-- April1980 RAIN Page3 an OPEN Movement by Murray Bookchin ith the opening of the eighties, the ecology movement in both the United States and Europe is faced with a serious crisis. This cris.is is literally one of its identity and goals, a crisis that painfully chaltenges the movement's capacity to fulfill its rich promise of advancing alternatives to the domineering sensibility, the hierarchical political and economic institutions, and the manipulative strategies f~r social change that have produced the catastrophic split between humanity and nature. To speak bluntly: the coming decade may well determine whether the ecology movement will be reduced to a decorative appendage of an inherently diseased anti-ecological society, a society riddled by an unbridled need for control, domination and exploitation of humanity and nature- or, hopefully. whether the ecology movement will become the growing educational arena for a new ecological s(lciety based on mutual ald. decentralized communities, a people's technology, and non-hierardlical, libertarian relations that will yield not only a new harmony between human and human. but between humanity and nature. Perhaps it may seem presumptuous tor a singlt, individual to address himself to a sizable constituency of people who have centered their activities around ecological concerns. But my concern for the Q. .r! (/'jre of the ecology movement is not an Impersonal or ephemeral one. For nearly thirty years I have written extensively on our growin g ecological dislocations. Th ese wri tIngs have been rei nforced by my activities against the growing usc of pesticides and food additives as early as 1952, the problem of nuclear fallout that surfaced with the first hydrogen bomb test In the PaCIfic in 1954, the radioactive pollution issue that emerged With the Windscalc nuclear reactor "incident" in 1956, and Con Edison's attempt to construct the world's largest nuclear reactor in the very heart of New York City in 1963. Since then, I have been mvolved in Ilntinuke alliances such as Clamshell and Shad, not to speak of their predecessors Ecology Action East. whose manifesto, Tile Potuer fo Destroy, TIll' POUler to Create , I wrote in 1969. and the Citizens ommittee on Radiation Information, which played a crucial role in Slopping the Ravenswood reactor in 1963. Hence, 10m hardly be described as an 41tcrloper or newcomer to the ecology movement. My remarks in this letter are the product of a very exrensive experience as well as my individual concern for ideas that have claimed my attention for decades. !It It is my conviction that my work and experience in al\ of these areas would mean very little if they Were limited merely to the issues themselves, however important each one may be in its own right. " No Nukes," or for that matter, no food additives, no agribUSiness, or no nuclear bombs is simply !tot enough if our horizon is limited to each one issue alone. Of equal importance is tbe need to reveal the toxic social causes, values, and inhuman relations that have created a planet which is already vastly poisoned. Ecology, in my view, has always meant social ecology: the conviction that the very concept of dominaring nature stems from the domination of human by huma,n. indeed, of women by men, of the young by their elden;, of one ethnic group by another, of society by the state, of the mdividual by bureaucracy, as welJ as of one economk class by another or a colonized people by a colonial power. To my thinking, SOCial ecology has to begin its quest for freedom not only in the factory but also in the family, not only in the economy but also in the psyche. not only in the material conditions of ljfe but also in the spiritual ones. Without changing the most molecular relationships in society- notably, those between men and woml'J1, adults and children. whites end other ethnic group~ , he terosexuals and gays (the list, in fact. is considerablel-society will be riddled by dOmination even in a socialistiC"classless" and " nonexploitative" form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as il celebrated the dubious vi rtues of " people's democracies ," "SOCialism ," and the " public ownership" of " natural resources." And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will \ontinue to exjst and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extincrion. The emergence of the women's movement, even more so than the counterculture, the " appropriate" technology crusade and the anti-nuke alliances (I will omit the clean- up escapades of " Earth Day"), points to the very heart of the hierardllcal domination that
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