Murray Bookchin: Ecologist and Environmental Activist

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Almost as soon as Little Jane and I started MOTHER, we began getting excited messages from folks all over the country: "Do you know about Murray Bookchin?" "Have you read Bookchin?" "Here's a pamphlet by Murray Bookchin, the anarchist ecologist"or simply, "Read Bookchin"

Naturally-being blessed with an open, inquiring mind and recognizing a good thing when so many levelheaded people pointed it out- I. . . steadfastly . . . ignored . . . Murray . . . Bookchin. I mean, I had the usual idiotic idea that anarchists were people with bushy, black beards and Molotov cocktails.

And then magnificent, warm Len Krimmerman invited me up to the University of Connecticut as a resource person for an alternatives-in-living conference . . . and Murray had received a like invitation . . . and he was there . . . and my mind was boggled and my heart won.

Murray Bookchin is one of the warmest, most thoughtful and sensible men I've ever met. Under the pen name of Lewis Herber, he's been writing about ecology more years than some of today's staunchest environmentalists are old . . . and Murray isn't that old himself (only 50). This is a man, in other words, with vision far into the future.

Murray has published four books-two on ecology-under his pen name. The ecology titles are OUR SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENT and CRISIS IN OUR CITIES. Bookchin's fifth book (this time under his real name), POST-SCARCITY ANARCHISM, has just been released by Ramparts Press.

Bookchin has taught ecology and now travels widely to speak on ecological, environmental and social problems a/ universities across the country. If your college hasn't books by Murray, bug someone till they do . . . he's worth it.

PLOWBOY: How long have you been interested in and working onenvironmental problems?

BOOKCHIN: My own interest in ecology dates back to the early 1950's. At that time a few people—numerically large, but still a definite minority of the literati population of the United States—became very much concerned about what was happening to the environment. We suddenly became aware, in the 50's, of the dramatic changes that were—and are still—being wrought in the world.

Since the end of the Second World War, there have been changes on a scale that are simply phenomenal by comparison with previous periods . . .

PLOWBOY: And terrifying.

BOOKCHIN: They are terrifying. A second industrial—a third industrial revolution, actually—was taking place at that time. Expansion of the cities, destruction of farmland, encroachment of suburbia on formerly agricultural areas.

A second problem that was becoming very compounded twenty years ago was the change in the diet that people were being exposed to. Chemicalization of the diet, particularly by DDT and other pesticides, was first coming under critical scrutiny at that point. There were hearings being held in Washington—the famous Delaney Committee hearings—and I got hold of a transcript of those hearings and found that the problems examined by the committee reflected my own discontent about the issue.

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