THE ECOLOGY OF FREEDOM by Murray Bookchin This article has been adapted from Chapters Ten-Twelve of The Ecology ofFreedom, © 1982 by Murray Bookchin. Reprinted by permission of Cheshire Books. The Ecology ofFreedom, by Murray Bookchin, 1982, $9.95 plus $1.50 p&h (add 6% sales tax in California), from: Cheshire Books 514 Bryant Street Palo Alto, CA 94301 Shortly after the monumental occupation of the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear plant site in 19771 remember hearing Anna Gyorgy, a founder of the Clamshell Alliance, say that Murray Bookchin provided “the political vision that a lot of us have, at least implicity, if not explicitly." Murray Bookchin may be the most important—and least recognized—social thinker of our time. And The Ecology of Freedom, his magnum opus a decade in creation, will provide coherence, insight and inspiration to our efforts to achieve a truly ecological society for many years to come. Bookchin is at once the conscience, the critic, and the visionary of our most ecological and human sensibilities. When he describes a free, ecological society, how our world could be, how we could be, one becomes suddenly aware of just how far the sum total of each of life's little compromises has taken us from fully realizing our human role as the conscious voice of nature. Yet at the same time, he makes apparent what kinds of attitudes and actions may genuinely lead to more harmonious relations between society and nature. For thirty years Bookchin has written extensively on social ecology. Two years ago in these pages (RAIN Vl:6) we published his "Open Letter to the Ecological Movement," written at RAIN’s request. Appearing on the tenth anniversary of Earth Day and the . "official” birth of the environmental movement, it was reprinted rapidly and widely around the world. Today, on the twelfth anniversary of the movement, we are pleased to present the following excerpts from The Ecology of Freedom, to be published this month. The Ecology of Freedom, unlike many of Bookchin's earlier writings, is neither suitable nor possible as bedtime reading. Historical and theoretical, it challenges the intellect to critically examine the most difficult issues of modern society and the conditions that create them. Those with any kind of theoretical interest, no matter how mild, will quickly find the style quite readable and their efforts amply rewarded. With this landmark work, perhaps Murray Bookchin will finally get the recognition he so rightfully deserves—and we all so assuredly require. —Mark Roseland It is difficult for us to understand that political structures can be no less technical than tools and machines. In part, this difficulty arises because our minds have been imprinted by a dualistic metaphysics of "structures" and "superstructures." To dissect social experience into the economic and political, technical and cultural, has become a matter of second nature that resists any melding of one into the other. But this tendency is also partly due to an opportunistic political prudence that is wary of confronting the stark realities of power in a period of social accommodation. Better and safer to deal with technics as tools, machines, labor, and design than as coercive political institutions that organize the very implements, work, and imagination involved in the modern technical ensemble. Better to deal with how these means achieve certain destructive or constructive forms on the natural landscape than to explore the deformations they produce within subjectivity itself. An environmentalist technocracy is hierarchy draped in green garments; hence it is all the more insidious because it is camouflaged, in the color of ecology. A liberatory technology presupposes liberatory institutions; a liberatory sensibility requires a liberatory society. By the same token, artistic crafts are difficult to conceive without an artistically crafted society, and the "inversion of tools" is impossible without a radical inversion of all social and productive relationships. To speak of "appropriate technologies," "convivial tools," and "voluntary simplicity" without radically challenging the political "technol- gies," the media "tools," and the bureaucratic "complexities" that have turned these concepts into elitist "art forms" is to completely betray their revolutionary promise as a challenge to the existing social structure. What renders Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship" mentality and the design mentality of the "how-to-do-it" catalogues, periodicals, and impresarios of the "appropriate technology movement" particularly unsavory is their readiness to make "prag-
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