Deep Ecology & Anarchism by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: deep ecology, food, green syndicalist, permaculture, social ecology, syndicalism
Published: 1993-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Deep Ecology, Anarchosyndicalism, and the Future of Anarchist Thought

by Murray Bookchin

There is very little I can add to the outstanding criticism Brian Morris levels at deep ecology. Indeed, Morris’s contribution to the debate around eco-mysticism generally has been insightful as well as incisive, and I have found his writings an educational experience that hopefully will reach a very wide audience in the United States in addition to Britain.

I should hope that his review of Arne Naess’s Ecology, Community and Lifestyle has revealed the intellectual poverty of the ‘father of deep ecology’ and the silliness of the entire deep ecology ‘movement’. Rodney Aitchtey’s rather airy, often inaccurate, and mystical Deep Ecology: Not Man Apart, it would seem to me, is perhaps the best argument against deep ecology that I have seen in quite a while. But after dealing with deep ecologists in North America for quite a few years, I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the acolytes of Naess et al operate on faith and are motivated in their allegiances by theological rather than rational impulses. There is no reasoned argument, I suspect, that will shake a belief-system of this kind — hence I will leave discussion of the issues involved to others who still have the energy to deal with mindless dogmas.

I would add — or possibly reinforce — only one observation to the incisive ones that Morris makes. One wonders whether deep ecology’s biocentric maxim that all living beings can be equatable with one another in terms of their ‘intrinsic worth’ would have had any meaning during the long eras of organic evolution before human beings emerged. The entire conceptual framework of deep ecology is entirely a product of human agency — a fact that imparts to the human species a unique status in the natural world. All ethical systems (including those that can be grounded in biotic evolution) are formulated by human beings in distinctly cultural situations. Remove human agency from the scene, and there is not the least evidence that animals exhibit behaviour that can be regarded as discursive, meaningful, or moral. When Elisee Reclus, the anarchist geographer, tells us that pussycats are (as cited by George Woodcock in his introduction to the Marie Fleming biography of Reclus) ‘natural anarchists’, or worse, that ‘there is not a human sentiment which on occasion they [i.e. cats] do not understand or share, not an idea which they do not divine [sic!], not a desire but what they forestall it’, Reclus is writing ethological and ecological nonsense. That anarchist writers celebrate the author of such an anthropomorphic absurdity as ‘ecological’ is regrettable to say the least. To the extent that ‘intrinsic worth’ is something more than merely an agreeable intuition in modern ecological thought, it is an ‘attribute’ that human beings formulate in their minds and a ‘right’ that they may decide to confer on animals and other creatures. It does not exist apart from the operations of the human mind or humanity’s social values.

To turn from the

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