A social ecology

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Volumn 8, Issue 3, 1997, Pages

  Clark, John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 10644222208     PISSN: 10455752     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10455759709358746     Document Type: Review

References (71)

1. "Social ecology" is also an interdisciplinary field of academic study that investigates the interrelationship between human social institutions and ecological or environmental issues. It is closely related to human ecology, the area of the biological sciences that deals with the role of human beings in ecosystems. However, studies in social ecology are much broader in scope, incorporating many areas of social and natural science in their analysis. This interdisciplinary social ecology offers much of the empirical data which philosophical social ecology utilizes in its theoretical reflection.
2. See especially Fields, Factories and Workshops (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968) and Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizons, 1955) for important discussions of many of these topics, and his pamphlet, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom Press, 1970) on communitarian and democratic traditions.
3. See especially Fields, Factories and Workshops (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968) and Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizons, 1955) for important discussions of many of these topics, and his pamphlet, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom Press, 1970) on communitarian and democratic traditions.
4. See especially Fields, Factories and Workshops (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968) and Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizons, 1955) for important discussions of many of these topics, and his pamphlet, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom Press, 1970) on communitarian and democratic traditions.
5. For the first English translation of some of Reclus' most important texts, and an extensive commentary on his thought, see John Clark and Camille Martin, Liberty, Equality, Geography: The Social Thought of Elisée Reclus (Littleton, CO: Aigis Publications, 1997). For a concise discussion of Reclus' relevance to contemporary ecological thought, see John Clark, "The Dialectical Social Geography of Elisée Reclus" in Philosophy and Geography 1: Space, Place, and Environmental Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997).
6. For the first English translation of some of Reclus' most important texts, and an extensive commentary on his thought, see John Clark and Camille Martin, Liberty, Equality, Geography: The Social Thought of Elisée Reclus (Littleton, CO: Aigis Publications, 1997). For a concise discussion of Reclus' relevance to contemporary ecological thought, see John Clark, "The Dialectical Social Geography of Elisée Reclus" in Philosophy and Geography 1: Space, Place, and Environmental Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997).
7. For discussions of Geddes' guiding values of "Sympathy, Synthesis and Synergy," and his regional concepts of "Place, Work, and Folk," see Murdo Macdonald, "Patrick Geddes in Context" The Irish Review, Autumn/Winter, 1994; and "Art and the Context in Patrick Geddes' Work," Spacioe Società/Space and Society , October/December, 1994.
8. For discussions of Geddes' guiding values of "Sympathy, Synthesis and Synergy," and his regional concepts of "Place, Work, and Folk," see Murdo Macdonald, "Patrick Geddes in Context" The Irish Review, Autumn/Winter, 1994; and "Art and the Context in Patrick Geddes' Work," Spacioe Società/Space and Society , October/December, 1994.
9. Ramachandra Guha, "Lewis Mumford, the Forgotten American Environmentalist: An Essay in Rehabilitation," in David Macauley, ed., Minding Nature: The Philosophers of Ecology (New York: Guilford Press 1996), p. 210.
10. Mumford did not choose to coin any convenient term to epitomize his social theory. I take the term "ecological regionalism" from Mark Luccarelli's very helpful study, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region (New York: Guilford Press, 1995).
11. The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), p. 386.
12. "The Human Prospect" in Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), p. 465.
13. Ibid., p. 471
14. The Condition of Man (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1944), p. 403.
15. Ibid., p. 404.
16. An adequate account of the eco-communitarian tradition would explore Buber's enormous contribution. See his major political work, Paths in Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), including his chapters on his predecessors Kropotkin and Landauer, and especially his essay, "In the Midst of Crisis." Significantly, Buber defines the "social" in terms of the degree to which the "center" extends outward, and is "earthly," "creaturely," and "attached" (p. 135).
17. Bookchin's best presentation of his version of social ecology is found in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (Palo Alto, CA: Cheshire Books, 1982).
18. Unfortunately, Bookchin lapses into the undialectical "fallacy that technology is a neutral tool to be used or abused by the one who wields it," as David Watson notes in Beyond Bookchin: Preface for a Future Social Ecology (Brooklyn, NY and Detroit, MI: Autonomedia and Black & Red, 1996), p. 119. See the entire chapter, "The social ecologist as technocrat," for a careful dissection of Bookchin's technological optimism from a social ecological perspective.
19. All done in the name of such values as "mutuality" and "cooperation," and on behalf of an "ethics of complementarity"!
20. Mumford, The Pentagon of Power, op. cit., p. 390.
21. "But God does not remain stony and dead; the stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit." Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 247, cited in Errol Harris, The Spirit of Hegel (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 103.
22. "But God does not remain stony and dead; the stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit." Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 247, cited in Errol Harris, The Spirit of Hegel (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 103.
23. See Alexander's classic evolutionary treatise, Space, Time, and Deity, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1966).
24. The ecological and cosmic evolutionary implications that are implicit in a Whiteheadian "philosophy of organism" are elaborated eloquently in Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, Jr., The Liberation of Life (Denton, TX: Environmental Ethics Books, 1990).
25. See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1961) and The Future of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
26. See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1961) and The Future of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
27. See S. Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1964), ch. vi., "Matter, Life and Mind," and Sri Aurobindo, The Essential Aurobindo (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), part one, "Man in Evolution."
28. See S. Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life (New York: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1964), ch. vi., "Matter, Life and Mind," and Sri Aurobindo, The Essential Aurobindo (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), part one, "Man in Evolution."
29. See Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995) and A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996).
30. See Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (Boston: Shambhala, 1995) and A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 1996).
31. We do not simply "identify" with a larger whole, but rather explore specific modes of relatedness and develop our outlook and feelings in relation to what we discover about self and other. In this analysis, a dialectical social ecology has more in common with ecofeminist thought than with those ecological theories that stress "expanded" selfhood.
32. As in Eric Katz's very useful discussion in "Organism, Community, and the 'Substitution Problem,'" in Environmental Ethics, 7, 1985. Katz raises many important issues, though he overstates the opposition between the two approaches by interpreting them as rather rigid "models."
33. The most flagrant case is Tom Regan's attack on "Holism as Environmental Fascism" in his essay "Ethical Vegetarianism and Commercial Animal Farming," reprinted in James White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems (St. Paul MN: West Publishing Co., 1988). Note Mumford's severe critique, from a holistic, "organicist" perspective, of the extreme, totalizing holism of Teilhard de Chardin in The Pentagon of Power, op. cit., pp. 314-319.
34. The most flagrant case is Tom Regan's attack on "Holism as Environmental Fascism" in his essay "Ethical Vegetarianism and Commercial Animal Farming," reprinted in James White, ed., Contemporary Moral Problems (St. Paul MN: West Publishing Co., 1988). Note Mumford's severe critique, from a holistic, "organicist" perspective, of the extreme, totalizing holism of Teilhard de Chardin in The Pentagon of Power, op. cit., pp. 314-319.
35. The concept of the "holon" was first proposed by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967), ch. 3 and passim. Its fundamental importance has recently been defended by Ken Wilber. For a concise discussion of Wilber's analysis of holons, their characteristics of "identity," "autonomy" and "agency," and their constitution of "holarchies," see A Brief History of Everything, op. cit., ch. 1.
36. The concept of the "holon" was first proposed by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967), ch. 3 and passim. Its fundamental importance has recently been defended by Ken Wilber. For a concise discussion of Wilber's analysis of holons, their characteristics of "identity," "autonomy" and "agency," and their constitution of "holarchies," see A Brief History of Everything, op. cit., ch. 1.
37. One of the most dialectical moves in recent ecological thought is Gary Snyder's choice of the title "No Nature" for his collected poems. Starting out from Hakuin's allusion to "self-nature that is no nature," he reminds us incorrigible logocentrists, "Nature is not a book" (No Nature [New York: Pantheon Books, 1992], pp. v, 381).
38. Tao te Ching I (Chan trans.) in Wing-Tsit Chan, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 139.
39. History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 161. It is through this idea of the primordial continuum of being that Merleau-Ponty's dialectical phenomenology makes an important contribution to a social ecology. David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "the Flesh," as "the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity," (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World [New York: Pantheon Books, 1996], p. 66). This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality. Merleau-Ponty refers to "that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break; it has neither the tight construction of the mechanism nor the transparency of a whole which precedes its parts." ("The Concept of Nature, 1" in Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960 [Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1970], pp. 65-66).
40. History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 161. It is through this idea of the primordial continuum of being that Merleau-Ponty's dialectical phenomenology makes an important contribution to a social ecology. David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "the Flesh," as "the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity," (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World [New York: Pantheon Books, 1996], p. 66). This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality. Merleau-Ponty refers to "that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break; it has neither the tight construction of the mechanism nor the transparency of a whole which precedes its parts." ("The Concept of Nature, 1" in Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960 [Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1970], pp. 65-66).
41. History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 161. It is through this idea of the primordial continuum of being that Merleau-Ponty's dialectical phenomenology makes an important contribution to a social ecology. David Abram explains Merleau-Ponty's concept of "the Flesh," as "the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as interdependent aspects of its spontaneous activity," (David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World [New York: Pantheon Books, 1996], p. 66). This concept unites subject and object dialectically as determinations within a more primordial reality. Merleau-Ponty refers to "that primordial being which is not yet the subject-being nor the object-being and which in every respect baffles reflection. From this primordial being to us, there is no derivation, nor any break; it has neither the tight construction of the mechanism nor the transparency of a whole which precedes its parts." ("The Concept of Nature, 1" in Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France 1952-1960 [Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1970], pp. 65-66).
42. Kovel, History and Spirit, op. cit., pp. 166-67.
43. Ibid., p. 1.
44. According to Harris, Hegel sees religion "as the felt awareness and conviction of the infinite, immanent and potent in all reality, in both nature and history, and transcendent above all finite existence," and as "one form of that final self-realization of the whole which is the truth, and without which there would be no dynamic to propel the dialectical process," so that, consequently, "[t]o repudiate spirit and reject all religion is thus to paralyze the dialectic, and in effect to abandon it." (Harris, The Spirit of Hegel, op. cit., p. 54). If we are careful to read "transcendent" as "transfinite" and not as "supernatural," and if we remember that no self-realization of the whole is "final," then this also describes an important aspect of the meaning of "spirituality" for a dialectical holism.
45. Joel Kovel, "The Marriage of Radical Ecologies" in Zimmerman et al., Environmental Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, 1st ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), pp. 410-11. While social ecology and other Western ecophilosophies have come to terms with unityin-diversity, perhaps they would do well to consider the radically dialectical concept of difference-non-difference, the bhedabhedavada of Indian philosophy.
46. Joel Kovel, "Human Nature, Freedom, and Spirit" in John Clark, ed., Renewing the Earth: The Promise of Social Ecology (London: Green Print, 1990), p. 145.
47. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, op. cit., p. 68.
48. This is precisely the social ecological problematic first proposed by Lao Tzu two and a half millennia ago.
49. Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 188.
50. Ibid., p. 154
51. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 99.
52. For a discussion of the radical implications of regionalism, see Max Cafard, "The Surre(gion)alist Manifesto," Exquisite Corpse, 8, 1990, pp. 1, 22-23.
53. See Gary Snyder's classic essay, "Good, Wild, Sacred," The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).
54. Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 3.
55. Ibid., p. 5.
56. Murray Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1990), p. 182.
57. The extent to which Bookchin holds a Promethean view of human activity is suggested when he asks how humanity is "to organize a 'free nature.'" ("What Is Social Ecology?" in Zimmerman, et al., op. cit., p. 370).
58. Ibid., p. 354.
59. Mumford, "The Human Prospect," op. cit., p. 471.
60. Bookchin's reduction of eco-communitarian politics to libertarian municipalism is a deeply flawed, undialectical and fundamentally dogmatic political problematic, and it is not possible to discuss most of its shortcoming here. For a detailed critique, see John Clark, "Municipal Dreams: Murray Bookchin's Idealist Politics" in Andrew Light, ed., Anarchism, Nature, and Society: Critical Perspectives on Murray Bookchin's Social Ecology (New York: Guilford Publications, forthcoming).
61. Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 176.
62. Murray Bookchin, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987), p. 276
63. and "Libertarian Municipalism: An Overview" in Green Perspectives, 24, 1991, p. 4.
64. Ibid.
65. Brian Tokar, in The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992), has sketched an even more extensive Green economic program, based on what is fundamentally a social ecological analysis. Tokar's concise and well-written introduction to the Green movement should be consulted for a clear example of an experimental, non-dogmatic social ecological politics and economics.
66. Murray Bookchin, The Modern Crisis (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1986), p. 91.
67. Bookchin, The Rise of Urbanization, op. cit., p. 263.
68. Ibid., p. 275.
69. Tom Athanasiou, Divided Planet: The Ecology of Rich and Poor (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996).
70. Ibid., p. 9.
71. have suggested some of the ways in which dialogue between social ecology and deep ecology might be usefully explored in "How Wide Is Deep Ecology?" in Inquiry, 39, June, 1996.