Answer the following within a word limit of 600 words:
Q1: Is it necessary to be an anarchist to be a genuine environmentalist?
Q2: Does capitalism have to go before we can save the planet?
Social Ecology: some readings from Murray Bookchin
Murray Bookchin (born 1920, died July 2006) is the acknowledged leader among anarchist theorists today, and one of the most prominent writers and thinkers in the radical ecology movement. He has been writing and speaking about the environmental crisis since the 1950s, and was still publishing just before he died. By the late 1960s he had begun to link environmental and social concerns, and founded a new school of thought: Social Ecology. The basic idea is exactly what the name says: our environmental problems are a direct result of deep flaws in our social order, and we cannot fix one without fixing the other. All forms of domination are facets of the same attitude: the domination of women by men, of the poor by the rich, of black by white, of nature by human, of people by other people - domination is the enemy that must be destroyed. And since domination is a fundamental of Western civilization, Bookchin is talking about nothing less than demolishing our entire culture and starting over: to build a new civilization of equality, democracy and justice, without government, without exploitation, without capitalism, without domination or hierarchy of any kind. You can't get more radical than that.
Much of Bookchin's work is "historical" in the sense that he is looking for the point at which our civilization took a wrong turn, tracing the mistakes made since then, and looking for a way to correct the worst error in human history. That original error was to separate humans from nature - to say that humans are "above" nature and entitled to use it for their own ends. The pre-Socratic Greek philosophers (around 500 BC) were the first to express this idea formal, though it must be much older. Nature to them was physis, and human culture was nomos - and the belief that physis and nomos are two separate realms, governed by different rules, is the essential flaw that Bookchin sees in our civilization. The result has been many centuries of misery: war and slavery, sexism, racism, economic exploitation, and most recently, the destruction of the natural environment. Bookchin offers an analysis of this long process and some suggestions for escaping the vicious cycle of domination and exploitation.
In recent years, many of Bookchin's most devoted followers turned away from him, as he grew increasingly bitter and confrontational toward everyone who disagreed with him. He attacked virtually every other radical ecologist and anarchist in print, leading many of us to conclude that - although he is the revered 'founder' of a profoundly important movement - it is time to move on beyond him. His most vitriolic attacks were addressed to the deep ecologists, whom he saw as "eco-fascists" preaching a disguised "nature religion" and ignoring social and political issues.