Editing Murray Bookchin (section)

=== Humanity's environmental predicament ===
Bookchin's book about humanity's collision course with the natural world, ''[[Our Synthetic Environment]]'', was published six months before [[Rachel Carson]]'s ''[[Silent Spring]].''{{sfn|Bookchin|2015}}{{pn|date=March 2025}}

Bookchin rejected [[Barry Commoner]]'s belief that the environmental crisis could be traced to technological choices, [[Paul R. Ehrlich|Paul Ehrlich]]'s views that it could be traced to overpopulation, or the even more pessimistic view that traces this crisis to human nature. Rather, Bookchin felt that our environmental predicament is the result of the cancerous logic of capitalism, a system aimed at maximizing profit instead of enriching human lives: "By the very logic of its grow-or-die imperative, capitalism may well be producing ecological crises that gravely imperil the integrity of life on this planet."

The solution to this crisis, he said, is not a return to hunter-gatherer societies, which Bookchin characterized as xenophobic and warlike. Bookchin likewise opposed "a politics of mere protest, lacking programmatic content, a proposed alternative, and a movement to give people direction and continuity."{{sfn|Bookchin|2015}}{{pn|date=March 2025}} He claims we need:<blockquote>...a constant awareness that a given society's irrationality is deep-seated, that its serious pathologies are not isolated problems that can be cured piecemeal but must be solved by sweeping changes in the often hidden sources of crisis and suffering—that awareness alone is what can hold a movement together, give it continuity, preserve its message and organization beyond a given generation, and expand its ability to deal with new issues and developments.{{sfn|Bookchin|2015}}{{pn|date=March 2025}}</blockquote>The answer then lies in communalism, a system encompassing a [[Direct democracy|directly democratic]] political organization anchored in loosely confederated popular assemblies, decentralization of power, absence of domination of any kind, and replacing capitalism with human-centered forms of production.{{sfn|Bookchin|2015}}{{pn|date=March 2025}}