an arrogant technocratic version of anthropocentrism characteristic of other political ideologies. Anarchism is ecologically sensitive but, and this is of major significance, it formulates this sensitivity in anthropocentric terms, in a belief that ecological harmony is conducive to social well-being and, vice-versa, that harmonious, egalitarian social relations engender respect for the rights of other species. This fundamental discrepancy between anarchism and ecologism determines their respective views on other broad issues, such as modernity and globalization, and explains their different reasons and degrees of radicalism in advancing the case for localization.

  Hierarchy is the prism through which anarchists understand the current ecological as well as social problems. The anarchist analysis is built upon an ontological postulation that nature cannot be interpreted ‘from a hierarchical viewpoint’ (Bookchin 1980: 270–1). From this metaphysical assertion stem more specific claims, such as the following: ‘mass pollution and environmental destruction are inevitable consequences of a system based on dominating the rest of nature […] This domination has its roots in the domination of people – class society’ (Anarchist Federation n.d.: 35). Analogously, the anarchist suggestion of the way out of the current ecological predicament takes off from the ideas that inform anarchist solutions to other social problems: ‘as long as hierarchy persists, as long as humanity organizes itself around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction’ (Bookchin, in Antliff 2005: 266).

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  The SAGE Handbook of Environment and Society

  • Jules Pretty, Andy Ball, Ted Benton, Julia Guivant, David R Lee, David Orr, Max Pfeffer, Professor Hugh Ward, Jules Pretty, Andy Ball, Ted Benton, Julia Guivant, David R Lee, David Orr, Max Pfeffer, Professor Hugh Ward(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  As such, this tradition stands in sharp contrast to the mainstream of social and political theory which has maintained that social order is gener-ated by the external imposition of authority. Indeed, anarchists have maintained that it is the very coer-cive ideologies, practices and institutions of modernity that are the source of the disorder and social chaos they are designed to prevent. We elaborate on this worldview in the first section of this chapter and argue that the resistance that many contemporary forms of ecological politics demonstrate for conventional leadership struc-tures, and the advanced division of labour has a long pedigree. In the second part of this chapter, we focus more specifically on the impact that social anar-chist, left libertarian and more recent ecological anarchist currents have had on the development of thinking about society–nature relations. The dom-inant figures here are Peter Kropotkin and Murray Bookchin. In these thinkers we can find a range of important contributions being made to eco-philosophy and environmental ethics, from attempts to cultivate a metaphysics of nature and develop naturalistic ethics, to reflections on scien-tific ecology and evolutionary biology. In the third part of this chapter, we go on to consider the broader impact that anarchist and libertarian thinkers have had on debates about the ‘built environment’. Anarchist thought has often been presented by its critics as simply advocating a pastoral vision of the future. Such readings though ignore the extent to which, as Peter Hall has observed ‘… the anarchist fathers had a mag-nificent vision of the possibilities of urban civili-sation …’ (Hall, 2002). In the work of Geddes and Howard, Bookchin and Ward, a stream of thought can be recovered which moves from advocacy of garden cities and city gardens to championing the virtues of allotments, participatory planning, ecological technology and urban direct democ-racy.

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  The ecological eye

  Assembling an ecocritical art history

  • Andrew Patrizio(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  In his contribution to The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism, he reviews the legacy of Murray Bookchin, who coined the term ‘social ecology’, in ways that also help us refine our own art historical position. Anarchism is a response, for Price, to two historical forces: the failure of Marxism against capitalism and the awareness of ecological degradation, which advantages individual societies. 22 Ecology can and should be seen as the explicit driver of anarchism, beneath which lie two vital ingredients of both natural and human/political worlds, namely diversity and spontaneity. 23 Price offers other challenging terms, the effects of which have had negative consequences for the biosphere, such as ‘massification’, ‘hierarchy’, ‘centralisation’ and ‘domination’, 24 all unfolding through processes of technological modernisation, models of unrestrained growth and market greed, and thus having responsibility for the ecological problems we face. Bookchin (as Price rightly notes) has unhelpful vestiges of anthropocentrism but, as a qualification, such centrism serves to focus on responsibility – it ‘assigns human society a particular role in combating ecological degradation on the grounds that humans are the most complex expression of evolution as a whole’. 25 This supports my focus on the (environmental) humanities as a social form that could have agency back towards the ecosystem. It is not about reverting to an outmoded notion of hierarchy but asking what happens next to whatever powers of complexity and self-reflexivity we have. One could say that to have the powers of creative thought, writing, insight, complexity and not use them for good is much worse ethically than not having access to that degree of reflection in the first place

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  Eco-Socialism

  From Deep Ecology to Social Justice

  • David Pepper(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 POLITICAL ECONOMY AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY: WHERE GREENS, MARXISTS AND ANARCHISTS FIT IN

  2.1 ECOCENTRISM AND TECHNOCENTRISM

  Before considering how anarchism and Marxism may illuminate green thinking it is useful to extend the discussion of context which was begun in Chapter 1.2 by examining how these three relate to each other in the sense of political economy and traditional political ideologies. To try to do this immediately invites condemnation from those who see ecologism as a new and separate political ideology. But I think that Chapter 1 has demonstrated that while ecologism may start from different premises and concerns to those of traditional politics, it has to become involved in old political questions when it begins to say what we should do to attain ecological rectitude. Hence, ecologism can at least partly be analysed in terms of the classic questions posed by political economy, and be mapped against other ideologies. The exercise is instructive because, first, it helps to define what ‘greens’ we are and are not discussing in this book. Secondly, it suggests that there are, indeed, grounds for concern on the part of those green activists who believe that their political ideology is too eclectic or lacking in coherence:

  the role of pressure groups has always had inherent weaknesses: to concentrate on pushing the establishment in a certain direction fails to challenge their power head on…. Those in power have also welcomed the pressure groups with suspiciously open arms, seeing… a relatively cheap method of courting popularity…. Pressure group activity in a vacuum, without an ideological framework or long-term strategy for change, is all too prone to exploitation by the Establishment….

  (Andrewes 1991)

  If environmentalism is about ideologies and practices which flow from a concern for the environment, it is no exaggeration to say that most politically aware people in the West are to an extent environmentalists now. However, some are ‘light’ green; others are ‘deeper’ green. Since colours are relative to everyone, it is wise not to use such terms, but a classification like O’Riordan’s (1981), which is still very useful. He proposes a fundamental, but not mutually exclusive, division between ‘technocentric’ and ‘ecocentric’ perspectives.

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  The Modern State

  Theories and Ideologies

  • Erika Cudworth, Timothy Hall, John McGovern(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  Anarchists generally agree that forms of political authority restrict individual actions and beliefs and constitute a violation of their freedom (Goodwin 1982: 110–12). In light of this, they endorse egalitarianism, volun-tary co-operation, self-management, individualism and decentral-isation (Goodway 1989: 2). Like many feminists, anarchists tend to define politics very broadly and their analysis of political power is not restricted to the ‘state’ and ‘government’ (see Chapter 9). This said, an antipathy towards institutionalised authority has meant that historically a key feature of anarchism has been the contesta-tion of authority exercised by the state. While anarchism emerged in eighteenth-century Europe in the context of political authoritar-ianism, it has remained staunchly critical of liberal intimations of ‘democracy’. Liberal or ‘bourgeois’ democracy with the represen-tative institutions of parliamentarianism is seen as inherently incap-able of providing anything more than a justification for oligarchy. There are a variety of different kinds of anarchist theorising and, almost inevitably, individual thinkers may slip across the lines drawn by a typology. All anarchists have provided some broader critique of social and economic structures and processes than simply a denunciation of the state. In the nineteenth century, most anarchists were also involved in workers’ political organisations and most contemporary anarchists subscribe to some form of ‘anarcho-communism’ (Miller 1984) or more commonly, ‘social anarchism’, which is collectivist and in many ways, communitarian. In sharp contrast, ‘anarcho-capitalism’ (Miller 1984) or ‘individu-alist anarchism’, exemplified by the work of Murray Rothbard Anarchism: the Politics of Anti-Statism 139 (1978), is an extreme form of liberalism based on the absolute sov-ereignty of the individual (also Nozick 1974: Part 1).

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  21st Century Dissent

  Anarchism, Anti-Globalization and Environmentalism

  • G. Curran(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  A post-ideological anarchist politics is instead a fluid, inclusive and non-sectarian politics that draws on a number of positions to construct an autonomous particularistic politics from below. Zapatismo represents well a post-ideological anarchical politics. 156 21 st Century Dissent 6 Greening Anarchy: Social Ecology Murray Bookchin is a radical ecology stalwart. His integration of ecology and anarchism helped create a novel form of eco-anarchism – one he prefers to call social ecology. Social ecology has contributed significantly to the greening of anarchism. Its primary insight is that the ecological crisis is a social crisis of values, with hierarchy the main culprit. Yet Bookchin claims to go beyond traditional anarchism and even newer forms of anarchism. He sees ‘authentic’ anarchism as highly individualist and champions municipalism, or communalism, in its stead. Municipalism describes a polity or civic arena in which free people participate directly in the consociational management of their community. Bookchin is certainly against the state, but not so the direct democratic practices of community self-government – a form of ‘town meeting government’. To the chagrin of many fellow anarchists, social ecologists encourage the fielding of and voting for candidates in municipal elections. Bookchin also promotes a highly rationalist polit- ical philosophy which he opposes to the ‘anti-rationalism’ that he argues infuses much of radical ecology and now much of contem- porary anarchism. Bookchin is increasingly sceptical of the social theory and practice that passes for anarchism today. He sees in contemporary anarchist expres- sions – including many forms of anarchist inspired anti-capitalist activism – a capitulation to extreme individualism, postmodernist ‘pastiche’ and hysterical anti-rationalism. As we saw in Chapter 1, he is contemptuous of contemporary ‘lifestyle’ anarchism.

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  Common Futures

  Social Transformation and Political Ecology

  • Alexandros Schismenos, Yavor Tarinski(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Black Rose Books

    (Publisher)

  The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, have managed for decades to protect the Lacandona jungle, through an autonomous system of self-governance, from the environmental destruction of the capital-nation-state complex. Similar is the case with the democratic confederation, developed by communities in Northeastern Syria (or Rojava), as noted in the beginning of this book. The stateless system they developed in the war-torn Middles East, based on popular assemblies and local councils, led them organically to the path of political ecology. They initiated the campaign “Make Rojava Green Again,” whose aim is dethatching the local populations from their dependence on oil and other unsustainable economic and energy revenues. Instead it strived at deepening local autarchy, which will deepen democracy further, through sustainable agricultural practices and renewables. In other words, the idea that humans are inherently anti-ecological is nothing but another fallacy in service of the current system of domination and hierarchy. Communities have proven their ability to collectively and sustainably interact with their social and natural environment, without recreating patterns of oppression and exploitation. In all these cases, amidst vibrant participatory processes, we witness the emergence of anthropological type of socially active and devoted stewards of nature. This means radical break with the dominant nowadays imaginary of economism, which views all human beings simply as rational materialists, always striving at maximizing their utilitarian self-interest. Instead, it implies radical self-instituting of society on the basis of political ecology and direct democracy. Humanity has proven its creative capacity. But what this creativity can bring in the future is, above all, a political matter.

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  Anarchism and Moral Philosophy

  • B. Franks, M. Wilson, B. Franks, M. Wilson(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Similarly, many anarchists are inspired by permaculture – an ethical design system for creating per- manent agriculture and permanent culture inspired by the understand- ings of natural systems developed by indigenous peoples. It is a practical method of producing abundance despite capitalism’s efforts to produce scarcity. Like anarchism, ecology is a fundamentally cooperative effort, and, as permaculturist Patrick Whitefield (2007: 414) writes, We can only co-operate with a person or a place if first we listen to them. I use the word listening here in its broadest sense, to include all the ways we can learn about places and people, not just those which involve our ears. 10.2 Caring [Human beings suffer from] a nostalgia for which there is no rem- edy upon earth except as is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit – some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitative relationship with his [sic] fellow creatures. (Bakunin, quoted in Tifft and Sullivan, 1980: 2) Whether expressed as class solidarity (Franks, 2006), mutual aid (Kropotkin, 2009) or love (Horrox, 2009; Christoyannopoulos, 2010; Davis, forthcoming), anarchism involves an ethic of care. I use this term advisedly, aware of the ways in which control over others, including institutionalisation, can be exercised under the guise of care. It is in this patronising sense that disability activists, for example, have been critical (Sposaro, 2003; Hughes et al., 2005; Shakespeare, 2006). Simi- larly, an anarchist ethic of care rejects paternal notions of development: ‘If you come only to help me, you can go back home. But if you con- sider my struggle as part of your struggle for survival, then maybe we can work together’ (Q. Australian aboriginal woman in People’s Global Action, 2008).

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