[SPN-Discussion] Event: Murray Bookchin's Social Ecology As A Pathway to Sustainable Change, Ramapo College of New Jersey

[Ashwani Vasishth]

[For what it's worth, there is a Shortline Bus 
<http://www.coachusa.com/shortline/ss.tickets.asp> from Port Authority 
directly to the Ramapo College campus.]

*
The Ramapo College Masters in Sustainability Studies Program*

*Invites you to the Fourth Lecture in Our 2016 Series 
(*http://goo.gl/7haKPr)*


*

*"Lessons of Sustainability: Voices of Key Practitioners" 
**(http://goo.gl/7haKPr)*

*MURRAY BOOKCHIN’S SOCIAL ECOLOGY AS*

*A PATHWAY TO SUSTAINABLE CHANGE*

*Janet Biehl*

*Followed by a Panel of Ramapo faculty*

*Wednesday, March 9, 2016*

*_SC 219 Friends Hall, 6-8:00 pm_*

**

*Free and Open to the Public---Help Spread the Word*

Janet Biehl, Author of /Ecology or Catastrophe, the Life of Murray 
Bookchin/, will discuss Murray Bookchin’s important contribution as the 
founder of Social Ecology and leading thinker about the social 
transformation to a sustainable society. Murray taught at Ramapo during 
its formative years as a model institution for interdisciplinary and 
integrative thought.

*****

Murray Bookchin came of age during a period of revolutionary thought and 
action. He grew up on discourse about how to create a better society. 
Drawn into a succession of social movements, he eventually espoused his 
own concept of transformation, a highly democratic and communal approach 
that he called Communalism. Largely self-taught, he was a disciplined 
learner who taught himself classic Greek in order to understand the 
classics in their original formulation.

By the 1960s, he had realized that social transformation not only had to 
address issues of workers’ rights and equity, but it also had to come to 
grips with the ever increasing destruction of the physical environment 
caused by capitalism dependent on perpetual growth; the resulting cancer 
was destructive of the earth and society alike. Bookchin’s /Our 
Synthetic/ /Environment/ predated not only Rachel Carson but anticipated 
virtually the entire breadth of discourse in subsequent field of 
Environmental Studies.


Bookchin’s genius was to place social problems into an ecological 
context, a radical reformulation of social theory totally missed by the 
Marxists. In his systemic thinking, the root error of society was its 
embrace of domination, not only of workers and the means of production, 
but of women and the environment. Needed was a theoretical formulation 
that replaced this domination with direct participatory democracy 
sensitive to place and community.


In his 1982 book /The Ecology of Freedom/, written while he taught at 
Ramapo, Bookchin achieved just this synthesis. As synthesized in his 
later thinking on Communalism, Bookchin saw the future shaped around 
nonhierarchical communities where free expression, involvement and 
shared responsibility united people and environment in a healthy process 
of future building. By describing the social mechanisms as well as the 
theoretical basis for Communalism, he clearly described the required 
path for the social transformation to a sustainable society as perhaps 
no one else has done.


Bookchin’s life has been powerfully described by his long term 
collaborator and second wife, Janet Biehl. She is the author of several 
books on social ecology, including /Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of 
Murray Bookchin/ (2015), /The Murray Bookchin Reader /(1997), and /The 
Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism/ (1998), as well as 
numerous articles, during her 19-year collaboration with Bookchin. Now 
that the Kurdish freedom movement has picked up on his ideas, she has 
translated (from German into English) several books on that subject, 
including /Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan/ (2013) and 
/Revolution in Rojava /(forthcoming). She earns her living copyediting 
books for Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin, W.W. Norton, and other publishers in 
New York.

Those parking on campus should acquire a parking permit from the guard 
booth at the north entrance. For additional information or an advance 
parking permit, contact Professor Michael R. Edelstein at 
_medelste at ramapo.edu <mailto:medelste at ramapo.edu>_. Ramapo is 
handicapped accessible but if special provisions are required, let us know.


-- 
-
   Ashwani
      Vasishth         vasishth at ramapo.edu          (201) 684-6616
                 http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~vasishth
        --------------------------------------------------------
           Associate Professor of Sustainability Planning
                 Director, Center for Sustainability
                   http://ramapo.edu/sustainability

                     Ramapo College of New Jersey
           505 Ramapo Valley Road, SSHS, Mahwah, NJ 07430
       --------------------------------------------------------

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sustainabilitypractice.net/pipermail/spn-discussion-sustainabilitypractice.net/attachments/20160305/b1bd057d/attachment-0001.htm>