Abstract

Today many people readily acknowledge that the force driving climate change and threatening complex life-forms on planet earth is capitalism. But back the 1950s, when Murray Bookchin not only raised the alarm about environmental ills but diagnosed their root cause in the market-driven economic system, his was a lonely voice. And as early as 1964, he warned that in order to avoid what was then called “the greenhouse effect,” our society would have to step down from fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy. His solution: a radical political, technological, and ecological decentralization. Janet Biehl, author of Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin, will describe the work of this insufficiently known thinker and his growing relevance today to movements calling for radical citizens’ assemblies.

Co-organized by the Global Capitalism and its Critics Discussion Group and the Critical Theory / Practice Seminar Series