Ecoanarchism: A Critical Defence Notes

Ecoanarchism: A Critical Defence

Abstract

The article questions the prevailing view in green political theory that the statist critique has definitively refuted ecoanarchism.
It analyzes the main arguments against ecoanarchism, particularly focusing on bioregionalism and social ecology.
Common criticisms include the difficulty of achieving collective action, distributive justice, and democratic commitment within ecoanarchist societies.
The article argues that the necessity of centralized, coercive institutions is often overstated.
Many criticisms directed at ecoanarchist structures can also be applied to state systems.

Introduction

Anarchist ideas have significantly influenced green political thought since the late 1960s.
Robert Goodin suggests greens are essentially libertarians/anarchists.
John Barry notes that for many green theorists, stateless, self-governing communities plus solar power equals a sustainable society.
Over the past 15 years, there's been a shift among green political theorists towards engaging with the state.
Michael Saward points out that green theorists now largely accept the liberal representative state.
Terms like 'green states', 'eco-states', and 'ecological states' are now common in environmental literature.
The focus has shifted from bypassing the state to creating and engaging with a specific type of state.
Robyn Eckersley notes that anti-state localism clashes with the practical demands of environmental activists for state regulation.
The move towards the state aligns environmental theory with the environmental social movement.
Eckersley emphasizes the state's persistence as a significant power center.
States have taken on new environmental roles in the late 20th century.
Greens aim to inform policymakers who address immediate environmental issues and have the resources to act.
Advocates of engaging with the state see it as a 'loss of innocence' for green political theory, moving beyond anarchist ideals.
The statist critique extends to questioning the viability and green credentials of ecoanarchist political structures.
This article addresses whether the statist critique of a stateless society in ecoanarchism is valid.
It identifies deficiencies in ecoanarchist structures, particularly regarding their 'green credentials'.
The critique is framed by analyzing bioregionalism and social ecology, two dominant strands of ecoanarchism.
This approach contextualizes criticisms within broader theoretical models.
The focus on these two strands allows for examination of a wide range of opinions, as they differ on ontology, ethics, community definitions, and political organization.
Bioregionalists favor autarky, while social ecologists advocate confederal structures.
Barry suggests a continuum from bioregionalism to social ecology, where the latter shades into a view prioritizing democratic transformation of the state and civil society.
Three main issues central to the statist critique are:
- Securing collective action among communities.
- Guaranteeing inter-polity distributive justice.
- Ensuring adherence to democratic procedures and universalistic green principles.
The argument is that the statist critique's victory is not definitive.
Green statists tend to overstate the need for coercive federal bodies.
They often fail to recognize that criticisms of anarchist structures can also apply to state systems.
Acknowledging ecoanarchist criticisms has led greens to consider decentralization and democratization of the state.
Barry advocates for deliberative democratization, Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), and commons regimes.
Regardless of statist acknowledgment of ecoanarchist criticisms, they still often see a reformed state as superior to ecoanarchist structures.
The relevance of differences between statist and green statist visions increases when considering if criticisms of ecoanarchist structures also apply to the state itself.

Bioregionalism

Bioregionalism emphasizes contemporary society’s disconnection from its natural environment.
Cultural and economic practices conflict with maintaining essential ecological systems.
This is attributed to the dysfunctional spatial configuration of social organizations, whether political or economic.
The large scale of the nation-state and its centralized decision-making make it unresponsive to specific ecosystems.
State actors make decisions far from the impact sites of resource extraction or consumption.
Extensive markets obscure product origins and their impact on nature, masking our dependence on it.
Political boundaries are superimposed arbitrarily on geographical regions, disregarding natural regions and their boundaries.
Snyder points out that political boundaries often confuse people's sense of natural associations and relationships.
These spatial problems contribute to an epistemic disconnection from nature.
As a species, we lack knowledge of the complexity of bioregional processes and the corresponding ecological limits.
Deep ecology suggests human identification with non-human nature is undermined.
McGinnis et al. lament the loss of an 'ecology of shared identity'.
A mass culture is disconnected from the patchwork of heterogeneous bioregions, the material basis of society.
Such societies cannot help but damage disregarded natural regions.
Berg and Dasmann advocate reinhabitation: becoming native to a place by understanding its ecological relationships.
Humans need to live-in-place, ensuring long-term occupancy of a site.
Decentralized, self-sufficient, self-ruling communities are needed with common land ownership, creating a form of primitive communism (Kovel).
Bioregional boundaries should reflect the self-producing and self-withdrawing characteristics of living systems.
Milbraith emphasizes organizing economic, social and political life based on natural phenomena.
This facilitates bioregion-based cultures integrated with nature at the ecosystem level.
Such cultures are knowledgeable of indigenous foundations and seek to incorporate the best elements of these traditions.
Bioregion-based cultures are to be reinforced through ceremonies, rituals, dance, and language.
Bowers stresses moving the education curriculum away from abstract, decontextualized knowledge and towards a bioregionally-orientated curriculum.
Kirkpatrick Sale links bioregional learning to scale, suggesting that understanding connections to problems directly can only be done at a limited scale.
Decentralization is necessary for cultivating a bioregionally-aware citizenry.
Sale insists decentralization solves philosophical problems by demonstrating the practicality of ecologically 'correct behavior'.
People don't pollute and damage natural systems on which they depend for life and livelihood.
Sale wishes to use community dependence on immediate natural surroundings to force them to act sustainably.
Autarky and self-sufficiency bind the fate of the social community with the biotic community.
Sale intends to increase a community’s knowledge of its impact upon its natural surroundings.
Bioregionalism minimizes errant behavior via community transgressions being known to everyone and their consequences visible to all.
Evil-doers are held in check by the limits of bioregional decentralism.
Barry attacks the 'autarky imperative' because it precludes resource redistribution across bioregional boundaries, essential for global distributive justice.
Bioregionalists view transactions as undermining the adaptive fit between a community’s economy, culture, and the specific bioregion it inhabits.
Those living in resource-poor ecosystems are condemned to their fate; Barry says that this is Sale's aim rather than an unintentional consequence.
The scale of political arrangements proposed by bioregionalists does not inherently cause distributional issues.
Natural regions overlap and vary in size.
Morphoregions can cover several thousand square miles, whereas a political community should be between 1000 and 10,000 people.
Cooperation is required between communities on countless occasions.
Isolationism and self-sufficiency at a local scale is impossible, like fingers trying to be independent of hand and body (Sale).
He envisages a bioregional confederation of communities with communication networks and a political deliberative and decision-making body.
Scale of confederations isn't the central cause of distributional difficulties; nation-states are of comparable scale.
Sale insists any larger political form is downright dangerous, precluding redistributive justice requiring state-like coordinating bodies.
A lack of centralized institutions fulfilling an information-pooling function is problematic.
The capacity to ‘act locally’ is dependent upon the ability to ‘think globally’ (de Geus).
Local communities lack a general overview of the 'total ecological situation'.
Contemporary problems like climate change and ozone depletion can't be reliably solved by nations or bioregions one at a time (Goodin).
Centralized coordinating agencies at the global level are required to combat environmental problems (Goodin).
Overcoming collective action problems necessitates enforceable regulations and sanctions imposed by a superior legal authority.
Sale's attempt to utilize ecological necessity raises questions about the extent to which sustainability determines socioeconomic form.
Bioregional diversity doesn't mean every community constructs itself along the same lines or evolves the same political forms (Sale).
Truly autonomous bioregions would go in separate and not necessarily complementary ways.
The question is: to what extent is the political system of any community shaped by the environmental setting in which it is situated?
If the political system is significantly shaped, then ecological diversity will translate into social diversity.
The combination of bioregional diversity and environmental determinism would make it difficult to talk of universal aspects in the bioregional polity.
Sale stipulates ‘bioregional principles’ such as limitations on scale, conservation, stability, self-sufficiency, cooperation, and diversity.
These principles are essential to sustainability, irrespective of environmental diversity.
This aligns with determinism, only the universal environmental context is the determinant rather than the local one.
Principles are kept at a broad and general level, designed to correspond to the similarities covering all diverse bioregions.
More precise principles, such as democracy and social justice, cannot be stipulated as bioregional principles because their necessity for sustainability will depend upon the bioregion's ecological needs.
Sale avoids determinism by arguing that an extraordinary variety of political systems would evolve within bioregional constraints.
His approach aligns with possibilism, where a bioregion offers a range of possibilities from which a culture makes economic life choices (Flores).
This can be conceptualized as an ecological leash constraining society.
Ecological limits may limit political choices, but they do not determine them (Ryle).
'Ecology' cannot satisfactorily define the new politics we are trying to develop (Ryle).
The lack of ecological necessity for democracy is what stops Sale stipulating it as a bioregional value.
Sale does not construct an alternative, non-ecological, defense of democracy and social justice.
His commitment to decentralization means leaving such decisions to individual communities.
No guarantee of democracy and justice is provided because bioregionalists prioritize the communal right to self-legislate.
Communal solidarity is prioritized over contingent and non-local values (Barry).
Sale's commitment to autarky means there is no mechanism in his vision to ensure communities abide by principles of democracy and social justice.
Arguments for universal principles not necessitated by ecological need would ring hollow.
For Sale, the price of theoretical consistency is that dystopian visions are a distinct possibility.
Dobson weighs the likely response: the wider green movement will lose its bioregional nerve as images of slavery and sexism come to mind.
There are issues that cast doubt on the theoretical coherence and appeal of the bioregional project.
Barry lays bare the deficiencies of an autarkical vision.
It is necessary to examine social ecology to see if this approach ameliorates some of the problems outlined above.

Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism

Murray Bookchin, father of social ecology, hails from the Aristotelian-Hegelian teleological tradition.
He sees evolution as a directional process—a dialectical unfolding of latent potentialities inherent in all natural phenomena.
Evolution progresses towards complexity, diversity and subjectivity.
Humans, as self-conscious beings, are on the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder.
Self-consciousness is a natural outcome of evolution, not marking humans off from nature.
Humans should be considered as 'nature rendered self-conscious'.
Bookchin incorporates the social realm into the evolutionary process, viewing it as a natural growth from what existed prior to humans.
It is eminently natural for humanity to create a 'second nature' from its evolution in 'first nature'.
Second nature is the development of a uniquely human culture with institutionalized human communities, human technics, symbolic language, and managed nutrition.
The 'grain' of evolution is implicitly ethical, values of mutualism, freedom and subjectivity are objective values inherent in all natural phenomena.
The actualization of these potentialities is not inevitable.
Second nature—our social ecologies—is at odds with first nature, running counter to evolution (Clark).
Humanity as the 'self-reflexive voice of nature' must transform society to restore harmony between first and second nature.
We must derive the principles of our social ecology from natural ecology and implement social principles assisting evolution towards greater freedom and subjectivity.
This creates 'a radical integration of second nature with first along far-reaching ecological lines'.
What is right is what fosters diversity, complexity, complementarity and spontaneity of the ecosystem (Eckersley, paraphrasing Aldo Leopold's land ethic).
Bookchin believes he has imbued humanity and nature with 'a common ethical voice'.
Social principles from the 'grain of nature' are unity-in-diversity, spontaneity and non-hierarchical relations.
Evolution is immanently self-elaborating and spontaneously self-organising.
A true politics of freedom will only be attained when society is based on self-management.
Bookchin's studies provide the ontological justification for libertarian municipalism: a stateless society based on an ethic grounded in nature.
The state, as a hierarchical institution, is unnatural and runs counter to evolution.
Libertarian municipalism involves a return to the original Greek meaning of politics as the management of the community by means of direct face-to-face assemblies.
It requires decentralizing cities and establishing new ecocommunities.
These 'libertarian municipalities' are the 'living cell' which forms the basic unit of political life, from which confederation, interdependence, citizenship, and freedom emerge.
They are to be artistically moulded to the ecosystems in which they are located, allowing for direct popular administration while fostering cultural diversity.
Popular assemblies are the minds of a free society.
The municipal economy would be guided by 'from each according to his or her ability, to each according to his or her need'.
Municipalization of the economy is distinct from nationalization.
Nationalization: reinforces centralized power, failing to challenge capitalist property relations.
The use of unions as coordinating bodies is the first step to centralization and bureaucratization.
Municipalization politicizes the economy by dissolving it into the civic domain.
'Property' is integrated into the commune as a material constituent of its libertarian institutional framework.
Citizens discuss how many cabbages or tables are needed in a town meeting.
Bookchin insists institutional decentralization be pursued within urban agglomerations.
Bookchin's position diverges from the strong communitarianism of orthodox bioregionalists.
An ecocommunity should be delicately attuned to the natural ecosystem, although he backs away from an ecologically grounded culture where community becomes an extension of one’s self-hood (Clark).
Clark's failure to 'take the risk of this kind of strong communitarian thinking' runs counter to the social ecological commitment to unity-in-diversity.
Diversity of bioregion-based cultures is achieved through the elimination of cultural diversity within communities.
Bookchin's Gesellschaftliche understanding of community represents an advance on the potentially stultifying Gemeinschaft conception advocated by orthodox bioregionalists.
Bookchin is more willing to accept the need for cooperation beyond the level of the municipality.
His confederal vision consists of a network of administrative councils elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies in villages, towns, and neighborhoods.
Sale accepts the need for inter-bioregional cooperation but warns against institutionalized interaction beyond this level.
Bookchin is less concerned with self-sufficiency and autarky; economic interdependence is a fact of life.
It is important to ensure power is placed firmly in the hands of individual municipal assemblies.
Policymaking is exclusively the right of popular community assemblies.
Confederal councils fulfill purely administrative and coordinative functions; their members are strictly mandated, recallable, and responsible to the assemblies.
Bookchin emphasizes that 'many in the ecology movement tend to ignore the very real problems with “localism”'.
Decentralism and self-sufficiency do not guarantee a rational ecological society.
There is a compelling need for democratic and truly communitarian forms of interdependence—libertarian forms of confederalism.
Bookchin provides an escape route from the relativism unappealing in Sale’s bioregionalism: the majority in a local or regional confederation has every right to prevent malfeasances through its confederal council.
It is difficult to see how this fits with the insistence that confederal councils are to have a purely administrative and coordinative remit.
The anarchist conception of federalism stipulates that no federal decision may bind constituency members against their will.
By claiming a legitimate right for confederal bodies to intervene in municipal affairs Bookchin violates this principle (Bakunin).
Bookchin has failed to convincingly demonstrate the stateless nature of libertarian municipalism (Barry).
His commitment to universal principles stands in tension with the particularism resulting from his insistence that communities enjoy self-determination.
Bookchin is stuck: where he advocates enforcement of universal principles, he violates self-determination and sneaks the state in; where he emphasizes self-determination, he accepts the relativistic conclusions.

A response to the statist critique of ecoanarchism

The transnational nature of environmental problems necessitates cooperation beyond the small-scale community or bioregion.
Goodin and de Geus claim coordinated response requires centralized agencies at the global level.
Dealing with environmental problems necessitates institutions anarchists traditionally oppose.
Issues of inter-community distributive justice are cited as a key problem.
Barry criticizes bioregionalism's autarky, ruling out redistribution and condemning those in resource-poor regions.
The relativism associated with a pure anarchist vision is another criticism.
There is no guarantee communities will be committed to democracy, equality or fairness.
Smaller polities may be susceptible to parochialism, while Gemeinschaft communities may threaten individual liberties.
Critics suggest each of these problems points to the need for state-like institutions.
This article defends ecoanarchist structures.
The claim regarding the need for centralized coordinating agencies only works if one subscribes to a caricature of anarchism as being opposed to any form of centralized institution.
One would have to view autarky as a defining principle of anarchism, which is inaccurate (Gue´rin).
'Toward the end of his life, Proudhon was more inclined to call himself a federalist than anarchist'.
Kropotkin shared this perspective, while Bakunin makes the envisaged global reach of this structure apparent when commenting that:
- $It is probable, and strongly desired as well, that when the hour of the People’s Revolution strikes again, every nation will unite in brotherly solidarity and forge an unbreakable alliance against the coalition of reactionary nations. This alliance will be the germ of the future Universal Federation of Peoples which will eventually embrace the entire world.$
Coordinating institutions in federalist structures would be capable of cultivating an understanding of the ‘total ecological situation’.
The issue remains of whether these bodies can overcome collective action problems without legislative/enforcement powers.
Paterson acknowledges the free-rider problem is circumvented if all parties implement the changes.
It is asked how communes, being free associations that lack formal punishment, are to maintain social control.
- (1) In the type of society anarchists propose, the conditions which generate the motive to commit crime are removed.
  - Theft and violence are born of poverty and alienation, both of which will be eliminated in a society in which goods are made freely available and work is meaningful and fulfilling.
- (2) Society itself, rather than the state, tends to be the main source of social control (Edward Goldsmith).
  - Public opinion is more effective at restricting crime than the formalized justice systems of the state.
  - Such measures constitute a form of authority, but unlike state authority is non-coercive and collectively exercised (David Miller).
Individuals are not constrained by the use of physical force under these measures, meaning that they could conceivably choose to ignore them if they wish.
The criticisms of anarchist federalism are an inter-polity replica of this problem.
The anarchist response to questions of social order within the ecocommunity may also be replicated at the inter-polity level.
An anarchist form of social organization removes the conditions which generate the motivation for an ecocommunity to degrade the environment.
The pressure for economic growth in a use-value orientated economy, and decentralization may plausibly increase citizens’ awareness of their impact and dependence upon nature.
The possibility of a commune degrading the environment is not removed by such conditions, particularly where environmental degradation occurs outside of the degrading commune.
It would be unreasonable to assume direct democracies are incapable of declining into authoritarianism or violating social justice.
The second argument is a reformulation of the argument forwarded by anarchists to questions of social order (has the inter-polity community the type of non-coercive means of social control available to it that are conceivably available to individual communes seeking to secure intra-communal social order?).
What we term ‘public opinion’ is not circumscribed by political boundaries: even in an anarchic international political environment, there exists a thin common lifeworld from which actors can move on to refer to common experiences.
Out of these shared understandings arise a web of norms, commonly held values and accepted practices, which are the building blocks of public opinion.
These are vital in securing order in the absence of a coercive global state.
These norms currently operate to ensure, in a world of sovereign states, there is wide-spread adherence to international treaties.
The consequences of not adhering to international norms are not generally coercive, at least in the sense that coercion is taken to mean the imposition of regulations on an errant polity.
Acting outside the web of norms brings censure and isolation, similar to those identified by anarchists within an ecocommunity (Eckersley).
Consequences of not adhering to international norms are not always coercive.
An argument could be made that non-coercive inter-communal sanctions will be more effective in an ecoanarchist order.
The effectiveness of sanctions is largely dependent upon the extent to which inter-polity cooperation is required.
The creation, up-keep and running of transportation, telecommunication and postal networks requires such cooperation (Purchase).
Fridges, bicycles and kidney dialysis machines cannot be made in domestic enterprises or craft workshops (Ryle).
The threat of exemption from participation in the benefits of these various forms of inter-polity cooperation may act as a serious deterrent to errant behavior.
Barry is correct to highlight contradictions in Bookchin's libertarian municipalism, but by not exploring the potential of non-coercive inter-polity sanctions he may have overstated the need for institutionalized enforcement mechanisms.
The greater the level of self-sufficiency, the less available and less effective sanctions will be.
The non-coercive forms of inter-communal sanctions will not always be effective.
Criticisms aimed at ecoanarchist political structures may be levelled at the state system itself.
No political form can guarantee that all constituent communities are democratic (Paterson).
Barry is culpable of applying different standards of justification to the green statist position and the ecoanarchist position: 'one has to guarantee the principles, while the other only has to make it possible for them to flourish'.
Despite the institutions of state sovereignty, there remains a significant implementation deficit on most environmental problems (Paterson).
Small-scale communities may be too parochial, the same can be said about sovereign states (Paterson).
States seem to be at an advantage over autarkical communities in redistribution.
Federal bodies are unable to guarantee redistribution across territorial boundaries.
This problem also arises in an environment of sovereign states.
There can be no guarantee states will engage in internal distributional policies either.
The state’s redistributive capacity is severely curtailed by its accumulation imperative and by the ideology propagated by dominant classes.
If ‘state-like’ institutions are deemed necessary to ensure that ecocommunities adhere to environmental agreements, then by the same logic a centralized, state-like global body will be necessary to keep individual states in check.
If Eckersley’s optimism regarding effective environmental multilateralism is well-placed, then this optimism must also be extended to the possibility of this happening between ecocommunities.
Statists are more amenable to the notion of shared sovereignty.
Ecoanarchism intensifies problems already encountered in the state-system:
- Successful ecodiplomacy is more likely to be achieved by the retention and reform of a democratically accountable State that can legitimately claim to represent at least a majority of the people in a nation (Eckersley).
- Reaching agreement may be more difficult under stateless conditions because of the increase in the number of parties to the agreement (Barry).
The existence of many small-scale communes would increase distributional problems.
Coordination between units is made easier through centralization at the expense of making coordination within units more difficult (Paterson).
Arguments that stress that coordination is made easier in centralized units appeals for a less responsive democracy.
Democratization would make coordination within the state more difficult, so we are still faced with a trade-off here rather than the superiority of one approach over the other.
It is questionable to assume that cooperation is more difficult or less likely to be achieved under stateless conditions.
Limitations on anarchist communities would increase the need for inter-community cooperation, and enhance the purchase of non-coercive inter-community sanctions.

Conclusion

There are problems associated with bioregionalism and social ecology, but claims that the statist critique has scored a decisive victory over ecoanarchism in general may be premature.
Many criticisms aimed at ecoanarchism can be levelled against the state-system itself.
Difficulties with securing cooperation and collective action among sovereign polities are evident in the current 'anarchic' state environment.
The arguments explored here have failed to demonstrate the state system to be greatly superior to the political structures advocated by ecoanarchists.
Ecoanarchist political structures not necessarily superior to attempts to 'green' the state.
The central focus of this article has been on the criticisms of ecoanarchism forwarded by statists rather than on visions of the green state themselves.
Ecoanarchism is open to the criticism that it is a global institution with coercive powers that is required, and that statists are more amenable ideologically to the existence of such an institution.
Claims regarding the need for coercive federal bodies tend to be overstated.
The increased need for intra-community cooperation felt by small-scale polities would at the same time enhance the influence of non-coercive forms of inter-polity sanction. Notes and References