An Introduction to Social Ecology and Communalism

We are standing at a crucial crossroads. Not only does the age-old “social question” concerning the exploitation of human labor remain unresolved, but the plundering of natural resources has reached a point where humanity is also forced to politically deal with an “ecological question.” Today, we have to make conscious choices about what direction society should take, to properly meet these challenges.

At the same time, we see that our very ability to make the necessary choices are being undermined by an incessant centralization of economic and political power. Not only is there a process of centralization in most modern nation states that divests humanity of any control over social affairs, but power is also gradually being transferred to transnational institutions.

Simultaneously, the elites governing the multinational corporations are virtually given free rein to continue exploiting people as well as the natural world, in a series of new “free trade” agreements that in turn have provoked a range of popular protests. The last few years have also witnessed, in the ongoing “War on Terror,” serious encroachments on a range of civil rights that we, in the Western world, have come to take for granted. So, at a time when the social and ecological crises are intensified in breadth and scope, we find ourselves utterly disempowered, and virtually stripped of possibilities to arrest and reverse this destructive “development.”

None of the established political tendencies, no matter how “radical” they claim to be, seem to be able to counter these processes.

One after another, the European Social Democratic parties, not to speak of the once so promising Green tendencies, have all lowered their banners and come to accept the most pernicious market forces. Their participation in national parliaments continuously hollows out their expressed ideals. Not only has the traditional Left crumbled ideologically with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc — which indeed is a tragic irony — but today, there exists no real extraparliamentary movement, with the will and ability to foster and advance an alternative politics. No left libertarian movement has yet emerged that could make use of the vast opportunities that opened up as “Real Existing Socialism” ceased to exist. The great hopes that were nurtured by the many new social movements which emerged in the twentieth century have all but faded away, and where the radical Left has not simply “melted into air,” it has become highly confused. This is a trend that echoes throughout the world, and, despite the recent resurgence of protest movements, there are still no visible tendencies which advance practical and credible alternative directions to the destructive tracks we are on.

If we are not able to intelligently respond to these challenges, it is clear that popular discontents will be channeled through the Right instead, as we indeed witness in many industrialized countries today — notably the disconcerting growth of religious fundamentalisms. Inasmuch as there exists no clear and principled Left radicalism, the conservatives and the reactionaries can set the political agenda, and as a result, the whole political spectrum has tilted markedly toward the Right. The current political climate is itself a reason to be concerned, as there is an urgent need to find political alternatives that can seriously deal with the social and ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. We have to open up a debate and clarify the basic theoretical issues at stake, before we can carve out a possible Left agenda suited for our time. It is in this quest for political alternatives that we turn to the radical theorist Murray Bookchin.

This book is a collection of essays written by Bookchin, a man who dedicated his whole life to seeking rational alternatives to capitalist society. Bookchin was born in January 1921, in New York City to Jewish-Russian immigrants. His grandparents had been members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Russia, and fled the country in the wake of the failed revolution of 1905. In the working class neighborhoods of the Bronx, Bookchin’s childhood and youth were strongly marked by the hopeful enthusiasm that followed in the aftermath of the October revolution of 1917. As America entered headlong into the Great Depression, Bookchin got in touch with the radical organizations agitating in his New York neighborhood, and quickly he became very politically active.

This marked the beginning of a long life dedicated to the cause of social freedom.

Because of his family’s economic situation, Bookchin had to start working at an early age, and got involved in the activities of the trade union movement. In the thirties, he was a member of the various organizations spawned by the Communist Party, acting as an agitator, organizer and study leader, although he gradually became strongly critical of many of its policies. Already by the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution, he broke with the Communists, mainly because of their Popular Front strategy (notoriously the Stalinist betrayal of the Spanish working class). He then became involved in the Trotskyist movement — while Trotsky was still alive — and wrote his first articles for dissident Left groups. After the Second World War, he gravitated more and more toward a libertarian socialism, and started reevaluating the basic premises and the logical conclusions of conventional radical theory.

Bookchin was an untiring activist and theorist in most of the significant radical movements that emerged after the Second World War. He was in the worker’s movement while it was still truly radical, and was active as a shop steward and a strike leader. He was one of the definitive pioneers of ecological thought, and participated in the environmental movement from its tentative inception in the 1950s. Bookchin was also a part of the Civil Rights Movement, the anti- nuclear movement, involved with Students for a Democratic Society, and a series of urban development projects. He was very engaged in efforts to develop neo-anarchist ideas, groups and projects. Later on he became heavily involved in the emergence of the Greens, and was active in local issues and electoral campaigns in his home town, Burlington, Vermont. It was only in the last few years that physical infirmities impeded him from taking part in active politics, and relegated him to the writer’s desk. Indeed, it is probably for his theoretical contributions Bookchin is most well-known and valued.

Bookchin published more than twenty books, and a wide range of articles, lectures and essays, and his work has been translated into many different languages. His writings have encompassed a great variety of subject matters, including history, anthropology, philosophy, science, and technology, as well as culture and social organization. Still, it is his treatment of ecological and political issues that has made Bookchin known to most readers, and some of his older books, notably Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Toward an Ecological Society, and The Ecology of Freedom, have been sources of inspiration for several generations of radicals.

Murray Bookchin experienced many radical movements in his lifetime, and had a relationship to all the major radical ideological trends of the last century. Still, he managed to hammer out a unique political philosophy that attempts to build on the best in these traditions. The purpose of his work was to renew radical theory so that it maintains its best principles and draws lessons from a broad spectrum of historical experiences, while being adapted to new issues and challenges.

Although by no means his first relevant work, it was with his 1964 essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” that Bookchin started to define the outlines of the body of ideas he called social ecology — a theory that was to be more fully developed in books like The Ecology of Freedom, Remaking Society, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, and Re-enchanting Humanity. In 1971, his “Spring Offensives and Summer Vacations” was hinting at a libertarian municipalist approach, that later was carved out in the pages of The Limits of the City, and particularly in From Urbanization to Cities, as well as in a series of shorter essays. His historical writings have recently culminated in his massive history of revolutionary popular movements — the four-volume The Third Revolution (1996–2005).

For more than four decades, the theory of social ecology has been continually nuanced and developed. For a rounded introduction to his body of ideas, readers should turn to Janet Biehl’s excellent presentation in The Murray Bookchin Reader.

The basic promise of social ecology is to re-harmonize the relationship between society and nature, and to create a rational, ecological society. Here Bookchin suggests a dialectical interpretation of human history, culture, and natural evolution. By looking at humanity’s potentialities for freedom and cooperation he argues that history itself suggests to us, if only in a fragmented and incomplete form, how such a rational future can and ought to be formed.

While Bookchin relied partly on the the theories of Karl Marx (particularly his critique of capitalism), he saw the need to distance himself from the Marxist tradition, of which he had been a part, in order to clarify the liberatory content of his ideas. As an anti-authoritarian and a libertarian socialist, he tried to build upon the viable fragments of anarchism to create a rounded libertarian complement to Marx’s ideas on the radical Left. In order to create a new ecological body of thought, as well as a new politics, he used the words “post-scarcity anarchism” to express the new transcendence his perspective reflected of both libertarian and Marxian views. Still, he gradually felt that the traditional radical orthodoxies inhibited the logic of his ideas. After making great efforts at defending (and trying to fill with meaning) variably an “anarchist-communism,” an “eco-anarchism,” and “social anarchism” that maintained a coherency and political radicalism, he came to a point where this project no longer seemed feasible. The inherent flaws of anarchism became all the more apparent as Bookchin studied the historical emergence of its basic ideas and its various organized expressions: Not only had anarchism been infected by current trends of nihilism and lifestyle approaches, it was indeed a product of individualist and anti-social attitudes from its very inception. He openly broke with anarchism at the second International Conference on Libertarian Municipalism, in Vermont, 1999 — and made it clear that his theory of social ecology had to be embodied in the ideology he called Communalism.

This is not to say that the anarchist tradition did not provide a set of sound sentiments, namely anti-statism, federalism, and self- management (however naïvely they were formulated), but that they never made up a coherent theoretical framework for radical social action. Accordingly, Bookchin urged serious libertarians to transcend anarchism, along with Marxism and other radical ideologies. It is necessary, he contended, to create a new body of thought based on a coherent and revolutionary social approach that integrates and goes beyond all traditional forms of socialist radicalism. Indeed, vague libertarian ideals of popular self- management, mutual aid, and a stateless community, are through Bookchin’s social ecology, developed into aspects of a coherent political theory, marked by direct democracy, municipalization, and confederalism. This constitutes the political alternative that Bookchin argued could confront the market economy and powerful centralized institutions.

These political ideas have been developed over many decades, and are based on both concrete lessons as well as the creative formulations of a man who passionately dedicated his life to the radical movement, a glowing passion that is clearly expressed in the essays here presented.

The purpose of this small collection of essays is to give a general overview of Murray Bookchin’s fundamental ideas on social ecology and Communalism. Of course four essays cannot replace the many books and polemical essays written by Bookchin on these subjects, and this collection is not meant as a substitute for a more thorough study of his ideas. Still, these essays can indeed serve as a decent introduction for serious readers, and give a good sense of the theoretical outlines of Bookchin’s theoretical corpus.

The first essay, “What is Social Ecology?,” gives an important overview of the basic theoretical tenets of social ecology. Here Bookchin offers a developmental perspective on society and nature, explaining how “second nature” (human culture) has developed out of “first nature” (biological evolution), and showing that the very “idea of dominating nature” is connected to the historical emergence of hierarchies, and later to the breakthrough of capitalism. In order to create an ecological society, Bookchin claimed, we have to confront and challenge all hierarchical relationships, and ultimately abolish hierarchy as such from the human condition.

The essay was originally published in an anthology edited by Michael Zimmerman, Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993), although it was revised both in 1996 and 2001.

The second essay, “Radical Politics in an Era of Advanced Capitalism,” appeared in Green Perspectives (#18, November 1989). The essay begins with a critique of Marxism and its economistic class orientation, urging radicals to understand the changing nature of capitalism. Bookchin urges us to clarify the relationship between “society,” “politics,” and “the state,” in order to develop an new radical ecological politics, by expanding on the historical advances made by the public domain and the city. It is, in my view, one of the clearest expressions of his proposal for a new libertarian politics, insisting on the centrality of the municipality and of confederalism. This essay was revised by Murray Bookchin in 2001.

The third essay, “The Role of Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction,” was written in 1995, when Bookchin had just finished writing Re-enchanting Humanity. It makes very clear distinctions between social ecology, and contemporary trends like “deep ecology,” mysticism, anti-humanism, as well as postmodernist eclecticism and relativism. It was first sent to an International Gathering of social ecologists in Dunoon, Scotland, in August of that year, and it was subsequently published as “Theses on Social Ecology in a Period of Reaction” in Green Perspectives (# 33, October 1995).

In addition to many interesting comments on current cultural and philosophical trends, Bookchin here places social ecology unequivocally in the trajectory of the Enlightenment and its revolutionary offshoots, and for those reasons I consider this essay particularly appropriate to include in this anthology.

The final essay, “The Communalist Project,” is in my view the most significant essay in this anthology, binding the other essays together by defining a new outlook. Although an earlier version (that was to be significantly revised and expanded) was circulated as “The Communalist Moment,” this essay was first published in the journal Communalism (#2, November, 2002). Bookchin details the need to go beyond all the ideologies of the traditional Left, such as Marxism, anarchism, and syndicalism, and create a new, coherent libertarian radicalism. He explains the relationship between Communalism and libertarian municipalism. This essay constitutes the best exposition to the extent that Bookchin had shaken off all the “anarchist” trappings that were formerly identified with his theories of social ecology. In fact, this essay was initially published with an appendix on “Anarchism and Power in the Spanish Revolution,” that criticizes anarchism for not having any theory of power, and for not being able to deal with this important question in real life politics. This appendix has been left out of this collection for one reason: in these pages, I wanted to present only general essays — essays which were neither considered too polemical nor too specific — which would constitute a short book properly expressing the main ideological aspects of Bookchin’s theoretical writings. (The appendix is available at www.communalism.org, and will be published, along with other critiques of anarchism and Marxism, in a forthcoming anthology presenting Bookchin’s recent writings on Libertarian Municipalism.)

The red thread running through all these essays is the drive to understand and explain the struggle for a rational society, and to understand the necessary ideological underpinnings of a contemporary radical politics. Although the essays included are very different in focus and emphasis, I think that taken together, they convey the ideological foundations of this political project, and its roots in the rich and fecund theory of social ecology.

This book gives a highly accessible introduction to social ecology and Communalism, as it has been developed by one of the most exciting and pioneering thinkers of the twentieth century. Its purpose is to give a general overview of Murray Bookchin’s ideas, and convey a sense of his originality, by presenting some of his most central contributions to radical theory. Despite Bookchin’s insistence that the ideas he proposed are a product of revolutionary movements of the past, and of the ideals of the Enlightenment, he nevertheless created a new and unique synthesis. This political philosophy suggests that the solution to the enormous social and ecological problems we face today, fundamentally lie in the formation of a new citizenry, its empowerment through new political institutions, and a new political culture. It is my profound belief that Communalism, as a coherent body of ideas — with a dialectical philosophy of nature, a confederalist politics, a non-hierarchical social analysis, and an ethics based on complementarity — can be an inspiration for a new radical popular movement in the years to come, indeed, for the resuscitation of the Left in a meaningful sense.

At this crossroads, we now have to decide where we want to go, and how we can get there. The current ecological crisis is also a social one, and we must redefine humanity’s relationship to the natural world by remaking the basic social institutions and advancing a new ecological humanism, in order to make science, technology, and the human intellect serve both social development and a natural evolution guided by reason. To carve the outlines of a rational ecological future, and to initiate the necessary steps in that direction, has now become not only a desideratum, but a necessity. As Murray Bookchin so challengingly asks, “humanity is too intelligent not to live in a rational society. It remains to see whether it is intelligent enough to achieve one.”

Eirik Eiglad, January 14th, 2006

What is Social Ecology?

Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. It follows, from this view, that these ecological problems cannot be understood, let alone solved, without a careful understanding of our existing society and the irrationalities that dominate it. To make this point more concrete: economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender conflicts, among many others, lie at the core of the most serious ecological dislocations we face today — apart, to be sure, from those that are produced by natural catastrophes.

If this approach seems a bit too sociological for those environmentalists who identify the primary ecological problem as being the preservation of wildlife or wilderness, or more broadly as attending to “Gaia” to achieve planetary “oneness,” they might wish to consider certain recent developments. The massive oil spills that have occurred over the past two decades, the extensive deforestation of tropical forest and magnificent ancient trees in temperate areas, and vast hydroelectric projects that flood places where people live, to cite only a few problems, are sobering reminders that the real battleground on which the ecological future of the planet will be decided is clearly a social one, particularly between corporate power and the long-range interests of humanity as a whole.

Indeed, to separate ecological problems from social problems — or even to play down or give only token recognition to their crucial relationship — would be to grossly misconstrue the sources of the growing environmental crisis. In effect, the way human beings deal with each other as social beings is crucial to addressing the ecological crisis. Unless we clearly recognize this, we will fail to see that the hierarchical mentality and class relationships that so thoroughly permeate society are what has given rise to the very idea of dominating the natural world.

Unless we realize that the present market society, structured around the brutally competitive imperative of “grow or die,” is a thoroughly impersonal, self-operating mechanism, we will falsely tend to blame other phenomena — such as technology or population growth — for growing environmental dislocations. We will ignore their root causes, such as trade for profit, industrial expansion for its own sake, and the identification of progress with corporate self- interest. In short, we will tend to focus on the symptoms of a grim social pathology rather than on the pathology itself, and our efforts will be directed toward limited goals whose attainment is more cosmetic than curative.

Some critics have recently questioned whether social ecology has treated the issue of spirituality in ecological politics adequately. In fact, social ecology was among the earliest of contemporary ecologies to call for a sweeping change in existing spiritual values. Indeed, such a change would involve a far-reaching transformation of our prevailing mentality of domination into one of complementarity, one that sees our role in the natural world as creative, supportive, and deeply appreciative of the well-being of nonhuman life. In social ecology a truly natural spirituality, free of mystical regressions, would center on the ability of an emancipated humanity to function as ethical agents for diminishing needless suffering, engaging in ecological restoration, and fostering an aesthetic appreciation of natural evolution in all its fecundity and diversity.

Thus, in its call for a collective effort to change society, social ecology has never eschewed the need for a radically new spirituality or mentality. As early as 1965, the first public statement to advance the ideas of social ecology concluded with the injunction: “The cast of mind that today organizes differences among human and other life-forms along hierarchical lines of ‘supremacy or ‘inferiority’ will give way to an outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological manner — that is, according to an ethics of complementarity.”[1] In such an ethics, human beings would complement nonhuman beings with their own capacities to produce a richer, creative, and developmental whole — not as a“dominant” species but as supportive one. Although this ethics, expressed at times as an appeal for the “respiritization of the natural world,” recurs throughout the literature of social ecology, it should not be mistaken for a theology that raises a deity above the natural world or even that seeks to discover one within it. The spirituality advanced by social ecology is definitively naturalist (as one would expect, given its relation to ecology itself, which stems from the biological sciences) rather than supernaturalistic or pantheistic areas of speculation.

The effort in some quarters of the ecology movement to prioritize the need to develop a pantheistic “eco-spirituality” over the need to address social factors raises serious questions about their ability to come to grips with reality. At a time when a blind social mechanism — the market — is turning soil into sand, covering fertile land with concrete, poisoning air and water, and producing sweeping climatic and atmospheric changes, we cannot ignore the impact that an aggressive hierarchical and exploitative class society has on the natural world. We must face the fact that economic growth, gender oppressions, and ethnic domination — not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic incursions on human well- being — are much more capable of shaping the future of the natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self-redemption. These forms of domination must be confronted by collective action and by major social movements that challenge the social sources of the ecological crisis, not simply by personalistic forms of consumption and investment that often go under the oxymoronic rubric of “green capitalism.” The present highly cooptative society is only too eager to find new means of commercial aggrandizement and to add ecological verbiage to its advertising and customer relations efforts.

Nature and Society

To escape from this profit-oriented image of ecology, let us begin with some basics — namely, by asking what society and the natural world actually are. Among the many definitions of nature that have been formulated over time, the one that has the most affinity with social ecology is rather elusive and often difficult to grasp because understanding and articulating it requires a certain way of thinking — one that stands at odds with what is popularly called “linear thinking.” This “nonlinear” or organic way of thinking is developmental rather than analytical, or in more technical terms, it is dialectical rather than instrumental. It conceives the natural world as a developmental process , rather than the beautiful vistas we see from a mountaintop or images fixed on the backs of picture postcards. Such vistas and images of nonhuman nature are basically static and immobile. As we gaze over a landscape, to be sure, our attention may momentarily be arrested by the soaring flight of a hawk, or the bolting leap of a deer, or the low-slung shadowy lope of a coyote. But what we are really witnessing in such cases is the mere kinetics of physical motion, caught in the frame of an essentially static image of the scene before our eyes. Such static images deceive us into believing in the “eternality” of single moments in nature.

But nonhuman nature is more than a scenic view, and as we examine it with some care, we begin to sense that it is basically an evolving and unfolding phenomenon, a richly fecund, even dramatic development that is forever changing. I mean to define nonhuman nature precisely as an evolving process, as the totality, in fact, of its evolution. Nature, so concerned, encompasses the development from the inorganic into the organic, and from the less differentiated and relatively limited world of unicellular organisms into that of multicellular ones equipped with simple, then, complex, and in time fairly intelligent neural apparatuses that allow them to make innovative choices. Finally, the acquisition of warm-bloodedness gives to organisms the astonishing flexibility to exist in the most demanding climatic environments.

This vast drama of nonhuman nature is in every respect stunning and wondrous. Its evolution is marked by increasing subjectivity and flexibility and by increasing differentiation that makes an organism more adaptable to new environmental challenges and opportunities and that better equips living beings (specifically human beings) to alter their environment to meet their own needs rather than merely adapt to environmental changes. One may speculate that the potentiality of matter itself — the ceaseless interactivity of atoms in forming new chemical combinations to produce ever more complex molecules, amino acids, proteins, and under suitable conditions, elementary life-forms — is inherent in inorganic nature. [2] Or one may decide quite matter-of-factly that the “struggle for existence” or the “survival of the fittest” explains why increasingly subjective and more flexible beings are capable of addressing environmental change more effectively that are less subjective and flexible beings. But the simple fact remains that these evolutionary dramas did occur, indeed the evidence is carved in stone in the fossil record. That nonhuman nature is this record, this history, this developmental or evolutionary process, is a very sobering fact that cannot be ignored without ignoring reality itself.

Conceiving nonhuman nature as its own interactive evolution rather than as a mere scenic vista has profound implications — ethical as well as biological — for ecologically minded people. Human beings embody, at least potentially, attributes of nonhuman development that place them squarely within organic evolution. They are not “natural aliens,” to use Neil Evernden’s phrase, strong exotics, phylogenetic deformities that, owing to their tool-making capacities, “cannot evolve with an ecosystem anywhere.” [3] Nor are they “intelligent fleas,” to use the language of Gaian theorists who believe that the earth (“Gaia”) is one living organism. [4] These untenable disjunctions between humanity and the evolutionary process are as superficial as they are potentially misanthropic. Humans are highly intelligent, indeed, very self-conscious primates, which is to say that they have emerged — not diverged — from a long evolution of vertebrate life-forms into mammalian and finally primate life-forms. They are a product of a significant evolutionary trend toward intellectuality, self-awareness, will, intentionality, and expressiveness, be it in verbal or in body language.

Human beings belong to a natural continuum, no less than their primate ancestors and mammals in general. To depict them as “aliens” that have no place or pedigree in natural evolution, or to see them essentially as an infestation that parasitizes the planet the way fleas parasitize dogs and cats, is not only bad ecology but bad thinking. Lacking any sense of process, this kind of thinking — regrettably so commonplace among ethicists — radically divides the nonhuman from the human. Indeed, to the degree environmental thinkers romanticize nonhuman nature as wilderness and see it as more authentically “natural” than the works of humans, they freeze nonhuman nature as a circumscribed domain in which human innovation, foresight, and creativity have no place and offer no possibilities.

The truth is that human beings not only belong in nature, they are products of a long, natural evolutionary process. Their seemingly “unnatural” activities — like the development of technology and science, the formation of mutable social institutions, highly symbolic forms of communication, and aesthetic sensibilities, and the creation of towns and cities — all would have been impossible without the large array of physical human attributes that have been aeons in the making, be they the large human brain or the bipedal motion that frees human hands for making tools and carrying food. In many respects, human traits are enlargements of nonhuman traits that have been evolving over the ages. Increasing care for the young, cooperation, the substitution of mentally guided behavior for largely instinctive behavior — all are present more keenly in human behavior. Among humans, as opposed to nonhuman beings, these traits are developed sufficiently to reach a degree of elaboration and integration that yields cultures, comprising institutions of families, bands, tribes, hierarchies, economic classes, and the state — in short, highly mutable societies for which there is no precedent in the nonhuman world, unless the genetically programmed behavior of insects is to be regarded as social. In fact, the emergence and development of human society has been a continual process of shedding instinctive behavioral traits and of clearing a new terrain for potentially rational behavior.

Human beings always remain rooted in their biological evolutionary history, which we may call “first nature,” but they produce a characteristically human social nature of their own, which we may call “second nature.” Far from being unnatural, human second nature is eminently a creation of organic evolution’s first nature. To write second nature out of nature as a whole, or indeed to minimize it, is to ignore the creativity of natural evolution itself and to view it one-sidedly. If “true” evolution embodies itself simply in creatures like grizzly bears, wolves, and whales — generally, animals that people find aesthetically pleasing or relatively intelligent — then human beings are de-natured. Such views, whether they see human beings as “aliens” or as “fleas,” essentially place them outside the self-organizing thrust of natural evolution toward increasing subjectivity and flexibility. The more enthusiastic proponents of this de-naturing of humanity may see human beings as existing apart from nonhuman evolution, as a “freaking,” as Paul Shepard put it, of the evolutionary process. Others simply avoid the problem of clarifying humanity’s unique place in natural evolution by promiscuously putting human beings on a par with beetles in terms of their “intrinsic worth.” The “either/ or” propositional thinking that produces such obfuscations either separates the social from the organic altogether or flippantly makes it disappear into the organic, resulting in an inexplicable dualism at one extreme or a naive reductionism at the other. The dualistic approach, with its quasi-theological premise that the world was “made” for human use, is saddled with the name anthropocentrism, while the reductionist approach, with its almost meaningless notion of a “biocentric democracy,” is saddled with the name biocentrism.

The bifurcation of the human from the nonhuman reflects a failure to think organically or to approach evolutionary phenomena with an evolutionary way of thought. Needless to say, if nature were no more than a scenic vista, then mere metaphoric and poetic descriptions of it might suffice to replace systematic thinking about it. But nature is the history of nature, an evolutionary process that is going on to one degree or another under our very eyes, and as such, we dishonor it by thinking of it in anything but a processual way. That is to say, we require a way of thinking that recognizes that “what is,” as it seems to lie before our eyes, is always developing into “what is not,” that it is engaged in a continual self-organizing process in which past and present, along a richly differentiated but shared continuum, give rise to a new potentiality for an ever-richer degree of wholeness. Life, clearly in its human form, becomes open- endedly innovative and transcends its relatively narrow capacity to adapt only to a pregiven set of environmental conditions. As V. Gordon Childe once put it, “Man makes himself; he is not preset to survive by his genetic makeup.”

By the same token, a processual, organic, and dialectical way of thinking has little difficulty in locating and explaining the emergence of the social out of the biological, of second nature out of first nature. It seems more fashionable these days to deal with ecologically significant social issues like an accountant. Thus, one simply juxtaposes two lists of cultural facts — one labeled “old paradigm” and the other, “new paradigm” — as though they were columns of debits and credits. Obviously distasteful items like centralization are listed under “old paradigm,” while more appealing ones like decentralization are regarded as “new paradigm.” The result is an inventory of bumper-sticker slogans whose “bottom line” is patently absolute good versus absolute evil. All of this may be deliciously synoptic and easy on the eyes, but it is singularly lacking as food for the brain. To truly know and be able to give interpretive meaning to the social issues and ideas so arranged, we should want to know how each one derived from the other and what its part is in an overall development. What, in fact, is meant by “decentralization,” and how, in the history of human society, does it derive from or give rise to centralization? Again, we need processual thinking to comprehend processual realities, if we are to gain some sense of direction — practical as well as theoretical — in addressing our ecological problems.

Social ecology seems to stand alone, at present, in calling for an organic, developmental way of thinking out problems that are basically organic and developmental in character. The very definition of the natural world as a development (albeit not any one) indicates the need for organic thinking, as does the derivation of human from nonhuman nature — a derivation from which we can draw far-reaching conclusions for the development of an ecological ethics that in turn can provide serious guidelines for the solution of our ecological problems.

Social ecology calls upon us to see that the natural world and the social are interlinked by evolution into one nature that consists of two differentiations: first or biotic nature, and second or social nature. Social nature and biotic nature share an evolutionary potential for greater subjectivity and flexibility. Second nature is the way in which human beings, as flexible, highly intelligent primates, inhabit and alter the natural world. That is to say, people create an environment that is most suitable for their mode of existence. In this respect, second nature is no different from the environment that every animal, depending upon its abilities, partially creates as well as primarily adapts to — the biophysical circumstances or ecocommunity in which it must live. In principle, on this very simple level, human beings are doing nothing that differs from the survival activities of nonhuman beings, be it building beaver dams or digging gopher holes.

But the environmental changes that human beings produce are profoundly different from those produced by nonhuman beings. Humans act upon their environments with considerable technical foresight, however lacking that foresight may be in ecological ideals. Animals adapt to the world around them; human beings innovate through thought and social labor. For better or worse, they alter the natural world to meet their needs and desires — not because they are perverse, but because they have evolved quite naturally over the ages to do so. Their cultures are rich in knowledge, experience, cooperation, and conceptual intellectuality; however, they have been sharply divided against themselves at many points of their development, through conflicts between groups, classes, nation- states, and even city-states. Nonhuman beings generally live in ecological niches, their behavior guided primarily by instinctive drives and conditioned reflexes. Human societies are “bonded” together by institutions that change radically over centuries. Nonhuman communities are notable for their general fixity, by their clearly preset, often genetically imprinted rhythms. Human communities are guided in part by ideological factors and are subject to changes conditioned by those factors. Nonhuman communities are generally tied together by genetically rooted instinctive factors — to the extent that these communities exist at all.

Hence human beings, emerging from an organic evolutionary process, initiate, by the sheer force of their biological and survival needs, a social evolutionary development that clearly involves their organic evolutionary process. Owing to their naturally endowed intelligence, powers of communication, capacity for institutional organization, and relative freedom from instinctive behavior, they refashion their environment — as do nonhuman beings — to the full extent that their biological equipment allows. This equipment makes it possible for them to engage not only in social life but in social development. It is not so much that human beings, in principle, behave differently from animals or are inherently more problematical in a strictly ecological sense, as it is that the social development by which they grade out of their biological development often becomes more problematical for themselves and nonhuman life. How these problems emerge, the ideologies they produce, the extent to which they contribute to biotic evolution or abort it, and the damage they inflict on the planet as a whole lie at the very heart of the modern ecological crisis. Second nature as it exists today, far from marking the fulfillment of human potentialities, is riddled by contradictions, antagonisms, and conflicting interests that have distorted humanity’s unique capacities for development. Its future prospects encompass both the danger of tearing down the biosphere and alas, given the struggle to achieve an ecological society, the capacity to provide an entirely new ecological dispensation.

Social Hierarchy and Domination

How, then, did the social emerge from the biological? We have good reason to believe that as biological facts such as kin lineage, gender distinctions, and age differences were slowly institutionalized, their uniquely social dimension was initially quite egalitarian. Later this development acquired an oppressive hierarchical and then an exploitative class form. The lineage or blood tie in early prehistory obviously formed the organic basis of the family. Indeed, it joined together groups of families into bands, clans, and tribes, through either intermarriage or fictive forms of descent, thereby forming the earliest social horizon of our ancestors. More than in other mammals, the simple biological facts of human reproduction and the protracted maternal care of the human infant tended to knit siblings together and produced a strong sense of solidarity and group inwardness. Men, women, and their children were socialize by means of a fairly stable family life, based on mutual obligation and an expressed affinity that was often sanctified by initiation ceremonies and marital vows of one kind or another.

Human beings who were outside the family and all its elaborations into bands, clans, tribes, and the like, were regarded as “strangers” who could alternatively be welcomed hospitably or enslaved or put to death. What mores existed were based on unreflective customs that seemed to have been inherited from time immemorial. What we call morality began as the rules or commandments of a deity or various deities, in that moral beliefs required some kind of supernatural or mystical reinforcement or sanctification to be accepted by a community. Only later, beginning with the ancient Greeks, did ethics emerge, based on rational discourse and reflection. The shift from blind custom to a commanding morality and finally to a rational ethics occurred with the rise of cities and urban cosmopolitanism, although by no means did custom and morality diminish in importance. Humanity, gradually disengaging its social organization from the biological facts of blood ties, began to admit the “stranger” and increasingly recognize itself as a shared community of human beings (and ultimately a community of citizens) rather than an ethnic folk or group of kinsmen.

In this primordial and socially formative world, other human biological traits were also reworked from the strictly natural to the social. One of these was the fact of age and its distinctions. In social groups among early humans, the absence of a written language helped to confer on the elderly a high degree of status, for it was they who possessed the traditional wisdom of the community, including knowledge of the traditional kinship lines that prescribed marital ties in obedience to extensive incest taboos as well as survival techniques that had to be acquired by both the young and the mature members of the group. In addition, the biological fact of gender distinctions was slowly reworked along social lines into what were initially complementary sororal and fraternal groups. Women formed their own food-gathering and care-taking groups with their own customs, belief systems, and values, while men formed their own hunting and warrior groups with their own behavioral characteristics, mores, and ideologies.

From everything we know about the socialization of the biological facts of kinship, age, and gender groups — their elaboration into early institutions — there is no reason to doubt that these groups existed initially in complementary relationships with one another. Each, in effect, needed the others to form a relatively stable whole. No one group “dominated” the others or tried to privilege itself in the normal course of things. Yet even as the biological underpinnings of consociation were, over time, further reworked into social institutions, so the social institutions were slowly reworked, at various periods and in various degrees, into hierarchical structures based on command and obedience. I speak here of a historical trend, in no way predetermined by any mystical force or deity, and one that was often a very limited development among many preliterate or aboriginal cultures and even in certain fairly elaborate civilizations.

Hierarchy in its earliest forms was probably not marked by the harsh qualities it has acquired over history. Elders, at the very beginnings of gerontocracy, were not only respected for their wisdom but were often beloved of the young, with affection that was often reciprocated in kind. We can probably account for the increasing harshness of later gerontocracies by supposing that the elderly, burdened by their failing physical powers and dependent upon their community’s goodwill, were more vulnerable to abandonment in periods of material want than any other part of the population. “Even in simple food-gathering cultures,” observed anthropologist Paul Radin, “individuals above fifty, let us say, apparently arrogate to themselves certain powers and privileges which benefited themselves specifically, and were not necessarily, if at all, dictated by considerations either of the rights of others or the welfare of the community.” [5] In any case, that gerontocracy was probably the earliest form of hierarchy is corroborated by its existence in communities as disparate as the Australian Aborigines, tribal societies in East Africa, and Native communities in the Americas. Many tribal councils throughout the world were really councils of elders, an institution that never completely disappeared (as the word alderman suggests), even after they were overlaid by warrior societies, chiefdoms, and kingships.

Patricentricity, in which masculine values, institutions, and forms of behavior prevail over feminine ones, seems to have developed in the wake of gerontocracy. Initially, the emergence of patricentricity may have been a useful adjunct to a life deeply rooted in the primordial natural world; preliterate and early aboriginal societies were essentially small domestic communities in which the authentic center of material life was the home, not the “men’s house” so widely present in later, more elaborate tribal societies. Male rule, if such it can strictly be called, takes on its harshest and most coercive form in patriarchy, an institution in which the eldest male of an extended family or clan has a life-and-death command over all other members of the group. Women may be ordered whom to marry, but they are by no means the exclusive or even the principal object of a patriarch’s domination. Sons, like daughters, may be ordered how to behave at the patriarch’s command or be killed at his whim.

So far as patricentricity is concerned, however, the authority and prerogative of the male are the product of a long, often subtly negotiated development in which the male fraternity edges out the female sorority by virtue of the former’s growing “civil” responsibilities. Increasing population, marauding bands of outsiders whose migrations may be induced by drought or other unfavorable conditions, and vendettas of one kind or another, to cite common causes of hostility or war, create a new “civil” sphere side by side with woman’s domestic sphere, and the former gradually encroaches upon the latter. With the appearance of cattle-drawn plow agriculture, the male, who is the “master of the beasts,” begins to invade the horticultural sphere of woman, whose primacy as the food cultivator and food gatherer gives her cultural preeminence in the community’s internal life, slowly diluting her preeminence. Warrior societies and chiefdoms carry the momentum of male dominance to the level of a new material and cultural dispensation. Male dominance becomes extremely active and ultimately yields a world in which male elites dominate not only women