THE JOY OF LIFE
147
ourselves, to appreciate our potential to create social and political institutions
that bring out what is most empathetic and intelligent within humanity.
The revolutionary impulse is fiercely organic, traceable to the impulse
toward creativity and development in first nature itself. Yet all over the planet,
the trend toward increasing mutualism, differentiation, and development which
has been evolving since the beginning of natural history, is at risk of being
reversed completely. By recognizing the very tenuousness of natural evolution,
we see that we can no longer reify nature as a kind of spirit, eternal flame, or
energy which remains the same while enduring throughout time. Unlike an
enduring spirit, natural evolution is a process which can either move forward
or regress into simpler phases. Each time a wetland is ‘filled in’ and a shopping
mall shoots up, we lose one more horizon in which both first and second
natures are able to unfold.
Creating the conditions for social and ecological complexity is not only
evolutionary, it is revolutionary. By creating social and political institutions
which encourage first and second nature to express what is most creative and
cooperative, we create erotic resonance between natural and social phases of
natural history. It is then that the socio-erotic and the eco-erotic meet: in the
work of creating a socially and ecologically desirable world.
Notes
I. Errico Malatesta,
2 Peter Kropotkin,
Anarchy (Great Britain: Freedom Press, 1974), p. 2 6 .
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Extending Horizons Books).
3. Ibid., p. 6
4. Ibid., p. 6.
5. Evelyn Fox Keller,
A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock
(New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983), p. 97.
6. Bookchin offers a convincing critique of the limitations of systems theory in "Toward a
Philosophy
of Nature"
and
"Thinking
Ecologically"
in
The Philosophy of Social Ecology
(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1995).
7.
Seeking
to
avoid
a
mechanistic
'systems'
language,
Bookchin
prefers
the
term
'eco-community' rather than eco-system, emphasizing the relational and holistic qualities of
natural processes.
8. Murray Bookchin,
The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire Books, 1982).
9. Ibid., p. 54.
10. Reich, as a post-Freudian Marxist, sought to create a totalizing theory of human behavior
that would have
revolutionary implications. For a broad
overview of Reich’s
work,
see
Wilhelm Reich: Selected Writings, an Introduction to Orgonomy (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, second printing, 1974).
II. Bookchin,
The Philosophy of Social Ecology, p. 119.
12. Radical ecologists reservations regarding the discussion of first and second nature reflect
deeper concerns regarding "anthropocentrism" in general. For a provocative exploration of
JRe-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the
Human Spirit Against Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism (London:
and response to these concerns, see Bookchin,
Cassell, 1995).