Recovering Bookchin

Download or read book Recovering Bookchin written by Andy Price and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recovering Bookchin holds social ecologist Murray Bookchin's ideas and legacy alive. Starting in the early 1960s, Murray Bookchin (1921–2006) shaped a political and ethical response to the emerging ecological crisis, which he called "social ecology." As Bookchin continued to publish and inspire the green movements of the 1980s and 1990s, he found himself embroiled in debates that increasingly had less to do with his ideas and became a pastime for detractors who devised a crude caricature of him as a hopeless sectarian. In Recovering Bookchin, Andy Price dives into these debates and walks readers through the coherent and consistent program of social ecology laid out by Bookchin. This engaging intellectual biography will inspire readers in our age of government and corporate inaction as new feminist, anticapitalist, and people-centered ecological movements are built.

Download or read book Ecology or Catastrophe written by Janet Biehl and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Murray Bookchin was not only one of the most significant and influential environmental philosophers of the twentieth century--he was also one of the most prescient. From industrial agriculture to nuclear radiation, Bookchin has been at the forefront of every major ecological issue since the very beginning, often proposing a solution before most people even recognized there was a problem. Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin is the first biography of this groundbreaking environmental and political thinker. Author Janet Biehl worked as his collaborator and copyeditor for 19 years, editing his every word. Thanks to her extensive personal history with Bookchin as well as her access to his papers and archival research, Ecology or Catastrophe offers unique insight into his personal and professional life. Founder of the social ecology movement, Bookchin first started raising environmental issues in 1952. He foresaw global warming in the 1960s and even then argued that we should look into renewable energy sources as an alternative to fossil fuels. Wary of pesticides and other chemicals used in industrial agriculture, he was also an early advocate of small-scale organic farming, which has developed into the present locavore movement and the revival of organic markets. Even Occupy can trace the origins of its leaderless structure and general assemblies to the nonhierarchical organizational form Bookchin developed as a libertarian socialist. Bookchin believed that social and ecological issues were deeply intertwined. Convinced that capitalism pushes businesses to maximize profits and ignore humanist concerns, he argued that eco-crises could be resolved by a new social arrangement. His solution was Communalism, a new form of libertarian socialism that he developed. An optimist and utopian, Bookchin believed in the potentiality for human beings to use reason to solve all social and ecological problems.

Download or read book The Modern Crisis written by Murray Bookchin and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Murray Bookchin’s frank assessment of the disaster we are heading toward at increasing speed is as much a work of ethics as it is of environmentalism. The four essays that comprise it share the view that, as he puts it, “our ideas and our practice must be imbued with a deep sense of ethical commitment.” Whether he is critiquing the market economy, the state, or the idea—common to both capitalists and certain left materialists—that human beings are motivated solely by greed and self-interest, Bookchin ever reminds us of the ineffable values of freedom, self-consciousness, and social harmony. Though first published in 1986, Bookchin’s framework still applies. The moral relativism of the 1980s—the politics of lesser-evils and risk vs benefit calculations—has morphed into what we now refer to as “both-sidesism” and the risk vs benefit calculations of yesterday are the 100,000 acre burn scars seen throughout the American west today. Beyond moral relativism or moral absolutism is an ecologically based ethics—one that sees our selfhood, reason, and freedom as stemming from nature’s variety and resilience. Bookchin’s social ecology refuses to separate society from nature. As such one can consider it a philosophy of participation—we cannot develop ecocommunities that aren’t participatory. We can’t save ourselves and the planet without an ethics of freedom. This edition, with a new introduction by Bookchin scholar Andy Price, is a breath of fresh air for a left that seems to have forgotten basic truths.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Social Ecology written by Murray Bookchin and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world? In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. In the essays of The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin confronts these questions head on: invoking the ideas of mutualism, self-organization, and unity in diversity, in the service of ever expanding freedom. Refreshingly polemical and deeply philosophical, they take issue with technocratic and mechanistic ways of understanding and relating to, and within, nature. More importantly, they develop a solid, historically and politically based ethical foundation for social ecology, the field that Bookchin himself created and that offers us hope in the midst of our climate catastrophe.

Download or read book Toward an Ecological Society written by Murray Bookchin and published by AK Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visionary essays from a founder of the modern ecology movement. In this collection of essays, Murray Bookchin's vision for an ecological society remains central as he addresses questions of urbanism and city planning, technology, self-management, energy, utopianism, and more. Throughout, he opposes efforts to reduce ecology to a toothless “environmentalism,” a task as vital today as when these essays were first published. Written between 1969 and 1979, the essays in this collection represent a fascinating and fertile period in Bookchin’s life. Coming out of the unfulfilled promise of the sixties and trying to develop a revolutionary critique of social life that avoided the pitfalls of Marxism, he was entering his creative intellectual peak. He was laying the foundations of a truly social ecology: a society based on decentralization, interdependence, democratic self-management, mutual aid, and solidarity. Presented with clarity and fervor, these key works contain the kernels of concerns that would occupy him until his death in 2006. This edition also includes a new foreword by Dan Chodorkoff, someone who was with Bookchin at the founding of his Institute for Social Ecology and who understand his work better than anyone.

Download or read book Brill's Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy written by Nathan J. Jun and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 609 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the recent proliferation of scholarship on anarchism, very little attention has been paid to the historical and theoretical relationship between anarchism and philosophy. Seeking to fill this void, Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy draws upon the combined expertise of several top scholars to provide a broad thematic overview of the various ways anarchism and philosophy have intersected. Each of its 18 chapters adopts a self-consciously inventive approach to its subject matter, examining anarchism’s relation to other philosophical theories and systems within the Western intellectual tradition as well as specific philosophical topics, subdisciplines and methodological tendencies.

Download or read book The Third Revolution written by Murray Bookchin and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprehensive account of the great revolutions that swept over Europe and America.