Social Ecology presents a broad-ranging critique of current anti-ecological trends while offering concepts, skills and tools to develop an alternative social vision for an ecologically sustainable society. The ISE played a central role in the grassroots anti-nuclear power movement of the 1970s – ‘80s and the early years of the Green politics movement in the United States. We have engaged in pioneering work in the fields of alternative technology, sustainable agriculture, and ecologically oriented community design. Over the past 35 years, the Institute has sponsored conferences and workshops exploring economic globalization, biotechnology, environmental activism, green cities, ecofeminism, environmental education, and ecological approaches to community development.
The ISE has also provided specific technical and organizational assistance for the development of community supported agriculture, low-income housing cooperatives, and community currency projects, with constituents as diverse as Puerto Rican urban homesteaders, Vermont farmers, environmental justice activists in New England, and community organizers in New York City.
The ISE’s approach to grassroots organizing is rooted in the principles of decentralism, community control, and direct democracy that have broadly inspired many of today’s movements for global justice. Over the past decade, our activist projects have included developing democratic anticapitalist perspectives within the alterglobalization and Occupy Wall Street movements, opposition to genetic engineering of food and corporate biotechnology, articulating visionary climate justice activism, building municipalist and right to the city movements, and bringing a directly democratic approach to a variety of other social and ecological issues and movements.
Check these pages for more info about some of the projects we’ve helped initiate or participated in:
