Green anarchism
Drawing from the ecology of Charles Darwin, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin elaborated a naturalist philosophy that rejected the dualistic separation of humanity from nature.
This was developed into an ecological philosophy by Peter Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, who advocated for the decentralisation and degrowth of industry as a means to advance both social justice and environmental protection.
But as the enclosure of common land increasingly forced dispossessed workers into factories, more wide-reaching ecological damage began to be noticed by radicals of the period.
[3] During the late 19th century, as capitalism and colonialism were reaching their height, political philosophers first began to develop critiques of industrialised society, which had caused a rise in pollution and environmental degradation.
[7] Ecology in its modern form was developed by Charles Darwin, whose work on evolutionary biology provided a scientific rejection of Christian and Cartesian anthropocentrism, instead emphasising the role of probability and individual agency in the process of evolution.
[14] Reclus himself argued that environmental degradation caused by industrialisation, exemplified to him by mass deforestation in the Pacific Northwest, was characteristic of the "barbarity" of modern civilisation, which he felt subordinated both workers and the environment to the goal of capital accumulation.
[17] Kropotkin and Reclus' synthesis of environmental and social justice formed the foundation for eco-socialism, chiefly associated with libertarian socialists who advocated for a "return to nature", such as Robert Blatchford, William Morris and Henry Salt.
[19] Green anarchism first emerged after the dawn of the Atomic Age, as increasingly centralized governments brought with them a new host of environmental and social issues.
[20] During the 1960s, the rise of the environmental movement coincided with a concurrent revival of interest in anarchism, leading to anarchists having a considerable influence on the development of radical environmentalist thought.
[22] As the threats presented by environmental degradation, industrial agriculture and pollution became more urgent, the first green anarchists turned to decentralisation and diversity as solutions for socio-ecological systems.
[28] In 1973, Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss developed another green anarchist tendency, known as deep ecology, which rejected of anthropocentrism in favour of biocentrism.
[29] In 1985, this philosophy was developed into a political programme by the American academics Bill Devall and George Sessions, while Australian philosopher Warwick Fox proposed the formation of bioregions as a green anarchist alternative to the nation state.
[36] Eco-anarchist actions have included violent attacks, such as those carried out by cells of the Informal Anarchist Federation (IAF) and Individualists Tending to the Wild (ITS) against nuclear scientists and nanotechnology researchers respectively.
[39] As environmental degradation was accelerated by the rise of economic globalisation and neoliberalism, green anarchists broadened their scope of action from a specific environmentalist focus into one that agitated for global justice.
[43] Drawing from its anarchist roots, the AGM adopted a decentralised and non-hierarchical model of horizontal organisation, embracing new "anarchical" technologies such as the internet as a means to network and communicate.
[47] Drawing on the biocentric philosophy of deep ecology, in 2006, Mark Somma called for a "revolutionary environmentalism" capable of overthrowing capitalism, reducing consumption and organising the conservation of biodiversity.
[29] Unlike social ecologists, theorists of deep ecology considered human society to be incapable of reversing environmental degradation and, as a result, proposed a drastic reduction in world population.
Green syndicalist Jeff Shantz proposed that a free association of producers would be best positioned to dismantle the industrial economy, through the decentralisation and localisation of production.
[70] According to green anarchism, the foundation of civilisation was defined by the extraction and importation of natural resources, which led to the formation of hierarchy through capital accumulation and the division of labour.
[71] Green anarchists are therefore critical of civilisation and its manifestations in globalized capitalism, which they consider to be causing a societal and ecological collapse that necessitates a "return to nature".
[73] Drawing from the ecological principle of "unity in diversity", eco-anarchism also recognises humans as an intrinsic part of the ecosystem that they live in and how their culture, history and language is shaped by their local environments.
