This Earth Day arrives at a turning point in the history of our planet and our species, in which we face existential threats including the pandemic which has made personal and undeniable the immediacy of the crisis, the melting of glaciers, the death of coral reefs and kelp forests, the collapse of the earth’s crust and the ground beneath our feet as the water vanishes and becomes more valuable than oil, firestorms and floods which devour cities, the extinction of species and one day of our own.
We may have already passed the point of no return, as our lives are fed into the machine of our commodification and destruction as raw fuel for the wealth and power of others.
I find it interesting that Earth Day is celebrated on the date of the first night of the traditional Nine Nights of the Wild Hunt of pre-Christian Europe, in which the wicked mighty are brought a Reckoning by chthonic forces which represent the oppressed underclass, a tradition most useful to we Antifa, revolutionaries and allies of liberation struggle, and Living Autonomous Zones.
We are dying, after all, with the earth we have poisoned as a consequence of extractive capitalism and our addiction to power conferred by control of oil as a strategic resource, for the benefit of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege who have enslaved and doomed us all. So, each year we perform nine nights of purging our destroyers from among us and bringing Reckonings to systems of unequal power and oppression, and the restoration of balance in an amok time in which nothing is Forbidden.
Happy monkeywrenching, friends.
If we the people of earth can find the political will to take action for our survival, what must be done?
Anyone who has studied the history of social movements and revolutions understands implicitly the dangers of ideological fracture; it caused the collapse of the Industrial Workers of the World early labor movement and the Socialist Party in America over the issue of peace during World War One, divided the Democratic Socialists in Germany and removed them as an oppositional force to the rise of Hitler, divided the civil rights movement and marginalized dissent, fragmented the Students For a Democratic Society and prolonged the Vietnam War, and during the seventies and eighties threatened to sabotage the emergent ecological movement.
The ideology and praxis of ecology was at this time polarizing as Deep Ecology, utopians who wanted to forge or reclaim a universal religion of all living beings as equals and return to a mythic Golden Age as a preindustrial society living in harmony with nature, and Social Ecology, scientific rather than religious in orientation, focused on capital and social hierarchy as causes of ecological disaster and rooted in Marxist dialectical theory. Proposals such as the Green New Deal are developments of Social Ecology, and of the historical Socialist Left intellectual tradition which comes to us through Murray Bookchin.
Some of these differences are those of strategy; education and legislation versus direct action and mass protest. Others are monsters born of our class differences, membership in the intelligentsia which privileges ideology or in labor which directs us toward action.
For myself, I coined the slogan Educate Systemic Change, Legislate Structural Change, because one cannot legislate values nor bring change to institutions by moral suasion alone; each requires its own solution. As to the street theatre and spectacle of mass and direct action, so critical to the performance of identity, to solidarity of action and to organizing, to consciousness raising and motivation, to be effective it must be performed as part of a strategy to shape opinion and generate a base for mass action, as motive forces for political and social change.
Both Social and Deep Ecology can provide informing, motivating, and shaping forces for revolutionary struggle and the reimagination and transformation of our civilization and of humankind. Along with the tactics of mass and direct action for institutional and structural change through legislation, the strategies of systemic change through education can bring a revisioning of our society.
We need both kinds of change, structural and systemic, harnessed together as a team if we are to solve both the how and the why of restoring the balance between nature and humankind.
Because the flaws of our humanity which have unleashed a war on nature which now threatens us with extinction has two parts; the limitless greed of extractive capitalism is the instrument of ecological destruction, and its origin is the human fear of nature, to which we react with a need to dominate and control a universe which is fundamentally irrational and uncontrollable.
We will restore our balance and harmony with nature only if and when we embrace our fear of the wildness of nature, and the wildness of ourselves.
As Murray Bookchin, anarchist philosopher and Social Ecology theorist teaches us in his 1989 debate with Dave Foreman, founder and principal figure of Earth First and spokesman of the Deep Ecology movement; “The ultimate moral appeal of Earth First! is that it urges us to safeguard the natural world from our ecologically destructive societies, that is, in some sense, from ourselves. But, I have to ask, who is this “us” from which the living world has to be protected? This, too, is an important question. Is it “humanity?” Is it the human “species” per se? Is it people, as such? Or is it our particular society, our particular civilization, with its hierarchical social relations which pit men against women, privileged whites against people of color, elites against masses, employers against workers, the First World against the Third World, and, ultimately, a cancerlike, “grow or die” industrial capitalist economic system against the natural world and other life-forms? Is this not the social root of the popular belief that nature is a mere object of social domination, valuable only as a “resource?”
All too often we are told by liberal environmentalists, and not a few Deep Ecologists, that it is “we” as a species or, at least, “we” as an amalgam of “anthropocentric” individuals that are responsible for the breakdown of the web of life. I remember an “environmental” presentation staged by the Museum of Natural History in New York during the 1970s in which the public was exposed to a long series of exhibits, each depicting examples of pollution and ecological disruption. The exhibit which closed the presentation carried a startling sign, “The Most Dangerous Animal on Earth.” It consisted simply of a huge mirror which reflected back the person who stood in front of it. I remember a black child standing in front of that mirror while a white school teacher tried to explain the message which this arrogant exhibit tried to convey. Mind you, there was no exhibit of corporate boards of directors planning to deforest a mountainside or of government officials acting in collusion with them.
One of the problems with this asocial, “species-centered” way of thinking, of course, is that it blames the victim. Let’s face it, when you say a black kid in Harlem is as much to blame for the ecological crisis as the President of Exxon, you are letting one off the hook and slandering the other. Such talk by environmentalists makes grassroots coalition-building next to impossible. Oppressed people know that humanity is hierarchically organized around complicated divisions that are ignored only at their peril. Black people know this well when they confront whites. The poor know this well when they confront the wealthy. The Third World knows it well when it confronts the First World. Women know it well when they confront patriarchal males. The radical ecology movement needs to know it too.
All this loose talk of “we” masks the reality of social power and social institutions. It masks the fact that the social forces that are tearing down the planet are the same social forces which threaten to degrade women, people of color, workers, and ordinary citizens. It masks the fact that there is a historical connection between the way people deal with each other as social beings and the way they treat the rest of nature. It masks the fact that our ecological problems are fundamentally social problems requiring fundamental social change. That is what I mean by Social Ecology. It makes a big difference in how societies relate to the natural world whether people live in cooperative, non-hierarchical, and decentralized communities or in hierarchical, class-ridden, and authoritarian mass societies. Similarly, the ecological impact of human reason, science, and technology depends enormously on the type of society in which these forces are shaped and employed.
Perhaps the biggest question that all wings of the radical ecology movement must satisfactorily answer is just what do we mean by “nature.” If we are committed to defending nature, it is important to clearly understand what we mean by this. Is nature, the real world, essentially the remnants of the Earth’s prehuman and pristine biosphere that has now been vastly reduced and poisoned by the “alien” presence of the human species? Is nature what we see when we look out on an unpeopled vista from a mountain? Is it a cosmic arrangement of beings frozen in a moment of eternity to be abjectly revered, adored, and untouched by human intervention? Or is nature much broader in meaning? Is nature an evolutionary process which is cumulative and which includes human beings?
The ecology movement will get nowhere unless it understands that the human species is no less a product of natural evolution than blue-green algae, whales, and bears. To conceptually separate human beings and society from nature by viewing humanity as an inherently unnatural force in the world leads, philosophically, either to an anti-nature “anthropocentrism” or a misanthropic aversion to the human species. Let’s face it, such misanthropy does surface within certain ecological circles. Even Arne Naess admits that many deep ecologists “talk as if they look upon humans as intruders in wonderful nature.”
We are part of nature, a product of a long evolutionary journey. To some degree, we carry the ancient oceans in our blood. To a very large degree we go through a kind of biological evolution as fetuses. It is not alien to natural evolution that a species called human beings has emerged over billions of years which is capable of thinking in sophisticated ways. Our brains and nervous systems did not suddenly spring into existence without long antecedents in natural history. That which we most prize as integral to our humanity — our extraordinary capacity to think on complex conceptual levels — can be traced back to the nerve network of primitive invertebrates, the ganglia of a mollusk, the spinal cord of a fish, the brain of an amphibian, and the cerebral cortex of a primate.
We need to understand that the human species has evolved as a remarkably creative and social life-form that is organized to create a place for itself in the natural world, not only to adapt to the rest of nature. The human species, its different societies, and its enormous powers to alter the environment were not invented by a group of ideologues called “humanists” who decided that nature was “made” to serve humanity and its needs. Humanity’s distinct powers have emerged out of eons of evolutionary development and out of centuries of cultural development. These remarkable powers present us, however, with an enormous moral responsibility. We can contribute to the diversity, fecundity, and richness of the natural world — what I call “first nature” — more consciously, perhaps, than any other animal. Or, our societies — “second nature” — can exploit the whole web of life and tear down the planet in a rapacious, cancerous manner.
The future that awaits the world of life ultimately depends upon what kind of society or “second nature” we create. This probably affects, more than any other single factor, how we interact with and intervene in biological or “first nature.” And make no mistake about it, the future of “first nature,” the primary concern of conservationists, is dependent on the results of this interaction. The central problem we face today is that the social evolution of “second nature” has taken a wrong turn. Society is poisoned. It has been poisoned for thousands of years, from before the Bronze Age. It has been warped by rule by elders, by patriarchy, by warriors, by hierarchies of all sorts which have led now to the current situation of a world threatened by competitive, nuclear-armed, nation-states and a phenomenally destructive corporate capitalist system in the West and an equally ecologically destructive, though now crumbling, bureaucratic state capitalist system in the East.
We need to create an ecologically oriented society out of the present anti-ecological one. If we can change the direction of our civilization’s social evolution, human beings can assist in the creation of a truly “free nature,” where all of our human traits — intellectual, communicative, and social — are placed at the service of natural evolution to consciously increase biotic diversity, diminish suffering, foster the further evolution of new and ecologically valuable life-forms, and reduce the impact of disastrous accidents or the harsh effects of harmful change. Our species, gifted by the creativity of natural evolution itself, could play the role of nature rendered self-conscious.”
“I also want to say that I think that many of the political differences between Dave and myself are complementary. Dave and Earth First! work on preserving the wilderness; I and others are trying to create a new grassroots municipal politics, a new cooperative economics, a new pattern of science and technology to go along with their direct action, demonstrations, rallies, and protests to protect wilderness. We need to learn that we are different aspects of a single movement. We also need to try to amicably deal with those principled political differences that do exist between us. There are probably still some major problems between us that have to be explored. Yet, even if we can’t straighten them all out, we must at least learn how to better work together on what we can agree on. Our future depends on it.”
So for the Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology ideological fracture and the dangers of division and fragmentation of power to bring change to systems of oppression which are driving us to extinction, and the dialectics of capitalism as fear of the wildness of nature and the wildness of ourselves.
There is a third ideology which synthesizes Social and Deep Ecology in dialectical process, the Holistic philosophy of Gregory Bateson which I encountered in my twenties.
Years before as a high school senior I began to see in the events and natural history of our material environment allegories and metaphors of human being and processes in which we are embedded from reading Annie Dillard’s luminous Pilgrim at Tinker Creek; already a survivalist and enthusiast of wilderness adventures, her book inspired me to spend the summer after high school and before university trekking across the Olympic Peninsula and exploring the coastal islands. Much later Basho’s poetry similarly motivated me to wander along his route of travel in The Narrow Road to the North to see where they were written; I have traveled in many places and lived with many peoples very different from myself, whose stories are beyond the scope of this essay and for another time, but in all of them there was a literary voice which became for me the voice of the wild.
What I have learned from all of this is that it is necessary to develop a personal relationship with nature, both our own and that of the world, of respect for our limits, love for our interdependence, and responsibility for the consequences of our actions.
As to wildness, of which Gary Snyder writes in The Practice of the Wild, Earth Day presents us with an opportunity to renew our commitments to our partnerships with our world and each other, and seek out new unknowns and possibilities of becoming human in harmony with nature through ecstatic trance and poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of ourselves and the choices we make about how to be human together.
And don’t forget to run amok and be ungovernable, make mischief for tyrants and those who would enslave us, sabotage the machine of our falsification, commodification, and dehumanization, question, expose, mock, disbelieve, disobey, and delegitimize authority, violate normalities and transgress boundaries of the Forbidden, seize power as Living Autonomous Zones and dance beyond all laws and all limits in the joy of total freedom, of refusal to submit to the force and control of Authority and in defiance of the terror of our nothingness, and stand in solidarity with all those who do the same regardless of how different they and their forms of liberation struggle may be.
Let us bring the Wildness.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe
The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99208.The_Monkey_Wrench_Gang
The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1836.The_Practice_of_the_Wild
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12527.Pilgrim_at_Tinker_Creek
Bashō’s Haiku: Selected Poems, David Landis Barnhill
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/175628.Bash_s_Haiku
Planet Earth II: Official Extended Trailer | BBC Earth
Blue Planet II Official Trailer 2 | BBC Earth
News for Earth Day
Biden marks Earth Day with $7bn ‘solar for all’ investment amid week of climate action
Copernicus online portal offers terrifying view of climate emergency
‘Children won’t be able to survive’: inter-American court to hear from climate victims
Ecology and the Green New Deal, a reading list
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy,
by Murray Bookchin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/312960.The_Ecology_of_Freedom
On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal, by Naomi Klein
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44055880-on-fire
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21913812-this-changes-everything
The Case for the Green New Deal, by Ann Pettifor
The Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet, by Noam Chomsky, Robert Pollin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53455018-the-climate-crisis-and-the-global-green-new-deal
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17910054-the-sixth-extinction
The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by Amitav Ghosh
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29362082-the-great-derangement
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber, David Wengrow
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything
Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth First! and the Environmental Movement,
by Susan Zakin
A Green History of the World: The Environment & the Collapse of Great Civilizations, by Clive Ponting
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90939.A_Green_History_of_the_World
The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, by David W. Orr
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/139049.The_Nature_of_Design
Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a time of Planetary Change, by Kathleen Dean Moore
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25786424-great-tide-rising
The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, by Adam Rome
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17934565-the-genius-of-earth-day
Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope, Tim Flannery
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9477538-here-on-earth
A Reading List on Batesonian Holism
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, by Gregory Bateson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/277145.Mind_and_Nature
Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, by Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson (Foreword by)
A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind, by Gregory Bateson
The Reenchantment of the World, by Morris Berman
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/486977.The_Reenchantment_of_the_World
Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through other patterns, by Nora Bateson
Understanding Gregory Bateson: Mind, Beauty, and the Sacred Earth, by Noel G. Charlton
Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness, by Anthony Chaney
Anarchy, a reading list
On Anarchism, by Noam Chomsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22558046-on-anarchism
We Do Not Fear Anarchy—We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement, by Robert Graham
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23282125-we-do-not-fear-anarchy-we-invoke-it
Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism
by Michael Schmidt (Goodreads Author), Lucien Van Der Walt
Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism, by Michael Schmidt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16057170-cartography-of-revolutionary-anarchism
Anarchism, by Daniel Guérin, Noam Chomsky (Introduction)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51624.Anarchism
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, by Peter H. Marshall
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/880355.Demanding_the_Impossible
Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, by Kristin Ross
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22716641-communal-luxury
On Anarchism, by Mikhail Bakunin, Sam Dolgoff (Editor/Translator)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203890.On_Anarchism
The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader
by Errico Malatesta (Editor), Paul Sharkey (Translation), Davide Turcato (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17675098-the-method-of-freedom
Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology
by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Iain Mckay (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9482965-property-is-theft
Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology
by Pyotr Kropotkin, Iain Mckay (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17675240-direct-struggle-against-capital
Mutual Aid, by Pyotr Kropotkin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51306.Mutual_Aid
An Anarchist FAQ, Vol. 1, by Iain Mckay
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2626552-an-anarchist-faq-vol-1
An Anarchist FAQ: Volume 2, by Iain Mckay (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13592232-an-anarchist-faq
The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936, by Murray Bookchin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/312964.The_Spanish_Anarchists
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy
by Murray Bookchin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/312960.The_Ecology_of_Freedom
Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization Series, by Abdullah Öcalan
https://www.goodreads.com/series/246784-manifesto-of-the-democratic-civilization
Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/978934.Possibilities
Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination,
by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13048162-revolutions-in-reverse
The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330433-the-democracy-project
Direct Action: An Ethnography, by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2543048.Direct_Action
Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination,
by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13048162-revolutions-in-reverse
Anarchism and Its Aspirations, by Cindy Milstein
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6919727-anarchism-and-its-aspirations
Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939), by Robert Graham (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168902.Anarchism
The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977) (Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume Two), by Robert Graham (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6548316-the-emergence-of-the-new-anarchism-1939-1977
Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 3: The New Anarchism (1974-2012), by Robert Graham (Editor)
Torch of Liberty 
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