Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 10 Green aspirations and anarchist futures

When Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops first appeared in 1899, the precursors of the Green movement found it an inspiration, since its author stressed the productivity of small-scale decentralized industry, and of a ‘horticultural’ approach to food production, for its immense output. When his book was re-issued at the end of the First World War, an added preliminary note observed that: ‘It pleads for a new economy in the energies used in supplying the needs of human life, since these needs are increasing and the energies are not inexhaustible.’

In those days this was a rare recognition of the limits to growth. Today we have a vast literature on the problems of resource depletion and environmental destruction. The difficulty for environmental activists, trying to enlist the support of fellow citizens, is one of priorities: which campaign most urgently needs a helping hand? Capitalism roams the globe, seeking the least protected labour market and the least protected physical environment, in order to stimulate, and to win, an ever-growing market for its goods. It describes this process as ‘consumer sovereignty’ and thus evades any responsibility for its ruthless exploitation of poor people and weak economies. The richer we are, the more we are inclined to shrug off our share of this responsibility.

For many years now, we in the rich economies have had a series of movements and campaigns described in general terms as ‘environmental’, ‘conservationist’, or ‘green’, or even ‘ecological’, drawing our attention to the crises of the environment, global warming, and the depletion of finite resources. Critics of these campaigns in the rich world point out that they do not always include an awareness of the plight of the rich world’s poor. Amartya Sen remarked on the paradox that ‘In the poor world the poor are thin and the rich are fat. In the rich world the rich are thin and the poor are fat.’ He is the author of a famous study of who eats and who starves, and of what they eat, with a theory of ‘entitlements’, defining these as the set of ‘alternative commodity bundles which a person can command’. His observation is a reminder that in every society there are several simultaneous food cultures, ultimately determined by levels of poverty and affluence. In the poor world the powerful and wealthy and their military elites live grandly, while the poor are ill-nourished and sometimes starving. In the rich world a significant poor minority lives on the ‘junk food’ that the affluent can afford to despise. In Britain the number of children growing up in poverty trebled between 1968 and 1998.

Any discussion of environmental issues has to start with the fact of malnutrition in a world of plenty, and then proceed to examine the high cost of the rich world’s ‘cheap’ food. Kropotkin’s arguments included the claim that a densely populated small country like Britain could feed itself from its own land, an idea regarded as absurd even though it was based on European experience. A century later I had the pleasure of meeting Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network and co-author of the United Nations report on Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities, who explained how in Chinese cities 90% of vegetables are locally grown, and that

The best-known examples of urban intensive food production are provided by the vast cities of South-East Asia. Singapore’s 1,500 hectares of ‘agro-technology parks’ are famous. As their admirer Geoff Wilson points out,

Tim Lang, a professor of food policy who has been concerned for years with the implications of findings like these, reminds us that

This is known as the food-miles issue. It has been extended to even more bizarre lengths by the policies of the giant food retailers, searching the globe for suppliers who are cheapest, regardless of the diversion of local water supplies from meeting traditional local needs. In my nearest town in East Anglia I can buy Mexican carrots, Australian onions, African mange-tout peas, and Peruvian asparagus. This fact contributes far more to global warming than my careless use of electricity. Professor John Houghton, Chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and of the United Nations Advisory Panel on Climate Change, thought there was something absurd in the fact that he had eaten delicious new potatoes for his lunch. They had been delivered by a 40-tonne lorry to his local hypermarket after being flown by superjet to England. And, as he commented, ‘I could have grown them in my own back garden.’

His remark was important because it illustrates the gulf between our green aspirations and our actual behaviour. In exploring this gap, the work of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin has been significant and influential. He, like Rachel Carson, had been a propagandist on environmental issues in the 1950s and 1960s, and this gave him the same kind of forerunner status in the emerging American Green movement. He linked this with the home-grown American anarchist tradition. ‘What we are trying to do’, he explained,

This is where Bookchin came into conflict with yet another American dream. As ecological awareness spread among the children of the affluent, the national guilt over the genocide of indigenous peoples led to an exaltation of the Noble Savage, and a distaste for ordinary mortals who hadn’t got the Message. What was seen as ‘Deep Ecology’ became fashionable among those affluent enough to ‘get away from it all’ and pursue every kind of mystical belief, so long as the cheques kept flowing into their bank accounts. Many of Bookchin’s fellow citizens shifted from an involvement in social issues to a sentimental and privileged idealization of ‘wilderness’ and the natural environment, with a consequent misanthropy towards their fellow humans.

Bookchin’s vigorous repudiation of these approaches has sought to confront the abandonment of social concerns in an increasingly divided America, re-asserting the claims of ‘Social Ecology’ and aiming, as he said, to advance ‘a serious challenge to society with its vast, hierarchical, sexist, class-ruled, state apparatus and militaristic history’.

Most anarchists would take it for granted that an ecologically viable society is incompatible with capitalism and its demand for continually expanding markets, achieved through the invention of wants and the built-in obsolescence of consumer goods. At the same time, most of us feel that in seeking more ecologically viable ways of living, we cannot wait until the downfall of the capitalist system. The Green movement has been in existence long enough for its adherents to learn which approaches are most relevant for them.

In the 1970s I was lucky enough to be employed to start a journal for teachers and students called the Bulletin of Environmental Education (BEE). One of its most stimulating mentors was an inventive young man called Peter Harper, who in 1975 went to Wales to join a group of enthusiasts who were starting the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) at Machynlleth, in an old quarry in a landscape of industrial dereliction. By the end of the century that enterprise (operating as a workers’ cooperative of 28 members) was being visited by about 80,000 people every year, including 20,000 children, and is world-famous as a demonstration site for environmentally friendly power generation, building construction, and sewage disposal. I am told that it generates 90% of its own energy requirements in renewable form from sun, wind, and water.

Since he has long practical experience in this field, I take Peter Harper’s conclusions seriously. He told interviewers in 1998 that

His continual probing of the environmental consciousness of our fellow citizens has led him to make a different distinction from that between Deep Ecologists and Social Ecologists. Peter Harper divides us into Light Greens (with more money than time) and Deep Greens (with, perhaps, more time than money). The Light Greens, he suggests, are involved with the new technology of solar heating, fuel-efficient lightweight motor cars, and sustainable consumption, while the Deep Greens believe in small, insulated houses, bicycles and public transport, home-grown food, repair and recycling, local currency schemes, and barter.

Meanwhile, the rest of society will continue to belong to the culture of MORE! For, as he observes,

Some of us, Peter Harper noted in his Schumacher Lecture at Bristol in 2001, have apocalyptic visions of uncontrollable catastrophes in the future resulting from indiscriminate economic activity. He, as an optimist, and from his own experience as an environmental activist, has a different expectation. He thinks that as life gradually gets worse for everyone else, the Deep Greens (the people he calls the recessive genes of the sustainability movement) will be found to have solved what he calls the great riddle of reconciling modernity and sustainability: ‘They will quite visibly be having a good time: comfortable, with varied lives and less stress, healthy and fit, having rediscovered the elementary virtues of restraint and balance.’

Twenty-five years of offering environmental choices to fellow citizens who came to the Centre for Alternative Technology with a variety of motives have led Peter Harper to adopt his relaxed approach to the task of convincing us all that our lifestyles have to change. Murray Bookchin would probably react differently, but many years earlier he posed the same issues in discussing the nature of a liberatory technology, one which frees rather than enslaves us. Can we imagine, he asked, that an ecologically viable economy could be based on a centralized nation state and its bureaucratic apparatus? He urged that, from the standpoint of the viability of the planet and all living things on it, anarchist concepts are not merely desirable, they are necessary:

Environmental and ecological concerns have been advocated long enough for us to recognize peaks and troughs in the support they receive from the general, uncommitted public, whose involvement is vital for the manipulators of change. There are fashions in crisis-consciousness, as in most other aspects of our communal life. A comforting thought for anarchists is the reflection that a society advanced enough to accept the environmental imperatives of the 21st century will be obliged to reinvent anarchism as a response to them.

_{14. Community gardens, as envisaged by Clifford Harper.}

For a very strong case has been made by such authors as Murray Bookchin and Alan Carter that anarchism is the only political ideology capable of addressing the challenges posed by our new green consciousness to the accepted range of political ideas. Anarchism becomes more and more relevant for the new century.