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Summary of the article:
Will ecology become the “dismal science”? by Murray Bookchin
Excerpt from: Which Way for the Ecology Movement? Essays by Murray Bookchin
San Franscisco, Ca AK Press, 1994
The purpose of this article is to illustrate how the current trends in the ecology movement
have adopted some quasi-religious aspects of what the author terms mystical ecology.
Many of these movements which originated in the 1960s denigrate human beings thus the
“eco-evangelists” in their reverence for “Nature” put humans on the same moral level
with insects, plants and all forms of biological life. He discusses movements such as
“Deep Ecology”, Gaian philosophy, which, according to Bookchin, regard “technology,
science and reason as the basic sources of the ecological crisis”. The increase in human
population is seen as central to the environmental crisis as viewed by these deep
ecologists and the solution to the crisis would be to forgo rational enlightenment, and live
a harsh, austere, primitive life.
He simplifies these movements into something he calls the dismal science because it
focuses on the hopeless aspects of human society and points to a grim future. He
contrasts these movements to the social ecology philosophy which states that capitalism
and neither technology, nor science has created this ecological crisis. Therefore resolving
the problem should focus on using technology and scientific thought to create a
nonhierarchical communitarian society.
Bookchin uses a great deal of emotive language to make his point. He uses phrases like:
prehistoric religiosity, surrogate reality, crass, mystical, hysterical, anti-human, watereddown liberalism, confused sensibility, clerical vitriol, ineffectual, dismal, bewildering,
and naïve prayer to explain how he sees many of the environmental activities of the last
twenty years. My impression is that he has immersed himself into using much of the
emotional evangelical discourse that he accuses the deep ecologists of adopting simply
because he thinks he the social ecology advocates are closer to the truth and the
environmentalists have missed the real cause of the ecological crisis we find ourselves in.
Summary by Bonnie Werner
Second article summary for Assignment #1
ED 870 Community, Sustainability and Education