#title Ecology and Revolutionary Thought
#author Murray Bookchin
#LISTtitle Ecology and Revolutionary Thought
#SORTauthors Murray Bookchin
#SORTtopics ecology, human ecology, social ecology, revolution
#date February 1965
#source Chapter from *Post-Scarcity Anarchism*.
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-09-13T13:32:22


In almost every period since the Renaissance the development of revolutionary thought has been heavily influenced 
by a branch of science, often in conjunction with a school 
of philosophy. 

Astronomy in the time of Copernicus and Galileo 
helped to change a sweeping movement of ideas from the 
medieval world, riddled by superstition, into one pervaded 
by a critical rationalism and openly naturalistic and 
humanistic in outlook. During the Enlightenment—the era 
that culminated in the French Revolution—this liberatory 
movement of ideas was reinforced by advances in mechanics and mathematics. The Victorian era was shaken to its 
very foundations by evolutionary theories in biology and 
anthropology, by Marx’s contributions to political economy, and by Freudian psychology. 

In our own time, we have seen the assimilation of 
these once-liberatory sciences by the established social 
order. Indeed, we have begun to regard science itself as 
an instrument of control over the thought processes and 
physical being of man. This distrust of science and of the 
scientific method is not without justification. “Many 
sensitive people, especially artists,” observes Abraham 
Maslow, “are afraid that science besmirches and depresses, that it tears things apart rather than integrating 
them, thereby killing rather than creating.”{1} What is perhaps equally important, modern science has lost its critical 
edge. Largely functional or instrumental in intent, the 
branches of science that once tore at the chains of man are 
now used to perpetuate and gild them. Even philosophy 
has yielded to instrumentalism and tends to be little more 
than a body of logical contrivances; it is the handmaiden 
of the computer rather than of the revolutionary. 

There is one science, however, that may yet restore and 
even transcend the liberatory estate of the traditional 
sciences and philosophies. It passes rather loosely under 
the name “ecology”—a term coined by Haeckel a century 
ago to denote “the investigation of the total relations of 
the animal both to its inorganic and to its organic environment.”{2} At first glance, Haeckel’s definition is innocuous 
enough; and ecology narrowly conceived of as one of 
the biological sciences, is often reduced to a variety 
of biometrics in which field workers focus on food chains 
and statistical studies of animal populations. There is an 
ecology of health that would hardly offend the sensibilities 
of the American Medical Association and a concept of 
social ecology that would conform to the most 
well-engineered notions of the New York City Planning 
Commission. 

Broadly conceived of, however, ecology deals with the 
balance of nature. Inasmuch as nature includes man, the 
science basically deals with the harmonization of nature 
and man. The explosive implications of an ecological approach arise not only because ecology is intrinsically a 
critical science—critical on a scale that the most radical 
systems of political economy have failed to attain—but 
also because it is an integrative and reconstructive science. 
This integrative, reconstructive aspect of ecology, carried 
through to all its implications, leads directly into anarchic 
areas of social thought. For, in the final analysis, it is 
impossible to achieve a harmonization of man and nature 
without creating a human community that lives in a lasting 
balance with its natural environment. 

*** The Critical Nature of Ecology

The critical edge of ecology, a unique feature of the 
science in a period of general scientific docility, derives 
from its subject matter—from its very domain. The issues 
with which ecology deals are imperishable in the sense that 
they cannot be ignored without bringing into question the 
survival of man and the survival of the planet itself. The 
critical edge of ecology is due not so much to the power of 
human reason—a power which science hallowed during its 
most revolutionary periods—but to a still higher power, the 
sovereignty of nature. It may be that man is manipulable, 
as the owners of the mass media argue, or that elements of 
nature are manipulable, as the engineers demonstrate, but 
ecology clearly shows that the *totality* of the natural 
world—nature viewed in all its aspects, cycles and interrelationships—cancels out all human pretensions to mastery 
over the planet. The great wastelands of the Mediterranean 
basin, once areas of a thriving agriculture or a rich natural 
flora, are historic evidence of nature’s revenge against human parasitism. 

No historic examples compare in weight and scope with 
the effects of man’s despoliation—and nature’s revenge—since the days of the Industrial Revolution, and especially 
since the end of the Second World War. Ancient examples 
of human parasitism were essentially local in scope; they 
were precisely *examples* of man’s potential for destruction, 
and nothing more. Often, they were compensated by remarkable improvements in the natural ecology of a region, 
such as the European peasantry’s superb reworking of the 
soil during centuries of cultivation and the achievements of 
Inca agriculturists in terracing the Andes Mountains during 
the pre-Columbian times. 

Modern man’s despoliation of the environment is global 
in scope, like his imperialisms. It is even extraterrestrial, as 
witness the disturbances of the Van Alien Belt a few years 
ago. Today human parasitism disrupts more than the atmosphere, climate, water resources, soil, flora and fauna of 
a region: it upsets virtually all the basic cycles of nature 
and threatens to undermine the stability of the environment on a worldwide scale. 

As an example of the scope of modern man’s disruptive 
role, it has been estimated that the burning of fossil fuels 
(coal and oil) adds 600 million tons of carbon dioxide to 
the air annually, about .03 percent of the total atmospheric mass-this, I may add, aside from an incalculable 
quantity of toxicants. Since the Industrial Revolution, the 
overall atmospheric mass of carbon dioxide has increased 
by 25 percent over earlier, more stable, levels. It can be 
argued on very sound theoretical grounds that this growing 
blanket of carbon dioxide, by intercepting heat radiated 
from the earth, will lead to more destructive storm patterns and eventually to melting of the polar ice caps, rising 
sea levels, and the inundation of vast land areas. Far removed as such a deluge may be, the changing proportion 
of carbon dioxide to other atmospheric gases is a warning 
about the impact man is having on the balance of nature. 

A more immediate ecological issue is man’s extensive 
pollution of the earth’s waterways. What counts here is not 
the fact that man befouls a given stream, river or lake—a 
thing he has done for ages—but rather the magnitude water 
pollution has reached in the past two generations. Nearly 
all the surface waters of the United States are now polluted. Many American waterways are open cesspools that 
properly qualify as extensions of urban sewage systems. It 
is a euphemism to describe them as rivers or lakes. More 
significantly, large amounts of ground water are sufficiently polluted to be undrinkable, and a number of local 
hepatitis epidemics have been traced to polluted wells in 
suburban areas. In contrast to surface-water pollution, the 
pollution of ground or subsurface water is immensely difficult to eliminate and tends to linger on for decades after 
the sources of pollution have been removed. 

An article in a mass-circulation magazine appropriately 
describes the polluted waterways of the United States as 
“Our Dying Waters.” This despairing, apocalyptic description of the water pollution problem in the United States 
really applies to the world at large. The waters of the earth 
are literally dying. Massive pollution is destroying the 
rivers and lakes of Africa, Asia and Latin America, as well 
as the long-abused waterways of highly industrialized continents, as media of life. (I speak here not only of radioactive pollutants from nuclear bomb tests and power reactors, which apparently reach all the flora and fauna of the 
sea; the oil spills and the discharge of diesel oil have also 
become massive pollution problems, claiming marine life in 
enormous quantities every year.) 

Accounts of this kind can be repeated for virtually every 
part of the biosphere. Pages could be written on the immense losses of productive soil that occur annually in almost every continent of the earth; on lethal air pollution 
episodes in major urban areas; on the worldwide distribution of toxic agents, such as radioactive isotopes and lead; 
on the chemicalization of man’s immediate environment—one might say his very dinner table—with pesticide residues 
and food additives. Pieced together like bits of a jigsaw 
puzzle, these affronts to the environment form a pattern 
of destruction that has no precedent in man’s long history 
on earth. 

Obviously, man could be described as a highly destructive parasite who threatens to destroy his host—the natural 
world—and eventually himself. In ecology, however, the 
word “parasite” is not an answer to a question, but raises a 
question itself. Ecologists know that a destructive parasitism of this kind usually reflects the disruption of an ecological situation; indeed, many species that seem highly 
destructive under one set of conditions are eminently useful under another set of conditions. What imparts a profoundly critical function to ecology is the question raised 
by man’s destructive abilities: What is the disruption that 
has turned man into a destructive parasite? What produces a form of parasitism that results not only in vast natural 
imbalances but also threatens the existence of humanity 
itself? 

Man has produced imbalances not only in nature, but, 
more fundamentally, in his relations with his fellow man 
and in the very structure of his society. The imbalances 
man has produced in the natural world are caused by the 
imbalances he has produced in the social world. A century 
ago it would have been possible to regard air pollution and 
water contamination as the result of the self-seeking activities of industrial barons and bureaucrats. Today, this moral 
explanation would be a gross oversimplification. It is 
doubtless true that most bourgeois enterprises are still 
guided by a public-be-damned attitude, as witness the reactions of power utilities, automobile concerns and steel corporations to pollution problems. But a more serious 
problem than the attitude of the owners is the size of the 
firms themselves—their enormous proportions, their location in a particular region, their density with respect to a 
community or waterway, their requirements for raw materials and water, and their role in the national division of 
labor. 

What we are seeing today is a crisis in social ecology. 
Modern society, especially as we know it in the United 
States and Europe, is being organized around immense urban belts, a highly industrialized agriculture and, capping 
both, a swollen, bureaucratized, anonymous state apparatus. If we put all moral considerations aside for the moment and examine the physical structure of this society, 
what must necessarily impress us is the incredible logistical 
problems it is obliged to solve—problems of transportation, 
of density, of supply (of raw materials, manufactured commodities and foodstuffs), of economic and political organization, of industrial location, and so forth. The burden 
this type of urbanized and centralized society places on 
any continental area is enormous. 

*** Diversity and Simplicity 

The problem runs even deeper. The notion that man must 
dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of 
man by man. The patriarchal family planted the seed of 
domination in the nuclear relations of humanity; the classical split in the ancient world between spirit and reality—indeed, between mind and labor—nourished it; the antinaturalist bias of Christianity tended to its growth. But it 
was not until organic community relations, feudal or peasant in form, dissolved into market relationships that the 
planet itself was reduced to a resource for exploitation. 
This centuries-long tendency finds its most exacerbating 
development in modern capitalism. Owing to its inherently 
competitive nature, bourgeois society not only pits humans against each other, it also pits the mass of humanity 
against the natural world. Just as men are converted into 
commodities, so every aspect of nature is converted into a 
commodity, a resource to be manufactured and merchandised wantonly. The liberal euphemisms for the 
processes involved are “growth,” “industrial society” and 
“urban blight.” By whatever language they are described, 
the phenomena have their roots in the domination of man 
by man. 

The phrase “consumer society” complements the description of the present social order as an “industrial society.” Needs are tailored by the mass media to create a 
public demand for utterly useless commodities, each carefully engineered to deteriorate after a predetermined 
period of time. The plundering of the human spirit by the 
marketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by 
capital. (The liberal identification is a metaphor that neutralizes the social thrust of the ecological crisis.) 

Despite the current clamor about population growth, 
the strategic ratios in the ecological crisis are not the population growth rates of India but the production rates of the 
United States, a country that produces more than half of 
the world’s goods. Here, too, liberal euphemisms like “affluence” conceal the critical thrust of a blunt word like 
“waste.” With a ninth of its industrial capacity committed 
to war production, the U.S. is literally trampling upon the 
earth and shredding ecological links that are vital to human 
survival. If current industrial projections prove to be accurate, the remaining thirty years of the century will witness a fivefold increase in electric power production, based 
mostly on nuclear fuels and coal. The colossal burden in 
radioactive wastes and other effluents that this increase 
will place on the natural ecology of the earth hardly needs 
description. 

In shorter perspective, the problem is no less disquieting. Within the next five years, lumber production may 
increase an overall twenty percent; the output of paper, 
five percent annually; folding boxes, three percent annually; plastics (which currently form one to two percent 
of municipal wastes), seven percent annually. Collectively, 
these industries account for the most serious pollutants in 
the environment. The utterly senseless nature of modern 
industrial activity is perhaps best illustrated by the decline 
in returnable (and reusable) beer bottles from 54 billion 
bottles in 1960 to 26 billion today. Their place has been 
taken over by “one-way” bottles (a rise from 8 to 21 
billion in the same period) and cans (an increase from 38 
to 53 billion). The “one-way” bottles and the cans, of 
course, pose tremendous problems in solid waste disposal. 

The planet, conceived of as a lump of minerals, can 
support these mindless increases in the output of trash. 
The earth, conceived of as a complex web of life, certainly 
cannot. The only question is whether the earth can survive 
its looting long enough for man to replace the current 
destructive social system with a humanistic, ecologically 
oriented society. 

Ecologists are often asked, rather tauntingly, to locate 
with scientific exactness the ecological breaking point of 
nature—the point at which the natural world will cave in 
on man. This is equivalent to asking a psychiatrist for the 
precise moment when a neurotic will become a nonfunctional psychotic. No such answer is ever likely to be available. But the ecologist can supply a strategic insight into 
the directions man seems to be following as a result of his 
split with the natural world. 

From the standpoint of ecology, man is dangerously 
oversimplifying his environment. The modern city represents a regressive encroachment of the synthetic on the 
natural, of the inorganic (concrete, metals, and glass) on 
the organic, of crude, elemental stimuli on variegated, 
wide-ranging ones. The vast urban belts now developing in 
industrialized areas of the world are not only grossly offensive to the eye and the ear, they are chronically smog-ridden, noisy, and virtually immobilized by congestion. 

The process of simplifying man’s environment and rendering it increasingly elemental and crude has a cultural as 
well as a physical dimension. The need to manipulate immense urban populations—to transport, feed, employ, educate and somehow entertain millions of densely concentrated people—leads to a crucial decline in civic and social 
standards. A mass concept of human relations—totalitarian, centralistic and regimented in orientation—tends to 
dominate the more individuated concepts of the past. 
Bureaucratic techniques of social management tend to replace humanistic approaches. All that is spontaneous, 
creative and individuated is circumscribed by the standardized, the regulated and the massified. The space of the 
individual is steadily narrowed by restrictions imposed 
upon him by a faceless, impersonal social apparatus. Any 
recognition of unique personal qualities is increasingly surrendered to the manipulation of the lowest common 
denominator of the mass. A quantitative, statistical approach, a beehive manner of dealing with man, tends to 
triumph over the precious individualized and qualitative 
approach which places the strongest emphasis on personal 
uniqueness, free expression and cultural complexity. 

The same regressive simplification of the environment 
occurs in modern agriculture.[1] The manipulated people in 
modern cities must be fed, and to feed them involves an 
extension of industrial farming. Food plants must be cultivated in a manner that allows for a high degree of mechanization—not to reduce human toil but to increase productivity and efficiency, to maximize investments, and to 
exploit the biosphere. Accordingly, the terrain must be 
reduced to a flat plain-to a factory floor, if you will—and 
natural variations in topography must be diminished as 
much as possible. Plant growth must be closely regulated 
to meet the tight schedules of food-processing factories. 
Plowing, soil fertilization, sowing and harvesting must be 
handled on a mass scale, often in total disregard of the 
natural ecology of an area. Large areas of the land must be 
used to cultivate a single crop—a form of plantation agriculture that not only lends itself to mechanization but also 
to pest infestation. A single crop is the ideal environment 
for the proliferation of pest species. Finally, chemical 
agents must be used lavishly to deal with the problems 
created by insects, weeds, and plant diseases, to regulate 
crop production, and to maximize soil exploitation. The 
real symbol of modern agriculture is not the sickle (or, for 
that matter, the tractor), but the airplane. The modern 
food cultivator is represented not by the peasant, the yeoman, or even the agronomist—men who could be expected 
to have an intimate relationship with the unique qualities 
of the land on which they grow crops—but the pilot or 
chemist, for whom soil is a mere resource, an inorganic raw 
material. 

[1] For insight into this problem the reader may consult *The Ecology of Invasions* by Charles S. Elton (Wiley; New York, 1958), *Soil and Civilisation* by Edward Hyams (Thames and Hudson; London, 
1952), *Our Synthetic Environment* by Murray Bookchin [pseud. 
Lewis Herber] (Knopf; New York, 1962), and *Silent Spring* by 
Rachel Carson (Houghton Mifflin; Boston, 1962). The last should be 
read not as a diatribe against pesticides but as a plea for ecological 
diversification. 

The simplification process is carried still further by an 
exaggerated regional (indeed, national) division of labor. 
Immense areas of the planet are increasingly reserved for 
specific industrial tasks or reduced to depots for raw materials. Others are turned into centers of urban population, 
largely occupied with commerce and trade. Cities and 
regions (in fact, countries and continents) are specifically 
identified with special products—Pittsburgh, Cleveland and 
Youngstown with steel, New York with finance, Bolivia 
with tin, Arabia with oil, Europe and the U.S. with industrial goods, and the rest of the world with raw materials of 
one kind or another. The complex ecosystems which make 
up the regions of a continent are submerged by an organization of entire nations into economically rationalized 
entities, each a way station in avast industrial belt-system, 
global in its dimensions. It is only a matter of time before 
the most attractive areas of the countryside succumb to 
the concrete mixer, just as most of the Eastern seashore 
areas of the United States have already succumbed to subdivisions and bungalows. What will remain in the way of 
natural beauty will be debased by trailer lots, canvas slums, 
“scenic” highways, motels, food stalls and the oil slicks of 
motor boats. 

The point is that man is undoing the work of organic 
evolution. By creating vast urban agglomerations of concrete, metal and glass, by overriding and undermining the 
complex, subtly organized ecosystems that constitute local 
differences in the natural world—in short, by replacing a 
highly complex, organic environment with a simplified, inorganic one-man is disassembling the biotic pyramid that 
supported humanity for countless millennia. In the course 
of replacing the complex ecological relationships, on which 
all advanced living things depend, for more elementary 
relationships, man is steadily restoring the biosphere to a 
stage which will be able to support only simpler forms of 
life. If this great reversal of the evolutionary process continues, it is by no means fanciful to suppose that the preconditions for higher forms of life will be irreparably destroyed and the earth will become incapable of supporting 
man himself. 

Ecology derives its critical edge not only from the fact 
that it alone, among all the sciences, presents this awesome 
message to humanity, but also because it presents this message in a new social dimension. From an ecological viewpoint, the reversal of organic evolution is the result of 
appalling contradictions between town and country, state 
and community, industry and husbandry, mass manufacture and craftsmanship, centralism and regionalism, the 
bureaucratic scale and the human scale. 

*** The Reconstructive Nature of Ecology 

Until recently, attempts to resolve the contradictions created by urbanization, centralization, bureaucratic growth 
and statification were viewed as a vain counterdrift to 
“progress”—a counterdrift that could be dismissed as chimerical and reactionary. The anarchist was regarded as a 
forlorn visionary, a social outcast, filled with nostalgia for 
the peasant village or the medieval commune. His yearnings for a decentralized society and for a humanistic 
community at one with nature and the needs of the individual—the spontaneous individual, unfettered by authority—were viewed as the reactions of a romantic, of a 
declassed craftsman or an intellectual “misfit.” His protest 
against centralization and statification seemed all the less 
persuasive because it was supported primarily by ethical 
considerations-by Utopian, ostensibly “unrealistic,” notions of what man could be, not by what he was. In response to this protest, opponents of anarchist thought—liberals, rightists and authoritarian “leftists”—argued that 
they were the voices of historic reality, that their statist 
and centralist notions were rooted in the objective, practical world. 

Time is not very kind to the conflict of ideas. Whatever 
may have been the validity of libertarian and non-libertarian views a few years ago, historical development has 
rendered virtually all objections to anarchist thought 
meaningless today. The modern city and state, the massive 
coal-steel technology of the Industrial Revolution, the 
later, more rationalized, systems of mass production and 
assembly-line systems of labor organization, the centralized nation, the state and its bureaucratic apparatus—all 
have reached their limits. Whatever progressive or liberatory role they may have possessed, they have now become 
entirely regressive and oppressive. They are regressive not 
only because they erode the human spirit and drain the 
community of all its cohesiveness, solidarity and 
ethico-cultural standards; they are regressive from an 
objective standpoint, from an ecological standpoint. For 
they undermine not only the human spirit and the human 
community but also the viability of the planet and all 
living things on it. 

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the anarchist 
concepts of a balanced community, a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology and a decentralized society—these rich libertarian concepts—are not only desirable, 
they are also necessary. They belong not only to the great 
visions of man’s future, they now constitute the preconditions for human survival. The process of social development has carried them out of the ethical, subjective dimension into a practical, objective dimension. What was once 
regarded as impractical and visionary has become eminently practical. And what was once regarded as practical 
and objective has become eminently impractical and irrelevant in terms of man’s development towards a fuller, unfettered existence. If we conceive of demands for community, face-to-face democracy, a humanistic liberatory 
technology and decentralization merely as reactions to the 
prevailing state of affairs-a vigorous “nay” to the “yea”
of what exists today—a compelling, objective case can now 
be made for the practicality of an anarchist society. 

A rejection of the prevailing state of affairs accounts, I 
think, for the explosive growth of intuitive anarchism 
among young people today. Their love of nature is a reaction against the highly synthetic qualities of our urban 
environment and its shabby products. Their informality of 
dress and manners is a reaction against the formalized, 
standardized nature of modern institutionalized living. 
Their predisposition for direct action is a reaction against 
the bureaucratization and centralization of society. Their 
tendency to drop out, to avoid toil and the rat race, reflects a growing anger towards the mindless industrial routine bred by modern mass manufacture in the factory, the 
office or the university. Their intense individualism is, in 
its own elemental way, a *de facto* decentralization of social 
life—a personal withdrawal from mass society. 

What is most significant about ecology is its ability to 
convert this often nihilistic rejection of the status quo into 
an emphatic affirmation of life—indeed, into a reconstructive credo for a humanistic society. The essence of ecology’s reconstructive message can be summed up in the 
word “diversity.” From an ecological viewpoint, balance 
and harmony in nature, in society and, by inference, in 
behavior, are achieved not by mechanical standardization 
but by its opposite, organic differentiation. This message 
can be understood clearly only by examining its practical 
meaning. 

Let us consider the ecological principle of diversity—what Charles Elton calls the “conservation of variety”—as 
it applies to biology, specifically to agriculture. A number 
of studies—Lotka’s and Volterra’s mathematical models, 
Bause’s experiments with protozoa and mites in controlled 
environments, and extensive field research-clearly demonstrate that fluctuations in animal and plant populations, 
ranging from mild to pestlike proportions, depend heavily 
upon the number of species in an ecosystem and on the 
degree of variety in the environment. The greater the variety of prey and predators, the more stable the population; 
the more diversified the environment in terms of flora and 
fauna, the less likely there is to be ecological instability. 
Stability is a function of variety and diversity: if the environment is simplified and the variety of animal and plant 
species is reduced, fluctuations in population become 
marked and tend to get out of control. They tend to reach 
pest proportions. 

In the case of pest control, many ecologists now conclude that we can avoid the repetitive use of toxic chemicals such as insecticides and herbicides by allowing for a 
greater interplay between living things. We must leave 
more room for natural spontaneity, for the diverse biological forces that make up an ecological situation. “European entomologists now speak of managing the entire 
plant-insect community,” observes Robert L. Rudd. “It is 
called manipulation of the biocenose[2] The biocenetic environment is varied, complex and dynamic. Although numbers of individuals will constantly change, no one species 
will normally reach pest proportions. The special conditions which allow high populations of a single species in a 
complex ecosystem are rare events. Management of the 
biocenose or ecosystem should become our goal, challenging as it is.”{3}

[2] Rudd’s use of the word “manipulation” is likely to create the 
erroneous impression that an ecological situation can be described 
by simple mechanical terms. Lest this impression arise, I would like 
to emphasize that our knowledge of an ecological situation and the 
practical use of this knowledge are matters of insight rather than 
power. Charles Elton states the case for the management of an ecological situation when he writes: “The world’s future has to be 
managed, but this management would not be like a game of chess 
... [but] more like steering a boat.”

The “manipulation” of the biocenose in a meaningful 
way, however, presupposes a far-reaching decentralization 
of agriculture. Wherever feasible, industrial agriculture 
must give way to soil and agricultural husbandry; the factory floor must yield to gardening and horticulture. I do 
not wish to imply that we must surrender the gains acquired by large-scale agriculture and mechanization. What I 
do contend, however, is that the land must be cultivated as 
though it were a garden; its flora must be diversified and 
carefully tended, balanced by fauna and tree shelter appropriate to the region. Decentralization is important, moreover, for the development of the agriculturist as well as for 
the development of agriculture. Food cultivation, practiced in a truly ecological sense, presupposes that the agriculturist is familiar with all the features and subtleties of 
the terrain on which the crops are grown. He must have a 
thorough knowledge of the physiography of the land, its 
variegated soils—crop land, forest land, pasture land—its 
mineral and organic content and its micro-climate, and he 
must be engaged in a continuing study of the effects produced by new flora and fauna. He must develop his sensitivity to the land’s possibilities and needs while he becomes 
an organic part of the agricultural situation. We can hardly 
hope to achieve this high degree of sensitivity and integration in the food cultivator without reducing agriculture 
to a human scale, without bringing agriculture within the 
scope of the individual. To meet the demands of an ecological approach to food cultivation, agriculture must be 
re-scaled from huge industrial farms to moderate-sized 
units. 

The same reasoning applies to a rational development of 
energy resources. The Industrial Revolution increased the 
*quantity* of energy used by man. Although it is certainly 
true that pre-industrial societies relied primarily on animal 
power and human muscles, complex energy patterns developed in many regions of Europe, involving a subtle integration of resources such as wind and water power, and a 
variety of fuels (wood, peat, coal, vegetable starches and 
animal fats). 

The Industrial Revolution overwhelmed and largely destroyed these regional energy patterns, replacing them first 
by a single energy system (coal) and later by a dual system 
(coal and petroleum). Regions disappeared as models of 
integrated energy patterns—indeed, the very concept of *integration through diversity* was obliterated. As I indicated 
earlier, many regions became predominantly mining areas, 
devoted to the extraction of a single resource, while others 
were turned into immense industrial areas, often devoted 
to the production of a few commodities. We need not 
review the role this breakdown in true regionalism has 
played in producing air and water pollution, the damage it 
has inflicted on large areas of the countryside, and the 
prospect we face in the depletion of our precious hydrocarbon fuels. 

We can, of course, turn to nuclear fuels, but it is chilling 
to think of the lethal radioactive wastes that would require 
disposal if power reactors were our sole energy source. 
Eventually, an energy system based on radioactive materials would lead to the widespread contamination of the 
environment—at first in a subtle form, but later on a massive and palpably destructive scale. Or we could apply ecological principles to the solution of our energy problems. 
We could try to re-establish earlier regional energy patterns, using a combined system of energy provided by 
wind, water and solar power. We would be aided by devices more sophisticated than any known in the past. 

Solar devices, wind turbines and hydro-electric resources, taken singly, do not provide a solution for our 
energy problems and the ecological disruption created by 
conventional fuels. Pieced together as a *mosaic*, as an 
organic energy pattern developed from the potentialities of 
a region, they could amply meet the needs of a decentralized society. In sunny latitudes, we could rely more 
heavily on solar energy than on combustible fuels. In areas 
marked by atmospheric turbulence, we could rely more 
heavily on wind devices; and in suitable coastal areas or 
inland regions with a good network of rivers, the greater 
part of our energy would come from hydro-electric installations. In all cases, we would use a mosaic of non-combustible, combustible, and nuclear fuels. The point I wish to 
make is that by diversifying our use of energy resources, 
by organizing them into an ecologically balanced pattern, 
we could combine wind, solar and water power in a given 
region to meet the industrial and domestic needs of a given 
community with only a minimal use of harmful fuels. And, 
eventually, we might sophisticate our non-combustion 
energy devices to a point where all harmful sources of 
energy could be eliminated. 

As in the case of agriculture, however, the application of 
ecological principles to energy resources presupposes a far-reaching decentralization of society and a truly regional 
concept of social organization. To maintain a large city 
requires immense quantities of coal and petroleum. By 
contrast, solar, wind and tidal energy reach us mainly in 
small packets; except for spectacular tidal dams, the new 
devices seldom provide more than a few thousand kilowatt-hours of electricity. It is difficult to believe that we 
will ever be able to design solar collectors that can furnish 
us with the immense blocks of electric power produced by 
a giant steam plant; it is equally difficult to conceive of a 
battery of wind turbines that will provide us with enough 
electricity to illuminate Manhattan Island. If homes and 
factories are heavily concentrated, devices for using clean 
sources of energy will probably remain mere playthings; 
but if urban communities are reduced in size and widely 
dispersed over the land, there is no reason why these devices cannot be combined to provide us with all the amenities of an industrialized civilization. To use solar, wind and 
tidal power effectively, the megalopolis must be decentralized. A new type of community, carefully tailored to 
the characteristics and resources of a region, must replace 
the sprawling urban belts that are emerging today. 

To be sure, an objective case for decentralization does 
not end with a discussion of agriculture and the problems 
created by combustible energy resources. The validity of 
the decentralist case can be demonstrated for nearly all the 
“logistical” problems of our time. Let me cite an example 
from the problematical area of transportation. A great deal 
has been written about the harmful effects of gasoline-driven motor vehicles—their wastefulness, their role in urban air pollution, the noise they contribute to the city 
environment, the enormous death toll they claim annually 
in the large cities of the world and on highways. In a 
highly urbanized civilization it would be useless to replace 
these noxious vehicles by clean, efficient, virtually noiseless, and certainly safer, battery-powered vehicles. The best 
of our electric cars must be recharged about every hundred 
miles—a feature which limits their usefulness for transportation in large cities. In a small, decentralized community, 
however, it would be feasible to use these electric vehicles 
for urban or regional transportation and establish monorail 
networks for long-distance transportation. 

It is fairly well known that gasoline-powered vehicles 
contribute enormously to urban air pollution, and there is 
a strong sentiment to “engineer” the more noxious features of the automobile into oblivion. Our age characteristically tries to solve all its irrationalities with a gimmick—afterburners for toxic gasoline fumes, antibiotics for ill 
health, tranquilizers for psychic disturbances. But the 
problem of urban air pollution is too intractable for gimmicks; perhaps it is more intractable than we care to believe. Basically, air pollution is caused by high population 
densities—by an excessive concentration of people in a 
small area. Millions of people, densely concentrated in a 
large city, necessarily produce serious local air pollution 
merely by their day-to-day activities. They must burn fuels 
for domestic and industrial reasons; they must construct or 
tear down buildings (the aerial debris produced by these 
activities is a major source of urban air pollution); they 
must dispose of immense quantities of rubbish; they must 
travel on roads with rubber tires (the particles produced by 
the erosion of tires and roadway materials add significantly 
to air pollution). Whatever pollution-control devices we 
add to automobiles and power plants, the improvements 
these devices will produce in the quality of urban air will 
be more than canceled out by future megalopolitan 
growth. 

There is more to anarchism than decentralized communities. If I have examined this possibility in some detail, it 
has been to demonstrate that an anarchist society, far from 
being a remote ideal, has become a precondition for the 
practice of ecological principles. To sum up the critical 
message of ecology: if we diminish variety in the natural 
world, we debase its unity and wholeness; we destroy the 
forces making for natural harmony and for a lasting equilibrium; and, what is even more significant, we introduce an 
absolute retrogression in the development of the natural 
world which may eventually render the environment unfit 
for advanced forms of life. To sum up the reconstructive 
message of ecology: if we wish to advance the unity and 
stability of the natural world, if we wish to harmonize it, 
we must conserve and promote variety. To be sure, mere 
variety for its own sake is a vacuous goal. In nature, variety 
emerges spontaneously. The capacities of a new species are 
tested by the rigors of climate, by its ability to deal with 
predators and by its capacity to establish and enlarge its 
niche. <em>Yet the species that succeeds in enlarging its niche 
in the environment also enlarges the ecological situation as 
a whole.</em> To borrow E. A. Gutkind’s phrase, it “expands 
the environment,”{4} both for itself and for the species 
with which it enters into a balanced relationship. 

How do these concepts apply to social theory? To many 
readers, I suppose, it should suffice to say that, inasmuch 
as man is part of nature, an expanding natural environment 
enlarges the basis for social development. But the answer 
to the question goes much deeper than many ecologists 
and libertarians suspect. Again, allow me to return to the 
ecological principle of wholeness and balance as a product 
of diversity. Keeping this principle in mind, the first step 
towards an answer is provided by a passage in Herbert 
Read’s “The Philosophy of Anarchism.” In presenting his 
“measure of progress,” Read observes: “Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society. If 
the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life will be 
limited, dull, and mechanical. If the individual is a unit on 
his own, with space and potentiality for separate action, 
then he may be more subject to accident or chance, but at 
least he can expand and express himself. He can develop—develop in the only real meaning of the word—develop in 
consciousness of strength, vitality, and joy.”

Read’s thought, unfortunately, is not fully developed, 
but it provides an interesting point of departure. What first 
strikes us is that both the ecologist and the anarchist place 
a strong emphasis on spontaneity. The ecologist, insofar as 
he is more than a technician, tends to reject the notion of 
“power over nature.” He speaks, instead, of “steering” his 
way through an ecological situation, of *managing* rather 
than *recreating* an ecosystem. The anarchist, in turn, 
speaks in terms of social spontaneity, of releasing the 
potentialities of society and humanity, of giving free and 
unfettered rein to the creativity of people. Both, in their 
own way, regard authority as inhibitory, as a weight limiting the creative potential of a natural and social situation. 
Their object is not to *rule* a domain, but to *release* it. They 
regard insight, reason and knowledge as means for fulfilling 
the potentialities of a situation, as facilitating the working 
out of the logic of a situation, not as replacing its potentialities with preconceived notions or distorting their development with dogmas. 

Turning to Read’s words, what strikes us is that both the 
ecologist and the anarchist view differentiation as a measure of progress. The ecologist uses the term “biotic pyramid” in speaking of biological advances; the anarchist, the 
word “individuation” to denote social advances. If we go 
beyond Read we will observe that, to both the ecologist 
and the anarchist, an ever-increasing unity is achieved by 
growing differentiation. <em>An expanding whole is created by 
the diversification and enrichment of its parts.</em>

Just as the ecologist seeks to expand the range of an 
ecosystem and promote a free interplay between species, 
so the anarchist seeks to expand the range of social experience and remove all fetters to its development. Anarchism 
is not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society which exposes man to the stimuli provided by both 
agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and mental 
activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal solidarity and individual development, 
to regional uniqueness and worldwide brotherhood, to 
spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil 
and the promotion of craftsmanship. In our schizoid society, these goals are regarded as mutually exclusive, indeed 
as sharply opposed. They appear as dualities because of the 
very logistics of present-day society—the separation of 
town and country, the specialization of labor, the atomization of man—and it would be preposterous to believe that 
these dualities could be resolved without a general idea of 
the *physical* structure of an anarchist society. We can gain 
some idea of what such a society would be like by reading 
William Morris’s *News From Nowhere* and the writings of 
Peter Kropotkin. But these works provide us with mere 
glimpses. They do not take into account the post-World 
War II developments of technology and the contributions 
made by the development of ecology. This is not the place 
to embark on “utopian writing,” but certain guidelines can 
be presented even in a general discussion. And in presenting these guidelines, I am eager to emphasize not only the 
more obvious ecological premises that support them, but 
also the humanistic ones. 

An anarchist society should be a decentralized society, 
not only to establish a lasting basis for the harmonization 
of man and nature, <em>but also to add new dimensions to the 
harmonization of man and man</em>. The Greeks, we are often 
reminded, would have been horrified by a city whose size 
and population precluded a face-to-face, often familiar, 
relationship between citizens. There is plainly a need to 
reduce the dimensions of the human community—partly to 
solve our pollution and transportation problems, partly 
also to create *real* communities. In a sense, we must 
*humanize* humanity. Electronic devices such as telephones, 
telegraphs, radios and television receivers should be used 
as little as possible to mediate the relations between 
people. In making collective decisions—the ancient Athenian ecclesia was, in some ways, a model for making social 
decisions—all members of the community should have an 
opportunity to acquire in full the measure of anyone who 
addresses the assembly. They should be in a position to 
absorb his attitudes, study his expressions, and weigh his 
motives as well as his ideas in a direct personal encounter 
and through face-to-face discussion. 

Our small communities should be economically balanced and well rounded, partly so that they can make full 
use of local raw materials and energy resources, partly also 
to enlarge the agricultural and industrial stimuli to which 
individuals are exposed. The member of a community who 
has a predilection for engineering, for instance, should be 
encouraged to steep his hands in humus; the man of ideas 
should be encouraged to employ his musculature; the “inborn” farmer should gain a familiarity with the workings 
of a rolling mill. To separate the engineer from the soil, the 
thinker from the spade, and the farmer from the industrial 
plant promotes a degree of vocational overspecialization 
that leads to a dangerous measure of social control by 
specialists. What is equally important, professional and vocational specialization prevents society from achieving a 
vital goal: the humanization of nature by the technician 
and the naturalization of society by the biologist. 

I submit that an anarchist community would approximate a clearly definable ecosystem; it would be diversified, 
balanced and harmonious. It is arguable whether such an 
ecosystem would acquire the configuration of an urban 
entity with a distinct center, such as we find in the Greek 
*polis* or the medieval commune, or whether, as Gutkind 
proposes, society would consist of widely dispersed communities without a distinct center. I n any case, the ecological scale for any of these communities would be determined by the smallest ecosystem capable of supporting a 
population of moderate size. 

A relatively self-sufficient community, visibly dependent on its environment for the means of life, would gain a 
new respect for the organic interrelationships that sustain 
it. In the long run, the attempt to approximate self-sufficiency would, I think, prove more efficient than the 
exaggerated national division of labor that prevails today. 
Although there would doubtless be many duplications of 
small industrial facilities from community to community, 
the familiarity of each group with its local environment 
and its ecological roots would make for a more intelligent 
and more loving use of its environment. I submit that, far 
from producing provincialism, relative self-sufficiency 
would create a new matrix for individual and communal 
development—a oneness with the surroundings that would 
vitalize the community. 

The rotation of civic, vocational and professional responsibilities would stimulate the senses in the being of the 
individual, creating and rounding out new dimensions in 
self-development. In a complete society we could hope to 
create complete men; in a rounded society, rounded men. 
In the Western world, the Athenians, for all their shortcomings and limitations, were the first to give us a notion 
of this completeness. “The *polis* was made for the amateur,” H. D. F. Kitto tells us. “Its ideal was that every 
citizen (more or less, according as the *polis* was democratic 
or oligarchic) should play his part in all of its many activities-an ideal that is recognizably descended from the generous Homeric conception of *arete* as an all-round excellence and an all-round activity. It implies a respect for the 
wholeness or the oneness of life, and a consequent dislike 
of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency-or 
rather a much higher ideal of efficiency; and efficiency 
which exists not in one department of life, but in life 
itself.”{5} An anarchist society, although it would surely 
aspire to more, could hardly hope to achieve less than this 
state of mind. 

If the ecological community is ever achieved in practice, 
social life will yield a sensitive development of human and 
natural diversity, falling together into a well balanced, harmonious whole. Ranging from community through region 
to entire continents, we will see a colorful differentiation 
of human groups and ecosystems, each developing its 
unique potentialities and exposing members of the community to a wide spectrum of economic, cultural and behavioral stimuli. Falling within our purview will be an exciting, often dramatic, variety of communal forms—here 
marked by architectural and industrial adaptations to 
semi-arid ecosystems, there to grasslands, elsewhere by 
adaptation to forested areas. We will witness a creative 
interplay between individual and group, community and 
environment, humanity and nature. The cast of mind that 
today organizes differences among humans and other life-forms along hierarchical lines, defining the external in 
terms of its “superiority” or “inferiority,” will give way to 
an outlook that deals with diversity in an ecological manner. Differences among people will be respected, indeed 
fostered, as elements that enrich the unity of experience 
and phenomena. The traditional relationship which pits 
subject against object will be altered qualitatively; the “external,” the “different,” the “other” will be conceived of 
as individual parts of a whole all the richer because of its 
complexity. This sense of unity will reflect the harmonization of interests between individuals and between 
society and nature. Freed from an oppressive routine, from 
paralyzing repressions and insecurities, from the burdens 
of toil and false needs, from the trammels of authority and 
irrational compulsion, individuals will finally, for the first 
time in history, be in a position to realize their potentialities as members of the human community and the 
natural world. 

New York <br>
February 1965 


{1} Abraham H. Maslow<em>, Toward a Psychology of Being</em> (Van Nostrand; New York, 1962), p. viii.

{2} Quoted in Angus M. Woodbury, <em>Principles of General Ecology</em> (Blakiston; New York, 1954), p. 4.

{3} Robert L. Rudd, “Pesticides: The <em>Real</em> Peril,” <em>The Nation,</em> vol. 189 (1959), p. 401.

{4} E. A. Gutkind<em>, The Twilight of the Cities</em> (Free Press; Glencoe, N.Y., 1962), pp. 55–144.

{5} H. D. F. Kitto<em>, The Greeks</em> (Aldine; Chicago, 1951), p. 16.