immanence

Damian White has posted an excellent review of Janet Biehl’s book Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin at the Jacobin blog. Bookchin’s legacy has undergone something of a revival of late thanks to the efforts of Kurdish eco-socialist communitarians in Rojava.

As he did in his 2008 book Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal — which remains perhaps the most useful critical assessment of Bookchin’s writings — White frames that legacy within the broader context of environmental and social justice movements and theories. But here he updates it with reference to today’s pressing issues of climate emergency and economic injustice.

White writes:

“Bookchin deserves enormous credit for being one of the first radical voices to insist that the Left must mobilize around climate change. Today we must cut greenhouse emissions by up to 90 percent in perhaps fifty years while ensuring that upwards of 9 billion people have access to a good life.

“The task is gargantuan. The standard liberal technocratic response to this challenge has focused all attention on the importance of decarbonizing our energy supplies. But this isn’t enough.”

He goes on to articulate what’s needed: building “a new, continental-scale, post-carbon energy infrastructure,” “more resilient and robust” communities, “just and sustainable industrial ecologies,” “demilitarization, the democratization of value creation and economic power,” and so on.

“The counterculture vision of a decentralized ecological society “neatly nested” into place [of Bookchin’s influential middle-period writings] will have to give way to a more dynamic vision of postcapitalist democratic urbanscapes and ruralscapes that are constantly adjusting to, and making and remaking, their surrounding social ecologies.

“[…] [T]his will have to involve enrolling many partners at many spatial scales of politics to facilitate social, technological, and ecological transformations. Most critically, the state — where it exists and where it is still relatively open to influence by progressive forces — is going to play a central role in this transition.

“The sensibility will have to be experimental and iterative rather than institutionally dogmatic and inflexible. The human scales of a democratic and ecological urban future are going to be multiple and varied.

“Anything less fails to understand the amount of trouble we are in.”

“Public art; collective experiments in eco-design and technology; attempts to cultivate participatory systems of social, urban, cultural and community innovation; an ecological politics of pleasure can all be scoffed at by purists.

“But it is striking how removed the apocalyptic politics of the contemporary ecological left is from this project. The idea that we might not aspire to simply shrink our ecological footprint but create a better ecological footprint seems to have gone entirely missing.” [emphasis added]

The very idea of creating a “better ecological footprint” implies a critique of the focus on numbers that has become so prominent among environmentalists — from 350 carbon parts per million to 2 degrees temperature rise to all the cap-and-trade and carbon credit schemes being developed around the world.

Not that we can do without numbers. But we need more.