Environmental Philosophy | Murray Bookchin

The lion is the king of the jungle, ant and bee colonies are governed by queens, and we talk about mammals as "higher" animals and insects as "lower" ones. Where does all this talk of hierarchy come from? Not from ecology itself, says Murray Bookchin. An ecosystem is a complex food web, in which all organisms are interconnected and interdependent. If we're inclined to see hierarchy there, that's just because we're imposing assumptions about how human society works on to our thinking about ecology. Bookchin encourages us to flip the script. If ecosystems don't need hierarchies to function, maybe human societies don't either. This non-hierarchical vision of both ecology and society is at the heart of Bookchin's theory of social ecology.

This is the topic of the eighth week of my online course, "The World Around Us: Philosophy and the Environment."

#environment #environmentalism #environmentalphilosophy #philosophy #murraybookchin #socialecology #anarchism

0:00 Introduction
0:53 No hierarchies in nature
3:16 The ecosystem as a dynamic unity of diversity
4:37 Envisioning a non-hierarchical society
6:07 The relation between nature and society

[WagnerdsClan]

Excellent video!! I love the work and philosophy of Murray Bookchin so much and I loved what you had to say about social ecology!

[AWOL]

Your videos should have way more views. They’re great.