Social Ecology

Social ecology stresses the link between the domination of humans and the domination of nature, envisioning the creation of a nonhierarchical society as the solution to both [Page 372]contemporary ecological and social crises. Social ecology's ideal society mirrors the integrative and communitarian order of natural ecology—characterized by dynamic unity in diversity. For social ecology, theory and activism are inevitably linked, as expressed in the programs of the Social Ecology Institute.

Social ecology, as developed by Murray Bookchin, has as its central premise the idea that the domination of other humans occurs in concert with the domination of natural systems. Both stem from hierarchical social arrangements that set men over women, rich over poor, race over race, humans over nature, and mind over matter. In such stratified societies, ideologies of objectification and instrumentalization develop in concert with a market system that prices everything—including human and natural life. Domination alienates humans from their true nature and potential for life in community, as well as from their essential freedom.

Technology flowing from capitalism (the supreme example of a dominating system) produces the toxic results laid out in Our Synthetic Environment, which Murray Bookchin published a few months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. In 1964, Bookchin predicted the greenhouse effect in his analysis of capitalism's “grow or die” imperative that turns water and airways into “sewers.”

Social ecology's method is that of an “integrative science,” consciously bridging ideas rather than ranking and separating them in the manner of a hierarchical paradigm. Thus Bookchin conceives of social ecology as a science in dynamic interaction with imagination, a rational search for truth in dynamic interaction with concrete history, and an evolving theory in dynamic interaction with activism.

The aspect of dynamism here is a key one. Both ecologically sound social systems and the systems of thought that nurture them must continually evolve through dialogue and criticism, reflecting the dynamism of living systems rather than the stasis of final answers and stagnant institutions produced under paradigms of domination and control.

Social ecology's central integration is its joining of social critique with an ecological model, thus giving ecology a “revolutionary edge” and socialism a focus on the major contradiction of our time: that between capitalism and natural systems. In combining socialist with ecological perspectives, it also differs from each of these. Though social ecology concurs with Marx's standard, “from each according to their ability, and to each according to their need,” it broadens the socialist focus on class oppression to encompass the oppression flowing from all hierarchical arrangements. It specifically rejects the instrumentalization of nature expressed in the socialist analysis of human labor as adding primary value to natural resources. It emphasizes not only the ways that humans work on nature but also the ways that nature works on humans.

Further, Bookchin stresses the distinction between social ecology and any environmentalism caught up in emotion and lacking rigorous assessment of the historical roots of ecological crises.

According to social ecology, the only way to counter the intertwined social and ecological crises of our day is to abolish all hierarchy. This is both necessary and intentionally utopian. As Bookchin puts it, those who cannot imagine the impossible will have to live with the unthinkable.

...