A Challenge for the Ecology Movement
Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement by Murray Bookchin [Originally published in Green Perspectives: Newsletter of the Green Program Project, nos. 4-5 (summer 1987). In the original, the term deep ecology appeared in quotation marks; they have been removed in this online posting.] The environmental movement has traveled a long way since those early Earth Day festivals when millions of school kids were ritualistically mobilized to clean up streets, while Arthur Godfrey, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, and a bouquet of manipulative legislators scolded their parents for littering the landscape with cans, newspapers, and bottles. The movement has gone beyond a naïve belief that patchwork reforms and solemn... (From : Anarchy Archives.)
This feeling of compassion for people, and of disgust with myself, which I had experienced in the Lyapinsky house, I experienced no longer. I was completely absorbed in the desire to carry out the scheme which I had concocted,—to do good to those people whom I should meet here. And, strange to say, it would appear, that, to do good—to give money to the needy—is a very good deed, and one that should dispose me to love for the people, but it turned out the reverse: this act produced in me ill-will and an inclination to condemn people. But during our first evening tour, a scene occurred exactly like that in the Lyapinsky house, and it called forth a wholly different sentiment. It began by my finding in one set of apartments an unfortunate individual, of precisely the sort who require immediate aid. I found a hungry woman who had had nothing to eat for two days. It came about thus: in one very large and almost empty night-lodgi...