This manuscript was provided to Anarchy Archives by the author. Ecology and Revolutionary Thought by Lewis Herber (pseudonym for Murray Bookchin) [Originally published in Bookchin’s newsletter Comment in 1964 and republished in the British monthly Anarchy in 1965.] In almost every period since the Renaissance, the development of revolutionary thought has been heavily influenced by a branch of science, often in conjunction with a school of philosophy. Astronomy in the time of Copernicus and Galileo helped to guide a sweeping movement of ideas from the medieval world, riddled by superstition, into one pervaded by a critical rationalism, openly naturalistic and humanistic in outlook. During the Enlightenment—the era that culminated i... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
We must always be on a quest for the new, for the potentialities that ripen with the development of the world and the new visions that unfold with them. An outlook that ceases to look for what is new and potential in the name of “realism” has already lost contact with the present, for the present is always conditioned by the future. True development is cumulative, not sequential; it is growth, not succession. The new always embodies the present and past, but it does so in new ways and more adequately as the parts of a greater whole. Murray Bookchin, “On Spontaneity and Organization,” 1971 Acknowledgments The idea for this reader initially came from David Goodway, who, one sunny afternoon in May 1992, sat down with Bookchin, Gideon Kossoff, and myself in an attic in Keighley, West Yorkshire, to draft a table of contents. Although the present book bears only the faintest resemblance to th...
Our Synthetic Environment Murray Bookchin CHAPTER FIVE: ENVIRONMENT AND CANCER The Importance of Environment One of the most challenging problems in public health involves the influence of man's environment on the incidence of cancer. Differences of opinion concerning the extent of this influence are likely to have important practical consequences. If a specialist believes that cancer is caused primarily by genetic factors or by the aging process, his hopes for controlling the disease will focus on advances in surgery, radiology, and chemical therapy. He will tend to regard the occurrence of the disease as inevitable. On the other hand, if he strongly suspects that environmental factors play a major role, he is likely to attach a great deal of importance to cancer prevention. He will regard environmental change as a serious problem requiring careful investigation. Nothing can be done to arrest the aging process or alter the indi...