Çevre Sorunlarının Çözümüne Yönelik Alternatif Bir Politika Arayışı: Murray Bookchin ve Sosyal Ekoloji

• Main Author: Orçun İmga
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abant İzzet Baysal University 2009-04-01
• Series: Alternatif Politika
• Subjects: Decentralization; Ecological society; Hierarchy; Libertarian municipalism; Social ecology; Domination
• Online Access: http://alternatifpolitika.com/site/dosyalar/arsiv/1-Nisan-2009/3.orcun-imga.pdf

he ecological crisis is certainly one of the most important problems today. The time that we are present at is defined as a period that humankind reached to the limits of it’s relations with the nature and thus risked the future of humanity and the whole world. Nevertheless, some solutions from “environmentalism” that consists of temporary precautions against the pollution to some ideological approaches, including “social ecology”, that question the social order as the reason of the problem were suggested as the responses to the ecological crisis. Bookchin, who comes from a Marxist and anarchist tradition and played an important role at the rise of “green action” in 1970’s, separates from the primitivist anarchist tradition by his both ideas that evaluates the technological level that civilization reached as a beneficial fact and consider that the community precedes the individual. On the other hand, social ecology rejects the duality of community-nature and it is against the approach of deep ecology which dissolves the community in nature because of it’s dominative character. Social ecology presents us a paradigm that promises to solve not only the ecological crisis but also the whole social problems. Bookchin considers ruling social order which can be characterized by the concepts of domination, hierarchy and social class as the source of the ecological crisis. So, it is impossible to solve the ecological crisis without solving the social problems. As a solution, Bookchin suggests local, confederal and urban-based organizations instead of nation-state as a ruler paradigm. By this, he encourages us for a new social imagination. In this context, the aim of the article is firstly to determine the position of social ecology in the ecological thought and then to explain the development of Bookchin‟s intellectual development and basic arguments of his approach as the founder of social ecology.