Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin by Janet Biehl

Author:Janet Biehl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 8.1 Institute for Social Ecology at Cate Farm, ca. 1976. During the 1970s, the ISE educated students in solar and wind energy, organic farming, composting, aquaculture, and permaculture, as well as radical social theory and revolutionary history.

Goddard College Archives.

The students built an open-sided shed, for compost. There they layered hay, kitchen wastes, dirt, and animal manure in four-foot piles, which they let stand; when the compost was ready, they applied it to the soil in the open fields, to enrich it without the use of chemical fertilizers.52 In the farmhouse basement, they constructed a composting toilet, to recycle human wastes.

These small-scale eco-technics projects, using minimal resources, were simple enough that students with little technical training could build and manage them. In an urban context, similar eco-technics could allow neighborhood residents, even as amateurs, to exercise control over the energy that powered their communities. Eco-technics at the human scale could thereby transform (in a riff on Marxian terminology) technology from “instruments of domination and social antagonism” into “instruments of liberation and social harmonization.”53

While its sister projects, New Alchemy in Massachusetts and Farallones in California, emphasized research, the Social Ecology Studies Program offered three months of total immersion for beginners in these hands-on techniques. In addition, it gave them a grounding in social theory. That first session, Dan Chodorkoff taught a class on utopia, “those images of the good life which have shimmered on the horizon throughout the whole of history.”54 The feminist activist Ynestra King taught a class called Women and Ecology, which discussed the domination of women in relation to the domination of nature. King hoped to develop a feminist ecology movement that would solve the ecological crisis by generating “truly human relationships,” as opposed to relations of domination. Guest speakers included the feminist anthropologist Rayna Rapp, the author and poet Grace Paley, the antinuclear activist Anna Gyorgy, and others. A women’s coffeehouse was held on Sunday nights.55

Karl Hess, in his classes, described the Adams-Morgan project to the students. At the town meetings, he said, people’s personalities changed: “People who had been shy spoke out. People who had seemed without hope sparked to new life.” Longtime cynics and naysayers aired their gripes, but when they saw others take up their ideas and turn them into actions, their lives gained “new meaning, new excitement, and a new sense of dignified purpose.” The Adams-Morgan assemblies “were the most exciting political experiences I have ever had,” Hess said. “After tasting a participatory democracy, I would never want to trade it for a merely representative one.”56

And Bookchin, of course, taught social ecology, which by now straddled history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, as well as social theory and politics. The students revered him for his moral imagination, his ebullience, and his generous open-heartedness. He was irrepressible as he lectured, pacing before them and gesticulating, insisting on the urgent need for a large-scale social and ecological transformation, reiterating that all the organic farming and eco-technics they were doing could not be separated from a liberated social context.

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