Introduction

Social ecology

In his recent book The Environmental Crisis, Mark Rowlands makes a telling criticism of Bookchin's social ecology, an influential version of eco-anarchism. The main defining claim of social ecology is that the domination of nature derives from the domination of human beings by human beings. Social domination must end for there to be an end to the domination of nature by human beings. On the face of it, Bookchin's eco-anarchism simply aims at ending the social domination characterizing “hierarchical” society, both for its own sake, and as the necessary means to saving nature from domination by human beings. It looks as if it is about that, and not about producing a social order, which, in its anarchism, is taken to be a peculiarly authentic continuation of the wider natural order. Indeed, Bookchin has expressed impatience with more “mystical” ideas of harmonizing with nature, because they tend to obscure the required critique of hierarchical social structures. However, things are not quite as they seem at first glance.

One major problem with the claim that human-on-human domination was the original source of other forms, including human-on-nature domination is, as Rowlands points out, that it is false. It implies that there was no “domination”, no purely exploitative activity, at all in the world before human beings turned up to do it to each other and then to nature. This is inconsistent with evolutionary theory: “That competition is one of the factors driving evolution is a truism.