Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy, revised edition (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991) pp.340-7

We must try to create a new culture, not merely another movement that attempts to remove the symptoms of our crises without affecting their sources. We must also try to extirpate the hierarchical orientation of our psyches, not merely remove the institutions that embody social domination. But the need for a new culture and new institutions must not be sacrificed to a hazy notion of personal redemption that makes us into lonely “saints” amidst masses of irredeemable “sinners.” Changes in culture and personality go hand in hand with our efforts to achieve a society that is ecological—a society based on usufruct, complementarity, and the irreducible minimum—but that also recognizes the existence of a universal humanity and the claims of individuality. Guided as we may be by the principle of the equality of unequals, we can ignore neither the personal arena nor the social, neither the domestic nor the public, in our project to achieve harmony in society and harmony with nature.

Before exploring the general contours of an ecological society, I must first examine the concept of individual competence in managing social affairs. To create a society in which every individual is seen as capable of participating directly in the formulation of social policy is to instantly invalidate social hierarchy and domination. To accept this single concept means that we are committed to dissolving State power, authority, and sovereignty into an inviolate form of personal empowerment. That our commitment to a nonhierarchical society and personal empowerment is still a far cry from the full development of these ideals into a lived sensibility is obvious enough; hence our persistent need to confront the psychic problems of hierarchy as well as social problems of domination. There are already many tendencies that are likely to force this confrontation, even as we try to achieve institutional changes. I refer to radical forms of feminism that encompass the psychological dimensions of male domination, indeed, domination itself; to ecology conceived as a social outlook and personal sensibility; and to community as intimate, human-scaled forms of association and mutual aid. Although these tendencies may wane periodically and retreat for a time to the background of our concerns, they have penetrated deeply into the social substance and ideologies of our era. [As Janet Biehl observes in her outstanding book, Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ecofeminist Politics: “It is bad enough that we are all less than human today, that the realm of second nature after thousands of years of progress and perversion has reached the cruel impasse that marks the present era. If women have a ‘calling,’ it is not the particularistic—even elitist—one that ecofeminists assign to them. Rather, it is the challenge to rise to a generous ecological humanism, so underlying to the principles of social ecology, and to an all-embracing sense of solidarity, not only with nonhuman life, but with the men who form an integral part of humanity as a whole.” (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991; p. 157)]

What would further reinforce their impact on contemporary consciousness and practice is the meaning—the function and sense of direction—they impart to our vision of an ecological society .Such a society is considerably more than an ensemble of nonhierarchical social institutions and sensibilities. In a very decisive sense, it expresses the way in which we socialize with nature. I use the word “socialize” advisedly: my concern is not merely with those cherished “metabolic” processes of production so central to Marx’s idea of labor, nor with the design of an “appropriate” technics so dear to the hearts of our environmental engineers. What concerns me deeply, here, are the functions we impart to our communities as social ecosystems—the role they play in the biological regions in which they are situated. Indeed, whether we merely “situate” our ecocommunities or root them in their ecosystems, whether we “design” them merely as part of a “natural site” (like a Frank Lloyd Wright dwelling) or functionally integrate them into an ecosystem (like an organ in a living body)—these choices involve very different orientations toward technics, ethics, and the social institutions we so blithely call ecological. Wiser solar technicians have emphasized that a domestic solar energy system is not a component of a home, like a kitchen or bathroom; it is the entire house itself, as an organism interacting with nature. In less mechanical terms, the same principle of organic unity holds true for the ecocommunities and ecotechnologies we seek to integrate into the natural world.

It is a commonplace that every human enterprise necessarily “interferes” with “pure” or “virginal” nature. This notion, which suggests that human beings and their works are intrinsically “unnatural” and, in some sense, antithetical to nature’s “purity” and “virginity,” is a libel on humanity and nature alike. It unerringly reflects “civilization’s” image of “man” as a purely social being and society as an enemy of nature, merely by virtue of the specificity and distinctiveness of social life itself. Worse yet, it grossly distorts the fact that humanity is a manifestation of nature, however unique and destructive—hence the myth that “man” must “disembed” himself from nature (Marx) or “transcend” his primate origins (Sahlins).

We may reasonably question whether human society must be viewed as “unnatural” when it cultivates food, pastures animals, removes trees and plants—in short, “tampers” with an ecosystem. We normally detect a tell-tale pejorative inflection in our discussions on human “interference” in the natural world. But all these seeming acts of “defilement” may enhance nature’s fecundity rather than diminish it. The word fecundity , here, is decisive—and we could add other terms, such as variety, wholeness, integration, and even rationality. To render nature more fecund, varied, whole, and integrated may well constitute the hidden desiderata of natural evolution. That human beings become rational agents in this all-expansive natural trend—that they even benefit practically from it in the form of greater and more varied quantities of food—is no more an intrinsic defilement of nature than the fact that deer limit forest growth and preserve grasslands by feeding on the bark of saplings.

For human society to acknowledge that its well-being, perhaps its very survival, may depend upon consciously abetting the thrust of natural evolution toward a more diversified, varied, and fecund biosphere does not necessarily mean that we must reduce nature to a mere object for human manipulation—an ethical degradation of nature as a “something” that merely exists “for us.” To the contrary, what is authentically “good” for us may very well not be a purely human desideratum but a natural one as well. As a unique product of natural evolution, humanity brings its powers of reasoning, its creative fingers, its high degree of conscious consociation—all qualitative developments of natural history—to nature, at times as sources of help and at other times as sources of harm. Perhaps the greatest single role an ecological ethics can play is a discriminating one—to help us distinguish which of our actions serve the thrust of natural evolution and which of them impede it. That human interests of one kind or another may be involved in these actions is not always relevant to the ethical judgments we are likely to make. What really counts are the ethical guidelines that determine our judgment.

The concept of an ecological society must begin from a sense of assurance that society and nature are not inherently antithetical. In our characteristic view of difference as a form of opposition and estrangement, we have permitted the unique aspects of human society to obscure our perception of its commonality with nature, as a “niche” in a given bioregion and ecosystem. More pointedly, we have permitted the very failings of “civilization”—its objectification of nature and human beings, its hierarchical, class, domineering, and exploitative relationships—to be interpreted as intrinsic social attributes. Hence, a deformed society has come to represent society as such, with the result that its antihuman and antinatural qualities become visible only when we contrast this deformed society with organic society. Without the benefit of this hindsight, we myopically extol the very failings of “civilization” as evidence of the II disembeddedness” of society from nature. Our greatest shortcomings and defaults are turned into grossly unjustifiable “successes”; our most irrational actions and institutions become the “fruits” of human reason and volition. That humanity was expelled from the Garden of Eden does not mean that we must turn an antagonistic face toward nature; rather, it is a metaphor for a new, eminently ecological function: the need to create more fecund gardens than Eden itself.

It is tempting to venture into a utopian description of how an ecological society would look and how it would function, but I have promised to leave such visions to the utopian dialogue that we so direly need today. However, certain biotic and cultural imperatives cannot be ignored if our concept of an ecological society is to have integrative meaning and self-conscious direction. Perhaps the most striking example of how natural evolution phases into social evolution is the fact that we are the heirs of a strong natural thrust toward association. Owing to our prolonged dependency as children and the plasticity of mind that this long period of growth provides, we are destined to live together as a species. Highly privatistic pathologies aside, we have a maternally biased need to associate, to care for our own kind, to collaborate. Whether in village or town, polis or city, commune or megalopolis, we seem impelled by the very nature of our child-rearing experiences and attributes to live in a highly associative world.

But what kind of associations could we expect to find in our future ecological society? While the kinship tie or the blood oath is a more strictly biological basis for association than any form we know, it is patently too parochial and restrictive, in view of our modern commitment to a universal humanitas. Indeed, it is fair to ask whether the strictly biological is necessarily mere “natural” than the human social attributes produced by natural evolution. Our very concept of nature may be more fully expressed by the way in which biological facts are integrated structurally to give rise to more complex and subtle forms of natural reality. Society itself may be a case in point, at least in terms of its abiding basic elements, and human associations that extend beyond the blood tie may reflect more complex forms of natural evolution than the highly limited biological kinship relations. If human nature is part of nature, the associations that rest on universal human loyalties may well be expressions of a richer, more variegated nature than we hitherto have been prepared to acknowledge.

In any case, it is apparent that we score a much richer ecological advance over the conventional biological wisdom of early humanity when we relate on the basis of a simple affinity of tastes, cultural similarities, emotional compatibilities, sexual preferences, and intellectual interests. Nor are we any the less natural for doing so. Even more preferable than the blood-related family is the commune that unites individuals by what they choose to like in each other rather than what they are obliged by blood ties to like. Conscious cultural affinity is ultimately a more creative basis for association than the unthinking demands of kin loyalties. The rudiments of an ecological society will probably be structured around the commune—freely created, human in scale, and intimate in its consciously cultivated relationships—rather than clan or tribal forms that are often fairly sizable and anchored in the imperatives of blood and the notion of a common ancestry. It is not “retribalization” that an ecological society is likely to seek but rather recommunalization with its wealth of creative libertarian traits.

On a still larger scale, the Commune composed of many small communes seems to contain the best features of the polis, without the ethnic parochialism and political exclusivity that contributed so significantly to its decline. Such larger or composite Communes, networked confederally through ecosystems, bioregions, and biomes, must be artistically tailored to their natural surroundings. We can envision that their squares will be interlaced by streams, their places of assembly surrounded by groves, their physical contours respected and tastefully landscaped, their soils nurtured caringly to foster plant variety for ourselves, our domestic animals, and wherever possible the wildlife they may support on their fringes. We can hope that the Communes would aspire to live with, nourish, and feed upon the life-forms that indigenously belong to the ecosystems in which they are integrated.

Decentralized and scaled to human dimensions, such ecocommunities would obey nature’s “law of return” by recycling their organic wastes into composted nutriment for gardens and such materials as they can rescue for their crafts and industries. We can expect that they would subtly integrate solar, wind, hydraulic, and methane-producing installations into a highly variegated pattern for producing power. Agriculture, aquaculture, stockraising, and hunting would be regarded as crafts—an orientation that we hope would be extended as much as possible to the fabrication of use-values of nearly all kinds. The need to mass-produce goods in highly mechanized installations would be vastly diminished by the communities’ overwhelming emphasis on quality and permanence. Vehicles, clothing, furnishings, and utensils would often become heirlooms to be handed down from generation to generation rather than discard able items that are quickly sacrificed to the gods of obsolescence. The past would always live in the present as the treasured arts and works of generations gone by.

We could expect that work, more craftlike than industrial, would be as readily rotated as positions of public responsibility; that members of the communities would be disposed to deal with one another in face-to-face relationships rather than by electronic means. In a world where the fetishization of needs would give way to the freedom to choose needs, quantity to quality, mean-spirited egotism to generosity, and indifference to love, we might reasonably expect that industrialization would be seen as an insult to human physiological rhythms and that physically onerous tasks would be reworked into collective enterprises more festive than laborious in nature. Whether several ecocommunities would want to share and cojointly operate certain industrial entities—such as a small-scale foundry, machine shop, electronic installation, or utility—or whether they would want to return to more traditional but often technically exciting means of producing goods is a decision that belongs to future generations. Certainly, no law of production requires that we retain or expand the gigantic, highly centralized and hierarchically organized plants, mills, and offices that disfigure modern industry. By the same token, it is not for us to describe in any detail how the Communes of the future would confederate themselves and coordinate their common activities. Any institutional relationship of which we could conceive would remain a hollow form until we knew the attitudes, sensibilities, ideals, and values of the people who establish and maintain it. As I have already pointed out, a libertarian institution is a peopled one; hence its purely formal structure will be neither better nor worse than the ethical values of the people who give it reality. Certainly we, who have been saturated with the values of hierarchy and domination, cannot hope to impose our “doubts” upon people who have been totally freed of their trammels.

What humanity can never afford to lose is its sense of ecological direction and the ethical meaning it gives to its projects. As I have already observed, our alternative technologies will have very little social meaning or direction if they are designed with strictly technocratic goals in mind. By the same token, our efforts at cooperation will be actively demoralizing if we come together merely to “survive” the hazards of living in our prevailing social system. Our technics can be either catalysts for our integration with the natural world or the chasms separating us from it. They are never ethically neutral. “Civilization” and its ideologies have fostered the latter orientation; social ecology must promote the former. Modern authoritarian technics have been tested beyond all human endurance by a misbegotten history of natural devastation and chronic genocide, indeed, biocide. The rewards we can glean from the wreckage they have produced will require so much careful sifting that an understandable case can be made for simply turning our backs on the entire heap. But we are already too deeply mired in its wastes to extricate ourselves readily. We have become trapped in its economic logistics, its systems of transportation and distribution, its national division of labor, and its immense industrial apparatus. Lest we be totally submerged and buried in its debris, we must tread cautiously—seeking firm ground where we can in the real attainments of science and engineering, avoiding its lethal quagmire of weaponry and its authoritarian technics of social control.

In the end, however, we must escape from the debris with whatever booty we can rescue, and recast our technics entirely in the light of an ecological ethics whose concept of “good” takes its point of departure from our concepts of diversity, wholeness, and a nature rendered self-conscious—an ethics whose “evil” is rooted in homogeneity, hierarchy, and a society whose sensibilities have been deadened beyond resurrection. Insofar as we hope to resurrect ourselves, we are obliged to use technics to bring the vitality of nature back into our atrophied senses. Having lost sight of our roots in natural history, we must be all the more careful in dealing with the means of life as forms of nature: to discern our roots in the sun and wind, in minerals and gases, as well as in soil, plants, and animals. It is a challenge not to be evaded—notably, to see the sun as part of our umbilical cord to power just as we discern its role in the photosynthetic activities of plants.

Inevitably, I am asked how to go from “here to there,” as though reflections on the emergence and dissolution of hierarchy must contain recipes for social change. For social “paradigms” one can turn to such memorable events as the May-June upheaval in France during 1968, or to Portugal a decade later, and possibly to Spain a generation earlier. What should always count in analyzing such events is not why they failed—for they were never expected to occur at all—but how they managed to erupt and persist against massive odds. No movement for freedom can even communicate its goals, much less succeed in attaining them, unless historic forces are at work to alter unconscious hierarchical values and sensibilities. Ideas reach only people who are ready to hear them. No individual, newspaper, or book can undo a character structure shaped by the prevailing society until the society itself is beleaguered by crises. Thus ideas, as Marx shrewdly observed, really make us conscious of what we already know unconsciously. What history can teach us are the forms, strategies, techniques—and failures—in trying to change the world by also trying to change ourselves.

The libertarian technics of change have been discussed and tried extensively. Their capacity for success still must be proven by the situations in which they can really hope to attain their goals. None of the authoritarian technics of change has provided successful “paradigms,” unless we are prepared to ignore the harsh fact that the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban “revolutions” were massive counterrevolutions that blight our entire century. Libertarian forms of organization have the enormous responsibility of trying to resemble the society they are seeking to develop. They can tolerate no disjunction between ends and means. Direct action, so integral to the management of a future society, has its parallel in the use of direct action to change society. Communal forms, so integral to the structure of a future society, have their parallel in the use of communal forms—collectives, affinity groups, and the like—to change society. The ecological ethics, confederal relationships, and decentralized structures we would expect to find in a future society, are fostered by the values and networks we try to use in achieving an ecological society.

We know from the Parisian sections that even large cities can be decentralized structurally and institutionally for a lengthy period of time, however centralized they once were logistically and economically. Should a future society, confederally integrated and communally oriented, seek to decentralize itself logistically and economically, it will not lack the existing means and latent talents to do so. Just as New York City has shown that it can effortlessly dismember itself in less than a decade and become a physical ruin, so Germany’s cities after World War II have shown that they can rebuild themselves from ruins into thriving (if tasteless) megalopolises in an equal span of time. The means for tearing down the old are available, both as hope and as peril. So, too, are the means for rebuilding. The ruins themselves are mines for recycling the wastes of an immensely perishable world into the structural materials of one that is free as well as new.