7
INTRODUCTION
beauty, pleasure, and collectivity as well as access to food, land, and control of
the means of production. Film footage of this revolution reveals the dual nature
of the struggle: while revolutionaries risked their lives in combat, they also, in
the process, converted luxury hotels previously owned by the rich into halls in
which everyone could eat, drink, dance—and enjoy, if for only a moment, the
quality of life for which they were willing to die.
This book represents an attempt to begin to rethink our notions of desire
in the hope of radicalizing our approach to ecological questions. It emerges
out of the belief that ecology should not be reduced solely to issues of physical
need and survival, but should also embrace the desire for an improved quality
of everyday life that can only be achieved through a profound transformation
of social, economic, and political institutions. It also represents an attempt to
reconsider our understandings of nature by challenging romantic and dualistic
assumptions that underlie notions of what constitutes ecological change.
The Ecology of Everyday Life brings together some of the ideas I have
grappled with during the years 1984 to 1998. These chapters were written from
within the movements in which I traveled as an activist and a teacher;
movements ranging from the greens and ecofeminist movements to the
anarchist movements that have re-emerged in recent years. The ideas
presented here were developed during a time in which activists in these
movements were rethinking such basic categories as nature, desire, identity,
and politics, reaching for more nuanced and complex understandings of
questions of power related to social and ecological questions.
These ideas also emerged from my work as a psychotherapist and social
worker. For over a decade, I worked with a range of people—poor and
privileged—developing an appreciation for the everyday struggles that people
endure as they search for meaning, community, and-pleasure in a world that is
often alienating and disempowering. Through this work, I began to understand
the enormous burdens and joys that people bring to ecology; I began to
appreciate both the personal and political sources of their hopes and dreams
for a better world.
Coming of age in a greater-New York suburb in the seventies, and raised
in a conservative middle-class Jewish family, my own voyage to feminism,
social ecology, and social anarchism has been complicated indeed. The ‘nature’
I knew was an acre of woods behind my elementary school, ‘politics’ was
Richard
Nixon
and
the
cold
war,
and
‘feminism’
was
the
white
business-woman standing proud with her briefcase on the cover of Ms.
magazine.
This book reflects my attempt to understand the origins of my own
dreams and assumptions about society and nature, as well as my ongoing
struggle to articulate new ways of thinking about social and ecological change.