In my previous post, Part I, I explained how I came to the conlusion that "deep ecology" should inform Green Politics. This was posted here and also on a the GPUS_FreeSpeech email list. Howie Hawkins responded to a question about "social ecology" and I obtained his permission to post that repsonse here, because it leads me into a new consideration.

Hawkins wrote:

I haven't read any deep ecology literature in about 15 years. I am not
familiar with Maturana and Varela.

But I read the early deep ecology literature, starting with the guy who
coined the term, Arne Naes. All I could get out of the early literature was
the the "deep" in deep ecology was a metaphor for profound, like a
California surfer dude might say, "That's deep, man."

I was invited to debate Arne Naes on social vs. deep ecology at a small
college in Ohio around 1990. It wasn't a debate because Naes said the socialecology positions that Bookchin had developed were part of deep ecology,too. Naes took the position that all analysis that tried to draw out thesocial or political implications of ecology was deep ecology. For Naes, deepecology seemed to embrace every form of political ecology from the
eco-facsist to the eco-anarchist. For Naes, deep ecology seemed to mean
nothing very specific, although there was a period in the 1980s when the
most prominent of its American expositers leaned toward misanthropic and Malthusian interpretations.

For me, the basic implications of ecology for politics were drawn out be
Bookchin in his 1964 essay, "Ecology and Revolutionary Thought," which
Bookchin subsequently would call social ecology in essays and books that
further developed that line of thought in a clear and coherent way.

Some deep ecologists call social ecology "anthropocentric" because its
historical and social analysis sees the attempt of humanity to dominate
nature as stemming from the domination of human by human. Therefore, the fights against racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and all forms of social hierarchy and domination are central to the fight for an
ecologically sustainable society. In order the harmonize humanity with
nature, we must harmonize human with human

The deep ecology literature, on the other hand, seemed to cover a wide swath of vague and self-contradictory positions, although a frequent theme seems to be to dismiss leftist political ecologies like social ecology or
eco-socialism as "anthropocentric." And to the extent that is true, deep ecology strikes me as reactionary and anti-ecological in the end.

-- Howie Hawkins

I can understand why Bookchin, and Hawkins would have a problem with Naes. Evem Capra appeared to have a problem with some of Naes's observations such as "The essence of deep ecology is to ask deeper questions." Yet, that is what I am trying to do, so maybe Naes was not wrong.

In the Web of Life, Capra was writing about the paradigm shift in scientific thinking that led to this new way of thinking about life. He says of deep ecology, social ecology and ecofeminism...

"It seems to me that each of these schools addresses important aspects of the ecological paradigm and, rather than competing with eah other, their proponents shold try to integrat their approaches into a coherent ecological vision."

The fundamental difference in approach between Capra on one hand and Naes or Bookchin on the other is that Capra is a scientist who started to explain a new scientific understanding of life, no matter what the level. In fact, some of what he writes about involved principles of organization that are present even in things that we would not call living but which might need to be described mathematically with fractals as in Mandelbrot Sets.

Neither Naes nor Bookchin were scientits. Naes was a philosopher and Bookchin a social activist. Both dealt with basically moral concerns and arrived at their understandings from a very different starting point.

It is probably instructive that they arrived at concepts that were similar enough to cofuse others.

While Capra was placing his vision of ecology in a scientific context, Bookchin was placing his in a historical context, one which he analyzed as a "dialectician upon who Hegel exercised considerable influence". In his later (1994) series of essays on the Philosophy of Social Ecology, he cuts through the crap of so much post modern deconstruction that leaves us without any sense of virtue.

Do we have no other ground than our pesonal preference for dealing with the social issus of the parst and present? Attitudes, wishes, desires, and imagined way of life are deeply rooted in existing social conditions - not even our most liberating "preferences" have solely personal origins.

So Bookchin found his ground in the historical unfolding of class, hierarchy, power and economics, one in which capitalism as practiced today was an implacable enemy. He begins with basic (deeper) questions. "What is Nature? What is humanity's place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world?"

It may come as a shock to some that he did not end up espousing a socialist economy, but rather chose to write of something close to community based economics.

In this book I consistently emphasize the significance of libertarian municipalist confederations in opposition to the state - historically as well as contemporaneously.

I find nothing contradictory between Capra and Bookchin, though Bookchin found Capra's "embodied mind" a bit too new-agey, a failing that belongs only to Bookchin. Given the different contexts in which they wrote many of their conclusions are remarkably similar.

My task then, is to show how Capra's description of the nature of living systems applys to social systems. Part III.

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