Page 32 RAIN Oct./Nov. 1983 AN OPEN LETTER TO THE ECOLOGICAL MOVEMENT by Murray Bookchin This is not only one of the most important pieces ever published by RAIN—it's also one of my favorite RAIN "scoops." RAIN asked Murray Bookchin to write this "Open Letter"for the tenth anniversary of Earth Day and the "official” birth of the environmental movement. Appearing at this time of reflection and renewal, the letter generated tremendous interest and was reprinted rapidly and widely in the U.S. and around the world. Things have changed a bit since the letter was first published in 1980. (At that time, no one really believed, for instance, that Ronald Reagan could ever be elected President.) But most of what Bookchin wrote more than three years ago is just as pertinent today, as 1984 swiftly approaches. His distinction between ecology and environmentalism is one of the key clarifications of the decade. The "managerial radicals” he warned about still plague us. And his vision of humanity as the conscious voice of nature is still as hopeful as we've got. This letter is addressed to you. Do yourselfa favor and read it. —Mark Roseland (RAIN editor, 1979-82) (First appeared in RAIN, April 1980) With the opening of the eighties, the ecology movement in both the United States and Europe is faced with a serious crisis. This crisis is literally one of its identity and goals, a crisis that painfully challenges 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 for 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 society based on mutual aid, decentralized communities, a people's technology, and non- hierarchical, libertarian relations that will yield not only a new harmony between human and human, but between humanity and nature. Perhaps it may seem presumptuous for a single individual to address himself to a sizable constituency of people who have centered their activities around ecological concerns. But my concern for the future of the ecology movement is not an impersonal or ephemeral one. For nearly 30 years I have written extensively on our growing ecological dislocations. These writings have been reinforced by my activities against the growing use of pesticides and food additivies 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 Windscale 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 involved in anti-nuke alliances such as Clamshell and Shad, not to speak of their predecessors: Ecology Action East, whose manifesto. The Power to Destroy, the Power to Create, I wrote in 1969, and the Citizens Committee on Radiation Information, which played a crucial role in stopping the Ravenswood reactor in 1963. Hence, I can hardly be described as an interloper or newcomer to the ecology movement. My remarks in this letter are the product of a very extensive experience as well as my individual concern for ideas that have claimed my attention for decades. It is my conviction that my work and experience in all 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 not enough if our horizon is limited to each one issue alone. Of equal importance is the need to reveal the toxic social causes, values, and irdmman 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 dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human, indeed, of women by men, of the young by their elders, of one ethnic group by another, of society by the state, of the individual by bureaucracy, as well as of one economic class by another or a colonized people by a colonial power. To my thinking, social ecology has to be^n 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 life but also in the spiritual ones. Without changing the most molecular relationships in society—notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable)—society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic "classless" and "nonex- ploitative" form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of "people's democracies," "socialism," and the "public ownership" of
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