The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism

Simon Dalby is a research associate at the Centre for International
Studies at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Since well before Rachael Carson’s early 1960s warnings about
pesticides, Bookchin’s thoughtful critiques of environmental politics
have contributed a unique dimension to discussions of society and
ecology. In this collection of four essays he concentrates on the
extraordinarily rich and diverse philosophical and theoretical
underpinnings of his views on “social ecology.”

Bookchin is concerned with the intellectual poverty of much
contemporary reasoning about the environmental crisis and the politics
of responding to the destruction of nature. Criticizing both the
uncritical acceptance of the dominant common-sense assumptions of
Western identity philosophy and the hypothetico-deductive logics of
practical reasoning when ecological matters are considered, he argues
instead for understanding ecology in terms of the unfolding dialectical
development of increased complexity, freedom, and diversity. This
approach places humanity, nature made self-conscious, or “second
nature” as a logical, albeit currently aberrant, outcome of
evolution’s tendency to increased complexity. The social dimension of
the current ecological crisis connects the domination of human over
human to the current domination of “first nature” by the capitalist
economic and political system.

The unique thrust of Bookchin’s social ecology points to the
political and social sources of the current crisis. By refusing both the
Marxist (and Frankfurt school) and the conventional economic accounts of
a “stingy” nature that humanity has to dominate to gain some measure
of freedom, social ecology instead focuses on the ways patriarchial and
military domination have led to exploitative modes of economy. This in
turn suggests that a political solution must be applied to the
ecological crisis: according to Bookchin, what is required are the
critique and transcendence of domination, the re-formation of community,
and the emergence of ecologically sensitive technics.

This is not a book for the politically or intellectually fainthearted.
Bookchin’s arguments draw on contemporary biological ideas, Western
political theory, political debates in the environmental movement, and
the dialectics of Hegel. Rarely an easy read, and suffering slightly
from being a collection of essays rather than a single argument, this
book is a useful corrective to simplistic thinking about the human
predicament. Readers who make the effort to grasp the ideas in
Bookchin’s complex prose will come away intellectually stimulated and,
whether or not they agree with his ideas, with new insight into the
contemporary ecological crisis.