Anarchism and Environmental Philosophy

CHAPTER 13 Anarchism and Environmental Philosophy Brian Morris Introduction This chapter explores the connection between anarchism and environmental philosophy with foremost attention on the pioneer ecologist Murray Bookchin and his relation to the prominent stream of environmental thought known as deep ecology. The first section takes aim at conventional accounts of the origins of modern ecological thinking and the concomintant rise of the global environmental movement. According to such accounts, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)—an eye-opening study of the adverse social and ecological ef- fects of synthetic pesticides—laid the foundation for the emergence of an ecological movement in the 1970s.1 This was accompanied, it is further alleged, by the development of an “ecological worldview” founded on a robust critique of Cartesian metaphysics and articulated in the seminal writings of system theo- rists, deep ecologists, and eco-feminists. All of this, as I will argue, is quite mis- taken. A critique of Cartesian mechanistic philosophy, along with its dualistic metaphysics and its anthropocentric ethos, already existed in the early nineteenth century. Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism, in particular, completely un- dermined the Newtonian Cartesian mechanistic framework, replacing it with an ecological worldview that transcended both mechanistic materialism as well as all forms of religious mysticism. In combining the ecological sensibility of evolutionary naturalism with anarchism as an emerging political tradition, nineteenth-century anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and Éliseé Reclus dis- tinguished themselves as pioneering environmental thinkers nearly a century before Rachel Carson and Arne Naess appeared on the scene. In the second section I discuss the life and work of Murray Bookchin, fo- cusing specifically on his philosophy of social ecology and dialectical naturalism. I outline Bookchin’s truly innovative studies of the ecological crisis, his critique of “environmentalism” (along with its anthropocentrism and techno- cratic reformist ethos), and his conception of nature as a complex evolutionary process. For Bookchin, as I will explain, nature consists of two distinct aspects that are dialectically interrelated, forming an essential continuity. Those two 1 V. Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993); F. Capra, The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter (New York: Harper Collins, 1997). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��8 | doi ��.��63/9789004356894_0�5 370 Morris aspects Bookchin described, following Cicero, as “first nature”—i.e., the bio- physical world and all its varied life-forms—and “second nature”—i.e., human social life and symbolic culture. I discusse at length Bookchin’s own conception of nature, which he contrasted with that of Marxism, liberal economic theory, and religious mysticism, and which he conceived as characterized by such inherent traits as fecundity, diversity, spontaneity, and subjective free- dom. I conclude the section with a brief note on Bookchin’s radical politics. The third and final section is devoted to a discussion of deep ecology, a major current of environmental philosophy that emerged during the 1970s and is associated specifically with the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. After briefly discussing the history and basic principles of deep ecology, both as a movement and as an ecological philosophy, I turn to Bookchin’s well-known and trenchant critique of the same—specifically his criticisms of its extreme biocentrism, its religious mysticism, its Neo-Malthusian tendencies, and the explicit misanthropy expressed by some prominent deep ecologists. I conclude the section by returning to Bookchin’s own social ecology and his emphasis on developing an ethical ecological sensibility of complementarity or mutualism that transcends the extremes of both anthropocentrism and biocentrism. At the end of the essay I discuss Bookchin’s relationship to a contrasting style of green anarchism—the anarcho-primitivism of John Zerzan—and re-affirm the importance of Bookchin’s legacy. An Ecological Worldview During the 1970s academic philosophers became increasingly aware of the ecological crisis and began to turn their attention to the environment—the bio- physical world that surrounds humans and of which humans are an integral part. This, of course, was something the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had emphasized a century earlier. Drawing on the seminal insights of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, Bakunin stressed that humans are not disembodied Cartesian egos divorced from nature and society, but social beings that are fun- damentally a part of the natural environment; for him, there was no “ecological rift” between humanity and nature.2 Environmental philosophy in the 1970s tended to be identified with environmental ethics, and particularly with a current of philosophical thought that came to be known as deep ecology (although there were also impor- tant debates around such issues as animal liberation and the concept of a 2 J.B. Foster, B. Clark, and R. York, The Ecological Rift (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010)..

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