Debbie Bookchin returns for this virtual conversation with professor Todd McGowan, who wrote the afterword to the upcoming rerelease by AK Press of Murray Bookchin's The Philosophy of Social Ecology.

In the essays of The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin compellingly invokes the ideas of mutualism, self-organization, and unity in diversity, in the service of ever expanding freedom. Refreshingly polemical and deeply philosophical, they take issue with technocratic and mechanistic ways of understanding and relating to, and within, nature. More importantly, they develop a solid, historically and politically based ethical foundation for social ecology, the field that Bookchin himself created and that offers us hope in the midst of our climate catastrophe.

Murray Bookchin (1929–2006) was an active voice in ecology, anarchist, and communalist movements for more than fifty years. His groundbreaking essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964), was one of the first to assert that capitalism’s grow-or-die ethos was on a dangerous collision course with the natural world that would include the devastation of the planet by global warming. Bookchin is the author of The Ecology of Freedom, among two dozen other books.

Debbie Bookchin is an investigative journalist and author. She has published in The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, HarperCollins' Best Science Writing and many other venues. She is coauthor of The Virus and the Vaccine (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) and recently co-edited and introduced a new book of essays by her father Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso Books, 2015).

Todd McGowan is a professor of theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Emancipation After Hegel, Universality and Identity Politics, Capitalism and Desire, and other works.