On Tuesday, April 26th at 7:00pm ET, join us alongside our friends and comrades Firestorm Co-op, Debbie Bookchin, and Todd McGowan for a discussion on The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism by Murray Bookchin. You won’t want to miss it!

Register here.

What is nature? What is humanity’s place in nature? And what is the relationship of society to the natural world? In an era of ecological breakdown, answering these questions has become of momentous importance for our everyday lives and for the future that we and other life-forms face. In the essays of The Philosophy of Social Ecology, Murray Bookchin confronts these questions head on: invoking the ideas of mutualism, self-organization, and unity in diversity, in the service of ever expanding freedom. Refreshingly polemical and deeply philosophical, they take issue with technocratic and mechanistic ways of understanding and relating to, and within, nature. More importantly, they develop a solid, historically and politically based ethical foundation for social ecology, the field that Bookchin himself created and that offers us hope in the midst of our climate catastrophe.

Murray Bookchin (1929–2006) was an active voice in ecology, anarchist, and communalist movements for more than fifty years. His groundbreaking essay, “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” (1964), was one of the first to assert that capitalism’s grow-or-die ethos was on a dangerous collision course with the natural world that would include the devastation of the planet by global warming. Bookchin is the author of The Ecology of Freedom, among two dozen other books.

Debbie Bookchin is an investigative journalist and author. She has published in The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, HarperCollins’ Best Science Writing and many other venues. She is coauthor of The Virus and the Vaccine (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) and recently co-edited and introduced a new book of essays by her father Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso Books, 2015).

Todd McGowan is a professor of theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Emancipation After Hegel, Universality and Identity Politics, Capitalism and Desire, and other works.