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The Transition to the Ecological Society: An Interview by Takis Fotopoulos

Published in Society and Nature, vol. 1, no. 3 (1993) Takis Fotopoulos: It is generally recognized that the Green movement is in crisis. This is indicated not just by its failure to appeal to the electorate but, more important, in terms of its failure to project a new vision of society, an ecological society. All […]

Deep Ecology, Anarcho-Syndicalism and the Future of Anarchist Thought

There is very little I can add to the outstanding criticism Brian Morris levels at deep ecology. Indeed, Morris’s contribution to the debate around eco-mysticism generally has been insightful as well as incisive, and I have found his writings an educational experience hat hopefully will reach a very wide audience in the United States in […]

Eco-cide in Women’s Bodies

As featured in Synthesis/Regeneration #3 (Spring 1992) For too long, feminism has lacked a global, ecological focus. In the 90’s, as reproductive technologies, fundamentalists, and ecological poisoning are on the rise, women’s health and self-determination around the world are on a steady decline. Thinking globally about women’s health is vital if feminism is to transform […]

The Left That Was: A Personal Reflection

Originally published in Left Green Perspectives (formerly Green Perspectives) A Social Ecology Publication Number 22 May 1991 I would like to recall a Left That Was–an idealistic, often theoretically coherent Left that militantly emphasized its internationalism, its rationality in its treatment of reality, its democratic spirit, and its vigorous revolutionary aspirations. From a retrospective viewpoint […]

Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview

Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction–I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed–is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo. Politics today means duels between top-down bureaucratic parties for […]

A Critique of the Draft Program of the Left Green Network

Editors’ note: The Left Green Network is in the process of writing, developing, and debating its program. The draft proposal for the program was published in the April/May 1991 issue of Left Green Notes, number 7. The following critique was written in response to that program. The program will be debated at the upcoming continental […]

The Meaning of Confederalism

This article originally appeared in Green Perspectives No. 20 November 1990. Few arguments have been used more effectively to challenge the case for face-to-face participatory democracy than the claim that we live in a “complex society.” Modern population centers, we are told, are too large and too concentrated to allow for direct decision-making at a […]

Intelligentsia and the New Intellectuals

Editorial Introduction: The following lecture was delivered as the opening address at the fourth continental Youth Greens conference that took place on the campus of Goddard College in Vermont on July 27,1990 The social theorist Murray Bookchin, whose work on ecology began with an article on the chemical additives in food in 1952, is a […]

A Philosophical Naturalism

This article is the introduction to The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, 2nd ed. revised (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995). What is nature? What is humanity’s place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world? In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of […]

Social Ecology and Community Development

Reprinted from Renewing the Earth, John Clark, ed., (London: Green Print, 1990). Social ecology, as developed by Murray Bookchin, brilliantly presents a comprehensive theoretical framework for analyzing the crises of modernity. It is perhaps the first such comprehensive approach since Marx, and suggests a reconstructive practice which holds promise of fundamentally transforming people’s relation to […]