Social ecology, deep ecology, and liberalism

Communalism: International Journal for a Rational Society, 2002

I]f the word ecology is used to describe our outlook, it is preposterous to invoke deities, mystical forces to account for the evolution of first nature into second nature.

libcom.org https://libcom.org/library/book-review-enlightenment-ecology-legacy-murray-bookchin-21st-century, 2021

Murray Bookchin's (1921-2006) anti-capitalist thinking combined community, direct democracy and ecology into a radical political theory he called social ecology. Throughout the 20th century it stood alongside growing arguments for eco-social change and influenced leftist discourses on citizenship, domination and freedom. In the new millennium, it has formed the basis of the Kurdish feminist-ecological revolution in Rojava and thus been implemented for the first time in practice. The edited volume Enlightenment and Ecology. The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century celebrates Bookchin's legacy and considers the lived experiences of social ecology. The anthology is a heartfelt endeavour to point out the urgency, potential and possibility for social change that grounds in the collaborative world-making of ecosystems to create free democratic societies that gain their resilience through a unity in diversity. The activists, thinkers and scholars writing place their contributions in political and economic theory, in decades of social engagement and in co-creation and observation of real-life movements. The outcome is a multifaceted anthology whose engaged voices paint a vivid, dialectical picture of the challenges and hopes of creating practice out of theory.

The Review of Politics, 1996

Liberalism and Deep Ecology are usually regarded as mutually exclusive. However, the “evolutionary” tradition of liberal thought, rooted in David Hume and Adam Smith, and including Michael Polanyi and F. A. Hayek, provides a foundation for their reconciliation. Linkage is through Hume and Smith's conception of sympathy, which today means empathy. For Hume, sympathy extends into the animal realm. Sympathy is essential for certain scientific work, and provides an foundation for both liberal and ecological ethics. Deep ecologists such as Arne Naess use the same concept. Linkage is first to biocentric ethics, and then, through examining natural beauty and, via Michael Polanyi's tacit knowledge, ecocentric ethics. The work of Hayek suggests how modern society might be harmonized with the requirements of nature. This deepens J. Baird Callicott's pioneering approach, uniting it with Lewis Hinchman's recent analysis. Liberalism's and Deep Ecology's foundations both benefit from their mutual integration.

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2016

2011

THE COMING ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION This book has now been published and is available for purchase. Abstract Part 1 The Emerging Ecological Consciousness This part connects the contemporary environmental crisis with the wider societal crisis. The environmental crisis is considered to be the product of a wider system failure. The perspective taken is that one civilisation is in the process of decay and another in the process of emerging. A fundamental critical self-examination of ourselves and our communities of struggle is necessary to locate and situate the choices, possibilities and strategies with respect to the circumscribed options within the system and the feasible alternatives to that system. This part examines the nature of the environmental crisis, paying particular attention to climate change and global poverty and inequality. Social and environmental justice are shown to be mutually supportive, the low-carbon economy which is a condition of the survival of civilised life also being socially just, egalitarian and democratic. The emergence of an ecological consciousness is shown to be part of the process of revolutionizing society, restructuring power, changing culture and emphasising the quality of individual lives over the quantity of material accumulation and possession. Part 2 The Coming Revolution in Economic Thought The environmental crisis is related to the crisis in economic thought and practice. The crisis in vision in economics is related to the economic system in general. This part exposes economics to be an ideology in the critical sense, that is, as not knowledge as such but a distorted knowledge concerning appearances which serves to conceal contradictions, material interests and power relations to the benefit of the dominant class. Conventional economics treats ‘the economy’ as an abstraction which functions independently of the political, social, moral and ecological context. This part restores economics to its true status as a means. Part of dealing with the future orientated problem of ecology involves examining in what direction economic thought must go in order to once more become relevant to human beings. The ecological problem is related to the globalisation of economic relations and the ‘free market’ economy. A distinction is made between price and value to reassert use value embedded in communities to the exchange value pursued on the market. The question of morality within market societies is addressed in terms of the need to secure the building blocks of a viable civilisation. The view is taken that the individual of Anglo-American liberalism an abstraction of market relations, a fictional person who exists only in the figure of homo economicus. Real individuals are shown to exist and flourish within a social matrix of reciprocal relations and trust. Part 3 Society as a Learning Mechanism Notions of knowledge and social transformation need to be reworked to take account of genuine change as a process rather than as event. It is a process because the new society only functions and flourishes if the individuals constituting it have developed their moral, political, intellectual and organisational capacities. In this sense, a social and ecological praxis is a form of capacity building which develops the know-how required to constitute the new social order. The argument draws upon the emergence of grass roots organisations and community organisations across the world and seeks to value the contributions that social movements can make not only to social provision but to urban governance. This part is organised around concerns for community, communication and the common good. Part 4 Political Philosophy and Ethics This part examines the emancipatory potentialities of reason and freedom to constitute the good life for human beings. The argument considers politics as creative human self-realisation to possess an ineliminable normative dimension concerning the appropriate regiment for the good. Green political theory is analysed in the context of a philosophical concept of ‘rational freedom’ drawn from the work of Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. Part 5 Ecological Praxis This part goes from principles to practice to examine how the emerging ecological consciousness can be embedded in social practices and institutions. This is a question not only of how the ecological society can be created, but governed and made to work. This part looks at critical political issues and constructive models, identifies key tasks in organising for political change. Particular attention is paid to the political boundaries of change and the changing boundaries of politics. Part 6 Environmentalism as Politics This part argues that realising the potential for a new ecological modus vivendi requires a new set of political practices and institutions. These practices and institutions affirm the co-construction of nature and culture through the practical reappropriation of the human powers alienated to the state and capital and the common control and comprehension of these powers as social powers. This creates the foundation for a renewal of public agency within public life and for popular identification with environmental and related public policies. This part pays particular attention to the notion of community self-regulation. To keep the above and the below in an interactive, organic fusion means going back to the grassroots and tapping into the social and human and natural roots that feed a genuinely Green politics. This requires that Greens start organising, campaigning and talking face to face, door to door, street to street, building a Green social identity neighbourhood by neighbourhood, community by community. A functioning social order requires extensive public spaces for social learning and cognitive praxis. A public life worthy of the name creates opportunities for citizen discourse and interaction, a civic solidarity in which citizens share social knowledge, discussing freely and critically the issues of common concern, the problems that confront all individuals collectively within communities and societies. Effective political engagement on the part of new and environmental movements is also an involvement in a public life on the part of individuals who have an "ecological consciousness". To nurture this ecological sensibility so that it contributes to cultural transformation requires a number of supportive conditions and social innovations generated by ecological praxis.

The Trumpeter, 2022

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2016

The Trumpeter, 1993

Modern liberal thought has been consistently "Promethean" in its overall tenor, exalting the human at the expense of the nonhuman. Followers of the deep ecology movement, by contrast, present a radical challenge to Western Prometheanism, promising to reintegrate humanity into the natural world. Most representatives of each perspective find little in common with the other. The bulk of environmental writings assume that liberal philosophical and political principles are exceptionally ill suited to provide the foundation for an ecocentrically sensitive perspective. 1 As a consequence, ecological thinkers have usually looked towards the critics of liberal modernity for guidelines when developing analyses of modern society and a program for its reform. In the 20s and 30s this frequently led to flirtation with various romantic right wing ideologies. The Nazi Party even had a green wing. 2 Today the flirtation is more often on the political left. "Eco-marxism" and Murray Bookchin's "social ecology" are contemporary examples. 3 In this paper I want to make the perverse sounding claim that, despite appearances, certain schools of liberal political and economic thought may well provide the soundest framework for integrating ecocentric insights into social thought. Social-philosophical approaches which favor market economies, representative democracy, and emphasis upon procedures over outcomes in social policy usually are termed liberal in the broad sense. But there can be different reasons and approaches for coming to similar conclusions about contemporary society. In fact, there are two broad approaches to understanding and analyzing society which we often label liberal, and the common ecocentric critique of liberalism applies to them very unequally. Individualist and Evolutionary Liberalism One school of liberal thought conceives the individual as in some sense the irreducible social unit, the other conceives individuals in significant degree to be social products, even though society itself is the result of individual volition and creativity. The first sees the individual as analytically and ethically prior to society. The second argues that ultimately this distinction cannot be made. The first school of liberalism has been intellectually and politically dominant. Its precursors include thinkers as diverse as Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Destutt deTracy, Bentham and the Mills. All modes of liberal thought which utilize rational self-interest, natural rights, or utilitarianism as foundations for their social theory tend to fall within this tradition. For purposes of social analysis, they tend to take individual choices as given and irreducible. Gus diZerega is a political scientist and artist whose art has often blessed the covers of The Trumpeter. He works for a research institute in San Francisco.

Despite more than a decade of widespread pubric discussion of "ecological crises" and,,enviro.r*arrtul problems,,, r"tfra"ti. ecological thinking has had only the *ort *u.ginal influence on contemporary society. The widespread tendenry to triviarize ecology is not limited ro its recycting Uy media, industry and politics for inclusion on their endless lists of ,.issues,,, ,,corcJrns,,, and "items on the agencra-" More disturbing irirr. ""..iii.ur treatment of ecological concep-ts by virtuallyitt tt. prevailing currents in social theory, including .,r., ih. allegldly most radical varieties.

Ecological thinking easily transcends the capitalist frame in which it appears caught.