In antiquity and in Middle Ages, nature was a living and direct manifestation of God's omnipotence, a source of awe and reverence for people. This is the way things were. But the coming of the era of the ideology of humanism, free of all manifestations of religion, developed an entirely new relationship to nature. Almost everything that surrounds us now is a product of human activity in our time.

Hardly anyone today needs to be told that the biosphere of this planet is endangered, and that its ability to support life, including human life, can no longer be taken for granted. Yet as recently as thirty-five years ago, the concept of ecology was little known outside the biological sciences. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when social theorist Murray Bookchin first began to develop the ideas that became social ecology, few people were aware that an environmental crisis was looming. In the decades since, in numerous books and articles and through a wide range of political activities, Bookchin has articulated social ecology into a distinctive set of ideas for radical social transformation.

In contrast to viewpoints that offer strictly biological, religious, or technological explanations, social ecology emphasizes that the ecological crisis has its origins in social relations--in the way in which human beings have been organized into various economic and political institutions over the course of history. In this account, the very idea of dominating the natural world (first nature) initially emerged with the social domination of human by human, that is, into hierarchies and exploitative classes. As the anthropological and historical records show, such domination--according to age, then gender, ethnicity, and race, as well as distinct economic classes--preceded and gave rise to the idea of dominating the biosphere. Social ecology adds that the mastery of some human social groups by others in early societies made it possible for people even to conceive of mastering the natural world in the intersts of social and finally class elites. Social ecology is therefore opposed to all forms of hierarchy and domination, as well as to class exploitation and oppression.

The effort by some sections of the ecology movement to prioritize a pantheistic, often mystical "eco-spirituality" over social analysis raises serious questions about their ability to come to grips with reality. At a time when a blind social mechanism, the market, is turning soil into sand, covering fertile land with concrete, poisoning air and water, and producing sweeping climatic and atmospheric changes, we cannot ignore the impact that hierarchical and class society has on the natural world. Economic growth, gender oppressions, and ethnic domination--not to speak of corporate, state, and bureaucratic interests--are much more capable of shaping the future of the natural world than are privatistic forms of spiritual self- regeneration.

Some ecological outlooks blame human beings generically for the ecological crisis, as if the species itself was tainted with some irreversible defect. By contrast, social ecology, as an expressly ecological humanism, sees human beings as the most differentiated and complex life- forms on the planet, without which neither consciousness nor freedom would exist. Potentially, at least, human beings are the only possible source of an ethics on this planet, especially an ethics that calls for the preservation of the biosphere.

The crucial question we face today -- not only for ourselves as human beings but for the entire biosphere -- is how social evolution will proceed and in what direction it will go. To deal with this question primarily as a matter of spiritual renewal, desirable as that may be. is not only evasive but socially disarming. Social evolution took a wrong turn ages ago when it shifted from egalitarian institutions and relations to hierarchical ones. It took an even worse turn a few centuries ago when it shifted from a relatively cooperative society to a highly competitive one. If we are to bring society and nature into accord with each other, we must develop a movement that fulfills the evolutionary potential of humanity and society, that is to say, turn the human world into a self- conscious agent of the natural world and enhance the evolutionary process -- natural and social. Given an ecological society, our technology can be placed as much in the service of natural evolution as it can be placed in the service of a rational social evolution.

Humanity, like all natural creatures, inhabits specific ecological locations, or “ecosystems.” As each creature has its own species- specific pattern of ecosystem, so the human ecosystem is distinct from that of all other creatures, and expressive of humanity’s own specific “nature” within the manifold of nature. Marx, often regarded as an anthropocentric thinker seeing humanity as essentially over nature and basically distinct from it, was in fact profoundly concerned about human nature and our organic relation to nature.  The core human-natural relationship for Marx is expressed in the fact of production, the transformative activity of labour that brings this about, and the subjective, or imaginative, interiority necessary for this. In this regard, humans produce their own ecosystems, and at the same time, define and reflect upon them. Such is our “nature,” and the way we produce ecosystemic relations depends upon whether nature is degraded or restored to integrity.

The formal properties that apply here can be summed up as follows:

The former engage a pattern of differentiation, in which elements of the ecosystem are distinct but connected; while the latter employ one of splitting—in which elements lack common being and move along separate paths—hence disintegrate. Differentiation is a notion within dialectics: the elements are distinct, even clash, but remain connected and give rise to new configurations of form. Splitting, on the other hand, is identitarian; it drives not toward wholeness but toward totalization, and, within the ceaseless flow of ecological relations, toward eventual breakdown.