Butterfly Experiment Highlights Biotech Hazards
This article originally appeared in Synthesis/Regeneration 21, Winter 2000. Genetically engineered crops threaten monarch butterflies. The headlines spread worldwide this past May, after three researchers at Cornell University published a study confirming what critics of biotechnology have been saying for a decade: that the environmental consequences of genetic engineering would prove to be widespread and […]
Interview with Murray Bookchin (by Dave Vanek)
Murray Bookchin, born in 1921, has been involved in leftist politics for seven decades and has written almost two dozen books on a great variety of subjects, encompassing ecology, nature philosophy, history, urban studies, and the Left, particularly Marxism and anarchism. In the 1950s, with his long 1952 essay “The Problem of Chemicals in Food,” […]
The Economics of Race Hatred
In August 1999, just a few months before the newly invigorated anti-capitalist movement scored a provisional victory in Seattle, an unemployed white supremacist named Buford Furrow shot a group of children at a Jewish preschool in Los Angeles. Furrow went on to kill an Asian-American mail carrier before turning himself in. This murderous outburst happened […]
Thoughts on Libertarian Municipalism
This article was presented as the keynote speech to the conference “The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism” held in Plainfield, Vermont, U.S.A., on August 26-29, 1999. The speech has been revised for publication. This article originally appeared in Left Green Perspectives (Number 41, January 2000). Age, chronic illnesses, and the summer heat oblige me […]
Stop the Biotech Assault on Earth and Humanity!
This article originally apeared in Earth First! Journal, Spring 1999. It used to be possible for some activists to dismiss genetic engineering and other biotechnologies as ideas recently emerged from science fiction, as problems that could safely be put on the back burner. Compared to the rapid loss of species and habitat, global climate changes, […]
The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism (CH. 1)
For two centuries social revolutionaries have cherished the ideal of the “Commune of communes” as part of their vision of a future liberatory society. Ever since the Great French Revolution of 1789, they have dreamed of creating decentralized, stateless, and collectively managed “communes,” joined together in confederations of free municipalities.
Gathering RAGE: Resistance Against Genetic Engineering
This article originally appeared in Z Magazine, January 1999. One important feature of the actions in Seattle and Washington, DC was many activists’ focus on a serious new threat to our food and health: The rise of genetic engineering as the technology-of-choice in countless new areas of corporate activity; the imposition of new biotechnologies on […]
Notes on an Ecology of Everyday Life
If I can’t dance in your revolution, I’m not coming. – Emma Goldman We need to rethink desire in social, rather than romantic or individualistic terms. This is crucial because, while our society offers us a variety of ways to describe the many dimensions of romantic and individualistic desire, we are offered a paltry vocabulary […]
The Communist Manifesto: Insights and Problems
This article by Murray Bookchin originally appeared in New Politics, vol. 6, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 24, Winter 1998 It is politically restorative to look with a fresh eye at The Manifesto of the Communist Party (to use its original title), written before Marxism was overlaid by reformist, postmodernist, spiritual, and psychological commentaries. […]
Mining Humanity: Genetic Research, Indigenous Resistance and the Human Genome Diversity Project
As originally published in Toward Freedom, Winter 1998/99 Recent opposition to biotechnology and genetic engineering has focused on these technologies’ implications for food and agriculture. This is entirely necessary, as tens of millions of acres of U.S. farm land are being planted with genetically engineered crops that have serious consequences for our health, and for […]
