Murray Bookchin, 85, Writer, Activist and Ecology Theorist, Dies

Murray Bookchin, a writer, teacher and activist who began his political odyssey as a Communist, became an anarchist and then metamorphosed into an influential theorist on ecology, died July 30 at his home in Burlington, Vt. He was 85. Murray Bookchin, 85, Writer, Activist and Ecology Theorist, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: August 7, 2006
NY Times

Murray Bookchin, a writer, teacher and activist who began his political odyssey as a Communist, became an anarchist and then metamorphosed into an influential theorist on ecology, died July 30 at his home in Burlington, Vt. He was 85.

The cause was complications of a malfunctioning aortic valve, said his daughter, Debbie Bookchin.

Mr. Bookchin’s environmental philosophy emerged from his leftist background. He argued that capitalism, with what he characterized as dominating hierarchies and insistence on economic growth, necessarily destroyed nature. This put him at odds with ecologists who favored a more spiritual view and with environmentalists dedicated to gradual reform.

“Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing,” he wrote in “Remaking Society” (1990), one of his 27 books.

Another book, “Our Synthetic Environment” (1962), raised issues about pesticides similar to those addressed by Rachel Carson in “Silent Spring” six months later. A decade earlier, Mr. Bookchin had warned about the dangers of chemicals in food. He also wrote under pseudonyms. His popular book “Small Is Beautiful” was published under the name Lewis Herber.

Mr. Bookchin’s writings had their strongest influence on Green Parties in the United States and Europe and on the radical edges of the environmental movement. His emphasis on human society and economic systems put him at odds with “deep ecologists,” who believe that humans have arrogantly usurped their position as just another species to wreak environmental havoc.

“Although he claims to be an anarchist, he writes like a Stalinist thug,” Gary Snyder, the poet and an adherent of deep ecology, said of Mr. Bookchin in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 1989.

Mr. Bookchin, in turn, called deep ecologists “eco-fascists,” partly because they wanted to limit the population radically.

In 1971, he started the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vt., to further his ideas, and began teaching at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where he was later given tenure.

Though criticism came most naturally to him, Mr. Bookchin also offered a utopian vision: he hoped that nation states could be replaced by a confederation of independent municipalities, each governed by the equivalent of a New England town meeting.

In 1992, The Independent, the London newspaper, referred to him as “the foremost Green philosopher of the age.” It called his 1982 book “The Ecology of Freedom” one of the “classic statements of contemporary anarchism.”

Murray Bookchin was born in the Crotona Park section of the Bronx on Jan. 14, 1921. His father, Nathan, had been a farmer and active in the revolution against the czar in Russia.

Nathan, who worked as a hatter, and Rose, Murray’s mother, joined the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union. Mrs. Bookchin knew Big Bill Haywood, its legendary leader.

At 9, Murray joined a Communist youth organization but drifted away from the Communists in 1937 because he disliked their authoritarianism. He was expelled from the party in 1939 for Trotskyist-anarchist tendencies. He later rejected Trotskyism.

Mr. Bookchin, who never went to college, worked in a foundry and as a labor organizer in New Jersey. In World War II, he served in the Army. He had the odd assignment, for a young radical, of helping to guard the gold at Fort Knox. He was an autoworker for General Motors after his discharge and helped organize a large strike.

He began writing a steady stream of articles under pseudonyms. His companion of many years, Janet Biehl, said leftists at the time commonly used pseudonyms to hide from anti-Communists. Ms. Biehl said he continued using pseudonyms into the 1960’s because it had become “second nature.”

In a bibliography of his works prepared by Ms. Biehl in 1996, Mr. Bookchin renounced articles he wrote in the early 1950’s under the pseudonym M. S. Shiloh, in which he argued that the Nazis’ slaughter of Jews had been prompted by labor surpluses rather than by anti-Semitism.

In addition to Ms. Biehl, Mr. Bookchin is survived by his daughter, Debbie, and his son, Joseph, both of Burlington; his brother, Robert, of Pelham, N.Y.; his former wife, the former Beatrice Appelstein of Burlington; and one granddaughter.

In 1980, Mr. Bookchin told a federal jury that he was perplexed as to why the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke into his apartment in the East Village of Manhattan in 1973. The F.B.I had been hunting for fugitive members of the Weather Underground.

“I hated the Weathermen,” he testified.

One of the two F.B.I. officials convicted for violating the constitutional rights of Mr. Bookchin and others was W. Mark Felt, the bureau’s No. 2 man at the time of the break-in. Last year, Mr. Felt was revealed as Deep Throat, the secret source of the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in his Watergate reporting.