In antiquity and in Middle Ages, nature was a
living and direct manifestation of God's omnipotence, a source of
awe and reverence for people. This is the way things were. But the
coming of the era of the ideology of humanism, free of all
manifestations of religion, developed an entirely new relationship
to nature. Almost everything that surrounds us now is a product of
human activity in our time.
Hardly anyone today needs to be told that the
biosphere of this planet is endangered, and that its ability to
support life, including human life, can no longer be taken for
granted. Yet as recently as thirty-five years ago, the concept of
ecology was little known outside the biological sciences. In the
late 1950s and early 1960s, when social theorist Murray Bookchin
first began to develop the ideas that became social ecology, few
people were aware that an environmental crisis was looming. In the
decades since, in numerous books and articles and through a wide
range of political activities, Bookchin has articulated social
ecology into a distinctive set of ideas for radical social
transformation.
In contrast to viewpoints that offer strictly
biological, religious, or technological explanations, social
ecology emphasizes that the ecological crisis has its origins in
social relations--in the way in which human beings have been
organized into various economic and political institutions over the
course of history. In this account, the very idea of dominating the
natural world (first nature) initially emerged with the social
domination of human by human, that is, into hierarchies and
exploitative classes. As the anthropological and historical records
show, such domination--according to age, then gender, ethnicity,
and race, as well as distinct economic classes--preceded and gave
rise to the idea of dominating the biosphere. Social ecology adds
that the mastery of some human social groups by others in early
societies made it possible for people even to conceive of mastering
the natural world in the intersts of social and finally class
elites. Social ecology is therefore opposed to all forms of
hierarchy and domination, as well as to class exploitation and
oppression.
The effort by some sections of the ecology
movement to prioritize a pantheistic, often mystical
"eco-spirituality" over social analysis raises serious questions
about their ability to come to grips with reality. At a time when a
blind social mechanism, the market, is turning soil into sand,
covering fertile land with concrete, poisoning air and water, and
producing sweeping climatic and atmospheric changes, we cannot
ignore the impact that hierarchical and class society has on the
natural world. Economic growth, gender oppressions, and ethnic
domination--not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic
interests--are much more capable of shaping the future of the
natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self-
regeneration.
Some ecological outlooks blame human beings
generically for the ecological crisis, as if the species itself was
tainted with some irreversible defect. By contrast, social ecology,
as an expressly ecological humanism, sees human beings as the most
differentiated and complex life-forms on the planet, without which
neither consciousness nor freedom would exist. Potentially, at
least, human beings are the only possible source of an ethics on
this planet, especially an ethics that calls for the preservation
of the biosphere.
The crucial question we face today -- not only
for ourselves as human beings but for the entire biosphere -- is
how social evolution will proceed and in what direction it will go.
To deal with this question primarily as a matter of spiritual
renewal, desirable as that may be. is not only evasive but socially
disarming. Social evolution took a wrong turn ages ago when it
shifted from egalitarian institutions and relations to hierarchical
ones. It took an even worse turn a few centuries ago when it
shifted from a relatively cooperative society to a highly
competitive one. If we are to bring society and nature into accord
with each other, we must develop a movement that fulfills the
evolutionary potential of humanity and society, that is to say,
turn the human world into a self- conscious agent of the natural
world and enhance the evolutionary process -- natural and social.
Given an ecological society, our technology can be placed as much
in the service of natural evolution as it can be placed in the
service of a rational social evolution.
Humanity, like all natural creatures, inhabits
specific ecological locations, or “ecosystems.” As each
creature has its own species- specific pattern of ecosystem, so the
human ecosystem is distinct from that of all other creatures, and
expressive of humanity’s own specific “nature”
within the manifold of nature. Marx, often regarded as an
anthropocentric thinker seeing humanity as essentially over nature
and basically distinct from it, was in fact profoundly concerned
about human nature and our organic relation to nature. The
core human-natural relationship for Marx is expressed in the fact
of production, the transformative activity of labour that brings
this about, and the subjective, or imaginative, interiority
necessary for this. In this regard, humans produce their own
ecosystems, and at the same time, define and reflect upon them.
Such is our “nature,” and the way we produce
ecosystemic relations depends upon whether nature is degraded or
restored to integrity.
The formal properties that apply here can be
summed up as follows:
-
ecosystems that tend toward wholeness may be defined as
integral, in which case they flourish and give rise to new
form;
-
ecosystems that fragment or become static and collapse can be
defined as disintegrating.
The former engage a pattern of
differentiation, in which elements of the ecosystem are
distinct but connected; while the latter employ one of
splitting—in which elements lack common being and move
along separate paths—hence disintegrate. Differentiation is a
notion within dialectics: the elements are distinct, even clash,
but remain connected and give rise to new configurations of form.
Splitting, on the other hand, is identitarian; it drives not toward
wholeness but toward totalization, and, within the ceaseless flow
of ecological relations, toward eventual breakdown.