He did not live to see how far they would travel. From the mountains of Kurdistan to municipalist city halls and classrooms in Vermont — a map of where social ecology went next.
The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human.
Reading Bookchin in prison, Abdullah Öcalan reframed the Kurdish movement around assemblies, ecology, and women’s liberation — ideas now woven into the institutions of North & East Syria.
Co-founded by Bookchin and Dan Chodorkoff in 1974, the ISE still teaches social ecology through courses, gatherings, and publications.
An eco-community research and development organization putting social ecology into practice — helping people hold land in common (usufruct, not property) and build directly-democratic “strongholds” resilient to ecological and social collapse. Its first, SI(GH)TE 92I, is taking shape on hundreds of acres in New England.
A confederation of neighborhood and municipal groups across North America that took communalism as its compass. Now inactive — its congress and local experiments seeded work that continues elsewhere.
Despite what the name might suggest, BSA was deeply grounded in social ecology as a framework — naming it in its central “Core Principles and Objectives” document and even starting the Pan-African Social Ecology Reading Group (PASERG). From 2018 to 2024 it built networks and tools for a bottom-up, dual-power politics across the United States.
Citizen platforms from Barcelona onward organizing city by city — a wave in explicit debt to libertarian municipalism.
Carrying the work forward somewhere we should know about?
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Legacy
Where the Ideas Went
The very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human.
The Ecology of Freedom, 1982
Carrying the work forward somewhere we should know about?
Write to the Bookchin family
Some noteworthy people carrying it forward →