Recovering Bookchin

Social ecologist Murray Bookchin dedicated his life to an ecological movement that is feminist, anticapitalist, and people-centered. Recovering Bookchin keeps these ideas alive.

Starting in the early 1960s, Murray Bookchin (1921-2006) helped shape a political and ethical response to the emerging ecological crisis. He called his approach "social ecology" and argued that our ecological crisis was also a political one. In the early 1980s, as more voices joined the chorus to defend the earth, there was an increasing movement that punched down, blaming overpopulation and immigration for our troubles. As Bookchin pushed back against this racist and patriarchal reasoning, be became a pariah. As he continued to publish and theorize about an ecological and anticapitalist anarchist socialism, Bookchin faced ongoing backlash into the 1990s. The spirited debates, rooted in ideas, gave way to ad hominem attacks.

In Recovering Bookchin, Andy Price dives into these ugly attacks that obscured Bookchin's ideas and sought to push them out of the public square by devising a crude caricature of him as a hopeless sectarian. In doing so, Price finds a coherent and consistent program as laid out by Bookchin, one that still inspires even as his critics' ideas have faded.

This engaging intellectual biography inspires us in an age of government and corporate inaction and rising ecofascism. An ecological movement that's feminist, anticapitalist, and people-centered must be rebuilt. By recovering Bookchin, we'll get a head start.