From Bookchin to Miyazaki, by way of Le Guin
The line from social ecology runs through Ursula K. Le Guin’s anarchist utopias straight into the forests of Studio Ghibli.
Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä stage the argument at the heart of social ecology: the war on the natural world begins as the domination of human by human. Hayao Miyazaki has long pointed to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books as formative — he sought the rights to adapt them as far back as the early 1980s.,Le Guin, in turn, read Bookchin closely. The anarchist ecology of The Dispossessed grew out of the ideas he had been publishing since the 1960s, and four decades later she wrote the foreword to The Next Revolution, introducing his communalism to a new generation of readers.,It is a thread worth pulling: from a Bronx street corner to Anarres to the Sea of Decay, the same wager — that a free society and a living planet stand or fall together.