Book Review of "Enlightenment and Ecology: The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century"
Written by Elvira Wepfer
Murray Bookchin’s (1921-2006) anti-capitalist thinking combined community, direct democracy and ecology into a radical political theory he called social ecology. Throughout the 20th century it stood alongside growing arguments for eco-social change and influenced leftist discourses on citizenship, domination and freedom. In the new millennium, it has formed the basis of the Kurdish feminist-ecological revolution in Rojava and thus been implemented for the first time in practice. The edited volume "Enlightenment and Ecology. The Legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st Century" (Black Rose Books, 2021) celebrates Bookchin’s legacy and considers the lived experiences of social ecology. The anthology is a heart-felt endeavour to point out the urgency, potential and possibility for social change that grounds in the collaborative world-making of ecosystems to create free democratic societies that gain their resilience through a unity in diversity. The activists, thinkers and scholars writing place their contributions in political and economic theory, in decades of social engagement and in co-creation and observation of real-life movements. The outcome is a multifaceted anthology whose engaged voices paint a vivid, dialectical picture of the challenges and hopes of creating practice out of theory.