Deep Ecology and Its Critics.

A concerted campaign afoot came at the Socialist Scholars Conference a year ago, where the author appeared on a panel with Murray Bookchin, the author and co-founder of the Institute for Social Ecology, to discuss "The Politics of Ecology." Bookchin gave one of his elegant, impassioned, learned presentations, but it had a harsh edge to it of sourness and rancors directed against those who might hold to any of the tenets of deep ecology, particularly the ideas embraced in the term "biocentrism." Deep ecology, it seemed, was a part of the broad ecological movement in the U.S. that was wrongheaded and dangerous, diverting attention from the serious tasks of eliminating capitalism and restructuring class society, and was in some way a threat to the reasonable, right-minded form of social ecology. Next came a broadside presented by Bookchin to the national Green gathering in Amherst, Massachusetts, last July, a paper starkly and forthrightly called "Social Ecology Versus Deep Ecology."